Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 23 May 2008
"Revolting," says Australian PM
Kevin Rudd:
A photograph by Bill Henson
Australian photographer Bill Henson is currently facing charges of creating and displaying child pornography (more specifically, "publishing an indecent article") relating to an exhibition of his work in Sydney. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described Henson's images as "revolting," and Australian police have announced their intention of prosecuting the artist.
The 13-year-old subjects of Henson's photographs do not appear to be enrapt in states of sexual excitement or posed in positions that explicitly depict intercourse (though they may not be particularly chaste either); instead, it's the very display of these fragile bodies, uniquely young and therefore innocently vulnerable (though "innocence" itself is a condition that Henson may be exploring), that offends. That adolescent sexuality is all-pervasive in this commercial culture as a means to sell products -- whether they're promoted through commercials during Gossip Girl or offered as iPod downloads after a performance by one of any number of scantily-clad adolescent pop-stars -- is apparently not at issue. Henson's photographs, instead, bring this vulnerability to light, as images and vulnerability that sell nothing. Responding to concerns that his work might provoke disturbing feelings (feelings that can't be catharted through the purchase of a product, anyway), Henson says, "You can't control the way in which individuals respond to the work," adding that his intention is to explore notions of intimacy: "Something which is absolutely inviolate and unknowable." Far from violating his subjects, Henson seeks to express their ambiguous inviolability, without attempting moral judgment or conclusion -- which is not the same thing as violation in the least.
What Rudd and the show's opponents hope is to further marginalize these bodies and images -- to push them further into the dark corners of society, where, in the shadows, they ironically would be even more vulnerable to corruption, violence and harm than in the light that Henson seeks to bring to them. The sickness of the puritan mind is that, through the relentless justification of moral condemnation, it itself imagines these bodies as objects of violence and exploitation, and therefore guarantees the continued curse of the taboo upon expressions and sexualities both mature and otherwise. The puritans themselves imagine the violation and the violence, rendering the bodies objects of shameful desire and disgust (for what can "revolting" mean, other than "disgusting"?). It should be the duty of every artist to condemn these actions by the Australian government, for there are Rudds and puritans everywhere, in every country. As Solzhenitsyn and Kafka have memorably demonstrated, it is one of the conditions of the 20th century that the greatest fear should be that of the knock of the police at the door (whether it's your apartment or the gallery or the theatre in which you show your work), and the disappearance of the individual, at the business end of a policeman's gun, in the night.
Alison Croggon and Chris Boyd have more on the story; Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has also released a statement. Grossly and crudely censored and mutilated samples of the work in question are here. And so much for the political capital that the Labor Party's Rudd government tried to pile up with the Australia 2020 summit, at least in some quarters; it'll be interesting to see where the dividing line falls on this one.
Posted at 2.54 pm in /Politics
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