On 26 January 2024, Bill Henson was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). I generally think less of someone who receives honours from the Australian government, as it is akin to receiving honours from Count Dracula. However, as Henson’s AO is more of an apology from the government and an insult to former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, I might make an exception.
For some background, read my original blog post about the Rudd-led attempt to criminalise Bill Henson’s art. I wrote a post soon after news of the police seizing Henson’s art broke, which has stood the test of time far better than Rudd’s judgment.
Sixteen years later, there has been a complete backflip by the government, and Henson has been given a government honour. Officially, Henson’s AO was “for distinguished service to the visual arts as a photographer and to the promotion of Australian culture.” This would be the same “Australian culture” that almost every politician in 2008 was willing to destroy for a few minutes of breakfast television virtue signalling.
Perhaps an apology from Kevin Rudd (who is notable for apologising when he could politically capitalise on it) would have been better as it could have been made to not just the harm Rudd did to Henson but also to Olympia Nelson. But as that is not going to happen, it is worth remembering that Rudd was not alone; he was enabled by almost all members of the ALP/LNP cartel. Notably, this included Midnight Oil’s frontman, Peter Garrett, who was posing as Rudd’s Minister for the Arts but lacked the courage and moral fortitude to say anything or even resign. But until an apology is made, I will never forgive or forget what they did or failed to do.
Who is this beardy bloke? If it were known, then the meaning and significance of the bust might increase. The artist who created it is known. His signature is on the back of the man’s collar; he is the sculptor of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, Paul Montford.
It is clearly by Paul Montford; the signature and the moulding quality are unmistakable. However, the crude block of stone for the base looks wrong, as Montford busts generally have a more refined and neo-classical base. Perhaps there is a clue in the base if the subject was a geologist or miner.
What is remarkable is that about a century later, its identity is unknown. He turned up in a house in North Caulfield, left behind in the bathroom by the previous inhabitants in the early 1970s. The name of the owner of the house in North Caulfield, since deceased, didn’t help, which raises the possibility of the bust having passed to a sister or daughter whose children have then little interest in a distant relative. Aside from close relatives, nobody wants a portrait of an anonymous old beardy bloke, but why abandon a well-made bust unless he was particularly unpopular?
Catherine Moriarty Making Melbourne’s Monuments The Sculpture of Paul Montford (2013) catalogue of Montford’s sculptures has several busts with unknown locations. From those, I selected all those European men, producing a short list of nine possible. I then tried to find photographs of these men and more information.
It is not Allan Wilkie, the actor (Montford made a bust of him in 1929). It is clear from the many photographs and caricatures that he is not the heavy-faced actor who is also too young to be the beardy bloke.
Nor is it Sir Nicholas Lockyer (who Montford did a bust of him in 1928). A portrait photograph in the Australian War Memorial Photograph Collection shows that Lockyer has flatter eyebrows and a different internal ear structure, a moustache and no beard.
Nor Dalafield W. Cook (bust made in 1931), an artist and grandfather of the artist Dalafield W. Cook, also named William Delafield Cook. Known for his coastal scenes and seascapes of Victoria, he was a Victorian Artist Society council member with links to the Heidelberg School. There is a photo of Montford making this bust in the Argus on 5 May 1931, and it is clear from the nose, forehead and inner ear that the mystery bust is not Cook.
Montford and Cook (Argus, Tuesday 5 May 1931, page 5)
James Burford (1895 – 1967), the architect Montford collaborated on for the Croydon War Memorial, would have been too young in 1922. And his bust would likely be in England.
It is also unlikely to be Pierre Bellow (bust in 1925), another actor who played Bonaparte and was described as ” short and wide with broad and beetling brow and a noble nose.” However, the newspaper photographs I’ve seen have not been good enough to rule this out definitively.
Richard Butler-George, a Gippsland pioneer (1844 – 1940), is probably too old (bust in 1925). His daughter May Butler-George was a miniature, fan and easel painter and sculptor who moved in the same circles as Paul Montford and his wife.
It could be Z. Schirle, the “round the world walker” (bust of in 1928). However, the tie, the three-piece suit and the age of the man make this attribution unlikely.
These leave two possible subjects.
Stuart Henry Heseltine of Malvern (bust in 1926), possibly 2nd Lieutenant Heseltine.
Or Dr Wilfred Kent Hughes (bust in 1925), an orthopaedic surgeon, publisher and Montford’s landlord at Bruce Street, Toorak. Montford’s wife also painted miniatures of some of his eight daughters. He was also the father of Wilfrid Kent Hughes, the fascist UAP politician. Two poor-quality black and white newspaper photos appear to have his eyebrows and nose the right shape for the bust.
If there is a philosophy of science (or religion), then is there a philosophy of art? Neither art nor science are empirical facts. There is no measure of arty or sciencey like there is for length or weight. Nor are they metaphysical classifications, like the absolute. Nor are they equivalent to ideas like truth or beauty; the philosophy of science is not the same as epistemology, and the philosophy of art is not the same as aesthetics.
Christine O’Loughlin, Cultural Rubble, 1993, University of Melbourne
For both the philosophy of science and art are about contested classifications. There is debate about what qualifies as art and what qualifies as science. What is called art has expanded to include many things that were not previously considered art. This is the opposite of the history of science-like activity, where previous practices are considered invalid, given current standards.
And is a discussion of this really philosophy or simply an analysis of fashion? If art and science can only be known anthropologically or sociologically and not through introspection, are they a fit subject for philosophical study?
But then, philosophy itself is a contested classification. Philosophy includes some previous versions of philosophy but excludes others as not real, e.g., pop philosophy. The dispute about what philosophy, particularly the schism between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, is similar to the arguments about what art is between traditionalists and contemporary art (after Duchamp’s readymades).
How do classifications, like art, science, or philosophy, develop and change? Having lived in Australia, Canada, Kenya and Nigeria, I have experienced a variety of ways that English was used. For example, I learnt that the word ‘football’ meant a game local people call ‘football’. This reference is entirely independent of how many feet or hands were used in the game. There is no connection between the word ‘football’ and the world. It is a word that reveals a historical interrelationship between the games but almost nothing about how the game referred to is played. There is no correct definition of football; there are only various sets of rules. It is a word used locally to refer to a local game. Each of these words, ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘art’, and ‘football’, occupies its shifting territory in different ways.
The meaning of a word is not eternal and unchanging; the word ‘art’ means something different from what it meant fifty years ago. For art became self-conscious of itself as an idea in the 20th century. It is no longer a decorative or illustrative part of other things, such as politics or religion, but a separate idea with its own history. Contemporary art looks at things as if they were within art history. This is not a circular definition but an idea that has snowballed with new layers of self-references—Arthur Danto‘s response to Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ and Warhol’s Brillo Box. It is also a definition that allows art to include previous iterations of the idea as valid.
For art is a colonising word; part of the word is similar to occupied territories. People wake up to find the idols on the altar of their village temple now in an art gallery in another part of the world. From an anti-royalist, atheist point of view art is the parts of palaces and temples you would like to keep once their inhabitants are gone. Art is also about imaging beyond the territory of Vassari’s pittori, scultori, ed architettori, for there is no absolute definition of art, nothing essential in the set of art things that could be distilled down to a pure meaning. It is a conspiracy, a breathing together of the word art; it is a creative language games doing things with words.
The stolen Sripuranthan Nataraja from the NGA’s collection before it was returned.
It is the 100th anniversary of Man Ray’s films Le Retour à la raison 1923. Return to Reason is four of his films, Le Retour à la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), L‘Étoile de mer (1928) and Les Mystères du château de Dé (1929), restored and together and on a big screen. Together, with a soundtrack by Sqürl, they make a feature-length film.
Previously I had only seen fragments in documentaries, still frames in books. To see more of Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) dancing the Charleston, Kiki with a pair of painted eyes on her eyelids, or with the window blind projecting vertical lines on her torso. The poet Robert Desnos appears briefly in Emak Bakia. And the poet Jacques Rigaut tearing up shirt collars in Le Retour à la raison.
Le Retour à la raison was at the centre of the split between Dada and Surrealism. Man Ray was seen as a neutral party. Tristan Tzara had asked Man Ray for a film for a Dadaist performance at the Théâtre Saint-Michel; during the first showing, one of his hastily pasted splices broke, plunging the audience into complete darkness. In the violent tradition of the modern avant-garde fights and a police response followed.
Everything in the modern world anticipates a future, sometimes a future that never happened. I wonder what it would be like to live in the future Man Ray’s films anticipated. A place with cine poems rather than video art. Should the avant-garde use the marketing and distribution techniques of cinema or those of art galleries? Emak Bakia was shown in Paris as the short before The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. Imagine if avant-garde films were still shown before the main feature.
No after-effects were in any of these films; all the effects were done in camera. And Man Ray used every trick he could think of, stop motion, reversing the film, direct contact film printing, sprinkling salt and pepper onto one piece of film and pins onto another before exposing them directly to light.
However, the soundtrack by Sqürl did not match the film’s inventiveness. Sqürl, whose members are filmmaker Jim and film producer Carter Logan. It consisted of Logan on drums and Jim Jarmusch wailing on guitar. Of course, Jim Jarmusch plays the guitar – look at him – he probably has a room for his guitars. And he’s not bad. It is fine music, but I don’t know if it was the fitting soundtrack for Man Ray’s movies. Although the pace of the music changed, there wasn’t enough variety in the mood. It gave them an angst that wasn’t there as Man Ray played games with his friends. Maybe Eric Satie or the composer George Auric, who appears briefly in Les Mystères du château de Dé, or a contemporary minimalist composer would have been better than Jim’s garage band.
“Big: Barry Humphries: Dada Artist”, at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993. I remember seeing the small exhibition in the foyer as I stood in the long line for tickets to the blockbuster exhibition “Surrealism: Revolution by Night.” Behind me, in the line, there was a mother with her pre-literate daughter. The girl asked her mother to read each gallery card that went with Humphries’s works.
After each one, the girl would say, “Yuk!” and then move on to the next piece. She was definitely getting her yuks. The exhibition now strikes me as little more than prop comedy and a shitload of dreadful puns.
The cosmic convergence of ANZAC day and the death of the comedian Barry Humphries brought these memories back and created more context for Humphries as a Dadaist artist. An examination of which strikes at the heart of Australia’s imaginal national character.
Dada was an anti-art movement created by Germans and Romanians escaping military service in Switzerland. It rejected all logic, civilisation and artistic conventions that had led to such a massive and senseless slaughter of people. In the aftermath of the war, it quickly spread to Europe, the Americas and even Japan, but not Australia.
Australia was not just behind the times; Dada was antithetical to the Australian national character. As an anti-war movement, Dada is deeply abhorrent to Australian culture and national identity, with its foundations in the Australians fighting and dying in World War One. For Australian nationalism, the slaughter of the war made mythic sense as a sacrifice.
Humphries had read Dada Poets and Painters, edited by Robert Motherwell, in high school. Then as a first-year student at Melbourne University, he held “The First Pan-Australian Dada Exhibition” in 1952. After this first exhibition, Dada became a one-man show for Humphries; there was no movement, group or imitators. The other artists were Clifton Pugh and Germaine Greer, but there is no detail of what either contributed. Pugh, who exhibited under an assumed name, would later recant his involvement.
Although this was the “First Pan-Australian Dada Exhibition”, it happened while neo-Dadaists were emerging in Japan and the USA. And it was very different to both Dada and neo-Dadaism.
This was not the anti-war Dada; Australia’s participation in the Korean War was not mentioned. Nor that Humphries was a private in the Melbourne University Regiment. Nor was this the anti-art Dada, with Humphries claiming to be part of art history with the first “Dada exhibition”, the pop art painting (Wheaties cereal box image) and experimental music recording in Australia.
“Wobboism” or “Wubboism”, with its comedy routine explanation of taking its name from a garbage collector or a pseudo-Aboriginal word, does have elements of Hugo Ball’s anti-semitism and Richard Huelsenbeck’s “negro poetry”. But these are not the celebrated aspects of Dada.
Humphries’s fascination with Dada led to him incorporating aspects into his early performances. What Humphries took from Dada was its superficial form, shock value, and use of random, absurd humour. Rejecting the nihilism at its core. Dada was just an act he took on and off like Dame Edna’s dress, not an existential statement.
One startling conclusion from examining Barry Humphries’s Dadaist art is that it indicates that Australia is more militaristic and conservative and less accepting of dissent, change and nihilism than Japan. Australians will tolerate the absurd, but only if they find it funny, and Humphries was.
The Picasso Ransom – and other stories about art and crime in Australia, (available in paperback and e-book) my second book is a collection of forty-five true-crime stories about the visual arts in Australia: art theft, art forgery, art censorship, art vandalism, and protest art.
The title comes from the famous artnapping of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the artnapper’s demands was an art prize called “the Picasso Ransom”.
While that crime is famous, others stories of crimes, from the colonial to the contemporary, are not well known but equally intriguing. Amongst them is an entire exhibition of forged Pollocks, paintings stabbed, art prosecuted as pornography, decapitated statues, and more stolen art.
I have long been interested in art crimes and have been building up a file of clippings and photocopies since I first heard Picasso’s Weeping woman was stolen from the NGV in 1986. That year I wrote a long essay on the aesthetic issues of art forgery as part of my undergraduate studies, but don’t worry, I won’t be quoting from it in the book. It is not an academic book, it is a true-crime book, and I now think I was wrong about almost everything I wrote in that essay.
However, my interest kept growing, as did my file on art crimes: newspaper clippings and photocopies about art forgers, iconoclastic vandals and graffiti writers. I read more and attended talks and seminars on forgery and iconoclasm.My interest in Melbourne’s public sculpture, the subject of my first book, introduced me to the theft of bronze sculptures for scrap metal.
Writing a blog is a good way of making contacts and gaining experience in an area. I found myself reporting on the accusations, first against Bill Henson and then, in more detail, against Paul Yore. As well as hanging around with Professor Alison Young, “Banksy’s favourite criminologist”, and graffiti writers and street artists.
When I started writing the book about five or six years ago, I had yet to learn how long it would take or how much work would be involved. I was sitting day after day in the Supreme Court. I conducted interviews and exchanged messages with various people, including convicted forgers, graffiti writers, defence lawyers and courtroom artists (the last two are great for name-dropping infamous criminals).
At first, I thought there might be enough crimes involving art in Melbourne alone to fill a book. From the attempted destruction of Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Liberto forgeries, art stolen from Albert Tucker’s home to the arrest of the American graffiti writer Ether, there was a wide variety of crimes. However, I soon learnt of crimes in other parts of Australia that were too fascinating to leave out. There are some intriguing art thefts in South Australia, the earliest attempt of prosecution for forgery in Sydney, an entire exhibition of fake Jackson Pollock in Perth and more. Adding up to over a century of stealing, forging, vandalising and censoring art around Australia.
So, I hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it. And as a thank you to my regular readers the first three people who comment will get a copy sent to them, anywhere in the world.
The Picasso Ransom and other stories about art and crime in Australia
Mark S. Holsworth
ISBN 978-0-646-87307-7 / ISBN 978-0-646-87308-4 (ebook)
314 pages 216×140 (5.5×8.50”)
The Picasso Ransom
Paperback, signed by the author, postage in Australia included.
A$26.99
It is available at, Avenue Bookstore, Readings Doncaster, Readings Carlton, Dymocks Nowra, Amazon and Booktopia.
“By combining grids with everyday materials – milk crates, twine, plastic cups and stickers – in public space, the works embodied an ‘open-source’ ethic, building on others’ designs and showing, rather than hiding, how they were made. Like open-source software and the open nature of the early internet, these artworks displayed their source code, inviting the viewer to copy and remake them.” (Off the Grid, p.23)
Thank you, Lachlan McDowall, for putting forward this concept because it explains much of 20th-century art. The trajectory of twentieth-century art history, starting with the Dadaist readymades, found objects, collages, chance art and cut-up poetry, shows an increase in open-source art. And it continued with Mail Art’s use of stickers, stamps and other open-source techniques. And Punk music with its open source code on the legendary t-shirt showing guitar tablature and words: “this is D, G, A now go out and form a band”. Or, to use McDowell’s examples, street artists like Invader or Sunfigo.
Open-source art, like open-source code, is where the code is evident in the product or readily accessible and free to use. It is not a technique that has to be taught and practised. The formula for cut-up poetry was first explained in 1920 by Tristan Tzara in his “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love”. And cut-up poetry has influenced William Burroughs, David Bowie, and many others.
For there are enormous numbers of people participating in art in the 20th century doing open-source art. For it is an anarchist manifesto of propaganda by deed empowering others to participate. Open-source art is democratic as it is art by the people, art anyone can do. Why is this important? For it is a source of freedom, liberation and the pursuit of happiness, my friend. It is important because everyone can enjoy it and participate, regardless of their social status, age and ability. This utopian aspect is why many Dada and Surrealist art codes, like collage, are now used in primary school art classes.
Yet open-source art is often very unpopular; angry cries of “this is not art!” Many would be voted out if there was a popular vote on what art was. Well-known works of open-source art such as Duchamp’s Fountain or Cage’s 4’33” are frequently held up as objects for derision because they destroy art’s position of superiority. That art requires skill to preserve it for the wealthy who can afford to pay for the time.
Open-source art doesn’t require a talent for the media or training in prescribed skills, and its critics miss the point by decrying the lack of skill involved. They ignore the mental effort in creating an open source code, the elegance in coding, and the artist’s character. We must not forget that in explaining cut-up poetry, Tzara noted, “the poem will resemble you”, ironically equating personal identity with random actions. The identity of the poet or artist of open-source is more evident than the studied, trained and mediated actions of a traditional painter. Like gifts, the gift and identity of the giver are forever entangled; for something to be a gift, it has to have been given by someone. Just as a battle axe blade signed by notorious stand-over man Chopper Read means something different from one I signed.
Black Mark 