Bill Henson is an Australian art photographer who is best known for shooting Vermeer-esque studies in light and texture, centred around scenes of contemporary tableau, and also notably artistic nudes.
What that means in non-art-student language (or perhaps real art-student language) is he photographs people standing in front of 4WD’s in suburban driveways, at night, with the lights glaring yellow, looking off into purple meaningless darkness with empty expressions, while standing on wet turf with no shoes on and, perhaps, bloody hands that look like they’ve been digging.
He’s also well known for sordid child sex photography such as these crackers:
Recognise them? Of course you don’t, unless apparently you’re a peadophile or an art student, or both. They’re from aptly named ‘Untitled Series’ from circa 1995, released to the gallery-going public without anyone giving the slightest shit.
But they’re exactly the same as his latest series, displayed in a small gallery, which was then instantly shut down by police for no known reason recently in Sydney, which you’ve probably heard about on the News. In Henson’s 2008 collection, similar ‘child’ (that is to say, 12-18yo) models are shown in half-light with the same prurient, full-lipped, vulnerable dazed expressions of recently recovering stroke victims like the characters in all his photographs, but now with *actual nudity*:
note: text added
Whether or not peadophiles look at Bill Henson images with the same pre-masturbatory glee as they do actual child porn (which, unlike artistic nudes, don’t have the full legal consent of the person involved) I think is beside the point. We all find it objectionable - or at least, being the greatest taboo in all humanity, we say we do, unless we happen to be Bill Henson, a professor of cultural studies or art history, or an outspoken individual who likes stirring up shit.
But it’s art, right? Art nourishes culture, and we shouldn’t interfere with it. Riiiight? Crossing the line into trying to censor and categorise something like artistic expression is surely the last line of demarcation for a free and civilised society, isn’t it? Yet for the protection of our most precious (and coincidentally most ignored and overly-ventriloquised) resource, The Children, does that line not need now to be crossed? For the children?
I mean, come on - say the amateur philosphers (many of them spokespeople of political and other standards-enforcing bodies) - What Is Art Anyway?
And they ask this as though this is a question that has never been asked before. Well people - let me, as a graduate of highschool art-history studies (with a Band 6 score in HSC Visual Art nonetheless), one-time almost-getter-in-er of the Art Express national annual HSC art exhibition, and amateur art-student-posing-as-a-science-student, tell you: Nobody Knows What Art Is, Not Even, And Especially, Artists, And People Who Make Their Actual Living Writing Papers, Theses and Books About Fucking Art.
Nobody can define art. Nobody. It’s like defining ‘what is funny?’. But the best definition so far, both posed as a result of careful and studious research by historians and philosophers over mostly the last 80-100years, since people started thinking art might not be just paintings of rich people and nude European chicks; and also as a product of an overall lack of interest, and actual utility for a definition - since about 600 people globally who aren’t art-school students actually visit art galleries or even give a shit; the best possible definition of art is: anything made by an Artist, that is shown in a Gallery.
The definition of an Artist is, a person, other than they who specifically make and sell Art, who says they are an Artist.
A Gallary is a physical (sorry internet art scene losers) location, usually with walls, where Art is displayed, within or on those walls. Sometimes it’s a park.
Sometime the Art is performance-based, and so can’t be made or displayed - but this is a moot point, since apart from The Happening, nobody has done performance art with any real conviction since the early 1970’s, and consequently, again, nobody gives a shit.
So what is the difference between child pornography - graphic or otherwise depictions of minors engaging in sexual or sexually suggestive behaviour; and Art - possibly also graphic or otherwise depictions of minors engaging in sexual or sexually suggestive behaviour (like being naked and looking vacantly into the camera like someone with agnosia)?
The answer is: one is a set of photographs of real children getting sexually abused, or doing something uncomfortable and weird, without their consent or express desire, that people with psycho-sexual mental illnesses look at pictures and videos of to masturbate to, the making of which causes irreparable psychological damage to the individuals involved for the rest of their lives;
And the other are pictures which look like child porn to white middle-class adults who have no concept of what real child porn looks like because they’ve never seen it (hopefully), which are actually carefully staged photographs with consenting models taken by a famous art photographer who only 0.8% of the Australian population was aware existed up until around two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, you can flick through a Target catalogue and see pages of 8yo girls dolled up like Sunset Blvd whores modelling miniature swimsuits and My First Slut play outfits, but nobody bats a fucking eyelid. Why? Well, because nobody but paedophiles would care, and it makes money - and we all usually accept or ignore anything until some TV news show makes a big deal out of it calling it A Shameful National Outrage or somesuch other truth-distorting bullshit that suggests anyone but the producers of the show and the three or four invisible political figures who engineered the stunt to draw attention from actual issues was involved in bringing it to public attention.
Now, art is different to catalogues and public media. I’m not saying that the sexualisation of youth is a conspiracy of the fashion and cosmetics industries, perpetuated through clothing design and reinforcing perceptions of acceptble beauty and sexuality through magazines designed only to sell products and make mon… well actually, I am saying that exact thing. Like about 4,000 other published essays, but whatever, they’re all written for journals only people who have PhD’s in gender studies read anyway, so you’ll never hear the likes of the above somewhere as important as television anyway, unless in an 8-second soundbyte voiced by some chubby post-feminist who works for a university or government department, once every couple of years when they trot out a piece making it seem like News Limited gives a shit about the women’s rights or whatever.
My point is - who gives a fuck about Bill Henson? Do you really think he got up one morning in 2006 and said, I’m going to spend several years working on a photographic series so I can let everyone know I abuse young girls? Oh yeah, I’m sure he spends 6months working on 8 slides from a shoot with an impoverished young model who spent 4 days in a studio just for bread and shelter, so he can get half a key of it packed away for secret export to the Baltic states where they pay for pure uncut child porn by the gram. That’s how international artistic nude photo art works. And coincidentally, that’s its main source, and innocent childrens’ main threat of sexual violence: recognised photo artists.
Clearly dawn raids on inner-city galleries by state police happen because the Prime Minister has a direct interest in maintaining the thin ethical line between celebration and abuse of the artistic nude, and protecting children. I bet he stays up late at night worrying about the state of child pornography as an emerging art-form in the Sydney and Melbourne scenes. I’m sure this point-scoring exercise would have happened if it hadn’t become apparent everyone hates him now because petrol is expensive and the Labor party is shit on a national scale, and he needed a diversion.
I don’t actually like peadophiles - not that censoring photographic art is going to reduce the number of them in the slightest. And I don’t think parents who sign their aspiring model children for nude shoots, however open-minded they may be to the intriguing themes of youth and sexual expression, should be invited to barbecues. I just think, with the amount of child porn trafficked on the net, do we need to worry about the least publicised and also most sensitive and thought-out public exploration of the topic of youth sexuality by an artist, or, maybe, do we need to worry about our obsession with worrying about fucking paedophiles everywhere lurking in art galleries and behind garbage cans when actually:
95% of all child sex abuse is committed by someone known or immediately related to the child
you have more chance of having your retina detached than having your child snatched from your front yard (invalid if you bungee-jump)
if you have children, one of them is probably under 15 and dressed like a goth Britney Spears already, right now
you’ve already forgotten who the fuck Bill Henson is in the time it took to read this article.
Stop watching the news.
