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322 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Opp Bar Open. Free event.
All proceeds to the Red Cross
Galleries 1, 2 & 3
Please come and join us for a great night of entertainment and an opportunity to bid on paintings, drawings, prints and photographs by Melbourne’s best artists at bargain prices. This is a great opportunity to help the victims of the tragic bushfires we have experienced in recent weeks. Please tell as many of your friends as possible and help us help those in need.
I need your help. I am donating a piece to an art auction to raise funds for bushfire relief. I am only allowed to contribute one work. which one should it be? you can vote on the ones I’ve already selected or add your own choice in as well.
The auction is on Tuesday March 3 at 6pm at BSG Gallery Brunswick st Fitzroy Melbourne. more details coming soon.
this post contains a poll. if you are reading it in rss you will need to click on the title and visit the post in order to vote – thanks!
The most repressive aspect of the guidelines is that they require retrospective documentation of compliance for images of nude or partly nude children taken over the last 18 years. This documentation will need to be reviewed by the Classification Board before such images can be exhibited. In other words, works such as Henson’s, which until now been have exhibited nationally and internationally and have not broken any state or federal laws, will be required to undergo review by Australia’s censorship body.
Aside from their anti-democratic character, the protocols present a multitude of almost impossible bureaucratic hoops through which artists and galleries will have to jump.
For example, prior to any future exhibition containing work produced by Henson in the last 18 years and featuring children, the photographer would be forced to track down the people involved, most of whom would be adults, and procure written confirmation of their own or their guardians’ consent for work produced at the time. What happens if any of those portrayed are untraceable or have died? Does that mean that the artist’s work cannot be exhibited or distributed?
Another contentious issue is that only depictions of real children will come under scrutiny, but not those images derived from “fantasy” or imagined. How is a viewer, editor, curator or censor to determine whether a painting or image is of a “real” child or an image conjured up by the artist, or an amalgam of several sources?
Another requirement that impinges on artistic spontaneity, a crucial element in the creative process, is the requirement for parental consent before a child is featured. Should an artist photograph their own child naked and then decide at a later point that the photograph has artistic merit, its exhibition or distribution could be prevented on the grounds that the artist had not sought a police check or signed a declaration of adherence to the protocols prior to taking the photo.
you may recall I posted about these when they were proposed back in October. having now read more about the “guidelines” that are now in effect I find myself completely bewildered and stumped. how on earth will any of this be enforced? how will they know if a painting is from life or imagined (or from a 3d resource like I use?) this strikes me as a pretty useless bill. a way to really annoy legitimate photographers like Bill Henson and Polixeni Papapetrou who will have most of the details in their files. It’s something that will be a hindrance, slowing down artists and galleries as these hoops are jumped through, ultimately for nothing.
why for nothing? why won’t it protect children? because the people they are prosecuting are not the ones that need policing. they are spending money and time and effort chasing down artists and making them jump through hoops when they should be out finding the real perpetrators of child pornography.
does this affect me? no, most of my works are adult and from imagined or 3d sources (or both). it is tailor made to specifically attack artists like Henson. and witchhunting is always wrong. I care about this because it sets a bad precedent. the government should never involve itself in censoring art and artists.
SHANGHAI (AFP) – Chinese Internet users angered by censorship in cyberspace have dressed up images of famous renaissance nudes in a protest against Beijing’s crackdown on “vulgar” online content.
Images posted as part of the protest include Michelangelo’s statue “David” shown in a Mao suit while black socks and a strategically placed necktie were added to the artist’s depiction of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The protest began last week after a user of the social networking site Douban.com complained that images of several paintings, including Titian’s nude “Venus of Urbino,” had been deleted from an online photo album.
According to blogs on the site, Douban’s administrators had told the user that posting pornography would endanger the site’s operations.
In response, protest’s organisers asked Internet users to clothe artwork to “save” it from the censors, who have shut down 1,635 websites and 200 blogs in a one-month campaign against content that “harms public morality.”
An interesting protest to combat the idiocy of internet filtering. China’s mandatory filtering has been extended to include traditional fine art including the David, the Sistine Chapel and other pieces that are only considered humorously obscene on the Simpsons. what saddens me, however, is not so much the regulations in China, a country renowned for heavy personal restrictions and censorship, but the fact that this may also become the case here in Australia. For a while now there has been talk of putting a mandatory filter on all australian internet to filter out anything on a secret government blacklist. the government will have the power to arbitrarily change whatever is filtered on the cleanfeed. this sounds like an insane plan from the pen of George Orwell but this “clean filter” has become less of a case of maybe and more a case of “when”. despite the protests, despite the fact that this will do very little to block actual criminal activity and illegal porn, despite the fact that it will slow our internet speeds substantially, the government is spending 128 million on a flawed plan. 128 mil that could go towards internet education, towards helping protect against fraud or helping support the online units that are sadly undermanned. 128 mil that could go towards helping the people who have lost everything in the fires.
If you are wondering why I am writing about this here, it is because I don’t want to clothe my nudes, even as a protest! we already know how the government feels about nude art, how long will it be before artists like me are filtered out?
you can find out more information and do your part to protest here: http://nocleanfeed.com/ or follow the #nocleanfeed conversation on twitter
There is good news in China though, I hope that when it’s our turn our protests will be as effective.
“Netizens in China are becoming more and more innovative in their ways of protesting against censorship authorities’ arbitrary use of power,” blogger Catherine Yeung wrote in a comment on the protest campaign.
And the protest has had an almost immediate effect.
By Thursday (local time), the Shanghai user whose renaissance album started the controversy said Douban had allowed the deleted paintings to be shown in their original form.
@nifwlseirff she isn't bad actually, understands quite a bit of my garbled speech, omits the ums.. Siri learns your speech too which is good 3 days ago
I'm painting in my studio, dictating a proposal to Siri and planning my next steps. life is good 4 days ago
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