I don’t need to fill you in on today’s events involving artist Bill Henson. I have little to add to the debate that hasn’t already been said and Peter Craven, the founding editor of Quarterly Essay, puts it much more eloquently than I ever could anyway.
All I ask is when did nudity automatically become sexual? Isn’t it we as individuals who decide whether we find a naked image sexual, irrespective of whether we find it appealing. Even the OFLC’s classification guidelines stipulate nudity can exist outside of a sexual context, so surely the two don’t go hand in hand.
Police say the artwork was of a sexual context, but for anyone whose seen the photos in today’s major newspapers (which they so eagerly ran), the shots portray little about sex. If you discount everything artistic that Henson brings to the table, the nudity in these photographs is equal to that seen in medical text books. It’s the adult perspective which has sexualised the photographs in this case. Not the photographer or subject.
In other Australian art censorship news (as if one case wasn’t bad enough)…
Melbourne City Council has rejected a painting by Kevin Rudd’s nephew, Van Thanh Rudd, which depicts Ronald McDonald carrying the Olympic torch past a burning monk (Van Thanh and the painting pictured below).
Van Thanh was invited to submit his work for the Council’s Ho Chi Minh City exhibition, but event organisers didn’t approve (Controversial, Oh My!).
Michelle Grattan for The Age writes:
He said the monk in the painting, which is oil and acrylic on canvas, referred to the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963 in Saigon. The McDonald’s image was “commenting on the fact that I believe the global economy is a direct hurdle to a lot of the good peace processes to deal with human rights abuses“, including in Tibet. He said he did not discount China’s obvious atrocities. “But the overwhelming historical thing is going back to American colonialism in Asia and globally.”
Blogger Mark Lawrence adds:
What I can’t help but wonder, though, is how on earth the Council assumed that Van Thanh Rudd’s work would not be political, when his whole reputation as an ‘activist artist’ and his previous works speak for itself.
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It makes me sick that arts administrators, grant bodies, publishers and others still expect artists and writers of Asian descent to churn out such material for their own cultural expectations and market demands.
A few weeks back Melbourne Council also went nutters over a photograph of a naked man.
So don’t delay. Maybe it’s time you got banned: eHow’s Guide to Creating a Work of Censored Art
