Who is MMCM...?
MMCM is an Art Life contributor - Art Life Management.
Okay, fair enough if Henson is fast becoming as unfashionable as a colour field painter, but does he have to be a scapegoat for all the mindless self absorbtion of recent years? I think he does not.
Great Piece. Love ya work who ever you are MMCM.
Er, by providing this link, have you not propagated further dissemination of this profane image? MMCM, should you yourself now be paraded through streets, a sign round your neck: smut peddler?
Fantastic piece and a relief after reading Marr's article in the GW. Good question "it may be interesting to hear from him what precisely his take on Henson’s gaze in these old photographs might be".
Beat there is no analysis of images in his book.
I'm rather more concerned with the array of politicians, religious figures etc who have regular and untrammeled access to public schools.
Thankyou for writing about this subject, it's nice to hear a perspective other than "he's a monster" or "he's an artist".
Honestly, I was going to go through the images to make up my own mind about it... and I tried, but his style just did not appeal to me.
I also think this is a great piece of writing, avoiding the two extremes mentioned in the previous comment.
I hope it's ok to quote you, on my blog, the paragraph starting "A core feature of child sexual abuse mythology is...". That about sums it up.
This assertion is pure crap. Presumably this writer has scanned the image from the magazine. Lightening that scan will not show you anything extra. If you had a file from a digital camera or a film negative then it would contain some extra information. But with ink on paper or a print, if an area is black then there is nothing extra to be found there.
Although it does read like he enjoyed discovering these images & having an extra close look at them (pant, pant).
Feel free to post the enhanced scans to prove me wrong.
M R
a wise friend of mine often talks about an artists output primarily as a self portrait
over the years i have thought about the work of artists i know in this light and come to a deeper understanding of what they do
And perhaps some artists like ordinary folk are more in touch with this element of their practice than others.
and Bill I think you need therapy mate after seeing that untitled photo that sold last weekend at auction linked in this article my conscience screamed "No thats wrong"
and besides the fact that viewers may not be able to lighten his reproductions or prints don't forget that Bill Hensen has the a whole archive of the negatives
trust him or not hes on his own as far as i am concerned
I think that the burden of proof lies with Henson MR, not the writer of this blog.
Huh? burden of proof of what? You are unclear.
Whoever moderates these posts before putting them up edited out the opening of my initial post, where I quoted part of the original article. No explanation has been given for that & it has distorted my comment.
Simply, I quoted from the article where the writer claims to be able to use imaging software to reveal more explicit detail in the Henson images than are apparent in their original presentation. The implication being that Henson is practicing some sort of subliminal hard core porn.
The images referred to are from a website & a magazine page. The writer is suggesting that as he has been able to see extra naughty bits in there then so can anyone else. I call BS on this & am still waiting for some proof.
To the moderator - if you edit bits out of my post then it's courtesy to have a note in the post saying what you cut out & why.
Your original post was not edited or changed in any way. On the question of "proof", the author provided this blog with images that indeed did "reveal" far more than we imagined but we made an editorial decision not to publish them. We are of course not required to tell you any of this, but provide this information as a 'courtesy'. - Art Life Management
Get critical, I am also concern about political and religious representatives entering schools. I think one of the positive things about this whole affair is the discussion about what kind of ethical boundaries we, as a society, want to put around childhood. Or at least the idea that some parents may wish that their children are not used for political or commercial gain, or a passive in the face of religious proselytizing.
What I really like about this article is that the writer not only has put forward a critique of the images, but also has done some basic investigative journalism. i.e. cross checking the exhibition list of the AGNSW show with some of Henson’s more “borderline” images. That show was constantly used as a defense of Henson work. That defense seems pretty hollow when it become clear that the institution performed self-censorship.
It's all very well to do some basic journalistic research, but it's quite another matter for the author of this piece to proceed from the assumption that Henson has got something to hide. The decision to not exhibit a piece in a retrospective could hav been for any number of reasons, but the author argues that it's because Henson knows the work in question is too pornographic for public consumption. That's what the author is arguing, but it's an assumption of a motive, not an actual fact.
Re. Above comment from Management
Snap.
I think this is a great article.
Excellent article - really nice to read something considered on the issue that doesn't just trot out the same tired clichés about artists' 'rights'. Where does that unquestioning sense of entitlement come from?
[quote]On the question of "proof", the author provided this blog with images that indeed did "reveal" far more than we imagined but we made an editorial decision not to publish them. We are of course not required to tell you any of this, but provide this information as a 'courtesy'. - Art Life Management[/quote]
How very Philip Ruddock of you.
Making grand claims while providing no evidence & then when called on it you come out with this arrogant nonsense. In fact you are required to 'tell us this' & to provide any visual evidence. What do you think - that we are going to blindly trust you when the original piece is obviously a piece of axe grinding.
I still don't believe the writer's claims of discovering extra detail from scans from a printed page or jpegs from a website. I am of course not required to tell you any of this, but provide this information as a 'courtesy'. Ha Ha.
You're implying we're lying to back up a false claim. We're not. We're a blog with little ability to defend ourselves if the issue was prosecuted by the law. Considering the nature of the image - and the hysterical heat around Henson - we decided not to publish. Maybe that was the wrong decision in the circumstances, but then again, why should we bow to the demands of a reader who has done little but troll? And just so you know - that whole thing about a "courtesy" - that was irony. Art Life Management.
As to the identity of MMCM, this might assist.
http://artwranglers.com.au/rippl...face/#more-
1233
The "untitled 1985/86" series included the subsequent Lawson-Menzies Lot 214; and an image included in MNEMOSYNE, on page 233. Neither was exhibited in the 2005 retrospective in Sydney nor Melbourne.
The image sold at auction May 30, 2008, was that on page 298 of MNEMOSYNE, and was included in those exhibitions. It is a C type (chromagenic) print, and is much larger than the silver chlorobromide prints.
The flaw in MMCM's argument is that Henson did not indeed "take" these photographs. He was not, as MMCM would imply, loitering over a sleeping and naked teenager. The vertical format of the images would have the viewer believe this was the case.
Henson was standing beside the bed, and used his camera on the horizontal. If you rotate these images ninety degrees clockwise, you will only then UNDERSTAND.
The girl is in a quite natural repose.
This does not excuse henson for exhibiting the photographs as he did, but the blame must be shared with those who see p--nography where there is naught but beauty.
These images are unlike any of Hensons other work. It is a domestic setting, and the light is suffuse; daylight turning to night.
(Thank you Susan for your invitation to respond to your comment, which arrived as I was about to post this):
I had not intended to write further on this issue, but rather than importune a ‘Salon Des Refuses - Extended Season’ upon the good people at Artlife, I feel that I should in all fairness clarify my investigative approach to the Henson images that turned up on the secondary market in May and September.
Firstly, working with basic photo software on my Mac I was able to increase the exposure on every image of interest to me, whether from the Roslyn Oxley website, Mnemosyne, or from the Lawson Menzies website, with varying results, mostly revelatory.
Secondly, my purpose in increasing exposure on these images was to determine what precisely chiaroscuro might mean for Bill Henson in his depictions of children beyond the aesthetic. I was investigating an hypothesis prior to the Lawson-Menzies images coming to my attention. There is considerable slippage between the process of photography and the published image, and I could not understand why, in the case of Bill Henson, this dimension had miraculously evanesced. I was nonplussed that virtually omitted from the debate by the art world were the relations between photographer and model constitutive of the image in the first instance. Unsurprising from the Establishment, but where were the independent critical voices?
Perhaps an image-fixated art world and a commodity-oriented art market had disassociated itself from the means and relations of Henson’s photographic art-making to a point of ethical and critical collapse.
It was only when news of the school yard breach leaked out of David Marr’s own pen that an awareness of the spuriousness of these relations broke the surface of community consciousness, battered into retreat by a particularly paranoid and omnipotent arts elite.
I apologise for any confusion that may have arisen from my mention of the AAR image alongside my discussion of exposure - I did not attempt to scan the AAR image as I had access to the Mnemosyne reproduction. My point in mentioning the AAR image was that, firstly, the image had been described by the author of the accompanying text - Dr Shireen Huda - as not containing any nudity, when in fact it had; and secondly, I believed that this oversight was a significant but perhaps inevitable slip in a text accompanying an unusually dark reproduction of Untitled 1985/86 (when compared with its counterpart in Mnemosyne).
If one is not looking for it, it will pass unnoticed, but if one does, it is plainly there to see. I believe this slip exemplifies Henson’s aesthetic subterfuge, where ambiguity to point of illusion is utilized for ulterior purposes.
Shortly after writing my piece, ‘Salon Des Refuses’, I discovered that the child model in this photograph (hereinafter referred to as Tweetie & Sylvester) and the child model used for TCM-Untitled 1985/86 (Lot 214) are one and the same.
When 'Tweetie and Sylvestor' (Mnemosyne, p 298) and ‘Lot 214’ (the online image of ‘Lot 214’ http://www.menziesartbrands.com/...rowse&
cat_id=83 has, incidentally, been recently passed by ACMA as not contravening the Australian Broadcasting Act) are placed side by side, it becomes obvious that the child model wears an identical bracelet on her right wrist. Both photographs were taken around the same time and are entitled Untitled 1985/86 in the two colour and black and white series, respectively.
Perhaps Susan, in her researches, did not notice this. It certainly took me a little while.
Slips, slippages, slipperiness - the work, the debate, the book provide a veritable cornucopia of parapraxes.
It does seem an odd coincidence that of all the Henson photographs to find their way onto the secondary market after the storm broke in May, that these two images, made in the same year yet not exhibited together before, should emerge from private collections at the same time (albeit at separate auctions).
I herewith reunite them in this ‘Extended Salon Season’.
Susan is correct in stating that Untitled 1985/86 (‘Tweetie & Sylvester’) is reproduced in ‘Mnemosyne’, while Lot 214 is not - seemingly having bypassed public exhibition and sold directly by the artist to the collector (or collectors) who divested himself of these various Hensons earlier this year. The Mnemosyne (p 233) version is a different photograph altogether (similar, but not identical to ‘Lot 214’, and possibly from the same shoot), and depicts the girl posed with her right hand behind her back, thus concealing the bangle, or bracelet, that confirms her identity as the same model as posed in ‘Tweetie and Sylvester’.
If there were not such a striking resemblance between the two girls, one might venture to suggest that the bangle was passed round a bunch of kids during 1985/86, the year Henson produced the colour and black and white series that included, respectively, each of these images.
But this seems a little far-fetched.
In light of the above (but not solely because of it), I am curious as to how a horizontal versus a vertical camera angle weakens my argument with respect to Henson's longstanding child fetish. And I am truly puzzled as to how a horizontal angle somehow implies that Henson (i.e. in standing by the bed rather than over the bed) did not in fact “take” this photograph.
I gather that Susan is asserting by this that Henson did not “pose” this photograph in a predatory fashion, and that the making of this image was another example of Henson’s “ethnography”, as he himself likes to commend his oeuvre. But even Susan intimates something spurious in the rotating of the image to the vertical ex post facto (if indeed this is what he has done), so I do not think the angle of the dangle logically undermines in any way my argument with respect to Henson’s predatory eye (the tragic narrative, as I have previously stated, of the ‘Tweetie and Sylvestor’ nursery cartoon).
It just confirms a kind of sleight-of-hand, and demonstrates a gift for trickery.
In bringing these images together, what can be deduced with respect to Henson’s aesthetic intentions? Does predation magically revert to ethnography along with the rotated angle?
Certainly this evidence raises doubts as to the “quite natural repose” of the child model in ‘Tweetie and Sylvester’: if the model is the same in both, as I am claiming, how can the “quite natural repose” of the former be reconciled with the quite ‘unnatural’ pose of the latter (Lot 214)?
One might even raise a further cheeky question as to the absence of pubic hair in this innocuous Disney scene compared with ‘Lot 214’: was it brushed out to make the model appear prepubescent? If so, why? Why would a photographic image of a girl in “quite natural repose” require genital modification in the darkroom? Or was it an addition to ‘Lot 214’? Now that seems a little farcical.
It is, in my view, simply disingenuous to assert that Henson was not taking pictures of a naked child, that he did not “take” the photograph, nor manipulate it to emphasise the girl’s genitalia. There is surely no other focus.
Perhaps Susan is able to view ‘Lot 214’ alongside Untitled1985/86 (Tweetie & Sylvester’) and see beauty where I do not.
No one is saying that naked children are not beautiful. All children are beautiful. But their greatest beauty lies ahead through a flowering of individual potential on their own terms, within the expanding freedoms and autonomies yielded during the confusing, carefree, and critical developmental years by the adults charged with their protection. I cannot see anything beautiful in a photographic ‘aesthetic’ enterprise that slyly and ruthlessly transgresses what is fundamentally sacrosanct in this.
In ‘The Henson Case’ Marr quotes Henson discussing the rationale behind his selection of Untitled 2007/08 for the Roslyn Oxley9 email invitation:
‘And he was strangely pleased the picture was vertical. ‘It’s exciting for me, because I have been working in a horizontal format for many years”. So when the time came to pick the invitation for the new show he didn’t hesitate: “I said. ‘Oh we’ll just use that. It’s great’”.
Despite the quote from Genesis, it seems verticality was the clincher for poor little ‘N’, objectified rather than considered and, again, left totally out of the picture.
Pleading the horizontal in this new evidential context does not, I think, an innocent eye make.
Thanks for your repost Mugsey.
Despite your considerable efforts at analysis, I'm not sure that you have deigned to do as I did suggest, which was: to rotate the thumbnail image of "Lot 214" by ninety degrees.
I have entered this affray because this image on which you would base your critique, is an impossible image.
I was perhaps being clumsy in asserting Henson did not "take' that photograph. Of course he did, but it was taken at the side of the bed, not at the foot of the bed.
What is important here is the eye of the photographer; the lens is just an extension of that.
Untitled 1985/86, "lot 214", is an impossible image because there is nowhere visible the shadow of the photographer. The light is natural and low, and appears to come from below; a sort of "limelight" effect. And yet there is no shadow cast over the girl. I'ts as simple as that.
I'll continue when you confirm that you have done as I suggested.
Susan
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