Sunday
Apr212013
AUSTRALIAN ARTIST BILL HENSON IN SOME/THINGS CHAPTER006
April21/2013 12/39PM 
[...BORROWED OPINIONS / [...] All of these things feed into the public imagination and so the idea of risk, the idea of danger, the idea of damage, all of this stuff is very exciting for the media. And when our elected representatives, politicians, are a part of that power structure, then the 24-hour news cycle unfortunately starts to set policy. So you have one scandal and then another one and then another one and every week it’s a new one. One week it’s a race riot, the next week it’s a volcano and then there’s an air crash and then it’s child murderers. It’s a machine that needs to be fed.
In Australia, more than in Europe, the idea of what culture is, or art if you want, has been progressively marginalised. It’s been made to seem less and less important, and increasingly you have politicians in Australia who say the arts are basically suspect. It is all nonsense because what they look at is activity, which drives the world— and activity is technology and sport, or science and sport, if you like. Because that’s how they see the world. this business of the arts becomes, to them, more and more an incongruity, more and more a politically suspect, marginal activity carried out by pretentious or weird people who are social misfits or something.
You get that a lot in Australia with politicians; they have no interest at all in culture, they have no interest in the arts and they think it’s kind of creepy. In that kind of environment the controversy of my pictures makes perfect sense because it’s not important to them, it’s just weird. They would never attack the entertainment industry, they would never attack big business, they would never attack the retail sector, they would never attack the mining sector where Australia gets all of its money digging up rocks and selling them to China. They would never attack that, but the arts, they are very happy to attack that if they can gain some political mileage...
/ EXCERPT FROM A TEXT BASED ON A CONVERSATION BETWEEN BILL HENSON & MONIKA BIELSKYTE. A PREVIEW OF the feature is ONLINE / ENTIRE ARTICLE ONLY IN THE PRINTED EDITION OF SOME/THINGS MAGAZINE CHAPTER006 / THE DARK LABYRINTH , AVAILABLE VIA OUR ONLINE BOUTIQUE OR FROM SELECT STOCKISTS WORLDWIDE.
/ magazine photographed by aleXey blaGutiN & nat urazmetova
CATEGORIES ARTS, PHOTOGRAPHY, SOME/THINGS MAGAZINE
ARTS, PHOTOGRAPHY, SOME/THINGS MAGAZINE TAGS BILL HENSON, BILL HENSON INTERVIEW, BILL HENSON SOME/THINGS MAGAZINE CHAPTER006, BILL HENSON UNPUBLISHED WORKS, aleXey blaGutiN, australian photography, bill henson THE HYPNOTIC STATE OF DESIRE, bill henson australian photography, bill henson beauty and sadness, bill henson luminous, bill henson photography, bill henson void
BILL HENSON, BILL HENSON INTERVIEW, BILL HENSON SOME/THINGS MAGAZINE CHAPTER006, BILL HENSON UNPUBLISHED WORKS, aleXey blaGutiN, australian photography, bill henson THE HYPNOTIC STATE OF DESIRE, bill henson australian photography, bill henson beauty and sadness, bill henson luminous, bill henson photography, bill henson void 
