Craig Kelly doesn’t know much about art, but that hasn’t stopped him spouting off about it. Earlier this week, the Liberal MP took issue with the Parliament House art collection in Canberra – specifically, a Wendy Sharpe piece entitled The Witches.
The painting depicts a scene from Macbeth, and it’s included in an exhibition of 14 artworks by Australian artists called The Art of Shakespeare. Kelly has no beef with the Bard. His problem is Sharpe’s depiction of a witch’s bare arse, which he finds “appalling”.
Perhaps Kelly doesn’t realise Shakespeare’s witches are frequently depicted as naked – most famously in Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of the play. This cultural reference notwithstanding, Kelly lives at an evolutionary moment where nudity is a noted feature of the world’s most popular television program and porn is as far away as the phone in your pocket.
The other glaringly inconvenient fact escaping Kelly is that every grubby soul within the spectrum of humanity is in possession of an arse. And yet, Kelly has concluded Sharpe’s painting goes “a bit far”.
It’s not a sexually graphic image, nor is it gratuitous, violent or exploitative in any obvious way. If Kelly is worried about children seeing a bare bottom, one suspects he has yet to meaningfully explore the dominant thematics of children’s humour: their preoccupation not merely with arses but their amusement at arse-functions, too.
But poor Kelly is a conservative – which, in the grand Australian tradition, is more than a political inclination. It’s a perpetual mindset irritated into vocal conniptions whenever it’s confronted with the confusing, strange artefacts of the arts. When your beliefs demand the glorification of the past and the maintenance of the status quo, visual provocations to imagine other experiences or possibilities can be as scary as witchcraft.
Kelly’s ideological prudery provoked him to poll no less than the readers of his Facebook page, asking those who choose to like him: “Do you think this painting is suitable for Parliament House?”
Encouraged by their chorus of disapproval, he created a blurry photographic portfolio of other works that offended his tastes. Among his regular page visitors, no one dared suggest that if he couldn’t even take a decent photograph, perhaps he was not qualified to judge the work of eminent Australian artists.
Conversely, the offending artist Wendy Sharpe is a winner of both the Archibald and Sulman prizes and currently exhibiting in Berlin. Fairfax reports is she “amazed” that “anyone could still be shocked by nudity”.
In fact, you only have to look to Kelly’s colleagues, comrades and cultural antecedents for moral outrage, veiled or otherwise. It’s not merely that recently deposed arts minister George Brandis indelibly reminded Australians this year that his preference for “heritage” arts meant the removal of $104.7m from the Australia Council for his personally approved “excellence” projects. It’s that his replacement, Mitch Fifield, has expressed zero intention to reverse Brandis’ funding decision.
It’s also that that in 2013, Melbourne artist Paul Yore had his exhibition at St Kilda’s Linden gallery raided by police and shut down at the behest of local Liberal identities claiming his satirical depiction of Justin Bieber as the Manneken Pis was pornography. Around the same time, Institute of Public Affairs alumnus Chris Berg published a stinging critique of Mikala Dwyer’s Golden Bend’er installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art – critically unencumbered, as it turned out, by the experience of actually seeing the show.
Most Australians, of course, remember the furious conservative outrage-a-thon that resulted in the seizure of work by photographer Bill Henson – slandered, again, as a pornographer – in 2008. Those of a certain vintage were smugly reminded by Labor’s Tim Watts on Twitter of the conservative apoplexy at the purchase by the Whitlam government of Jackson Pollock’s abstract-expressionist Blue Poles for $1.3m in 1973. It was to the national good fortune that Whitlam saw a value in Pollock’s “action painting” his conservative peers did not; the painting now has a resale worth estimated at up to $100m.
But conservative cultural horror long predates the 1970s. The former prime minister Robert Menzies founded a national “Academy of Art” in 1937 with the explicit mission of marginalising the radical practice of modernism. “Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand,” he said at the academy’s inauguration. “The people who call themselves modernists today talk a different language.”
That was 78 years ago. Now Kelly suggests: “Parliament should feature more works depicting important scenes from Australian history – and fewer abstract and edgy contemporary works.”
In a country with a government that shrugs off reports that children have been sexually assaulted in offshore immigration detention centres, no reasonable person could really argue that a colourful, theatrical painting that manages that rare thing – a successful depiction of live performance – is the most “appalling” item in the building.
Yes, the painting contains an arse. But maybe someone should explain to Craig Kelly that truly great art confronts us with the realities we cannot face about ourselves.
