I know I am a bit slow off the mark, but I am just catching up on some weekend newspaper reading and came across two articles of interest.
The first is an article from SAJ pin-up girl Miranda Devine as she puts her pen to paper about the troubled Federal Government back-bencher Belinda Neal.
This would make a welcome addition or scene for the film I proposed last week. (When will someone take up my idea??)
In the article, Devine goes on to defend Neal;
"We don't like to think of ourselves as bullies, but the pile-on demolition of Belinda Neal in recent weeks shows that the mob will always find a victim."
She then draws a bow the length of a rugby pitch to a letter that some poor kid wrote into the Geelong Advertiser who complains about the bullying he has to endure at school.
What a delicious irony when someone like Devine defends a person like Neal (who is a member of the NSW ALP no less) and then accuses the media and society of 'bullying'. Talk about rose-tinted glasses.
The second, and much more interesting column I discovered was one by David Malouf on the back-page of The Australian's Review section. It is the most sensible thing written about the whole Bill Henson-Hetty Johnson affair and is a timely review of what happened only a few weeks ago.
Malouf proffers a clear perspective of the role of art in society by stating that;
"We live in a complex society made up of people with different interests. Some of them, sport for instance, are majority interests. Others, like the high arts, are easily categorised and dismissed as elitist. But democracy, and egalitarianism too, is about spread, not the superior rights of the majority; government support of the arts is not an optional extra. It is a necessary fact of democracy, of egalitarianism and spread."
He then goes on to give a clear critique of the Henson's work;
"What we discover in ourselves after long contemplation of a Henson image for instance, after our original astonishment at its formal beauty, the subtle gradations of colour in the skin tones, the play with light and shade (and this will be only the first of many astonishments at Henson's technical virtuosity and the magic it produces), is the mixture of emotions all this arouses in us; especially if what we have before us is one of his tranquil but inward-looking nudes, or one of those images in which young people are lyrically engaged with one another in a moment of intimacy that commands our attention, is in fact mesmerising, but which we feel we ought not to be privy to. A sense, to begin with, of the immediacy and touching unknowableness of these familiar creatures; a sense of awe, too, at what the human animal, in all its otherness and essential mystery, may be, beyond the animal and physical; a sense, now that looking has triumphed over our inclination towards not-looking, of reverence, of being haunted by an image that, once we have fully experienced it, we cannot easily dismiss. But all this comes only after long looking and contemplating. Of giving ourselves over to the work."
And then the wonderful clincher, which I cannot help but feel is aimed like a bazooka directly at Hetty Johnston and Chairman Rudd;
"Of course we may still find a work unworthy of the artist, or simply bad; but we have first to do our own work of attending; of reading, looking, listening. To "know" that a work is bad, or revolting, before you have actually looked at it, is to show no regard for the artist and to say you have no interest in or regard for art. Henson's 13-year-old nude may well be erotic. So is a lot of the greatest art, and much else that we think of as belonging only to spirit and intellect. It is a sick mind whose only response to the erotic is disgust or shame, and a sick or hypocritical society that has no respect for Eros as one of the forces that makes us what we are."
It's interesting to look at Miranda Devine's new found issue of bullying and place it on the Bill Henson-Hetty Johnson debate.
Who was the bully in all of that? Was it Devine who started the debate with her article Moral backlash over sexing up of our children?
Or was it Hetty Johnston? She is about to move to Sydney to make sure she can keep hounding Henson who she believes his photos are "exploitative ... of children".
Or is it Henson? Or is it the arts community, yelling Johnston down at a recent arts forum at the Museum of Contemporary Art?
The first is an article from SAJ pin-up girl Miranda Devine as she puts her pen to paper about the troubled Federal Government back-bencher Belinda Neal.
This would make a welcome addition or scene for the film I proposed last week. (When will someone take up my idea??)
In the article, Devine goes on to defend Neal;
"We don't like to think of ourselves as bullies, but the pile-on demolition of Belinda Neal in recent weeks shows that the mob will always find a victim."
She then draws a bow the length of a rugby pitch to a letter that some poor kid wrote into the Geelong Advertiser who complains about the bullying he has to endure at school.
What a delicious irony when someone like Devine defends a person like Neal (who is a member of the NSW ALP no less) and then accuses the media and society of 'bullying'. Talk about rose-tinted glasses.
The second, and much more interesting column I discovered was one by David Malouf on the back-page of The Australian's Review section. It is the most sensible thing written about the whole Bill Henson-Hetty Johnson affair and is a timely review of what happened only a few weeks ago.
Malouf proffers a clear perspective of the role of art in society by stating that;
"We live in a complex society made up of people with different interests. Some of them, sport for instance, are majority interests. Others, like the high arts, are easily categorised and dismissed as elitist. But democracy, and egalitarianism too, is about spread, not the superior rights of the majority; government support of the arts is not an optional extra. It is a necessary fact of democracy, of egalitarianism and spread."
He then goes on to give a clear critique of the Henson's work;
"What we discover in ourselves after long contemplation of a Henson image for instance, after our original astonishment at its formal beauty, the subtle gradations of colour in the skin tones, the play with light and shade (and this will be only the first of many astonishments at Henson's technical virtuosity and the magic it produces), is the mixture of emotions all this arouses in us; especially if what we have before us is one of his tranquil but inward-looking nudes, or one of those images in which young people are lyrically engaged with one another in a moment of intimacy that commands our attention, is in fact mesmerising, but which we feel we ought not to be privy to. A sense, to begin with, of the immediacy and touching unknowableness of these familiar creatures; a sense of awe, too, at what the human animal, in all its otherness and essential mystery, may be, beyond the animal and physical; a sense, now that looking has triumphed over our inclination towards not-looking, of reverence, of being haunted by an image that, once we have fully experienced it, we cannot easily dismiss. But all this comes only after long looking and contemplating. Of giving ourselves over to the work."
And then the wonderful clincher, which I cannot help but feel is aimed like a bazooka directly at Hetty Johnston and Chairman Rudd;
"Of course we may still find a work unworthy of the artist, or simply bad; but we have first to do our own work of attending; of reading, looking, listening. To "know" that a work is bad, or revolting, before you have actually looked at it, is to show no regard for the artist and to say you have no interest in or regard for art. Henson's 13-year-old nude may well be erotic. So is a lot of the greatest art, and much else that we think of as belonging only to spirit and intellect. It is a sick mind whose only response to the erotic is disgust or shame, and a sick or hypocritical society that has no respect for Eros as one of the forces that makes us what we are."
It's interesting to look at Miranda Devine's new found issue of bullying and place it on the Bill Henson-Hetty Johnson debate.
Who was the bully in all of that? Was it Devine who started the debate with her article Moral backlash over sexing up of our children?
Or was it Hetty Johnston? She is about to move to Sydney to make sure she can keep hounding Henson who she believes his photos are "exploitative ... of children".
Or is it Henson? Or is it the arts community, yelling Johnston down at a recent arts forum at the Museum of Contemporary Art?
Maybe Henson should have just said from the outset, "Don't you know who I am?" But then again, Henson ain't no Belinda Neal (or even a member of the ALP Right).
3 comments:
I would have thought the definition of bullying would be a government MP standing over a new staffer and forcing her to perjure herself on a stat dec. But then again, I'm not Australia's Highest Paid Columnist, so what would I know?
Thanks for this. The thought of Eros in Dudd in one sentence made me bring up me lunch. Ta.
And in a climate like this we wonder why artists like Barrie Kosky flee for more civilised parts of the world?
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