In Melbourne, they do things differently – they take their death threats seriously. What? Andrew Bolt is a columnist for the Herald Sun and is so far right it’s almost comical. Like his august colleagues elsewhere in Australia (Alan Jones, Gerard Henderson, Piers “disgrace to journalism” Ackerman) he occasionally takes time out from his busy schedule of writing anti-Labor-Latham-Greens-Islamic-extremists-multiculturalism-single-mums-blah-blah-blah columns to have a go at the arts. His recent piece on courses being offered at the Victorian College of The Arts was a classic call to arms for all sensible people outraged by the moral vacuum of the arty left.
“Two college academics tell me it is now possible for a student to take the VCA’s modishly revamped History of the Arts course for three years and never be taught about giants such as van Gogh or Vermeer. So what might they study instead?
Well, the head of the History of Arts course, critic Edward Colless, now offers students “Porno Chic”, an “R-rated” subject examining the “stylisation of sex”. Each student must produce a work for exhibition and Colless says in a flyer that “by that stage you’ll be proud to be into porno”.
“Porno Chic” is “not necessarily sexual”, he warns. In fact, students might discuss “the style and aesthetics of terrorism” and “recognise the voluptuous horror and convulsive, shocking beauty of the terrorist’s action”.
Or they could study another subject Colless teaches – “Trigger Happy”, a study of filmed violence, including “splatter” movies and footage of terrorism. “By the end of this semester you will see things on the screen that you never saw before,” Colless boasts.”
We wish we could also be accused for being “modish” too as the idea of riding Lambrettas, listening to decadent beat music and getting high on reds and greens really appeals to us. But that’s Melbourne and they’ve always had a reputation for sexy, stylish pastimes. Bolt saved his big guns for later…
“You’d be right to think this is miles from the usual course of art history, in which students are exposed to the great works of art, and learn where those works — and they themselves — fit in the Western intellectual tradition, the greatest glory of the human mind. That was teaching of the “best that has been thought and said”, so students could join this Great Conversation.
[…]
How tragic is this modish contempt for the past and obsession with the sensation of the present. And what meaninglessness, what barbarity, this know-nothing nihilism leads us to, as you might judge from the work of Colless himself.”
Bolt then gave his readers an abridged and highly inaccurate summary of Colless’s career highlights including the outrages of public funding, trips to Paris and critical writings on pornography. He concluded this way:
“In July, [Colless] praised as “elegantly macabre” and “compelling” a video of an artist who had “her tongue spiked to a tree stump with what looks like an ornate hypodermic syringe”. He hailed a still of another artist being splattered with custard as “lyrically beautiful”. Yes, yes, all this may possibly be art, too, as the new barbarians squeal. But if so, it is the art of the artless, of a people sadly without soul.”
You may well be thinking, as we did, what a waste of our time. Bolt is a typical creature of the right, a slightly educated dilettante with no real depth of knowledge to back up his arguments and prejudices in place of reason. His admonishments for art students to be admitted to the “great conversation” are utterly absurd and out of touch. Bolt’s knowledge of art rides on the coattails of the 19th Century.
Just what an art student is meant to gain from studying the greats is implied, not stated – but we’re guessing that a thoroughgoing knowledge of the pinnacles of Western Art History will no doubt lead to a generation of wise, knowledgeable and talented artists. Never mind that just such an education created generations of modernist copyists (with notable exceptions of course), the implication stands that only the received wisdom of the ages will set you free. Never mind about the contemporary world, look at Van Gogh! Vermeer!
All of this could be dismissed as the utter twaddle it is if it didn’t get so serious. Art Life agents operating in Melbourne returned with the information that readers of Andrew Bolt took his words to heart and sent threatening letters to the VCA and issued death threats against Colless. So seriously did the VCA take these threats that Colless is now accompanied by security guards while he gives his lectures for the remainder of the semester. But Andrew Bolt can’t be blamed for a fright wing fatwa, could he? He didn’t actually call for Colless’s head but he did embroider the story with enough venom for his followers to take up the cudgel.
It’s a standard ploy of the arch conservative to misrepresent the facts (or perhaps to never know them in the first place) to advance a contentious argument.
John McDonald used similar tactics to Bolt in his piece on Colless and the course outlines in the first issue of East West Arts.
For McDonald, a critical study of pornography, terrorism or media culture is the same thing as condoning the worst excesses of them. What is porno? asks Colless. McDonald answers:
“We don’t know, and probably never will. The human cloth is dyed into too many different shades to allow either puritans or libertarians to have the last word.
“It is a more pressing question as to whether we should be condoning pornography, and even serving it up in the form of university courses. This may be the reason we have already seen a very large research grant going to academics Alan McKee, Cathy Lumby and Kath Albury, so they can investigate Australians’ use of smut…”
It doesn’t bother us so much that McDonald actively misrepresents these academics work and its findings – it’s just perhaps a slackness of tone and metaphor that leads to the misunderstanding – it’s the illogical next step that paints Colless as a pornographer:
“…The first results of that study [into smut] have now found their way into the pages of The Australian (17 August 2004), under a heading announcing that pornography is actually good for you […] Now that the tonic and healthy effects of pornography have been established by a panel of experts there should be no obstacle preventing it from becoming a fully-fledged academic subject – perhaps at the expense of Classics, Art History, English Literature, or some other dreary, outmoded subject. With this in mind, one can only be amazed at the prescience of Ted Colless, Head of Art History and Theory at the VCA, who has managed to rid the school of courses in Asian art and other boring subjects, and introduce two dazzling new electives: Porno Chic and Trigger Happy.”
For the record, Colless didn’t “rid” the school of anything and has in fact introduced new courses on contemporary Asian art to the VCA syllabus. East West Arts reproduces (without permission we might add) the two offending course flyers that an unidentified individual sent to both Bolt and McDonald, and which the erstwhile East West editor uses for some rather piss weak pot shots against Colless. For conservatives, the flyers are a masochistic playground, full of the kind of stuff that would make your granddad apoplectic. Take this from the Porno Chic flyer:
“[The class] shall combine the stylish and the sexy, and look at Porno Chic as an emphasis on extravagant superficiality and cosmetic styling. Porno Chic is sexy, but not necessarily sexual (although, when we need to, we won’t shy away from that).”
The flyer for Trigger Happy uses an image from Baise-moi and both flyers mention terrorism. You can see why this is such rich bait to conservatives and right wing commentators like Bolt – it’s just one hot button topic after another.
The Art Lifeis now going to reveal something that may shock our more sensitive readers – the kind of classes that Colless is teaching at the VCA are in fact highly respectable academic courses in contemporary visual culture. You may well argue that an art student would ideally have knowledge of both the history of art and a critical understanding of contemporary culture and we wouldn’t argue with you. But to mount a decent critique of visual arts education, we think that a commentator must have a decent grasp of what is actually being taught, what the philosophy of the courses really are, what the academics are actually studying and saying and what the full ramifications of what is being denigrated really are. Anything else is just weak kneed parody, spoken from a position of ignorance with a full and unfettered loathing of the new.
