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November 26, 2009
One session at the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House in October was a forum Can the arts still produce dangerous ideas? John Carroll (sociologist and commentator), Catherine Deveny (writer) and Julian Morrow (writer & presenter, The Chaser) debate the claim that 'The Arts Don't Deserve a Place at This Festival'.
The discussion is whether the arts still have the ability to shock, or even to produce any genuinely new or dangerous ideas given the shift to entertainment and titillation in our culture.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, homeless, Adelaide Parklands, 2009
Carroll says that the role of (high) art is to tell stories which help people to make sense of their lives through death and tragedy eg., Homer's Iliad; Raphael's Madonna; a Bach Cantata. It makes us more than human in an everyday sense. Fair enough. What then of modernism? It repudiates this traditional role for one of shock of the new: breaking taboos and conventions.
Carroll says that modernism has given up being a custodian of culture for shock or political. So we should ignore modernism as it has nothing to say to us. It's good film and television (Sopranos, Madmen, Deadwood) that picks up the traditional story telling tradition.
Deveny defends the shock value of art (cunt poetry) and the importance of being shocked in challenging comfort. Though her performance was designed to shock the male audience this was not connected to contemporary art---art that is post modernism.
Julian Morrow asks whether art can be dangerous in a democratic society committed to freedom of speech. It is one of danger in the sense of shocking sensibilities (offensive) and this depends on the context of an elite or mass audience. It is not worthwhile for art just to shock conservative people?
Surprisingly, there was no mention of photography and truth by the panel or the audience, despite the example of photography and the Abu Ghraib prison. Nor was the relationship between visuals and news narratives explored given, even though these images of torture caused revulsion, and contradicted or disrupted the dominant discursive frame of our enlightened liberal culture. These photographs would have been seen by the panel and audience.
Even if the Abu Ghraib photographs had minimal political or policy repercussions, they nevertheless dealt a fatal blow to the United States’ mission in Iraq. These photographs alienated much of the Arab world; but they created their own autonomous frame of reference in the sense that the heretofore banned sight of American soldiers in the role of sadistic dominators/occupiers has become an integral part of our understanding of the US war on terror.
The photographs of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison told a story ----but what was it? Doesn't answering that require an ordering the photographs, contextualizing the photographs, trying to understand what they are photographs of?
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The Abu Ghraib torture pictures were taken by American soldiers and so would not be seen as art -high or mass. They are outside the bounds of the discussion.
They do provide us with evidence, and a picture of things that we would otherwise not have known, because we live in a kind of world of fantasy. This one spun by the war machine of the US, UK and Australian Governments.