Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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Home > Politics Wednesday, 11 March 2009 Campaign-a-lujah!UPDATE: More about contemporary political theatre – this time from England – in Andrew Haydon's post today at the Guardian theatre blog, which links to Lyn Gardner's positive review of a revival of Howard Barker's Victory at the Arcola Theatre.
Two pieces of news for those interested in political theatre
post- The first New York performance of Caryl Churchill's controversial Seven Jewish Children will take place this coming Monday evening, 16 March, at 8.00pm at the Brecht Forum, 451 West Street between Bank and Bethune Streets. (I'll leave the quibbling as to whether this reading constitutes a "New York premiere" to the beancounters.) Theaters Against War and Rachel's Words are sponsoring the reading, which will feature, among others, Kathleen Chalfant and Ellen McLaughlin; more information at the Theaters Against War Web site. Admission is free; a collection to benefit Medical Aid to Palestine will be taken at the end of the program. Now from political tragedy to political comedy, though with just as serious an intent. The streets and news media of New York will see, in a performance scheduled to run through 3 November 2009, the campaign of Rev. Billy Talen for Mayor of New York on the Green Party ticket. Billy, who announced his candidacy earlier this month (which got him this story by Rebecca White in the New York Times), explores the three main planks of his platform in this post, called "Three Kinds of Silence," at the campaign Web site:
Those three planks? "Anal Sex, Socialism, and Peace" – or, as he also has it, "Love, money and the right to have a childhood." Read the entire post here. For Billy's actual chances of victory, see the entry under hell, snowball's chance in. But finally, a candidate and platform one can ... ahem ... get behind. Posted in /Politics Home > Politics Sunday, 12 October 2008 Letter of SupportThose who wish to add their names to the open letter of support for Bill Henson can now do so here. Those who doubt that sex may be on the minds of Australian politicians far more than Australian photographers may find this a source of enlightenment, as well as worthy of a laugh or two. Maybe Chris had a point about the Freudian approach. Posted in /Politics Home > Politics Sunday, 12 October 2008 Innocence LostAustralian 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 in /Politics
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