An image of a girl

Art, we were told last week, is about “giving people dignity”.

That’s how art critic Robert Nelson described the role of art on ABC’s PM program. “We’ve got to have faith in art,” he implored.

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.

Flicking through a copy of Art Monthly I picked up in a Canberra newsagency, I wondered if Mr Nelson had actually looked through the magazine which featured his little daughter, before he gave us his profound 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 school girl trussed in rope and hanging, 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 of the magazine was a “protest” in defence of his work).

They’re followed by selections from the work of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki is probably best known for his passion for taking photos of girls and women exposed and bound.

There’s his slumped, bound, school girl 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 Mr Laity give us? An images of a woman being bound with the tentacles of an octopus as he (the octopus) fellates 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. This is not a coincidence, or unintentional.

On their own, the images which show Olympia reclining, back arched, her pose and look more that of an adult (flowing curled hair, wearing nothing but the jewellery of an adult woman), can be seen as sexualised. But surrounding her with these other images superimposes a further, even more sinister meaning on them.

Some people reckon it’s just about little girls playing dress-ups - that’s what former Democrat Senator Lyn Allison told Sunrise. But don’t dress-ups usually involve putting clothes on, not taking them off?

And does this game usually end up having your photo published with a gallery of female genitals? 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 and a sea creature giving oral sex?

Artists who recognise there should be ethical constraints to art. Artists who don’t think humanity is advanced by violent images of women bound and exposed - among them girls not much older than Olympia is now.

Now that would be dignified.