How long does it take for the New South Wales Police and their legal advisers to decide whether or not to charge Bill Henson with offences under Commonwealth or State law? The coppers have had the Henson pictures they took off the wall of Ros Oxley’s Paddington Gallery for almost a week now and yet no charges have been laid against Henson or the Gallery.
Why not? This is not a case that requires any forensic analysis of material, or the interviewing of a substantial number of witnesses. It merely requires the coppers to make a judgement call on whether or not they think Henson and the Gallery have breached the law on the creation and distribution of child p-rnography, or whether an indecent article has been published Hardly Sherlock Holmes stuff now is it?
Mind you, how could Henson and the Gallery get a fair trial, now that politicians like the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the New South Wales Premier have decided to judge Henson guilty? Their populist and ill-informed condemnation of Henson’s work is particularly odious and dangerous given that any charges against Henson and the Gallery require a judge or a jury to make an assessment of what a reasonable person in today’s society would think of the images created by Henson.
Perhaps the New South Wales Police haven’t charged Henson and the gallery yet because they are too busy running around other art galleries like the one in Newcastle yesterday and ordering them not to show Henson’s works.
Since when did we allow our police forces to become censors of art and culture? And by the way, under what legal power were the New South Wales Police acting yesterday in telling an art gallery what it can and can’t show in its exhibition? It is not as though the gallery was showing the pictures in defiance of a law, a regulation or a court order. The New South Wales Police have overstepped the mark in Newcastle.
What is happening here is that vigilante, McCarthyist moralists masquerading as child abuse campaigners are being allowed to take over the justice system. Some moralist complains that a gallery has a Henson hanging on its walls, and the New South Wales Police waste taxpayers money and their own limited resources in a jackbooted attack on poor unsuspecting art curators and gallery directors.
It’s a sad scenario: politicians fulminating about what art is acceptable and what is not, police officers rampaging through galleries and concert halls. The persecution and public denunciation of artists have been the hallmarks of vile regimes.
Is the Australia of Kevin Rudd and Morris Iemma any different?
While we are having a great old ding-dong about art and porn – I though this had finished by 1970 but the rise of politicians that have to scrape the dregs of the religious political bucket has woken up the dinosaurs – sight seems to have been lost of the fact that the legal and perhaps moral idiocy resides in the bonce of the marketing genius who decided to use THAT image to advertise the show. Certainly there is an argument that this is the blatant use of the image of a child for commercial purposes and hence intended to appeal to those who would be particularly attracted to such an image. Now that is what I would call pornographic.
The police are holding off announcing there will be no charges laid until this all dies down. They rushed in for PR purposes and now they realize they stuffed-up. They would look like gooses if they returned the artworks now under such media attention. Henson’s legal team, if he has one, should be calling for the immediate return of the works.
Most of the comments on Henson have focussed on what Henson was trying to do with his art. Perhaps we should be focussing on what is going on in the minds of those who are trying to censor him? Henson’s images are uncomfortable and sometimes creepy. But what is it that the critics and censors are seeing through the lens of their perception of the world? In my late parents’ day the sort of view they seem to have of Henson’s work was summed up with the words -” they must have dirty minds”.
Re: Thylacine> Well at least he has the wit to know he/she is a member of an extinct species. The true, blue (nosed) people are the ones who say “How would you like it if your teen aged/ pre-pubescent child, etc, etc.” The thought of the walloping brigade being told to judge Bill Henson’s work is truly obscene. These people have literacy skills on a par with having to move their lips to read. Their love of art can be seen by their (hidden these days) calenders of naked ladies of the variety seen in any car-mechanic’s building. That these people should judge art takes us back to the days of Sir Arthur Rylah, rhymes with galah, who destroyed anything that might offend his, as it turned out, fictitious teen-aged daughter.
I would love to know the answer to one question. Namely: where was the wowser army when the advertising industry started sexualizing children? Oh come on you guardians of public morality. Were there no uneasy moments when the age of models got down to fifteen year old models, fourteen, thirteen, twelve. No feelings of outrage then? Headlines: Aussie teen-aged model takes Manhattan by storm. Sarah Blogs a just turned fifteen year old Adelaide school girl, etc, etc,
Hetty Johnson and her rotten followers have thrown Bill Henson to the wolves. Why have they thrown a famous artist to the wolves? For reflecting on our culture. Go back to your foetid rat holes and the footy that is all you understand.
One can only hope the wallopers will be just as vigilant in protecting the public morals and arrest the head of a worldwide society of paedophiles, one Joseph Ratzinger, when he arrives in Australia next month