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KIDDY FIDDLERS AU GO GO
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KIDDY FIDDLERS AU GO GO

October 7 2008

Just when you thought it was safe to feel a tiny bit optimistic about the state of the nation again, Bill Henson is back in the headlines. Henson, you may recall, is the mild-mannered photographic artist whose work Prime Minister Kevin Rudd felt able to label “revolting” without even bothering to look at it.

The media furore that resulted from the raided exhibition was a classic Salem-style witch-burning episode that writer and journalist David Marr labeled a “convergence of fears” as the internet changes the way we view photography and thus is changing the way we look at art and consider art.

Marr very speedily set about writing a thoughtful essay on the sorry episode and it’s just been published by Text and titled The Henson Case ($24.95).

The book is a slim 160 pages and towards the end is the (passing) reference which was included in an excerpt published in Good Weekend, the mag that goes out with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on weekends. Curious is it not that of the 160 pages on offer it was the few in which Henson spoke of visiting a Victorian primary school to scout for possible models that the papers chose to run?

Was it merely a canny editorial choice or was it deliberate mischief? Would you, making such a choice, anticipate another outbreak of splenetic moralising and think “goodo, there goes the circulation”? Or would you think “ha ha, this should get ’em going again”? Either way it amounts to much the same thing: a passage taken out of context that almost inevitably will provoke responses with absolutely no basis in fact. It’s what passes for public debate in Australia these days and it really is beyond tiresome.

This time around the usually reasoned Julia Gillard and the previously sensible Malcolm Turnbull have felt obliged to make comment and that somehow makes the latest turn of events worse. It’s one thing when zealots and bigots start banging their drums but when others take up the tambourine, it’s time to say – hang on a minute, for once let’s look at the facts.

In visiting the playground of a primary school in the company of the school’s principal Bill Henson did nothing that hasn’t been done a thousand times before by football and other sports scouts, casting agents and movie extra wranglers. Has anyone stopped to wonder how each successive generation of champion gymnasts, swimmers, footie players and catwalk stars are discovered? Knowledgeable adults spot them: on playing fields, in dance classes, on streets and in swimming pools. Sometimes these events are formalised and sometimes it’s by chance.

David Marr said on Lateline and repeated it on the Radio National Breakfast that both Alex Dimitriades and Vince Colosimo were “discovered” in just that way; and there are dozens of others in all fields of endeavour who owe their elevation to being eyed up and down by an experienced adult. According to Peter Craven, writing in The Age, the gorgeous (whoops, sorry) Kodi Smit-McPhee(Romulus My Father) was found in the same way.

So what makes Bill Henson different? Someone in the media melee said, “They shouldn’t be able to use kids for their own personal gain.” Where does that leave football scouts who are paid by clubs for the talent they spot? Where does it leave casting agents whose businesses depend on finding the next Nic, Cate or Russell? Why is Henson’s personal gain so much more reprehensible?

KIDDY FIDDLERS AU GO GO

Genuinely reprehensible and really creepy is the way politicians sidle up to little kids for photo opportunities. How many babies have been scarred for life by the sight of John Howard’s remora-like pucker descending on their defenceless foreheads during the last election? Why is it okay and not revolting for Kevin Rudd to sit around in classrooms full of little kids for the cynical purpose of having his picture taken with them? Take a look at any pollie’s website and you’ll find them grinning away from the centre of a bunch of small kids – with not a parental consent in sight.

If Bill Henson – and David Marr – are guilty of anything in this sad farrago it’s naivete. Like many artists Henson lives in a world of his own and sees nothing wrong with wanting to compose beautiful pictures. Caravaggio was the same, Titian and Ingres too. They all worshipped the human form, human skin and the play of light on both. Nowadays they’d have the revolting police after them.

The naivete of Henson and Marr is in intellectualising the ideas of perception while failing to apply those ideas to themselves. These days, perhaps more than any other time in history, perception is all. We live in an era of instant images, images captured on tiny phones and transmitted instantly to computers, newspapers, friends – and enemies. We know more about images, and understand less about them, than since brush was first applied to canvas to capture the human form.

I would like to guess that part of the current problem is the perception of both men as middle-aged white chaps with an expressed interest in images of children. At this very moment there will be those who’ve read the preceding sentence and jumped to the conclusion that I’ve just accused them of being pedophiles. Read it again and you will see, I hope, that nothing could be further from the truth. But that’s the nature of perception in the modern era. Because it’s not just about Marr and Henson, it’s about the pervasive context of a mass media obsessed with cheap celebrity, the worship of nothingness and the eternal chase for sensation. Put these factors together with the easy accessibility of the net for actual perverts and their collections of thousands of images of children, and you have a train crash waiting to happen: the naive, the ignorant and cynical. And the crash has happened in the form of Henson’s photography.

As it is a much-admired and experienced head teacher has been vilified and virtually labeled a procuress; parents and children of a hitherto happy and well run school have been needlessly upset; Bill Henson has, yet again, been accused by default of being a pedophile and – yet again – a lot of politicians and others have got up on their hind legs to fulminate without a single real thought in their heads.

David Marr has found himself drawn into a bizarre circus that he could not have anticipated and of which he commented, “There is a sincere concern that has turned into a kind of panic.” It was a typically reasonable and calm response. Of course, being the kind of writer he is, Marr is intrigued by the underpinnings of social panic (see Dark Victory the splendid analysis he wrote with Marian Wilkinson of the Tampa incident).

Meanwhile, the real nasties, the real kiddy fiddlers, continue to operate under the noses of the Great Appalled in schools, churches and other places where children are to be found. And that doesn’t include the one who flourished under Premiers Bob Carr and Morris Iemma in the NSW state cabinet: Milton Orkopoulos. It’s about time a lot of people took their heads out of their outrages and started really talking about how to protect children: from politicians and their policies, if nothing else.

Ironically, it was left to an elite athlete, James Tompkins, multi-Olympian and dad of kids who attend the primary school at the centre of the storm, to bring a voice of sanity and reason to TV news broadcasts when he said he saw nothing wrong with what had happened, that the head teacher was terrific and no parents of his acquaintance had a problem with any of it either. Perverts all, I guess.

 

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