I appeared briefly on Australian story last night in a piece about Olympia Nelson, inspired by her significant piece on the rise of the selfie, ‘Dark undercurrents of teenage girls selfies’, published in The Sydney Morning Herald, July 11, 2003, and reprinted here.
Because a much longer interview was cut (as is often the case – I’m not complaining, it’s the nature of media and having ones opinions quoted anywhere is a privilege), some of my thinking on the issue of sexualisation, sexuality, selfies, and the debate around the depiction of children in art, was not included. I wanted to put on the record views expressed earlier, for a more complete picture. I’d like to say straight up that I find Polexini Papapetrou’s art quite beautiful and evocative. And it wasn’t Olympia’s naked image in and of itself that was the main problem for myself and my colleagues (we don’t have an issue with nudity per se). There is an important context that needs to be considered.
The publishing of the naked image of then six-year-old Olympia Nelson on the cover of Art Monthly in July 2008 was in protest against the response to Bill Henson’s naked artwork of children, particularly an image of a young topless girl with budding breasts featuring in a promotional invitation to his latest exhibition. I commented on Henson’s work here (photos redacted but can be viewed here).
Henson’s sexualised depictions of young girls: calling it art doesn’t make it OK
I haven’t seen the latest photographs by artist Bill Henson to go on show at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne.
But I have seen these.
So I know what Henson is capable of and how he likes to depicts and shoot young girls.
The girl (image to the right) who featured naked on the invite to the Roslyn Oxley gallery was 13. While that photo was widely circulated, an even more graphic one of another girl (image to the left) was not. She is ‘Untitled 1985/86’, quietly auctioned by Menzies Art Brands, Lot 214, for $3800, only weeks after the original Henson controversy.
And when Tolarno Galleries refuses to reveal the age of the youngest naked girl in the new exhibition, you have to suspect there is a problem. Why the secrecy? Was she at an age where she could consent? As respected teen psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg put it when I asked his view, would she “have sufficient cognitive or emotional maturity to fully comprehend the potential ramifications of what she is doing?”
Where will her photo end up? Where did the photos of the other two girls above end up?
Why does calling it “art” make sexualised depictions of young girls OK?
It is right to question Henson’s sexual depictions of vulnerable naked young girls – and other overtly sexualised imagery of children – a point I made on Channel 7’s Morning Show last Thursday. Media academic and researcher Nina Funnell also reveals here that Henson’s images have been found in the collections of paedophilies. (video no longer available)
Dr Abigrail Bray also has a chapter on the Henson affair in Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls (Spinifex Press, 2009 titled ‘The Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics’).
This is my letter in the Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2008, on the placement of Olympia’s image in a magazine featuring images of extreme porn-themed torture, including schoolgirl torture. It was publishing her image in this context that added a new and very problematic layer, not commented on at all in the debate at the time, apart from the observations I made here. Dismissing these concerns as a ‘moral panic’ is just too easy and too convenient.
Art is about “giving people dignity”, the critic Robert Nelson told ABC radio this week. “We’ve got to have faith in art,” he said. Nelson is the father of Olympia, whose naked photos appear in Art Monthly Australia’s latest issue. The photos were taken in 2003 by her mother, when the girl was six.
While flicking through Art Monthly, I wondered whether Mr Nelson had looked at the magazine that featured his daughter before he gave us his thoughts on art and human dignity.
Call me particular, but I don’t find images of semi-naked, bound women with protruding sex organs all that dignified. I looked really hard, but I couldn’t see much dignity in the photograph of a Japanese schoolgirl trussed in rope and suspended with her skirt raised to reveal her underwear. Torture porn just doesn’t stir my soul.
Some of Bill Henson’s images are there, of course (this issue was a “protest” in defence of his work). They are followed by selections from the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, probably best known for his passion for taking photos of girls and women exposed and bound.
There’s his slumped, bound schoolgirl picture and an image of a woman with her clothing stripped back, the ropes squeezing her naked breasts and contorting her into a pose that displays her genitals. A third uplifting work depicts a woman on the ground, strained forward, her naked spreading backside to the camera.
Faith in art?
A little further into the magazine you come upon the work of David Laity. What offering of truth and beauty does Laity give us? An image of a woman being bound with the tentacles of an octopus as it performs oral sex on her. That’s some dignified octopus. Then there’s an image of a woman bending over so we can see her … Well, you get the picture.
The photographs of Olympia need to be viewed in the context of the images positioned around her. On their own, the images that show Olympia reclining naked, her pose and look more that of an adult, can be seen as sexualised. But surrounding her with these other images superimposes a further, more sinister, meaning on them.
The former Democrats senator Lyn Allison told Sunrise the controversy was just about little girls playing dress-ups. But don’t dress-ups usually involve putting clothes on, not taking them off? And does this game usually end with your photo published in a gallery of female genitals?
The magazine’s editor said he wanted to “restore dignity to the debate”. Does he really think he’s achieved that?
Artists who recognise there should be ethical constraints to art; artists who don’t think it advances humanity to tie up naked girls and capture their images. Now that would be dignified.
The SMH letter was expanded into a piece for Online Opinion published July 18, 2008. While Robert Nelson criticised myself and my colleagues on twitter this week claiming we read the image of his daughter inappropriately, see how he himself has described some of his child’s photographs.
…Of course it’s not about dress-ups. Even Robert Nelson doesn’t think that.
In fact, (as Andrew Bolt uncovered) in the year 2000 Robert Nelson had described one of the photographs as part of an exploration of his daughter’s “eroticism”. Even her sucking a dummy as a four-year-old, was, said Nelson “potentially the most diabolically sexual” image, a symbol of “the perversity of pleasure-sucking’’.
Critics of the Polixeni Papapetrou images have been criticised for reading too much into them. Yet Nelson himself renders the child in sexualised ways.
Nelson once described Henson’s work as displaying a “vulgar relish in depicting naked, pouting teenagers” in a “teasing sexual spectacle” to present them as a “passive target for the viewer’s lust”. He wrote, “Henson’s interest in juvenile erotica … is an aesthetic of spying, granting you an illicit glimpse, as in all pornographic genres … Henson’s grope in the gloaming has unpleasant moral overtones, as when the participants are too young for sex’’.
So why give photographs of your daughter to a magazine whose raison d’être was a defence of Henson? It is hard to understand.
The magazine’s editor Maurice O’Riordan said he had wanted to “restore dignity to the debate”. Does he really think he’s achieved that by throwing Olympia in with tied up school girls, women who have been rendered completely powerless…
3 Responses
I don’t think that at age six a child can give meaningful consent to having nude pictures published. A child lacks the emotional maturity to make an informed decision and to understand the possible implications of her photos being made public.
Given that this is art, aren’t these pictures open to interpretation? If I believe they could be exploitative is my interpretation less valid just because someone else sees something different?
I think we should take Polixeni’s word that her intention was not to present her daughter erotically or in a sexualised manner. But the whole family just seem incredibly naive as to the impact of the image/s beyond their intent. No matter how intelligent and educated Olympia (quite obviously) is, she was SIX years old when the photo was taken. Her own mother had, for her entire life, normalised posing for photos – including nude photos. Of course she defended them aged 11. Why would she do anything else? What 11 year old is going to stand up and publicly criticise her seriously ill mother who taught her about what right and wrong and art are? That’s not a sign of maturity beyond her years. It’s a sign of being a child, and one of the exact reasons minors are not legally able to consent.
Now, at 16, and *still* a minor in the care of the artist, Olympia not only continues to defend her childhood pics but sees no problem with other girls self objectifying as long as they’re not ‘competing for likes’. And she is repeatedly rewarded by her parents and others who benefit from her advocacy of their use of her in their art, for speaking positively about all of it. This is not at all to say that Olympia is not capable of working out her own opinion – but it’s irresponsible to ignore these factors, and pretend that just because a 6/11/16 year old says they are ok with something means it’s ok for the adults in their life to be doing it.
I’ve also been thinking about what Polixeni said on the show, about Olympia as a child ‘commanding the gaze’. I find it quite extraordinary for a parent, or any adult, to respond to a child’s countenance ‘commanding’ people to look upon her, by photographing her nude, putting that picture in the public sphere, and then when control of the way people look at that image is lost, blaming *them* for ‘gazing’ at her the wrong way. This just seems an incredibly odd approach to issues of child protection which are unavoidable in this kind of matter.
So when I see the original image – even taken separately to the Art Monthly context and Bill Henson controversy – it’s not really the image itself which disturbs me half so much as everything which has gone into creating it, and its willing subject.
Firstly it is not ‘children’ male pornographer Bill Henson is photographing and then publicly displaying for men to ‘drool over.’ Oops – forgot whenever a male artist claims his material is art we women are expected to say yes what this male claims is true! As regards ‘children being photographed’ – wrong it is female children not male children who are being preyed on by predatory Henson in the name of art so that makes it okay then?
Reverse the situation and imagine how men would react if there were naked images of male children complete with their genitals on display and particularly pubescent male children. Why men would react with anger and outrage because the male is not a dehumanised sexualised commodity – that is is women’s and girls’ roles.
Male pornographers have always engaged in portraying/representing pre-pubescent/adolescent female children as ‘males’ sexual prey’ and with the invention of photography the male pornographers and male sexual predators were delighted. This meant they were able to easily purchase/drool over photographs of naked female children because it was supposedly ‘art!’
I do have a problem with nudity because the only nudity acceptable is as always female nudity because women and girls aren’t human but merely exist to be males’ disposable sexual service stations. I rarely see paintings/pictures of so-called ‘art wherein it is the naked male body on display complete with mandatory sexual organs on display! Why not? Because men know the penis must never be displayed especially if the male object is portrayed as a ‘sexualised object!’
So let’s be clear the photographs male pornographer Henson takes are not those of male children but female children and secondly men are the ones who have always sexualised and dehumanised women and girls because men claim ‘women and girls aren’t human but merely males’ disposable sexualised commodities.
As regards Polexini Papapetrou’s art – sadly she refuses to accept reality wherein because men have successfully made their male created pornography industry global, any innocuous image of a naked female child will be seized on by males who love their porn because no female is immune from males viewing her as ‘just another dehumanised sexualised commodity.’
Male sexual predators cannot be divided into those mythical paedophiles and those ‘good males’ because male sexual predators commonly view all females as suitable sexual prey. Some male sexual predators prey on adult women; others prey on adult women; female and male children; whereas a minority merely (sic) sexually prey on female and/or male children!
Bill Henson is a pornographer who hides behind his misogynistic claim that he is a ‘male artist’ who just happens to specialise in portraying pre-pubescent and adolescent female children as mens’ sexualised commodities.
The issue of ‘consent’ is a deliberate male supremacist tactic because this immediately leads to the lie that if a male ‘consents’ to being sexually assaulted by another male it is okay because both males were merely engaging in ‘rough homosexual sexual activity!’ This means BDSM and malestream pornography is acceptable because ‘hey the female actors supposedly “consented” to a group of naked males penetrating the female simultaneously in every conceivable way and it is ‘erotic’ and ‘sexy!’ What is not recognised because men don’t want us women to see what exactly is happening is that male sexualised violence against women and girls does stimulate and excite innumerable men because it is interconnected with male social ideas of how male sexuality is enacted. Male sexual domination and male sexualised torture of women doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it is how many men view women and girls.
Nobuyoshi Araki, is another male pornographer who hides behind his claims ‘my work is art’ when in reality he is recording real sadistic male sexual violence being inflicted on females because they are female and hence aren’t human!
Imagine if Araki were to photography naked men subjecting other naked men to sadistic male sexual violence wherein the males’ genitals are subjected to torture – what would men say? Why this is torture and is a violation of mens’ human rights. Of course a minority of male libertarians will claim ‘but the male victims consented so that makes it okay!’ But it doesn’t because said activity is sadistic sexualised torture whereby the male perpetrator(s) enjoys what he is doing/viewing because it is eroticised male sexual violence. Which begs the question why do so many males enjoy/want to subject women and girls to sadistic male sexual violence in order that these males can ‘achieve sexual stimulation and orgasm? What does this say about how men construct their male sexuality given men continue to claim they are the rational and non-emotional sex? Emotions are feelings which are supposedly the preserve of females because real males are rational and are not emotional!
If and when our Male Supremacist system is finally destroyed and at long last women and girls are rightly accorded their fundamental human rights of dignity and respect, then perhaps we can begin to view the naked male form as ‘art’ rather than protecting the naked male body because men will become upset (sic) if they see another male’s naked penis on public display because that would be to dehumanise the default human who is always male!
We can also finally begin to accept that the naked female form is not a dehumanised sexualised commodity which exists to be sexually exploited/sexually degraded by men for mens’ sexual pleasure and entertainment. We might just finally recognise that so-called ‘mens’ art is all too often depictions of sadistic male sexual violence inflicted on women and girls.
Mens’ so-called ‘famous male artists’ are ‘littered’ with depictions of naked women and girls being subjected to male sexual violence and these paintings all portray the female(s) as supposedly provoking/causing the male(s) to rape them! Until we recognise what men claim is ‘art’ is really just routine depictions of dehumanised naked females then we cannot possibly begin to challenge mens’ centuries old obsession with having to constantly create/view images of women and girls as men see them. This is misogyny – not art and certainly not ‘great art!’
Earlier this year an exhibition of art featuring paintings/images of (horror!) totally naked males was shown at the Leopald Museum, Vienna and yes it did feature a tiny number (sic) of totally naked males displaying their penises! Western malestream media was divided into decrying this exhibition because it featured the naked male body and/or applauding such a courageous event! I viewed this exhibition and discovered only four images were shown wherein the naked penis was not hidden by a piece of clothing/or position of naked male body. I wondered why is it because men believe phallocentricism is sacrosanct and must never be seen for what it is – just another fragile organ whereby men claim this has mythical powers.