The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Fearing reality: Bill Henson and the Australian wowser > Comments

Fearing reality: Bill Henson and the Australian wowser : Comments

By Binoy Kampmark, published 29/5/2008

Art exhibitions can be a hazardous business, especially in Australia. Seeing Henson’s works is bound to turn us all into drooling deviants.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. Page 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. All
Hamlet dude: I think that it is abuse - at least indirectly - of everyone who has to work and sacrifice themselves so that these self-styled purveyors of parasitic "refinement" keep feeling smug, pampered and beyond responsibility to any collective values for compassion, hope and other truly high regard for human life.

There should be serious busts here, and Turnbull has all but placed crosshairs on his own properties. I'd be glad to do it, just need the warrant, cuffs and a Glock. Second thoughts, probably need a decent-sized team too, given such circles means for hiring plenty of thugger proxies and professional sophists/lawyers.

I don't expect any of our apparatchiks now have the gonads to take action though.
Posted by mil-observer, Sunday, 1 June 2008 4:41:32 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
One has to wonder whether Cate Blanchett would allow Bill Henson to capture, in photographic art form, the defining moment of sexual changes, of her babies body and genitals into a toddler, and from toddler into a little boy, and set it up at an art gallery.

Would this be art Cate?
Posted by Suebdootwo, Sunday, 1 June 2008 2:22:06 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I have no doubt that Henson's photographs are art... his forms with these figures that i have seen are mono-gender...boys look like girls...girls look like boys, where he says he sometimes photographs pre-pubescent adolescents for their "humanity and vulnerability"...... of youth untainted, without the infection of sexual awareness or development ..... which can only really be found in pre-pubescent children. The irony of all this for Henson is that here we see him as anti-sexual, anti-paedophilic and anti-pornographic as you can get.

The history of Western art is quite full of nudity in drawing, painting and sculpture expressing humanist ideas. A good example that comes to mind is Donatello's somewhat pre-pubescent sculpture of David that helped bring out the apocalyptic wrath of Savonarola with his Bonfire of the Vanities. Cripes, humanist ideas bring out calls associated with moral laxity. We now have our own Savonarolas.

Because Henson is a photographer, the controversial issue is not with the end product artworks, but the process involved in creating the artworks. I am not privy to this process and I suggest neither is Rudd and just about everyone else. If i was asked at thirteen to be one of his models i would be inclined to see it as anything but abuse but among others an issue of trust.

I suggest that Rudd take a good look at our ABC if he is concerned about exploitation and abuse of young minds. e.g. ...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/planetslayer/greenhouse_calc.htm

This “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator" is an inexorable and schemingly designed piece of propaganda targeting young impressionable minds.
Posted by Keiran, Monday, 2 June 2008 9:00:00 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Yet another example of a media beat up and rush to judgement by no less than our own prime minister. Has Mr Rudd seen the offending images?

Whether YOU consider the viewing of nude pubescent teenagers as art or pornography is probably irrelevent as it is mainly in the mind of the viewer. For example, would you react in the same way if the work were by a doctor, nurse or trainer and/or made available for public viewing.

Can we really expect the law to adjudicate on what Bill Henson may or may not have been thinking about and should we speculate on why anybody would wish to view his work in a public gallery.

This whole debacle must surely be confusing and embarrassing to the model involved and I can hardly imagine she would wish to identify herself in a public courtroom, especially if the action were to fail.

It also appears that many us are not afraid to be photographed nude in a public place for the sake of art and sanity.
Posted by tassiedevil, Monday, 2 June 2008 11:20:35 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I guessed earlier that Renaissance subjects, including Savonarola, would pop up in this discussion: I was brainwashed by the same cult(ure), hence it's predictability. I am also unsurprised that our culture's adversarial English legal system has reduced and displaced the issue via a simplistic binary asking whether Henson's work is “art” or “pornography”.

Part of my youth's brainwashing too involved the nebulous concept "Humanism", an actually strange and funny term meant to be warm and fuzzy. If we scrape off the term's lustre, we can see that it's just a kind of branding. Ever seen a (still) working-class person described as "a great humanist", for example? Does it mean someone: steeped in classicism ("classicist"); humanitarian (ditto); concerned with the "human condition" (so many "isms" there)? No, "humanism" seems more a cloak meant to accord a subject vaguely positive notions of learning, compassion, artistic refinement and “cultured” status. But the term's usage actually dissipates substantial debate about whether there is truly a high value on human life in the “humanist” pursuit or person under examination.

As with Greer's article in today's SMH and its simpleton “art/porn” binary, comparisons with the Renaissance are quite irrelevant, but such imagery is perhaps the heaviest weaponry in the ideological arsenal that forms our secular cult of western supremacism. While the period is known properly (and definitively) for restoring knowledge lost since Greco-Roman civilization, what is forgotten are the period's brutalities and injustices - especially those against women, children and the poor. But Germaine and her acolytes seem to have no problem with that sort of thing, because they're OK thank you, and never on the receiving end of it.

Perhaps Henson should be stripped naked, with suitable lighting effects for chiarascuro accentuation of any “youthful vulnerability” he may have, then let punters jeer and hurl rotten produce at him. If times get harder for us great unwashed, underpaid and humiliated workers, they'll want to use live ammunition.

And why so little debate over the banning of Pasolini's “Salo”? Perhaps because that work gets to the rotten, very political core of this issue?
Posted by mil-observer, Monday, 2 June 2008 11:59:59 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Kevvy the artist on Henson says ........
"I find them absolutely revolting," he told the Nine Network.

"I gave my reaction, I stand by that reaction and I don't apologise for it and I won't be changing it. I am passionate about children having innocence in their childhood," Mr Rudd told reporters.

Now Kevvy go to ....... where quite clearly we see the deceitful corruption of the truth in the name of science and your education revolution at work.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/planetslayer/greenhouse_calc.htm

Now I don't know if people have been to this ABC's “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator" but please do and find out your carbon quota and when you should DIE.

Isn't this terrorizing and brainwashing children to advance a political agenda .... a la the Hitler youth?

Isn't this like the Nazis where the first objective of the ABC is to dehumanize their enemies by depicting them as sub-human, or in this case “Greenhouse Pigs”.

OR try various calculations on the cost to the state of a mentally ill patient.
OR once you have dehumanized a group, genocide becomes so much easier.

OR is it money and how much you donate to the church of Global Warming?

This ABC disgrace is more than being passionate about children having innocence in their childhood because it instructs a young mind when you should die, that you are not welcome to this world, that you are a burden until you die, that we are all guilty of this carbon sin, that you have quotas like when you use all the coupons in this book, then we kill you.
Posted by Keiran, Monday, 2 June 2008 6:40:55 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. Page 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy