Salon des Refuses: A Bill Henson Retrospective
From MMCM...
The recent resurfacing of two early-career photographs by Bill Henson on the secondary market (initially picked up by Corrie Perkin, in The Australian), and the publishing of another disturbing photograph from the same period in a local art market magazine (the Australian Art Review), may throw fresh doubts upon vigorous art milieu assertions of Henson's disinterested gaze and the aesthetic intentions underpinning his decades-long preocupations with prepubescent, pubescent and adolescent nudes.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that these photographs came bobbing back up on the secondary market.
Of course, it’s an ordinary commercial fact of life that art market reliance upon the internet makes the latter an indispensible ancillary to the promotion of the entire gamut of boundaries-crossing art works in a healthy industry. Lawson-Menzies’ recent internet publication of Lot 214, however, serves only to illustrate how readily commercial principles override all others in the publication and internet dissemination of dubious child material to promote their September auction (as observed in the AAR feature article: “There is a market for everything, whether that market is big, small, consistent or niche”). In Perkin’s report, the online catalogue publication of Lot 214 was rationalised by Lawson-Menzies in terms of the failure of the police prosecution of Henson and Roslyn Oxley Gallery in June, which in Tim Abdallah’s confident view, retro-legitimised Henson's entire oeuvre (and Lot 214 by extension).
Tamara Winikoff (NAVA) promptly extrapolated upon this fallacious assertion by invoking the Classification Board’s June classification of Untitled 1007/08 as putting the kybosh on the debate (“Henson’s work has been assessed by the Classification Board…and it didn’t break the law”), as if the Classification Board had miraculously mutated into a court of law.
Lawson-Menzies proceeded to sell Lots 213 & 214 for $4000 and $3800 respectively (confirming at least AAR’s report that his auction popularity seems to be declining). Both remain on its website, eminently downloadable and amenable to photo software and/or disseminated online .
But this debate cannot be simply opened and closed by order of authoritarian pronouncements of vested interests. Lot 214 (Untitled 1985/86) continues to be of special interest as it depicts an under-age nude in an explicitly sexual pose and, in my view, attests to the persistence of Henson’s preoccupations. I, for one, have been wondering what the Classification Board would have made of Lot 214 had Henson’s style not shifted into less sexually-explicit representations in more recent times, and had this photograph been selected instead for inclusion in his 2008 show and chosen for the invitation (inter alia). Certainly the 1985/86 series represented a robustly transgressive period chock-full of chiaroscuro renderings of the butt-naked under-aged.
Chiaroscuro may come in handy as a concrete tool of concealment, however - it is the ultimate realm of the hidden after all - and the most basic photo software can expose the content of the shadowed regions in these photographic images once assumed securely (albeit titillatingly) opaque to a pre-cyberspace world.
The very disturbing photograph reproduced in the current edition of AAR (whose provenance is, coincidentally, from the same 1985/86 series/period as Lot 213 & 214) accompanied a feature article, Sensational Artists and The Art Market: does notoriety equate to bankability?. While the article makes predictable comment upon the subject of the impact of notoriety upon auction prices, reporting a decline in Henson’s secondary market value since 2005, it alludes to the sale at auction on May 30th of this Henson photograph Untitled 1985/86, and describes it as "not containing any nudity". This almost self-negatingly dark photograph (in this reproduction at least) depicts, in fact, a semi-naked child shrouded in an opacity eminently hospitable to increased exposure in photo software.
Some tweaking of this dark image throws light on the truth, however - a principle seemingly in short supply (if not in drought) along with empathy for children during the Henson debate last May/June. When this is done, much is revealed about the gratuitousness of Henson’s transgressive praxis - at least around 1985/86 - that could not by any stretch be described as unequivocally aesthetic in intention.
Untitled 1985/86 -is of a sleeping pre-pubescent child, whose Disney t-shirt (or pyjama-top) has 'ridden up' to reveal her pubic area (a viewer may wish to supply finer details). Her hand is between her thighs and gestures towards her exposed pubic region. Signs and symbols abound. The tv set beside the child’s bed is on test pattern. Apart from the photographer's own febrile gaze, it is a penetratingly blue, ocular presence in the room that provides a neutralizing decoy (“nothing is on”) irrespective of its being the symbol sine qua non of voyeuristic culture. The t-shirt (or pyjama top) that the girl is wearing comes up nicely under the light. It depicts the cartoon characters Sylvester and Tweety, the cat having at last pounced on the bird - or at least lured and beguiled it into a fateful, momentary trust. In representing the dreadful trick in the classic narrative of predator and prey, the proposition that Henson is rendering some psychological fact about the vulnerability of children is drained of all validity given his seeming complicity in the exploitation of the dependence and vulnerability of a child in the making of this image.
Is this the “tender proximity, that ineffable, fragile, breathing closeness or presence”, the thing that “can never be possessed” that “remains forever outside our grasp” of which Henson speaks?
The scary nursery story has been actualized. An unequal power relation still obtains. A man is in the room photographing a sleeping, vulnerable, naked child. In 2007/08 the same man with the same problematic gaze was still photographing a naked child. The photograph was exhibited, looked at, emailed, bandied about by a voracious media, then sold and looked at again and again, ad infinitum. The eyes, like Sylvester, have it. An early career photograph disappears, then reappears on the secondary market. It never completely goes away, even without the aid of cyberspace in committing it to an eternal purgatory of voyeurism and an entire universe of paraphilias.
A conspicuous theme in Henson’s oeuvre has been the gratuitous boundary that gets played about with - almost danced with - via protean utilizations of various formal techniques and pseudo-narrative presentations. Continuity is ruptured and development arrested by the interpolation of neo-baroque tableaux and triptychs, non-figurative landscape spells, colourful populist phases, or clothed children.
Perhaps a kind of 'cat and mouse' game has been engaged in by this photographer with the real world for a long time: a dynamic feature of his oeuvre seems to be that of pulling back from the edge the moment transgressive intentions and gaze verge upon the obvious and explicit. This almost sexual approach/retreat movement does not, in my view, surround an aesthetic boundary but tampers with fantasy realms of illicit desire from which sporadic retreats into the shadows merely demonstrate an acute sense of self-preservation.
The history of Henson's gaze with all its ruptures and fragmentations reached denouement in the 46th Venice Biennale in 1996, a crowning achievement for both Henson and Roslyn Oxley. The ultimate imprimatur came with the AGNSW 2005 Henson Retrospective and the accompanying off-shore publication of his massive doorstop, Mnemosyne, another (un)critical triumph for all concerned.
But a simple cross-check of images with the Exhibition Concordance Table in Mnemosyne reveals that the most explicit or unequivocal child nudes were excluded from the Retrospective. No doubt decisions were made according to various usual criteria, but this suggests a break with tradition and a curatorial sensitivity towards - if not complicity with - borderline perversion that at some point has limited, albeit niche market, commercial potential. Mnemosyne, therefore, becomes a kind of salon des refuses of prurient neo-Victorian child material rationalized by its poetic revelation of the psychological qualities of childhood and adolescence that would otherwise remain ineffable.
Where would our understanding of children and adolescents be without these furtive pokings about in the apparently dark and private habitats of children and adolescents (scenarios in fact choreographed by Henson himself)? What remains inaccessible to us about the subjective realms of children and adolescents that Henson is able to reveal to us? Is it a unique emergent sexuality that no adult could be said to have experienced themselves? If it is teen sexuality that is so problematic and inscrutable, why have Henson’s images suddenly been denuded of all sexual content and even of eroticism by his defenders? Was it solely the vulnerability of a child that constituted the metaphoric intent of Untitled 2007/08? Certainly there was not much evidence demonstrated during the debate of art world sensitivities with respect to the vulnerability of children (and their protection as a logical corollary) that would point to the success of Henson’s heroic enterprise - apart from below-the-belt tactics by civil libertarians in accusing child advocates of being the sole harbingers of pain and suffering for the child.
One hundred years of psychological research has established that stated intentions and rationales do not necessarily equate with unstated agendae and unconscious motivations. Henson is unarguably well-versed in Renaissance and Romantic symbology, and in true renaissance style, he scatters clues and signs as to what I consider to be non-aesthetic intentions. For example, in 1998, a new symbol in his work appeared in his work in the form of a bicycle. In this studio shot a young girl is seated bare-breasted in a miniskirt, her legs open to reveal her darkened crotch (remembering that, nowadays, all that is dark can be made light). Before her lies a fallen bicycle.
Irrespective of any likely alternative symbolism of the bicycle (e.g. of lost virginity, and so on), as with the Sylvester and Tweety t-shirt the message is clear - both signify childhood, and cinematically enwrap or accompany the nakedness of these girls who have become the unwitting, cypher-like objects of an inscrutable, relentless gaze that is far from disinterested.
The question is now begged - to whom are these signs and symbols directed?
Is the art world engaging in a kind of shared delusion, akin to the collusive blind-sightedness and denials of an incestuous family? Perhaps we have all been taken for a ride here.
A core feature of child sexual abuse mythology is the notion that actual physical sexual violation constitutes the final boundary, and that anything prior to that is harmless. What a child sleeps through, cannot possibly hurt them. What a child is stunned into not feeling, cannot possibly affect them. What a parent approves of, what a national gallery gives imprimatur to must, of course, be okay.
But all that is refulgent is not gold. Perhaps Henson is telling his own story through Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). Many abuse survivors engage in re-enactments.
This much we may guess at, however: rather than the resourceful utilization of mature models in a poetic expression of subjective existential themes, perverse mastery has been resorted to rather than creative sublimation in the deployment by Henson of actual children in sinister reconstructions of arcane abuse scenarios.
David Marr just published The Henson Case: Art and Panic . In a contemptuous stroke, a cropped Untitled 2007/08 has been chosen for the cover.
Given the stridency of the civil-libertarians in howling down child protectionists as "witch-hunters", "mothers" and "philistines", it may be interesting to hear from him what precisely his take on Henson’s gaze in these old photographs might be. Certainly, judging from Marr’s Hetty-bashing at the MCA in June, it should be a very catty affair.
The recent resurfacing of two early-career photographs by Bill Henson on the secondary market (initially picked up by Corrie Perkin, in The Australian), and the publishing of another disturbing photograph from the same period in a local art market magazine (the Australian Art Review), may throw fresh doubts upon vigorous art milieu assertions of Henson's disinterested gaze and the aesthetic intentions underpinning his decades-long preocupations with prepubescent, pubescent and adolescent nudes.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that these photographs came bobbing back up on the secondary market.
Of course, it’s an ordinary commercial fact of life that art market reliance upon the internet makes the latter an indispensible ancillary to the promotion of the entire gamut of boundaries-crossing art works in a healthy industry. Lawson-Menzies’ recent internet publication of Lot 214, however, serves only to illustrate how readily commercial principles override all others in the publication and internet dissemination of dubious child material to promote their September auction (as observed in the AAR feature article: “There is a market for everything, whether that market is big, small, consistent or niche”). In Perkin’s report, the online catalogue publication of Lot 214 was rationalised by Lawson-Menzies in terms of the failure of the police prosecution of Henson and Roslyn Oxley Gallery in June, which in Tim Abdallah’s confident view, retro-legitimised Henson's entire oeuvre (and Lot 214 by extension).
Tamara Winikoff (NAVA) promptly extrapolated upon this fallacious assertion by invoking the Classification Board’s June classification of Untitled 1007/08 as putting the kybosh on the debate (“Henson’s work has been assessed by the Classification Board…and it didn’t break the law”), as if the Classification Board had miraculously mutated into a court of law.
Lawson-Menzies proceeded to sell Lots 213 & 214 for $4000 and $3800 respectively (confirming at least AAR’s report that his auction popularity seems to be declining). Both remain on its website, eminently downloadable and amenable to photo software and/or disseminated online .
But this debate cannot be simply opened and closed by order of authoritarian pronouncements of vested interests. Lot 214 (Untitled 1985/86) continues to be of special interest as it depicts an under-age nude in an explicitly sexual pose and, in my view, attests to the persistence of Henson’s preoccupations. I, for one, have been wondering what the Classification Board would have made of Lot 214 had Henson’s style not shifted into less sexually-explicit representations in more recent times, and had this photograph been selected instead for inclusion in his 2008 show and chosen for the invitation (inter alia). Certainly the 1985/86 series represented a robustly transgressive period chock-full of chiaroscuro renderings of the butt-naked under-aged.
Chiaroscuro may come in handy as a concrete tool of concealment, however - it is the ultimate realm of the hidden after all - and the most basic photo software can expose the content of the shadowed regions in these photographic images once assumed securely (albeit titillatingly) opaque to a pre-cyberspace world.
The very disturbing photograph reproduced in the current edition of AAR (whose provenance is, coincidentally, from the same 1985/86 series/period as Lot 213 & 214) accompanied a feature article, Sensational Artists and The Art Market: does notoriety equate to bankability?. While the article makes predictable comment upon the subject of the impact of notoriety upon auction prices, reporting a decline in Henson’s secondary market value since 2005, it alludes to the sale at auction on May 30th of this Henson photograph Untitled 1985/86, and describes it as "not containing any nudity". This almost self-negatingly dark photograph (in this reproduction at least) depicts, in fact, a semi-naked child shrouded in an opacity eminently hospitable to increased exposure in photo software.
Some tweaking of this dark image throws light on the truth, however - a principle seemingly in short supply (if not in drought) along with empathy for children during the Henson debate last May/June. When this is done, much is revealed about the gratuitousness of Henson’s transgressive praxis - at least around 1985/86 - that could not by any stretch be described as unequivocally aesthetic in intention.
Untitled 1985/86 -is of a sleeping pre-pubescent child, whose Disney t-shirt (or pyjama-top) has 'ridden up' to reveal her pubic area (a viewer may wish to supply finer details). Her hand is between her thighs and gestures towards her exposed pubic region. Signs and symbols abound. The tv set beside the child’s bed is on test pattern. Apart from the photographer's own febrile gaze, it is a penetratingly blue, ocular presence in the room that provides a neutralizing decoy (“nothing is on”) irrespective of its being the symbol sine qua non of voyeuristic culture. The t-shirt (or pyjama top) that the girl is wearing comes up nicely under the light. It depicts the cartoon characters Sylvester and Tweety, the cat having at last pounced on the bird - or at least lured and beguiled it into a fateful, momentary trust. In representing the dreadful trick in the classic narrative of predator and prey, the proposition that Henson is rendering some psychological fact about the vulnerability of children is drained of all validity given his seeming complicity in the exploitation of the dependence and vulnerability of a child in the making of this image.
Is this the “tender proximity, that ineffable, fragile, breathing closeness or presence”, the thing that “can never be possessed” that “remains forever outside our grasp” of which Henson speaks?
The scary nursery story has been actualized. An unequal power relation still obtains. A man is in the room photographing a sleeping, vulnerable, naked child. In 2007/08 the same man with the same problematic gaze was still photographing a naked child. The photograph was exhibited, looked at, emailed, bandied about by a voracious media, then sold and looked at again and again, ad infinitum. The eyes, like Sylvester, have it. An early career photograph disappears, then reappears on the secondary market. It never completely goes away, even without the aid of cyberspace in committing it to an eternal purgatory of voyeurism and an entire universe of paraphilias.
A conspicuous theme in Henson’s oeuvre has been the gratuitous boundary that gets played about with - almost danced with - via protean utilizations of various formal techniques and pseudo-narrative presentations. Continuity is ruptured and development arrested by the interpolation of neo-baroque tableaux and triptychs, non-figurative landscape spells, colourful populist phases, or clothed children.
Perhaps a kind of 'cat and mouse' game has been engaged in by this photographer with the real world for a long time: a dynamic feature of his oeuvre seems to be that of pulling back from the edge the moment transgressive intentions and gaze verge upon the obvious and explicit. This almost sexual approach/retreat movement does not, in my view, surround an aesthetic boundary but tampers with fantasy realms of illicit desire from which sporadic retreats into the shadows merely demonstrate an acute sense of self-preservation.
The history of Henson's gaze with all its ruptures and fragmentations reached denouement in the 46th Venice Biennale in 1996, a crowning achievement for both Henson and Roslyn Oxley. The ultimate imprimatur came with the AGNSW 2005 Henson Retrospective and the accompanying off-shore publication of his massive doorstop, Mnemosyne, another (un)critical triumph for all concerned.
But a simple cross-check of images with the Exhibition Concordance Table in Mnemosyne reveals that the most explicit or unequivocal child nudes were excluded from the Retrospective. No doubt decisions were made according to various usual criteria, but this suggests a break with tradition and a curatorial sensitivity towards - if not complicity with - borderline perversion that at some point has limited, albeit niche market, commercial potential. Mnemosyne, therefore, becomes a kind of salon des refuses of prurient neo-Victorian child material rationalized by its poetic revelation of the psychological qualities of childhood and adolescence that would otherwise remain ineffable.
Where would our understanding of children and adolescents be without these furtive pokings about in the apparently dark and private habitats of children and adolescents (scenarios in fact choreographed by Henson himself)? What remains inaccessible to us about the subjective realms of children and adolescents that Henson is able to reveal to us? Is it a unique emergent sexuality that no adult could be said to have experienced themselves? If it is teen sexuality that is so problematic and inscrutable, why have Henson’s images suddenly been denuded of all sexual content and even of eroticism by his defenders? Was it solely the vulnerability of a child that constituted the metaphoric intent of Untitled 2007/08? Certainly there was not much evidence demonstrated during the debate of art world sensitivities with respect to the vulnerability of children (and their protection as a logical corollary) that would point to the success of Henson’s heroic enterprise - apart from below-the-belt tactics by civil libertarians in accusing child advocates of being the sole harbingers of pain and suffering for the child.
One hundred years of psychological research has established that stated intentions and rationales do not necessarily equate with unstated agendae and unconscious motivations. Henson is unarguably well-versed in Renaissance and Romantic symbology, and in true renaissance style, he scatters clues and signs as to what I consider to be non-aesthetic intentions. For example, in 1998, a new symbol in his work appeared in his work in the form of a bicycle. In this studio shot a young girl is seated bare-breasted in a miniskirt, her legs open to reveal her darkened crotch (remembering that, nowadays, all that is dark can be made light). Before her lies a fallen bicycle.
Irrespective of any likely alternative symbolism of the bicycle (e.g. of lost virginity, and so on), as with the Sylvester and Tweety t-shirt the message is clear - both signify childhood, and cinematically enwrap or accompany the nakedness of these girls who have become the unwitting, cypher-like objects of an inscrutable, relentless gaze that is far from disinterested.
The question is now begged - to whom are these signs and symbols directed?
Is the art world engaging in a kind of shared delusion, akin to the collusive blind-sightedness and denials of an incestuous family? Perhaps we have all been taken for a ride here.
A core feature of child sexual abuse mythology is the notion that actual physical sexual violation constitutes the final boundary, and that anything prior to that is harmless. What a child sleeps through, cannot possibly hurt them. What a child is stunned into not feeling, cannot possibly affect them. What a parent approves of, what a national gallery gives imprimatur to must, of course, be okay.
But all that is refulgent is not gold. Perhaps Henson is telling his own story through Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). Many abuse survivors engage in re-enactments.
This much we may guess at, however: rather than the resourceful utilization of mature models in a poetic expression of subjective existential themes, perverse mastery has been resorted to rather than creative sublimation in the deployment by Henson of actual children in sinister reconstructions of arcane abuse scenarios.
David Marr just published The Henson Case: Art and Panic . In a contemptuous stroke, a cropped Untitled 2007/08 has been chosen for the cover.
Given the stridency of the civil-libertarians in howling down child protectionists as "witch-hunters", "mothers" and "philistines", it may be interesting to hear from him what precisely his take on Henson’s gaze in these old photographs might be. Certainly, judging from Marr’s Hetty-bashing at the MCA in June, it should be a very catty affair.
Labels: Henson Affair, here we go again
This entry was posted
on Monday, October 06, 2008 at 10:38 AM.
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