On Luminous

Classical music might be the least self-confident of all the arts, the one who reaches out with a fumbling need for reassurance to the first youngish, poppish collaborators its sees, too eager for their youthful charm to know whether they're good for them or not.

That's how you end up with the middlebrow mess of 'events' like 'Luminous' where the Australian Chamber Orchestra plays REM beneath the titillatingly controversial images of Bill Henson.  Like your mother wearing a crop top and a belly button stud it's not always a pretty sight .

The State theatre is Sydney's most beautiful and it gives both a grand and intimate setting for the ACO, hung over them is a large screen onto which is projected images from the photographs of Bill Henson.  The show starts ominously, both intentionally and unintentionally.  If you've been to anything in a theatre or gallery that has pretensions to that type of dark arthouse seriousness you will be familiar with the atonal sub-bass rumble that is a standard signifier of post-industrial angst...  or something.  The rumbles are apparently provided by a 'sound sculptor' and are the kind of clumsy signaling of tone that much of the music really doesn't deserve.

The first half of Luminous has lights both high and low.  The ACO accompany the singer Katie Noonan, whose operatic vocals work beautifully with Britten's 'Corpus Christi Carol' but the final song sounded like an Enya song ripe for use in a hair conditioner commerical, it was very bad indeed.  So keen are the ACO to trowel on novelty that the audience sat through a piece for cello and water, where the orchestra took to playing wine glasses with their bows.  Both physically excruciating and hilarious, especially if one has seen 'Broadway Danny Rose', the interval came as a high pitched relief and the compulsory did little to mask scattered groans. 

Musically the second half improved vastly.  The performance of Petris Vask's violin concerto "Different Light" should remind us all that subtlety, depth and beauty will create don't need to force themselves into trendy clothes.  The power of the piece together with the precision of the playing and the power of the setting (the State, acoustics aside, does make us feel we're watching and hearing something special).  I was moved beyond my limited classical music critical lexicon.

The second half of the program is defiantly good, and overcomes the cringiness of the pop collaboration.  However the music isn't the biggest barrier.  

I have written about my response to the work of Bill Henson before, I find the combination of dark melodramatic lighting and taboo sexuality the worst type of High Art Lite, he flatters viewers into feeling edgy and art literate (yes, we know Vermeer loved skin and Caravaggio liked a shadow).  What struck me about the work projected above the orchestra was how very few favours it does Henson.  If comedy is tragedy plus time (or perhaps timing) the prolonged and repeated zooming and panning across Henson's work only helps to make his sullen and ever so serious craft appear funnily monotonous.  

In galleries or print we are less conscious of the sheer repetition, of how breathless bruised lip and open mouthed pouts are just as subject to the law of diminishing returns as any other artistic device.  Shown so that a face might be perhaps twenty feet across, the grain of the film exposed, it's clear how artful Henson is in showing the supposed artlessness of his subjects.  There is dirt beneath every fingernail, skin aspires to that oily Roman smear and you quickly feel you're watching an art director rather than an artist.

As a part of the package of 'Luminous' the pictures are annoying in the first half and distracting in the second, where the music deserves the prominence.  The roaming of the rostrum camera over them really does little other than underline clichés, in fact if you were to look at the photo album application 'iPhoto' you would see that there is a facility called the 'Ken Burn's Effect' (sic) that creates similarly restless moving pictures from your own snapshots.  There is little sense of either unity or counterpoint between the various elements of Luminous, unless you count a confluence of smugness, and that does no-one much good.

The chiaroscuro and electronic groans serve to remind us how often Art Lite is dressed up as Art Dark and how what was served up in Luminous felt very light indeed.

On The Henson Case

The high farce of last year's stand-off between millionaire aesthetes and provincial philistines, as internationally acclaimed photographer Bill Henson had an exhibition raided by police at the start of a media storm about child pornography and art, ought to have made a delicious and thought provoking read. However, David Marr's book, 'The Henson Case' proves to be simply another round in this intractable bout of snobbery and incomprehension rather than the analysis of the issues raised that we need.

The carefully contrived apoplexy of talkback, tabloids and Today is indeed vile, but we would be wrong to assume that when an issue is taken up by populist demagogues it is immediately invalidated.  The essential problem here is the simple denial in the art world that anyone could actually care about nude photographs of underage children sold in galleries.  At no point in the book does Marr acknowledge that the whole affair is fuelled by anything more than the philistinism and prejudice of the masses indeed dismissing their concerns as "a mishmash of anxieties".

There are issues to be answered.  One can legitimately debate, without being a prude (although this as a tough one since Marr states saying "I'm not a prude" is the surest sign you are),  whether photographing nude children, and presenting that as art, normalises their bodies as objects of desire and whether that is healthy in a society that does have concerns over their sexual exploitation.  The 'porn versus art' polarisation precludes this debate, neither side is willing to have it and it is entirely false for either to suggest they do.

Modern art, and its economies, feeds on the oxygen of transgression.  Ever since the Salon Des Refusés artists, critics and gallery owners alike have taken the breaking of norms, first of aesthetics and then social or moral, to be a mark of both progress and quality.  To be 'dangerous' or 'challenging' is wholly desirable.  This the art world claiming no offence could or should be taken is disingenuous in the extreme.  We ought to ask ourslves if Henson's work would be so valuable or lauded if it did only feature clothed children.

This is where Marr's, and the anti-censorship lobby's, arguments become disingenuous and implicitly deny opposing parties the possibility of any nuanced or subtle objections.  At this point the defence, such as I understand it, descends into farce.  Let us call it the 'Wank Fallacy'.  In short this runs something like:  

• Does something banal, let's say a shoe, become pornographic if someone masturbates over it?  Clearly not.  Thus ANYTHING that anyone masturbates over is by definition not pornography.
  

I struggled with that one as well.  Other claims remain wilfully unexamined, the idea that what was good enough for the art of earlier centuries should be good enough for us conveniently ignores that these took place in societies where child labour and pre-pubescent marriage were common, and we probably don't want to resurrect those particular artifacts.  Similarly the argument of the kids willing participation certainly does demonstrate the complexity of the issues, but it also runs uncomfortably close to the 'but she wanted it' defence.

Comedy enters the narrative with Cate Blanchett, make that "Politically committed and beautiful Blanchett".  Seemingly unaware that  most of the nation were guffawing at the preposterous 2020 summit we learn that the group of creative people involved were an organised force.  Cate Blanchett tells us that "2020 had asserted that artists were citizens' said Blanchett' that they had a place at the centre of national life'".  This betrays the sense of entitlement that is so irksome, the arts have become marginalised because of their choice or inability to be relevant.  Marr's chief contempt is reserved for Kevin Rudd, and it's informative to see why, "This was the new scholar Prime minister, the Mandarin man, the leader who had lately consorted with Cate Blanchett at the 202o summit.  But with these remarks on 'Today' Rudd killed Camelot" in short Kevin Rudd has proven himself to be a class traitor.

Class is THE great unspoken theme of the book, the effrontery of  the uneducated, of those who had never registered Henson's existence in the past, the prudery of the religious, how dare any of them pass judgement on what the consensus of a group of rich sophisticates deems to be serious.  Bob Debus offers a rare glimpse of sanity here, pointing out that as a politician he does actually have to respond to the views of vast majority of his constituents.  This is heresy to Marr, elites should stick together and just as they demand the approbation of the masses they deny them the dignity of a voice.

Not even when we hear of QCs, heiresses, publishers and national broadcasters at the Henson opening do we get a hint that this is a very exclusive club, dealing in very expensive commodities.  The operational realities of the art world are only ever dealt with to demonstrate how the moving, storage and appreciation of art are Byzantine rites conferring a priestlike status on their participants.  Never are the commercial realities spoken of, price tags, commissions, super-funds or auction prices don't belong in this world.  With Hensons trading for upward of $20,000 dollars a piece it's hard to imagine a more bizarre omission but people are 'supporters', never customers or investors.  Given the importance of notoriety you would imagine that the whole affair would be money in the bank for his brave supporters. 

And me?  Well I like censorship as little as I like the snobbery and hypocrisy of elites, I find Henson's images beautiful and cliched, a kind of portentous kitsch that is anything but challenging or insightful.  Henson and cohorts are presented as Candides, blithely unaware that they may ever cause offence, which given their experience, exposure to the trajectory of art debate in the last forty years and their very worldly success is difficult to believe.  But this lies at the crux of the issue.  When novelty and transgression are your measure of artistic worth one ought to be willing to expect a heightened and aggressive response from those who hold the norms you seek to break.  To expect otherwise is essentially juvenile, and has its echo in derivative driven financial institutions who want all of the rewards of risk but for the rest of society to pay for its downside.

The Henson affair, or something very like it will happen again.  If the art world desires both a privileged place in the government and shaping of society whist it continues to proclaim 'art pour l'art' and feed on the economics of shock that much is inevitable.