Over in Sydney, there’s yet another controversy about the cultural crossroads between erotic media and art. Renowned Australian photographer Bill Henson has just had several photographs removed from an exhibition at Sydney’s prestigious Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, because they contain art photographs of naked barely pubescent girls. Sigh. Not again. Cue memories of Pictura Britannia and the Virgin in a Condom, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring over here, and Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” installation in Victoria, across the ditch.

Pro-censorship feminists and the Christian Right “women’s activist” Melissa Tankard Reist have slammed the exhibition, labelling it smut, and arguing that it is unpalatable to see young women ‘exploited’ at the end of a photographic lens. This is all happening at the same time as a (related?) controversy over the unneccessary eroticisation of prepubscent female children in the advertising and fashion industries across the Tasman. So, what is one to think?

I do not believe that single, posed photographs of naked young women or men neccessarily should be labelled “smut. ” From a formalist perspective, there is a considerable difference between the conventions of art photograph and those of child porn, in which there is an industrialised context of deliberate exposure and associated exploitation. If these photographs consisted of an adult engaged in rape of those same children, then it would be child porn, and would justifiably attract public condemnation and revulsion.

Added to which, at the same time as this arts controversy was going on, there was a related imbroglio about paedophiles eroticising freely available advertising layouts of children. Sadly, while banning legit, ‘industrial’ conveyor belt child porn hampers the pedo cause significantly, these creatures are liable to find other media material to provide them with sexual stimulation, nauseating as it may seem. Problem is, too, that this may well not be the dominant framework of reception and interpretation for those images, which complicates the argument. One can guarantee that child porn was not Henson’s intention in taking those photographs, surely.

I’m afraid that this is one of those cases where “community standards” of the purse-lipped-ex-nun-(or-fundamentalist-cardy-wearing-old-man)-and-their-horn-rimmed-gasps- of -outrage variety has gone beserk without considering the contexts of production, reception and interpretation of art. Let’s reserve our condemnation for the real child porn out there, not art gallery images which are wholly unconnected to it, shall we?

Recommended:

http://www.smh.com.au

Excellent review of the controversy, with both sides represented.