Donald Friend’s Nude Studies Bali.
Yesterday … was your last chance to view a collection of artwork by Donald Friend at the Deutscher and Hackett auction house in South Yarra. Today, it’s being packed up and freighted to Sydney where it will go under the hammer on October 27. Friend’s work has been quietly on display in Melbourne since Thursday and features some loving drawings of nude boys from Bali in the 1970s; they were made around the time photographer Bill Henson’s early work was being shown at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Some of Friend’s drawings, in terms of the bald but modest posture of his subjects, could be studies for a Henson photograph. If Friend was to produce the work today, all it would take is an anonymous call to the police for these drawings to generate the kind of ”child porn” controversy that Henson suffered through in 2008.
Or, if a gallery wanted to avoid controversy, the work would be taken down on the sly. Certainly, if the great Donald Friend was applying for an Australia Council grant to make these drawings, he’d most probably be knocked back.
The Henson affair changed everything in terms of the art world censoring itself. Or perhaps it’s truer to say, Kevin Rudd changed everything.
Leading curators and gallery directors, all of them reliant on federal funding, and most of them speaking nervously off the record, believe the local art scene has become ”overly risk-averse” since Rudd made a strong populist moral stand, placing himself in the middle of the Henson furore. If there was a moment commentators point to, it was when the former PM, at the height of his popularity, appeared on Channel Ten’s The Project and implored: ”For God’s sake, can’t we just let kids be kids.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/covering-their-arts-20131012-2vf7j.html#ixzz2i6nFM8Rh
Earlier on Tasmanian Times, Jane Rankin-Reid: An Impure Tasmania …
