On Thursday 22 May 2008 Bill Henson was preparing for the opening of his latest exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. But someone called the cops and everything turned into a witch-hunt.
Henson, one of most significant Australian artists, is worldwide renowned. His artwork is held in Guggenheim Museum, New York, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and many others, not to mention all major Australian collections. However, that day made the world thought of him as a child-exploiting pornographer.
The art of Bill Henson is an unconventional, provocative and challenging one. Deep fascinated by “our sense of ourselves living inside our bodies”, as he confessed many times over the years, the artist explored the transition between childhood and adulthood and its endless possibilities. Henson’s photographs surprise androgynous models in their search for identity, artistically transcribing the turmoil of adolescence in the magical lights and shadows of a nocturnal theatre. They are haunting and beautiful. On that day, they became the hunting.
Couple of hours before the opening, media pushed the trigger. A newspaper column and a radio show with no artistic trademarks but with a conservative moral agenda demonised the exhibition. Politicians in search for votes came along for the ride. Till afternoon, a paedophilic pornography paranoia raged and the opening was cancelled.
“What is Art and What is Porn?”, everyone asked, conveniently forgetting that pornography, by definition, has no artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire. The beauty and the artistic credits of Henson’s photographs were overlooked for the nudity they exposed. The darkly, mystical looking through foggy glass to nubile Adams and Eves leaving Eden to discover the miracle of being was sexualised. Pubescence was labelled as pornographic. The softness of the bodies’ natural changes was demonised. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Henson’s photographs are confusing the viewers with what is and what is not real and making them question, but the answers and interpretations belong to the viewers, as well. The images are haunting, as they trigger images that no one can see in viewers’ minds. If Henson’s photographs can be hunted, the others cannot be.
However, I find ironic that media, an institution which struggled since its beginnings against censorship, asked for it, after it has itself created a climate conducive to child pornography. Bill Henson’s artwork would seem, then, to be the ‘scapegoat’ for a harm already done, but censoring art wouldn’t be a terrific harm by itself? Freedom of art, expression and imagery are fundamental, as main tool for conserving the universal liberty of the humankind. One of the hardest to win freedoms, the freedom of expression is, also, one of the most easily to loose. According to history records, any suppression of such essential freedoms would have lethal consequences on those who allow it.
Of course, the restrictions to the freedom of art and expression in Henson’s case would first affect the artist and those engaged within his works, but the impact would quickly spread to affect anyone who loves and appreciates his art and, ultimately, all art lovers. The simple thinking behind censorship would shadow the richness of emotions that Henson’s photographs offer and would misunderstand his act of artistic communication. Once Henson’s photographs would be censored, the messages of the artist would be lost and trivialized and the concepts standing behind his images would remain unknown and impossible to grasp. The photographs would no longer depict controversial subject matters, but they would not provoke any response, either. Australian art galleries would be poorer with some worldwide famous artworks and Australian people with whole ranges of emotions. However, we should call ourselves lucky if these would be the only consequences. Once a single artwork subjected to censorship, this one would spread its tentacles into all that is beautiful and would cripple for good the greatest gift ever offered to man: the gift of imagery.
Henson’s opponents asked for a line to be drawn between art and pornography, but ‘drawing a line’ and censoring an image on the potentiality of its eroticism is the beginning of a very slippery slope that would threaten to affect any artistic manifestation. However, judging the pornographic potential of a image is a very subjective matter that is completely dependant of the intimate understanding and interpretation that are given to it.As potentiality is defined through absence, any photograph could be find guilty of such sin, eventually.
Sydney police seized up to 21 photographs from the gallery. They didn’t stop there, though, and turned upside down any art gallery or museum in Australia, looking for any photograph of adolescents Henson ever took. Detectives, police photographers or Child Protection and Sex Crimes Squad’ representatives carefully searched for genitals’ exposure in each image. They debated for a long time if and what genital organ was represented. And I think they might have had doughnuts. When the search ended, no charges were laid.
