Category Archives: media

The Weight

Inferno

Last Saturday was the hottest temperature I have ever experienced. At our house, it reached 47 degrees, which I see is over 116 degrees in the old fahrenheit scale.

In the afternoon, after abandoning the house when it hit 30 degrees inside, we walked a hundred metres from the car to the entrance of a shopping centre looking for shelter from the heat, and I covered my little boy as if radiation was falling from the sky, which it was. Hot wind like a blast-furnace swirled around empty carparks. The sky was yellow and we could smell smoke. I had an intimation of armageddon.

Looking at the images of Marysville and Kinglake, armageddon is about right.

I have been preoccupied by thoughts about the effect of these public disasters and my reaction to them. I’ve been working in the federal Parliament this week, and the sense of despair has been overwhelming as the sheer size of the destruction and the number of lives lost rolls out over the media across several days.

I’m not one to emote very much when the public join in with these festivals of mourning over some dead celebrity, or even when lives are lost in natural disasters. Mostly, I’ve thought my reaction was reasonable and civilised, as these events are part of a larger picture of birth and death, creation and destruction, and a long way from me. And it’s true, they are, but sometimes I have cause to doubt the self-satisfied veneer of my response.

Yesterday, on the plane, I felt an uncontrollable welling in me, a heaviness in the heart that I had to struggle to control. On the video screen, a shot from a helicopter of a large area of burned out grassland, then following a car’s tyre tracks clearly discernable against the black earth. Pulling out to a wider view, a white car, pathetically abandoned at the very edge of a large dam still full of water. It was not known, said the voiceover, whether the person in the car had survived.

The last few days have been spent with the constant din of the television and radio news, cycling and recycling the same stories and bits of information that really aren’t information at all. It’s hard not be cynical as the commercial stations mine this disaster like a seam of gold, as they interview anyone with a story to tell or just an anecdote that will become worn with age and repetition, an emblem of an experience.

I haven’t read anything as thoughtful as David Tiley’s contribution, so I will link to it here.

Barista: ‘We lived again but life was different.‘

Economic irrationalism at Radio National

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Nine’s ‘Sunday’ program axed, Fairfax cutting staff, one university after another announcing staff cuts and cuts of subjects, the latest: La Trobe University.

It reminds me of the counterintuitive line pedalled by several of the major banks years ago when they started cutting suburban branch numbers, informing us that it was to “improve customer service.”

I am further depressed by the news that the same dead hand is hovering over important programs on Radio National, including the Media Report. Without doubt, the best current affairs commentary to be found in this country is on Radio National’s World Today, AM and particularly, PM programs.

As Andrew Dodd, the Media Report’s founding presenter, wrote in Crikey today:

The Media Report has popped up in Hansard, the indexes of books, the curricula of university courses and the ipods of listeners. It has kept on keeping on for fifteen years with informed intelligent debate about the state of the nation’s media.

Not bad for a half hour show that’s staffed by one and a half people and costs much less to produce over a year than just one episode of almost any TV program you’d care to mention.

He concludes:

We are looking for media that starts where current affairs reporters finish and which challenges us with new ways of thinking about issues or which introduces us to ideas that we’d never thought to consider. These wonderful Radio National programs did this regularly and their loss is a huge blow to the diversity of our media.

It’s rare that I agree with The Australian’s editorial writer about anything, but I concur with every sentence of today’s piece, except one:

The paradox of this media-abundant age is that the thirst for quality has never been greater, as the growing circulation of newspapers such as The Australian shows.

Yyyeeeeesssss…….

Bill Henson: Let’s have ourselves a hangin’!

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“WHEN the forces of public order march into art galleries and walk off with exhibits deemed to be offensive, two things are certain: one, that images which the vast majority would never have seen or wanted to see will be made famous and will be looked up on the internet by slavering hordes, and, two, a great deal of nonsense will be talked by a great many people.”

– Germaine Greer

My first reaction to the latest artistic moral panic was sadness and disappointment. Disappointment because the abduction of several Henson works by police was an extreme overreaction to a complaint, and sadness because I knew that when confronted all parties would scurry to occupy mutually hostile sides of the argument, neither side engaging with the valid arguments of the other. This has proved to be the case.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this latest episode in the intellectual life of the nation. Firstly because I dislike Bill Henson’s work. Unlike Sebastian Smee who published a defence in The Australian last week, I find it unconvincing, empty and pretentious, the very definition of mannerism.

I remember as a photography student reading a profile of Henson in a weekend magazine. This is probably unfair to him, but the thing that struck me the most at the time were the terms in which he chose to describe and discuss his work: parallels with classical music were evoked, with romantic poets of the past. I thought, oh dear…

This was an impression that only solidified with Henson’s career retrospective at the Victorian National Gallery I saw a few years ago. So much depended upon the massive scale, the all-enshrouding darkness of the photographs, with bits of pale flesh peeking out here and there from the gloom; large slabs of torn black photographic paper to no apparent purpose other than superficial visual effect, and most irritating of all, the generalised aura of sweaty ennui.

I came away with the feeling that what I had just seen was a contemporary equivalent of a Royal Academy exhibition of the 1880s; grand, very large, but equally cut-off from the currents of artistic history that really matter. We have seen this sort of thing before. Henson’s work echoes some of the most cloying and sentimental Victorian Academy painting, especially that which dealt with the ‘fallen woman’ and the sanctimonious claptrap of Victorian sexual hypocrisy.

Secondly I feel uneasy about this because I am a parent to a daughter and I find the assumptions his work appears to be based on extremely questionable. As images, they seem to me to belong to a rather unsavoury history of adult men musing at their leisure about the sexuality of adolescent or pre-adolescent children. At best, this mode of image-making is self-indulgent and at worst a kind of exploitation based on fantasy that at its extreme margins includes sexual assault.

That’s not to make the category mistake of saying that all art belonging to this history is itself a form of assault. It may be exploitative or it may not. Germaine Greer was admirably precise in unpacking the assumptions of gender and the (sometimes) unconscious habit of making allowances for no other reason than that something was painted and not photographed, coming with the patina of art-historical credibility, when its intention was sometimes literally pornographic.

In my opinion Henson’s work is not and could not be seriously confused for actual pornography. Not by either its dictionary definition or by the widest practical use of that word. To call it pornography is simply wrong in fact. However, it is, at least in my view, exploitative.

I have mixed feelings thirdly because I defend Henson’s right, and the right of artists generally, to explore difficult or contentious territory. In fact, I think artists have a moral responsibility to do so.

But since we’re talking about morality, I think artists have the same duty to operate morally in the world as everyone else does. That is, I do not think art occupies a special zone exempt from the moral precepts that bind the rest of society together.

This is an important point to make because many who dispute Henson’s right to operate in such an ethically complex territory (like, I suspect, the Prime Minister), apparently apply a burden of proof that doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. I mean that we accept different kinds of images in different contexts, without dispute. Society doesn’t seem to have a problem with sexually explicit imagery per se (we have censorship categories to deal especially with it) but we would not accept that imagery in all places at all times.

Henson’s work operates in special contexts. The first most important is that it is ‘art’. It is usually encountered in a gallery where people have to make a special effort to attend. It is a certain size, has certain characteristics, etc. That is, even though they are photographs and are reproducible, the artwork itself is the print, not the reproduction of the print. By endlessly reproducing the work or part of the work on websites, television screens and so on, the work is stripped of its qualifying contexts and presented as something else. This has important effects on what it is that we are arguing about. When the Prime Minister is presented on a morning TV interview where the discussion has strayed onto child pornography and the media’s creeping sexualisation of children, he responds that it is ‘disgusting’. It is entirely predictable that he would do so, no matter how much we might like him to be aware of its special contexts. The context has changed, and the man who is anxious to be seen to represent the population as a whole, reacts as the population as a whole reacts when such an image is seen in a new context. He might have responded very differently if he had been standing in a gallery before the work itself.

It is not pornography but unfortunately Henson’s work may still meet a legal definition of an offence at some point in the future. I have heard various legal authorities over the last few days make the point that he could be legally vulnerable if one of his models retrospectively decided to lodge a complaint. This seems to me to be credible and Henson is also morally vulnerable on this point. To what degree can a child give consent to participate in the making of an image that will have a life of its own forever afterwards? Henson’s work is freely reproduced without reference to anyone but him. This has been demonstrated to an almost ridiculous degree as the contentious images are endlessly reproduced on every newspaper website, the hypocrites claiming that the issue is one of ‘child welfare’.

It strikes me that there is an absence at the heart of artistic debate in this country, at least regarding the visual arts, and that is the artists themselves. I totally respect Henson’s decision to remain out of the controversy while he is burned in effigy by talk-back callers and tabloid TV (I think of what the 1943 Archibald Prize controversy did to the health and peace of mind of William Dobell). However, I can’t help but yearn for a visual artist at least as publicly articulate as so many of our writers. Celebrity is the language of the mass media, and while the subjects of the discussion remain absent, the wolves will go on playing with the corpse of their reputations. Artists don’t have to be celebrities to regard themselves as public intellectuals, just as writers so often do, with a role to play in informing and educating the public and fostering discussion. The result is that artists are regarded as little better than perverts and kiddie-fiddlers.

Believe me that I agree with John McDonald when he fumes that the Prime Minister should be aware of the name of one of his country’s premier visual artists. Where we diverge is that I think that visual artists are at least partly to blame. Visual artists (unless they are populists like a Ken Done or Pro Hart) will always be marginal with reference to the mainstream of popular culture, just as classical musicians are. The responsibility is not with the popular mainstream to understand how special we are and to respect our priorities; if we want acceptance, the responsibility is on us to explain, interpret and participate in cultural discourse in something other than a precious, resentful, condescending way.

Many of the defenders reveal their bad faith when, like John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald, they deny that ordinary people don’t have the right to an opinion at all. He said:

“It is no secret that rank populism is now a fact of life in Australian politics. But in an age when every message is refined and spin-doctored to avoid offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities, it appears to be OK to pronounce judgments on unseen works of art in the name of public morality.”

I can’t say whether he finds it worse that people can have an opinion about works of art in the name of public morality, or that they can have an opinion when the work is unseen. At any rate, the Prime Miniser was looking at an image when he gave an opinion (not, I add, the work but an image of the work), and he prefaced his remark with the words “I think…” My point is that he has every right to have an opinion, just as every talkback caller has the right to an opinion. They are not informed opinions, but then whose fault is that?

Most defensive discussion of the work has largely avoided facing the fact that while we so often denounce ‘corporate paedophilia’ and the creeping sexualisation of children in the media, the onus is on those who defend Bill Henson’s work to explain how or why it does not belong on this continuum.

A few things need stating, that despite the special art-context and all that that implies:

1. The images frequently depict children, and

2. The images are frequently sexualised.

These are almost statements of fact, rather than interpretation. The images are ‘about’ sexuality in a sense that includes adolescent sexuality. That is why they are so edgy. It is part of their power as images, it is also why so many find them disturbing, including some that were so disturbed they took their complaint to the police. For curators and the general art mafia is disallow this as part of the conversation is irresponsible and intellectually dishonest. This is why I find so much of the defence of the works unconvincing.

I find other artists and photographers don’t often have much to say about Henson’s work apart from noting his obvious technical mastery. Those that crow the loudest in his favour tend to be curators and the sort of people who get done for tax evasion. You would be mistaken if you thought that Bill gets down to the seedier parts of Darlinghurst to look for models, even though that’s just how he makes them up. Oh no. These are private school boys and girls, their parents the art equivalent of wealthy stage-mothers, lining up to pimp their kids for the social cache of being part of a ‘Bill Henson’. These parents have Henson’s work on their walls anyway – they can afford it. If you had any doubt, the Shadow Treasurer and wealthiest person in the federal Parliament Malcolm Turnbull had to ‘fess up the other day and admit that he quite liked Bill Henson’s work and in fact he had some on his walls at home. Was he hounded in the parliament as a pornographer? Of course not, he’s a Liberal and a toff and we expect that sort of thing from people like him, but woe betide any Labor politician who evinces any sympathy for the arts. Latte sippers! Elitists! Witness the abuse heaped on Kevin Rudd for the expressions of support directed his way by the ‘Creative Australia’ segment of the 2020 Summit.

I have heard talkback callers state simply that to photograph a child in any context without clothes is wrong. I can sympathise with those who hold this view without agreeing with it. This would include any image that is taken of an unclothed child for any reason whatsoever. It would also sexualise images that are in no way sexual, imposing such an interpretation on any image regardless of the context. We should avoid this extremism no matter how shrill public moralists like ‘Bravehearts’ may get.

To simply say that art can never intrude upon some aspect of life is a principle that we should never embrace. It is a statement like “No comedian should ever tell a joke about cancer, because cancer is never funny.” That statement is wrong not because cancer is funny, but because it remains to be seen whether a joke about cancer is funny. That is, we need to hear the joke first.

Similarly, art about adolescent sexuality may be smut or it may say something original, something affecting, something worth saying about that aspect of life. The point is, we need to see and judge the art first. Does Bill Henson’s art say something original about sexuality? In my opinion it doesn’t. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that it might say a few interesting things about adolescence, for example, and I have no doubt about Henson’s seriousness of purpose. Certainly he thinks it does and many people (Sebastian Smee, for one) believe he does. That should be enough for any community to tolerate its existence.

Henson’s work must also be seen in the context of his reputation, even though it doesn’t insulate him from criticism. He has represented his country at the Venice Biennale. His bibliography is several pages long and the list of institutions that own his work includes many of the premier art institutions in the world and in Australia. By anyone’s estimation, he is one of the nation’s most senior visual artists in any medium.

I have no doubt that the courts will find against the complaint. Henson’s work is plainly not ‘obscene’ in either the legal or the usual sense. More explicit images of adolescents can be seen on many newsstands and on television. This makes the whole affair potentially embarrassing for any politician or other public figure who may still have something even more inflammatory to say about the work, sensing that there is now a competition on about who can denounce pornography the loudest.

What we are left with is a sense of sadness that the climate of intellectual debate in this country is the loser. Bill Henson is a loser. Kevin Rudd is a loser. The only winners are those like commercial talkback radio, tabloid current affairs television, morals crusaders and media proprietors whose economic interests are served by a good old witch-burning.

A different kind of election?

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Michael Leddy’s comment to my previous post made me think that despite all the distance and the word-bites that constitute almost our entire picture of the American election, maybe it is possible to get the sense of it about right.

In what I have read and seen, I’ve been surprised and discomforted by the cynicism of the Clinton campaign, a kind of scorched earth policy that would bring the house down so no one else can live in it.

Yesterday, Guy Rundle was talking about the appearance of Hillary on Good Morning America, in which she apparently promised to “obliterate Iran”. I’m surprised I missed it actually, as it’s on at about 5.00am on our television and I’m usually up trying to get young Sweeney Payne, aged six weeks, back to sleep.

I can’t imagine what she thought she was doing saying crap like that on morning television. I can only imagine the context, but it seems to me she often rushes to occupy the vacuum the failure of neo-conservatism has opened up, something Obama seems loath to do.

Hillary is angling to make Golda Meir look like a Geelong regional office special needs coordination program conflict resolution officer and part-time reiki masseuse, with an incredible ad which appears to suggest that Bin Laden started the War in the Pacific using Hurricane Katrina against Pearl Harbour, and the only person who can stop him/them/it is a pants-suited terminatrix from the future.

I was recently surprised to hear left-leaning friends of mine all enthusiastically endorsing Hillary, including Doug, whose passion for American politics and history should not be doubted. Even amongst informed people working in politics, the feeling seemed to be almost universal. I put it down to the powerful pull of the gender question. Does it look like a woman President is a more momentous leap into a progressive future than a black one? Given the economic and (there’s no better word) moral state of America at present (I’m thinking of Iraq, Guantanamo, waterboarding etc, etc), it seems to me that Hillary the insider, behaving as she is, is not so much a step backwards but pretty much the status-quo, same-old same-old candidate.

In a comment, Michael says:

Here in the States (United, that is), the ABC moderators have been widely criticized for focusing the first half of the debate on distractions and nonsense — e.g., flag lapel pins. No one on the stage was wearing a flag lapel pin!

…And neither were most people watching the telecast! Surely that’s the problem with the supercilious question: If a flag lapel pin denotes patriotism, and the lack of a pin suggests a lack of patriotism, then patriotism is in short supply on the streets of America given the woeful lack of flag lapel pins everywhere!

We could say a lot about the strange fetishization of the American flag in that country (without it, Jasper Johns didn’t make any sense), except to note how very strange it looks to the rest of the world, if I can speak for the whole world for a moment. I’m trying to think of a flag that carries a comparable weight in the national consciousness – maybe the French? Certainly the tricolor is as symbolically loaded, but nowhere near as evident in their popular culture.

I say this as an inhabitant of a country whose flag is an image that is constantly under dispute. Statements of a Republican nature (yes we are still a nominal monarchy) always quickly lead to discussion of the flag. Personally I find the presence of the Union Jack on our flag bizarre. I’m always reminded of something my grandfather once said, that his Irish policeman father refused to acknowledge a flag that had the symbol of his enemy in the top corner.

There’s no doubt that American political commentary goes some strange places. Yesterday ‘The Australian’ reprinted an op-ed piece of puffery by P. J. O’Rourke, who has at least the benefit of being funny, even if he often mistakes flippancy for wit.

Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.

If you got through the second sentence without feeling nauseous, you’re better than I. It follows that if you’re Liberal, you must be dishonorable, cowardly, unpatriotic, irresponsible, with no sense of duty and so on and so forth. This is civilization?

Head of Ivan Pochitonov?

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A fascinating suggestion in yesterday’s gossip column in The Age. Daniel Ziffer has reported the remarkable resemblance between the NGV’s ‘Head of a Man’, formerly attributed to Van Gogh, and ‘Portrait of Ivan Pochitonov’ by Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov (1882). I have mentioned the recent controversy about its attribution before.

Apparently someone called Bill Rawlinson tried to alert the NGV to his long-held concerns about the image on the front cover of the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’. The painting is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The gallery’s Sue Coffey said curators commented that it was an “interesting comparison” but the two works had distinctly different noses and coloured eyes.

Nevertheless, the resemblance could be a solid lead in what should be the most pressing question before the curators of the NGV, namely, who painted ‘Head of a Man’, in what circumstances, and why does a painting apparently done in 1885 without reference to the contemporary Van Gogh so resemble his style?

Wikipedia on Wolfgang Sievers

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Just as, several years ago, I started hearing about Google and quickly began using it on a daily basis, the word about Wikipedia has spread in a similar way. Like Google, it is now ubiquitous. I recently warned Bec, who is teaching Orwell’s 1984 this year, to carefully read the Wikipedia entry, as she would undoubtedly come across the very same words in students’ essays. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s sure to.

The viral nature of Wiki is fascinating, and it deserves an entry all to itself. I read an impressive article a while ago – I don’t remember where – about the evolution of the definition of ‘abortion’. By virtue of the ‘hive mind’ approach, and despite my immediate suspicion that it would have been a mess, what came out of the process was a very good, clear article.

I was impressed with founder Jimmy Wales on his recent appearance in Australia. The tabloids (both print and otherwise) attempted to catch him out with several gotcha stories. Ellen Fanning’s was the most transparent, when she demanded to know why Wikipedia had her as (Powderfinger singer) Bernard Fanning’s sister. Wales patiently explained to her how Wikipedia works and the error was corrected in minutes. She ended up looking self-promoting and a bit of a goose.

Even though the accuracy of Wikipedia is often defended by its contributors, I note that this is in regard to science and technical articles only. Even a quick review of humanities articles reveals that the quality is often less than ideal. I think those of us with some knowledge or expertise in the area should make it a conscious priority to contribute where we can, especially since Wikipedia is fast becoming the first port of call for information by students.

Lately I’ve been amusing myself editing and substantially expanding the article on photographer Wolfgang Sievers. I just barely know what I’m doing as far as the html code goes, but I’m finding that some nice person is watching the article and fixing up some of my errors as I go.

In the early nineties I lived with my uncle who was the photography critic for The Age at the time. He reviewed the major retrospective of Sievers’ work at the NGV, and Wolfgang made contact with him. Presently, we were asked over to his house in Sandringham for breakfast and to give our opinion of a new ABC TV documentary that Wolfgang was a little anxious about. Already in awe, I was astonished into silence when he mentioned that his very good friends Helmut Newton and June (known as ‘Alice Springs’) had been round the previous week for tea.

At the end of our amazing morning, Wolfgang mentioned that he was about to go into the darkroom to print some of his old negatives, and would Greg like to choose one for himself? We were in his attic studio and we were looking at a whole wall of folders containing carefully filed proofs of almost every negative he had ever exposed.

In an act of generosity I still find hard to credit, Wolfgang asked if I (a very lowly photography student) would like to choose one for myself? The floor opened up under me and for the rest of our time there, I found it difficult to concentrate.

The photograph has hung on my wall ever since, surviving even a burglary, when they cleared off with almost everything else I owned.

So writing an article on this great man was an honour for me, and I hope I have the details of his life correct. As more comes to hand, I will add more. I especially want to see some of his extraordinary images up there, as soon as I come to grips with how it all works.

To my surprise, I opened The Age on Saturday, to see a large photograph of Wolfgang, now in his nineties, and the news that an archive of several hundred photographs, worth up to AUS$1 million, will be sold to raise money for justice and civil liberties causes.

He said:

“There’s a funny little word called compassion. It’s the sort of thing that the present Government hasn’t heard about, but that is what drives me on, because I had a most fortunate and wonderful life and I think it’s bloody well my job to pay back for that.”

Sulphuric acid plant, Electrolytic Industries, Risdon, Hobart, 1959

Dissent has its limits at Quadrant

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In an example of obscene hypocrisy, a crowd of hand-picked Howard lickspittles lined up at a dinner last night to toast the 50th anniversary of Quadrant magazine, claiming that it was celebration of non-conformity and eccentricity.

Apparently though, non-conformism has its limits, as Quadrant’s most successful editor Robert Manne, a man who was forced from his position when his humanist views proved too much for the reactionary editorial board, was not invited.

Without irony, the whale-like Paddy McGuinness claimed:

This is our mission: to defend the great tradition of free and open debate, to make possible dissent, while at the same time insisting on both civilised discourse and rational argument.

This was probably greeted with self-congratulatory applause at this point, when instead the words should have provoked a long embarrassed silence, perhaps the odd cough, as the wind blew a lonely tumble weed across the floor.

Robert Manne was the editor of Quadrant from 1989 to 1997. I may be wrong, but I suspect the magazine achieved its greatest circulation under his editorship.

The magazine was the organ of choice for the anti-communist right in Australia for the entire length of the Cold War. Indeed, it was initiated by something called the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1956 with funding from the American CIA by Richard Krygier and James McAuley, the man who, with Douglas Stewart, concocted Ern Malley and his accidentally great body of poetry.

Cassandra Pybus recounts the story very well in Jacket magazine. Apparently no one at the dinner, or in The Australian’s report of it, thought it notable enough to mention that one of the longest running of our cultural journals was set up by the CIA.

It’s certainly the journal with the ugliest cover in the rack, which shows how little regard it has for visual, as opposed to written, expression.

The UnAustralian, part 2

The Australian lurches ever rightward