Manifesto for the imagination - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Frank Moorhouse
TO PARAPHRASE THE EMINENT JURIST WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (1723–80): ‘You may write as you wish but you must bear the consequences of your temerity.' Blackstone wrote a treatise that still remains an important source on classical views of the common law and its principles. He was arguing that there be no attempts by the state to pre-censor, to prevent publication through pre-publication inspection by the state (something the Australia Council has been asked to do for work it funds). He argued that all publication should be allowed and that only then, if the law allows it, should prosecution occur. Western societies have gradually been taking Blackstone's thinking about freedom of expression one step further, especially towards the arts.
That step is that there should be no prosecution at all, that the consequences of temerity should be that the artist bears the storm of discourse surrounding the presentation of the artwork – the opprobrium or praise, honour or outrage – but that the artist should not be hounded or punished or penalised by the government or its arts funding agencies.
The artists who find themselves under public attack will have to put up with journalists camped outside their homes until we reach a higher point of evolution. This was strongly stated in 1957 when Lord Wolfenden's committee recommended to the British Government that homosexuality should no longer be a criminal offence. The Wolfenden report stated: ‘[U]nless a deliberate attempt is to be made by a society ... to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is ... not the law's business ...' Likewise with the practice and presentation of, and engagement with, art. And it has to be noted that the Australia legal system, in the end, took no action against Henson or his works.
In part the fears behind the protocols are to do with a heightened sensitivity about paedophilia and sexual harassment, a confusion over the meaning of the word ‘sexism', and a degree of sentimentality and unreality about childhood. Media and lobby groups have played on the natural anxieties of parents about protecting their children by finding new ‘threats and dangers' often not statistically based – what Marr describes as a ‘mishmash of anxieties'. Moralistic lobby groups also use ‘complaint campaigns' to pressure regulatory boards.
It has to be said that many people also feel excluded from the cutting-edge of the arts: they feel it isn't for them. But against this, the number of people who are intrigued by the arts and who are attending events and making their own art is accelerating.
For some parents and for moralists, the uncontrollable and unsettling fact of life is that they are not the only people who shape their children. Authors, for example, have a special relationship with children. They are the outsiders who are sought by children, whose works find their way to children regardless of restriction because many children have active, curious, information-seeking minds (the reading-with-a-torch-under-the-blankets defiance – usually not only an ‘after lights out' defiance but also involving a forbidden book).
It is not just the internet. When I was at school, older students passed on typewritten and handwritten sexually arousing samizdat some generations old, taboo sections of the encyclopaedias, purloined adult magazines, and the references to the sexy parts of books. The internet is something else again. The marvel of the uncensored internet is that it is exposing to us for the first time, in a most accessible way, close to a complete picture of the human consciousness and its reality in all its distasteful extremes. It is the first museum of the human mind. For governments to begin screening and tampering with it would be a dangerous act of intellectual vandalism.
By the way, authors' and artists' lives become role models. Australia's largest poet, Les Murray, tells a nice story: ‘Just by walking into the room of school children I tell them something about being a poet – that is, that all poets are not starving in garrets.' Artists tell a story by their public profile; our personal behaviour when it becomes public is seen as endorsing a position, say the ‘heroic lesbianism' of Duana Barnes in the 1930s. As I sip my martini in the Bayswater Brasserie with louche friends, I sometimes think, ‘What sort of signal is this sending our children?' The next step for the Australia Council is a code of behaviour for artists similar to that imposed on sportspeople.
There is a cry about ‘stolen childhood' and ‘let children be children' – a dreamy, sentimentally unreal view of children. Children are in ‘the world' alive with curiosity, constantly seeking to find out the way the world really is. What children expect from us is that we tell them how things are: tell them how thing should be; tell them how things once were. ‘Why, really, and truly?' are three of the most common and heartfelt words to come from the mouths of children.
The protocols, while asking that parents give their consent to the creation of the works involving their children, (which was never in question) do not address the question of artist-parents who wish to involve their children in artworks – literary and visual. The combination of sexuality and children was discussed some years ago around the work of American photographer Sally Mann, who photographed girls as they were entering puberty and displayed the photographs in the exhibition At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). In her words, these portraits ‘captured the confusing emotions and developing sexual identities of girls at that transitional age, one foot in childhood and one foot in the adult world ... The twelve year old ... disarms me with her sure sense of her own attractiveness and, with it, her direct, even provocative approach to the camera ... If you cannot photograph the things that are closest to you in the world as art then art will have no substance, no meaning.' Mann's works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among many others. Time magazine named her its ‘Photographer of the Year' for 2001.
The vexed subject of sexual relationship between the young and adults has been examined by American feminist Professor Camille Paglia, who has said of post-pubescent sexuality: ‘We quite rightly talk and pay attention to the injured in older/younger sexual relationships, but the bulk of such relationships, experience and sense tells us, were neither good nor bad nor dangerous nor damaging nor enriching – yet some were inspiring mentorships – replete with learning and caring.' At present, the efforts to separate out the diversity of such relationships are usually defeated in public discussion by the heat of the subject.
AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PREFERENCE, I WOULD NOT WISH TO ARGUE for special freedoms for the arts – artistic freedom as distinct from the wider freedom of expression for all citizens. At present I feel that it is necessary to defend the castle to save the villages. I want to argue that, in the absence of evidence that art does harm, society should continue to grant legal latitude to the arts and to continue to exempt the artistic imagination from content regulation by funding bodies. Where is the predictable and measurable harm to children, or to anyone, from being an audience to the arts or from participating in the arts? How do the arts cause so-called emotional ‘injury' or ‘abuse'?
I suppose what I see as the manifesto for the imagination of the twenty-first century is simply an affirmation of the great Western tradition that believes in the ultimate authority of the inner-directed, untrammelled imagination, supervised only by the artist's judgement and estimation of their own limitations and, as stated, the repercussions of their temerity. For the ever-increasing number of people who are directly involving themselves in the arts, they are, I think, a way of breaking the silence among us about the inexplicable and unknown. At the same time, they give us equilibrium and poise, and permit us to enjoy the labyrinth of existence.
Another part of the paradox of the arts is that after scaring us they stabilise us, because their creations – a story, an object, an image – are, after all, just that – objects, playthings, not live, marauding monsters. The arts allow us to play with cultural heresy and taboo, with erotica, to play with society's nightmares, our dreads, the sinister. Although, as I write it, I am uneasy about the use of the word ‘play' as a description of the arts, I am reminded of Montaigne's observation that no one is more serious than children when they are at play. The arts, even when they are being comic, are serious. A sophisticated society should be able to say to the arts: astonish us, disturb us, shock us, investigate our shyness, our sense of shame, our inhibitions; entrance us, make us gasp, delight us.
The manifesto of the imagination for the twenty-first century is, then, the same manifesto as that of the last century and of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the seventeenth century and back further to when our species began to sense what remarkable things can be achieved when the talent for artistic expression, fused with wide free expression, meets a fearless audience and where the inner voice (whatever its source) is seen as paramount. ♦