Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.

Nina Katchadourian is an artistic opportunist, to be sure.

Armed with nothing other than a couple of scarves, a beret, the airline seat pillow, a few artfully arranged tissues, and a face that could rank alongside Maria Falconetti's in expressiveness, she reaches toward the sublime while balanced above the toilet bowl on a long-haul flight. I am awestruck with admiration.

Why can't I be you?

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

— Maurice Sendak

I wonder whether young Jim was Catholic. It seems a peculiarly religious thing to do. I hope he was an older kid, performing the ritual deliberately, and not a toddler. Maurice doesn't say.

Reading this, I was reminded - in the undisciplined way such thoughts often are - of one of my favourite Cure songs: Why Can't I Be You?

Robert Smith can barely express what he feels for his beloved, a longing so intense that notions of possession or even just intimacy are exceeded until nothing short of complete identification - the total abrogation of physical and psychic barriers - will do.

You're so gorgeous, I'll do anything!
I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins
You're so perfect, You're so right as rain
You make me, make me, make me
Make me hungry again

Everything you do is irresistible
Everything you do is simply kissable
Why can't i be you?

Ginny Grayson

It's so rare to come across a 'straight' drawing show these days that it provokes comment for that reason alone. So my attention was drawn immediately to the invitation to Ginny Grayson's show at Place Gallery in Richmond, which starts on 9 November.




It also helps that I am a sucker for drawing which is contingent and exploratory, an approach which is always associated in my mind with Alberto Giacometti.


Such a way of drawing, rather than making the statement "This is what I see", continually asks itself "Is this what I see?"

I see this approach ultimately as having serious philosophical implications, about the nature of sensation and perception, about the limits of our ability to perceive the world, and maybe the ultimate question "is there a world to perceive at all?"

Some of the observations of phenomenological philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty actually have a great deal to teach practicing artists, those who face the perceptual gulf between all that is you and all that is not-you every time they front up to the white page.

Old Master Cheese

When asked what kind of cheese he would like, my son Sweeney (two years old) stipulates "Old cheese. Like a grown-up". This must be what he means: Old Master cheese.

Tom Waits, an aesthetic credo

"What I do is kind of abstract. I break a lot of eggs. And I leave the shell in there. Texture is everything." Tom Waits

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

Louise Bourgeois (the last great artist of the twentieth century?) is dead.


Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Sure she was an extraordinary 98 and apparently making art until her death, but she was a great soul, and should be mourned.

The Banquet of Cleopatra

The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo (1743-44)

The episode represented in Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra is drawn from the Roman historian Pliny’s Natural History (written in AD 77). Here Pliny recounted the tale of a famous contest between the Egyptian and Roman rulers (who became lovers), whereby Cleopatra wagered that she could stage a feast more lavish than the legendary excesses of Mark Antony. Tiepolo’s painting shows the dramatic moment at the end of Cleopatra’s sumptuous repast when,
faced with a still scornful Mark Antony, she wins the wager with her trump card. Removing one of a pair of priceless pearls that adorn her as earrings, Cleopatra dissolves the pearl in a glass of vinegar and drinks it, an extravagance that causes Mark Antony to lose his bet.

From a text by Ted Gott on the National Gallery of Victoria's website.


A billboard off Smith Street, Fitzroy.

Michael Lusk's disciplined eye

Originally uploaded by finsmal...Low & Slow.

A quality I sincerely admire in photographers is something I call "a disciplined eye".

I suppose I mean an ability to seek out and find pictures in the world, even in the most unremarkable and apparently chaotic places. By 'pictures' I don't just mean images, since anyone with a finger can make an image. I mean something with structure, whose features amount to an aesthetic argument of some kind, the evidence of a discriminating consciousness.

It's a quality that is so easy to miss in others, since our landscape is saturated in images so that we come to think that such things are part of nature. But they're not. They have be constructed from educated sensation. If you don't think it's difficult, just try it.

I found this person (photographer Michael Lusk) somewhere in the photographic dumpster that is Flickr.

'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire'

I will shell out an exorbitant amount of money to see a Dali exhibition (there seems to be one every five years or so), based on an assessment of how many pictures it contains of that period before 1940, before his thirty-fifth birthday, when Dali’s corrupt imagination burned with a peculiar, stinky intensity.

The good news is that ‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’ at the NGV contains many choice morsels and a good many even older pictures when the little creep was just a teenager. There is bad news, but more of that shortly.

It contains a number of juvenilia, pictures done as he was chewing his way through diverse influences as a teenage prodigy.

It seems that he landed on a selection of Renaissance and Mannerist painters, especially Caravaggio with his ability to concentrate the eye on symbolically loaded detail with deep shade and theatrical light; and Velasquez and his bravura technique (that Dali regarded as a personal challenge) and domestic surfaces picked out in raking light, rendering them su(per)real, like the crustiness of peasant bread, the lustre on a terra cotta milk jug, and the ancient ruin of a crumbling block of cheese.

And of course the peculiar mix of sacred subject matter and perversity found in artists like Parmigianino, whose ‘Madonna with the Long Neck’ (1534) he imitated in an early self-portrait.

Wall texts in blockbuster exhibitions are always slightly dubious. There is often a sense of a curatorial barrow being pushed, or else I sometimes suspect pressure has been brought to bear by lenders to stick to an approved line. (I have no proof of this, and I’ve never even heard it complained about, but then if it was happening, the borrowers aren’t likely to complain too loudly.)

The man’s peculiarities were evident from an early age but the text in this exhibition is often coy about the nature of the imagery. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ (1925) and ‘Girl’s back’ (1929) both fetishize his sister’s hair, an obvious erotic trigger for him. The latter is a peculiar inversion of a salon portrait, the subject is turned from us, her suggestive ringlets hanging down and rendered in expert chiaroscuro. 'Portrait of My Sister' has a hard-edged eye for detail, like the early Miro, set in an uncanny de Chirico space, but those ringlets over the subject's shoulder are pure Dali.


The text plays a straight bat, waffling about their neo-classical pedigree, with the names of Ingres and Vermeer invoked, but the weird intensity of focus is already Dali’s own, and its nature is unmistakeable. The paintings virtually throb with it.

Later, the game gets funny when attempting to say something apropos about ‘Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano’ (1934). Needles to say, things are kept nice.

I’ve always appreciated Robert Hughes’ comment that Dali had a mind “like a gland, irritated by constant scratching.” It neatly suggests the sense of morbid pathology that the early paintings radiate. That is their lasting power as works of art, and what makes them key objects of the 20th century – objects of any kind.


The work ‘Suez’ (1932) is strange and unsettling, maybe because its restraint is so unlike his hysterical signature style. The famous canal was being constructed at the time and perhaps the idea of a huge trench linking two continents had some unusual connotations for him. An elongated spoon, liquid as if hot from the forge, reaches out from one wall of the canal towards an odd arabesque object, which emerges out of the other wall, the two forms forever in an unconsummated coupling. The image is suggestive and pathetic at the same time.

He was constantly registering new objects as fetishes loaded with unlimited sexual potential no matter how unlikely the resemblance. I was keeping a mental list while moving through the exhibition, which included:

Bones, beans, crutches, spoons, pianos (soft), violins and cellos, ants, knives, skulls, lamb chops, shoes, keys, lobsters, watches, keyholes, telephones, milk, trees, cannon, wheelbarrows. The list is evidently limitless and unconstrained by any obvious (to the rest of us) sexual connotation.

I was stopped in my tracks by a picture so unlike what had come before it, ‘Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September, 1939’.


This sombre image, heavy with grief, represents a path not taken. Again the mesmeric concentration on domestic objects but this time stripped of artifice, carrying their symbolic load with dignity. I was put in mind of Picasso’s paintings of the war period when he was shut up in his studio, the curtains drawn, anxious and cut off from his supporters and seemingly at the mercy of the occupying Nazis (who never in fact came knocking). He turned to still life in browns and greys, pictures of skulls and bulls’ heads, bizarre disjunctions of imagery telling their own suggestive story about what was going on outside.

For me this was the point of eclipse for Dali, after which he descended into mediocrity and confusion and an increasingly desperate chase after celebrity. By the late 40s he was already a full blown reactionary. His stated ambition was to be a ‘Renaissance painter’, whatever that meant, when he left Europe for the US, claiming he was leaving surrealism behind.

Needless to say he came back to it shortly after; that’s where the money was of course: baguettes and circuses. There was no way the American media or art establishment was going to let him get away with that. “So what kooky surrealist outrage are you going to foist on an art-hungry (and newspaper-buying) American public now, Mr Dali – walk down Broadway with a leopard on a chain? Give a lecture dressed in a diving helmet? Oh, Mr Dali, you are a card!”

And so the moustache grew in inverse proportion to any actual artistic achievement until it looked like a pair of tusks; classic sublimation, which as a good Freudian, Dali should have realised.

The only objects worth a damn in the latter part of the show (which goes on forever) were a couple of the jewels he made in the late 40s, just as I had given up hope and thought the show had hit a new low, with crude rehashes of his best imagery done in gold as indescribably tacky brooches and pendants.

There is only one object that for me suggested he still had his sense of humour about him. A ridiculous beating heart in rubies and gold, for the new Queen Elizabeth II, which actually throbs by means of a tiny motor, hitting just the right note if he was attempting to perpetrate an elaborate joke, which I’m not at all certain was his intention.


There is a section of the show dedicated to ‘Destino’, the animated film on which he collaborated with Walt Disney, left unfinished but completed (I assume faithfully) by Roy Disney in 2002. What a natural collaboration Dali and Disney turned out to be, Disney the entertainer anxious for high artistic credibility, and Dali the freak European aesthete who after all just wanted to play to the gallery.

I have my doubts about the success of the finished film. It’s hard from this distance to know how surprising it would have seemed to an audience at the time, but I doubt it would have really have satisfied anyone. It is too formless and lacking in narrative for a general audience, and too ‘Disney’ to satisfy the art crowd.

Given it was never finished, it looks like the evolution happened anyway. Less than ten years later, Terry Gilliam had started to make his surrealist cut-out animations for British TV, with a similar stream-of-consciousness (lack of) logic, and certainly advertising was well on to Dali much earlier than that. The fact that none of this would have happened had it not been for him is no criticism, but merely to say that he had anticipated himself way back in the 1930s. The rest was repetition.

I left the show feeling slightly sad and deflated, and the usual tacky merchandising outside the entrance was for once not a great break from what had immediately preceded it.

Pump that Expressionist bass!

"If they were alive today, what speakers would Max Beckmann or Edvard Munch buy"? I know I've asked myself this questions thousands of times.

Question no longer. The Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass FX3022 Speaker has arrived.

Forget about bass booming at your shins. The Expressionist Bass features twin desktop speakers with subwoofers built right in the base of each one. Separate 1.5-inch drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with brilliant clarity. And an auxiliary input gives you the convenience of connecting any MP3 player.

And what sound should I play through my Expressionist Bass speaker? Why, a scream, of course.

Classically white

When we use the adjective 'classical', we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it's a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It's hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked "jewelled" and "busy". Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn't prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.


The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.

Ballard Street: Sparky's portraits

From Jerry Van Amerongen's Ballard Street.

The hand-made thing

Almost all the time, the objects we use in daily life - the door handles we turn, the glasses we drink from, the pens we write with - were made by machines. At most, someone somewhere has simply screwed a few pieces together never touched by human hands.

Further down the scale of economic fortune, down to the bottom, where life is a daily struggle of subsistence as it was for our ancestors, the fewer machine-made objects you will find in their original state.

Down there among the people whose lives resemble the rag-pickers and mudlarks of Dickensian times more than they do yours or mine, the machine-made objects have already been used and discarded by others.


Lately I spent some time in our quirky local shop 'Just Planet' in Sunbury, created by my friends Lee and Norman. They sell all sorts of objects with an implicitly internationalist agenda: things like Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, toys for children, organic this-and-that, all in a happily cluttered space. But apart from the excellent coffee, I like to go there to see the large range of hand-made things.

Recently, my wife bought me a little tin guitar, only a few centimetres high, to go on my keyring. The strings are made of wire, the face of the guitar is from an aluminium drink can, while the clips holding it together and the sides and back of the guitar are made from an old sardine tin. I'm amazed how hardy it is. It will certainly last for years.

It is also ingeniously designed.



I'm sure no pencil ever touched paper, but it is design nevertheless. Done in the mind and the hand.

I've since bought a tin car, made from an insect repellant can, with working tin wheels, a steering wheel, seats, and even a transparent windscreen.

Appropriately it looks like a Volkswagon. I say appropriately because the VW spent the longest time in continuous production of any car. It will run on just about anything including banana skins (I saw it in a documentary), and it was for decades the car most likely to be owned by the working poor around the world.

Here's to hand-made things.

Madness & Modernity

'Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900' is an exhibition curated by Leslie Topp and Gemma Blackshaw at the Wellcome Collection in London.

It is not your usual art gallery, but has several exhibition spaces concentrating on matters medical and mental.


'Portrait of Heinrich Mann' by Max Oppenheimer, 1910.

Max Oppenheimer seriously rivalled Kokoschka as a portrait-painter. In 1911, rows erupted between the two artists over who could lay claim to the invention of the ‘psychological portrait’. Oppenheimer’s depiction of the German novelist Heinrich Mann in a state of nervous enervation, with flickering eyelids, rigid limbs and splayed fingers, was declared a ‘Kokoschka-copy’. Heinrich was Thomas Mann's brother, who continually engaged with themes of mental illness, incarceration and freedom in his fiction.

There is an interesting video discussion with the curators on the website.

Freehand wall drawing

I was diverted by this freehand drawing on a wall of a lane off Gertrude Street recently.


I was struck by how rarely you see a freehand drawing on a wall, as opposed to the kind of rarified, cultish typography that usually constitutes 'graffiti art', at least in Melbourne.

It isn't rare elsewhere, though. Thanks to the Wooster Collective website, I see that everyone is not a wannabe rapper, least of all in Europe, where stunning public art of an original and even provincial kind is being made.


This is by David de la Mano.


This is by the Canadian artist OTHER.

A modern tulip mania

Like the tulip mania of the Seventeenth Century, the contemporary art market, as it has come to be in recent decades, has lost connection with whatever set of aesthetic or cultural values that might create a lasting sense of value.

Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford writing in Prospect, think the end is near for another galloping, unregulated form of financial speculation that has jumped the fence and headed for the horizon. Put the nag down, is what I say.

"Over the winter of 1636, the tulip mania reached its peak. One kind of bulb sold for 900 guilders (three times the price of a small town house), up from 95 a year before. The peak prices of Dutch tulips were achieved when the bulbs were snug in the ground, and were based on futures contracts—a form of leverage that allowed investors to place an enormous price on a bulb without actually laying down the cash. On 3rd February 1637, the tulip market crashed. There was no particular reason for the panic—except that spring was nearing and, on its arrival, the bulbs would be dug up, cash settlement sought for futures and the game would be up.

"We have surely reached the same point in the world of contemporary art. One of the emotions that has driven its boom is the narcissistic belief of the rich in the greatness of the age in which they are living. They thought they were buying masterpieces. But like the Dutch merchants and their tulips, the obsession of the new rich with contemporary art is likely to be remembered as the epitome of the vanity and folly of the age. The bulbs are still in the ground but the spades are poised."

Andrew Curtis, nocturnal emissions

Andrew is best known for his figuratively and literally dark images of the industrial landscape and its antique vestiges. At first glance, his new show ‘Cell’ at Christine Abrahams Gallery is a departure, but despite appearances these new pictures are recognisably the products (emissions?) of the same hand.

They recall Andrew’s earliest works, of industrial hulks and ageing bits of machine effluvia shot at night with long exposures, caressed by a soft hand-held light source that gave many of them an unearthly glow, collapsing notions of scale or context in the process and energising them with life. These new pictures have that same sense of discreet action illuminated by pools of hot light, a palette of primary colour against blackness.

Young women out on the town, in their natural habitat, stare longingly into the screens of their little electronic avatars, while they are watched, apparently without unease but without the slightest sense of obligation, by us, the impotent observer.


‘Katie’ reminds me in a strange way of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘At The Moulin-Rouge’. They have a similar wide view of a nightclub scene and they evoke the same lonely disconnection that can come upon us in a crowded night club, a feeling of desolation, that I could only ever be a voyeur in such a space, a watcher and never a participant.


Andrew’s pictures capture that sense perfectly.

There is no mistaking these for the work of a woman, or not a heterosexual woman at any rate. These young women are palpably desired. There is no equivocating about the ‘male gaze’ here, they unapologetically embody it. But the smiles that play about these glossy mouths are not for the middle-aged bloke behind the camera, no matter how cool he might think himself to be (and Andrew is very cool). That boat has sailed, as it does for all of us, even if the most we ever did was gaze longingly from the pier. Desire, such as it might be, is for the love object on the other end of the text message, or for the device itself.

Greg Neville observed that the experience in the gallery was "like looking at tropical fish in an aquarium", a perfect analogy. It captures the exotic nature of its subjects to the observer, but more importantly the sense that we are somehow separated from the world we observe, like gapers on one side of a sheet of glass.

I have a feeling that the subtext of specifically masculine desire might be a problem for some; I have already heard some critical voices along these lines. However, the pictures themselves are more subtle than such dismissal often allows. Several of them hint that the relationship between observer and observed is more ambiguous than a casual glance might suggest. Sometimes the picture contains other silent watchers within the frame, a blurred hand of indeterminate gender holding a lit cigarette, a shadowy profile in the foreground, one photo taken from the car's passenger seat looking back at a woman in the back, implying the presence of at least three people. The expressions of the women themselves are ambivalent about the presence of an observer, and I suspect there are many potential readings of those expressions possible.

I love the ambiguity of the word ‘Cell’. It is most obviously the name for the object of desire itself, the cell-phone. But it is also a prison cell – of the single consciousness, at a remove from all that might be going on around it while that thin line is still connected.

A single frame of cinema film is also called a ‘cell’, and these images are certainly cinematic, in that they each have a highly constructed mise-en-scene complete with character actors and background extras. A single frame of cine-film is only a one-twenty fourth section of an unfolding event but these pictures are in another category. They are complete in their stillness, there is no sense that anything significant has proceeded either before or after the action.

My only criticism is that the presentation doesn’t really add anything that is not already there in the images on the gallery website. The hanging is a bit crowded and unnecessarily traditional with big prints under glass. Such furtive, nocturnal subject matter could have done with low lighting, on darkly painted walls.

Andrew’s elegant website contains the whole current series as well as examples of former works both commercial and otherwise

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

"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 Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

I picked up the third volume in the multi-part series of Picasso biographies by John Richardson with much excitement. It is very heavy and very expensive, not usually qualities that I look for in a biography but the first two were landmarks that I often turn to.

Unfortunately, the series is starting to get a little cranky and opinionated and Richardson’s interpretations of the works themselves a bit redundant, his grasp of the theory obscure. He uncritically accepts, for example, the greatness of the relatively short-lived ‘neo-classical’ period, when I believe Picasso himself quickly came to regard them as a dead-end. Whenever I’ve come across them in travelling shows, they have always looked overblown and empty compared with what came before. They look like battery-recharging exercises to me. Richardson intimates that they might have been done to impress his new conservative and socially ambitious wife, which chimes with Picasso’s ingratiating behaviour at the time.

There are several annoyances. Jean Cocteau was a constant figure in Picasso’s circle, often to his irritation, especially during the 1920s and the long association with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Yet Richardson never lets a mention of Cocteau’s name go by with attaching a derogatory adjective to it. Now, it is incontestable that Cocteau could be an annoying, craven, social climbing little greaser, who was constantly trying to ingratiate himself with any passing member of society with a healthy bank balance, a bit of talent or a good arse. But let’s not forget people, that we are also talking about the author of La Belle et la Bette and Blood of a Poet. I, the reader, am quite capable of coming to my own conclusions about Cocteau’s behaviour without the author’s constant editorialising.

And why the squeamishness when it comes to Olga’s illness? This is not an unimportant detail. Picasso’s apparent horror at her symptoms was exploited in the vast canon of works dealing explicitly with Olga throughout the 1920s and 30s, so I would say the question is a critical one. Several times, Richardson insinuates that it was a gynaecological condition that remained uncured or inaccurately diagnosed following Paulo’s birth. He suggests it was something (he won’t say what) that resulted in haemorrhages, hence the frequent depiction of Olga in the later works as a screaming harpy clothed in various permutations of blood red. Is it a fault of research? Or does it reflect Richardson’s own prejudices? The reluctance to ‘go there’ seems disappointingly sexist, if that’s what it is. By all accounts Olga was a difficult customer and probably a nightmare to be married to, whether one happened to be a self-obsessed macho like Picasso or not. She certainly seems to have been mentally fragile, but Richardson’s persistent habit of connecting this to her ‘woman’s problems’ seems to reveal an odd Victorian-era connection between the uterus and ‘hysteria’. Whatever, it is not good enough.

Still, Picasso is vividly present on the page. This volume covers his famous ‘sell-out’ period when he shunned his grubby bohemian friends and took up fine clothes, socialising on a big scale, grand villas both in the country and the city and a very big car for the sake of Olga and her social pretensions. Probably his social pretensions as well, as this wasn’t a brief moment in Picasso’s life, but a fertile couple of decades.

Olga Khoklova the former ballerina is the big hole in this volume. Her personality remains remote. We get very little sense of this strange woman’s qualities, the qualities that a man as complex as Picasso found so captivating. Richardson just seems to note Picasso’s friends’ dismissal of her as a blank without trying too hard to dispel the impression, which was surely wrong.

Picasso was a complete shit to the women in his life, but then that is hardly news. He did, however, have a few saving personal graces. I particularly liked Picasso’s habit of getting about in his enormous town car with its Erich Von Stroheim look-alike chauffeur while dressed in paint-spattered work clothes. As far as I can tell from the picture, we’re talking about exactly the kind of car Norma Desmond got around in in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. That’s class you can’t fake.

It’s interesting that we are talking about Picasso now at all. Certainly his life, his art and his career are absolutely at odds with our era’s preoccupation with the political consequences of identity. Interesting because one can’t separate Picasso’s identity from the art for long. To even begin discussing Picasso’s constantly anthropomorphic work of the late 1920s and early 30s is impossible without unpacking his idea of sex, which is deeply antifeminist. Reading the book, I kept imagining myself standing in front of a class of eighteen year-old shrinking violets saying things like “Notice the internal rhyme between the female figure’s mouth and her vagina”, and “See how the sleeping Marie-Therese’s profile becomes the artist’s penis”. I shudder to think of it.



Is it definitive? Certainly not. There is much to be thankful for, but still questions that remain unanswered.

Orange Crate Art

In honour of Michael Leddy and his blog Orange Crate Art, here is a selection of real, honest-to-goodness orange crate art.

These are my favourites. Enjoy:









I found these at the amazing BoxOfApples.com.

The site contains this helpful description:

BoxOfApples.com is the online museum (and gift shop) of fruit crate labels from the early 1900s to 1950s. Back in the days of our grandparents and their parents, people did their produce-shopping at markets that were more like a farmer’s market than today’s grocery stores. The fruit and vegetables would be displayed in their shipping crates somewhere near the railroad tracks, probably under a big shed. Each crate would have a label (up to a foot square) showing the name of the packer, and a colorful design to differentiate the brand. Fruit crates disappeared with the advent of self-service supermarkets and cardboard boxes, but thousands of vintage labels have survived in mint condition, rescued from warehouses and print shops, mostly on the West Coast. Beautifully printed by stone lithography with eight- or twelve-color inks, they are now collectors' items with a big following on eBay. On this site you can see dozens of different designs, and buy large-format, high-quality reproductions for home or office.

It includes an article on the history of crate labels.