This paper is about the moral criticism sometimes directed at certain works of art, and specifically about the danger in such criticism of descending into mere moralism. By moralism I mean here a certain kind of vice; a vice that involves the distortion of moral reflection and judgement.Footnote ¹ There is a difference, I will suggest, between the moralist and the moraliser, who I take to be a person who indulges in moralism: That Dr Johnson, for example, was a moralist as juxtaposed to a moraliser is shown not by the absence of ‘naughty words’ in his dictionary but by his scrutiny of anyone who would go looking for them. Dr Johnson's question to Mrs Digby and Brooke reminds us that we cannot always take a person's concern for morality at face value; that serious moral debate, which is to say the proper activity of the moralist, requires of us something more, and I will claim something more onerous, than a mere concern for morality. I will focus on the recent (and extreme) moral criticism directed against the work of Australian artist Bill Henson. While the example is Australian the controversy over Henson could easily have arisen in many other countries, including in Europe and North America. What I hope to draw from this example is something of the nature of moralism and in contrast to this what serious moral thought and reflection really requires of us both in this case and more generally.

The Henson Case

On Thursday 22^nd, May 2008 Australian photographer Bill Henson was to open an exhibition of new works at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Though an international artist of some note for many years – his work is held in many major international galleries and he has represented Australia at the Venice Biennale – Henson was not widely known in Australia. By 23^rd May he would be front page news. As reported in The Australian newspaper on 22^nd, May the invitation to the exhibition opening reproduced an image from the exhibition of a naked twelve-year-old girl. Similar images from the exhibition also appeared on the gallery's website.Footnote ² The image of the girl, like other images of nude adolescents from the exhibition, was immediately condemned as obscene or sexualised in a variety of quarters. The exhibition opening was postponed and the gallery closed while police, in response to a number of complaints, decided on whether to lay charges against either the gallery or Henson. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said at the time that the image of the girl was ‘absolutely revolting’ and that, ‘kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected.’ Morris Iemma (Premier of New South Wales at the time) declared ‘I find [the images] offensive and disgusting. I don't understand why parents would agree to allow their kids to be photographed like this.’ Many in fact saw the issue of consent here as the crucial one arguing that these images were clearly sexualised and that as such the parents could not give consent to have their daughter photographed in this way. Still others claimed that the children in these images were exploited by Henson. In the end the government's classification board – itself made up of broadly representative members of the public – was asked to classify the offending image. This they did giving it a rating of ‘PG’ for ‘parental guidance suggested’ (one rating above ‘G’ or ‘suitable for general admission’) and no charges were ever laid.Footnote ³

There is no doubt that in condemning Henson many commentators were concerned with morality. But the nature of some judgements here suggests that many were also guilty of moralism. In the most general terms moralism involves the distortion of moral thought, reflection and judgement about both people and events.Footnote ⁴ But the more specific characteristic of moralism that I will focus on in this paper, and which is striking in the Henson case, is that moralism involves a failure in an important sense to recognise that morality is hard. I don't mean that it is hard to follow morality's dictates, though it often is, but that morality requires the will to be hard on oneself. More important for morality than a willingness to judge others is the courage to critically examine one's own actions or responses and motivations. For the moraliser however the situation is reversed: While the moral scrutiny of others is central for them, they almost never subject themselves to the same critical gaze. Commenting on the debate over Henson Germaine Greer had a point I think in suggesting that any man who calls a picture of a naked adolescent girl ‘revolting’ protests too much.Footnote ⁵ If a heterosexual adult male tells us that such an image is revolting we would be wise, much as Dr Johnson was in the example above, to be suspicious. Even if we think that there is a genuine moral concern with Henson's photograph, to put the point like that does not indicate serious moral reflection but an evasion of it.

The sort of extreme and possibly self-deceiving reaction to Henson's work indicated above only serves to obscure important distinctions we might need to make here. So a frustrating aspect of the debate about Henson's photographs was that one could not in this context talk positively about the representation of human sexuality without seeming to endorse the sexualisation of children. Obviously Henson's images represent human sexuality, but that is not the same thing as sexualising children. The point is so obvious it reminds me of a scene in the spoof rock documentary This is Spinal Tap. The band's manager informs the group that the record company won't release their new album Smell the Glove because the cover image is sexist, to which the guitarist Nigel replies, confused, ‘What's wrong with being sexy?’ It seems that many of Henson's critics have something in common with Nigel in that they think any description with the word ‘sex’ in it amounts to only one thing. Nigel misses the point but at least he is honest about his own motivations.

Ern Malley

The case of Henson and the moralism it engendered is by no means unique in the history of art and censorship. Indeed the Henson case has similarities to, and is further illuminated by, an earlier instance of moralism in Australia: The prosecution in South Australia in 1944 of Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, a modernist literary and art review, for publishing a number of allegedly obscene poems by Ern Malley. Harris must be the unluckiest literary editor of all time. Not only was Harris the victim of Australia's most famous literary hoax – Ern Malley never existed, his poetry was created by two young conservative Australian poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, to mock the modernist style – he was then charged because the works were thought to be either ‘indecent advertisements’ or ‘indecent, immoral or obscene’.Footnote ⁶

The hoaxers' point in the Ern Malley affair was to show that since, as they thought, modernist poetry was all pretentious nonsense Harris would not be able to spot that their poems were meaningless. But the fact that the poems were meaningless was no deterrent to the police or prosecution. As Michael Heyward says in his account of the Ern Malley affair, ‘the Crown case seemed to be that where the poetry was not obscene it was unintelligible, and that was almost as bad … [the prosecutor, D.C. Williams] sought to deny a paraphrasable content where he could detect nothing risqué, but was on the alert for meaning if the poem looked naughty’.Footnote ⁷ And as Heyward goes on to suggest the magistrate, L.E. Clarke, seemed to want it both ways too. So Clarke thought that interpreting the poem ‘Sweet William,’ was ‘rather like attempting to unravel a crossword puzzle with the aid of only half the clues and without the satisfaction of seeing the solution in the next issue’,Footnote ⁸ yet at the same time he wanted to claim the phrase ‘unforgivable rape’ that appears in the poem could only be referring to the actual act of rape despite the alternative interpretation Harris had offered him.

As Heyward puts it, ‘The Angry Penguins trial concluded a script which nobody without a sense of humour could have invented, and nobody with one could resist’.Footnote ⁹ Most ridiculous, and telling, of all was the cross examination of the arresting officer Detective Vogelesang, whose testimony Heyward says ‘brought the house down.’ Questioned about the meaning of the poem ‘Night Piece’ Vogelesang had this to offer: ‘Apparently someone is shining a torch in the dark… visiting through the park gates. To my mind they were going there for some disapproved motive… I have found that people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes’.Footnote ¹⁰ Vogelesang's thoughts about parks at night and the tendentious speculations of Williams and Clarke seem to have led them to see immorality where there was none except in their own imaginings. But we might also wonder whether some of those who see pornography, sexualisation or exploitation in Henson's nocturnal images of naked adolescents see anything except the content of their own imaginings.

From our viewpoint, the concerns of the prosecution and the police in the Ern Malley case may seem laughable. Yet one thing that was driving that concern can be seen to be driving the concern over Henson as well. It seems clear from the Ern Malley case that one thing that worried people was that they did not know what to think or make of Malley's poems. And that seems to be part of the problem in the Henson case as well. Henson's photographs are not obviously pornographic or obscene in the ordinary sense of those terms.Footnote ¹¹ That, I think, explains why the debate quickly turned from the issue of obscenity to one of consent and child exploitation. But that hardly clarified matters, for to claim that the girl in Henson's photograph was exploited just begs the question. If Henson's photograph was obscene or sexualised then the girl would have been exploited by Henson. But Henson's images were not in any obvious sense obscene or sexualised; that was the original problem with accounting for many peoples' concern with them. Certainly the girl's parents actually admired Henson's work and thought that posing for Henson was a worthwhile thing for their daughter to do. But then where is the exploitation? One might claim that the parents got it wrong and that their daughter will regret the affair later in life. But children often grow up to regret or even resent some aspect of their upbringing. So a child may grow up to regret or resent being brought up in accordance with strict religious rules or practices. The issue in all such cases is not whether a child regrets or resents aspects of their upbringing but whether their rights were infringed or whether they were harmed. But any claim that this girl has been exploited or harmed is no more plausible in the end than the claim that Henson's photographs are straightforwardly obscene. Here as in the case of Ern Malley people were clearly troubled but were unable to adequately account for that feeling.

Art and ambiguity

I do not want to deny than Henson's images of naked or semi-naked adolescents are in a way disturbing. But if we are to avoid moralism here we need to ask ourselves why. I remember the first time I saw Henson's photographs; it was at an exhibition in Melbourne in the 1980s. In some of the works in that exhibition Henson had juxtaposed images (characteristically dark and squalid) of naked or semi-naked street kids with images of grand interiors. I found these images hard to look at. There is in these photographs as in many of his later photographs of adolescents as well a disturbing ambiguity, by which I mean that they are apt to produce conflicting responses in the viewer. As John McDonald observes in his excellent review of Henson's 1980s photographs ‘Henson leaves the viewer with an unbearable dilemma. Is this an exercise in gruesome voyeurism or social comment? … This dangerous and difficult ambiguity seems central to the experience of Henson's work’.Footnote ¹² But of course, it is precisely this sort of ambiguity, and the consequent lack of simple or obvious moral meaning or purpose, which many people find so offensive about Henson's work – and much other artistic achievement as well.

To illustrate, consider another morally contentious work with which Henson's photographs were compared during the controversy: Nabokov's novel Lolita. Attempts to defend Henson by making comparisons with Nabokov's great novel may fail because many people regard Lolita as morally objectionable for much the same reasons as they find Henson's photographs of naked adolescents objectionable. For Nabokov's book too is ambiguous, in fact it is multiply ambiguous; this story of a paedophile's obsession with a twelve-year-old girl is variously shocking, poignant and even funny. And one objection is then that a book on such a subject ought not to be funny; being funny it may be thought counts against it being shocking in a morally edifying sort of way. According to a certain, moralistic, turn of mind, if you are going to tell a story about a paedophile or photograph adolescents nude you had better have a clear and unambiguous moral purpose. So according to this way of thinking it is acceptable to, say, photograph a naked adolescent running in terror from her napalmed village, but only because such a photograph serves openly a noble cause.

Of course visual art and literature too can wear its moral purpose, as it were, on its sleeve. William Hogarth's series of paintings (and subsequent engravings) The Rake's Progress and Charles Dickens' Hard Times along with some of his other novels are examples here. But art, including literature, does not always serve morality or truth in such an openly didactic way. It may be that an artist has no very clear conception of what they want to say – artists are not essayists – and that their work is itself a way of working that out. In that case all an artist can do is trust in that particular mode of responsiveness to the world that is manifest in their work. And the viewer (or reader) faces a similar challenge; we too may need to trust in our own potentially conflicting responses to the artist's work, to accept them and to be willing to learn from them. Which brings me back to moralism, for it is characteristic of the moraliser that he does not trust his own responses, he does not trust himself.

We can see now what was more or less implicit in the Ern Malley trial: why ambiguity itself is so offensive to the moraliser. The moraliser wants to know what the work is about so that he can respond (morally) appropriately, but we may only come to understand the meaning (or meanings) of a work through our responses to it. We have to be open then to such responses whatever they may be. The moraliser, though, is unable or unwilling to be open in this way. That may be because the moraliser is unable to accept the responsibility that such openness entails: If he condemns child nudity in art it is perhaps not because he believes he will find the image of a naked teenager revolting but because, and notwithstanding his denials, he is worried he might not. Or if he is disgusted at the very fact or idea that such photographs are produced it may not be his fear for children that is driving him but maybe his fear for himself. But at many other times a moraliser's lack of openness may indicate simply a fear that with only his own responses to go by he may not know what to think when he feels that he should know; or, what this amounts to, a want of confidence in his own judgement as mediated by those very responses.

Art and moral reflection

What the moraliser misses in relation to art (but not just in relation to art) is what we might learn through our various responses to the work (as to the world). To illustrate, an important feature of art as I have already noted is that it may produce a number of conflicting responses in us. Think again for example of John McDonald's review of Henson. Looking at Henson's photographs of young people we may derive a voyeuristic pleasure. But at the same time the reference to this mode of viewing in the work itself – Henson uses low directional light which seems to draw his subjects out of the darkness – not to mention the overall level of abstraction of the images is apt to produce in one an unsettling consciousness of this very pleasure, and which may undercut it; the taste, as it were, turning to dust in one's mouth. And that conflict, a conflict at the level of immediate response, may be the point. It is perhaps through this kind of conflict that the work is illuminating. So, Henson's images do not endorse voyeuristic tendencies or responses, they play such responses off against other conflicting responses, thereby exposing and undermining the voyeuristic gaze.

Let me stress that to acknowledge that a viewer may derive some kind of voyeuristic pleasure from Henson's photographs of naked and semi-naked adolescents is not to concede – what I have in fact denied – that such images are after all sexualised. Consider Henson's image of the naked twelve-year-old at the heart of the recent controversy. One reason any voyeuristic pleasure a viewer derives from this image would be disturbing is that the image truthfully represents the girl's sexuality; it does not – as a sexualised image would – represent her as something that she is not. If the image had lied, then of course a viewer deriving a specifically sexual voyeuristic pleasureFootnote ¹³ from it might complain they were tricked into seeing the girl as having the kind of sexuality that a twelve-year-old girl could not have – which is to give the viewer grounds for condemning Henson and excusing their pleasure. But the image does not lie, and so the viewer must examine and take responsibility for their particular responses to it.Footnote ¹⁴ In so far as there is a reference to voyeurism in Henson's work it functions in part as an invitation to do just that. This is hardly child exploitation but it can, as I say, make for an uncomfortable experience for the viewer.

Consider another example of how the possible response of the viewer may be not just undercut but turned on its head by a work of art. In discussing Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will Isaksson and Furhammar comment on the way the viewer is ‘not only called upon to observe the crowd's enthusiastic reactions to its leader… but also forced into a state of participation’.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet as they go on to say, while ‘the power of crowds in films may be quite overwhelming… it is surprisingly easy for a commentator to undo the effect – not just minimising it but actually reversing it’.Footnote ¹⁶ So they suggest for example that in These are the Men (1943), in which sequences of Riefenstahl's film are given a hostile English commentary, ‘the enthusiasm of the mass constitutes a sounding board, but… for emotions that are directed against all that the mass stands for’.Footnote ¹⁷ In the film These are the Men we can see how art can reveal what is corrupt or corrupting in a particular moral viewpoint, in this case the moral viewpoint of the Nazis.Footnote ¹⁸ This is just one further example of the complex ways in which a work of art may exploit our capacities of response in illuminating, including morally illuminating, ways. But it also illustrates again how our assessment of a work of art may depend on the way, and how successfully, it exploits those capacities; and that is not an assessment that can be made in advance of one's open-minded experience of the work.

The problem of moralism in relation to art might be put like this: The moraliser insists on assessing the work from what they take to be the point of view of morality. But in so far as they deny, distrust or are otherwise unwilling to reflect upon their own responses to the work, the ‘moral’ point of view from which they assess it remains a fundamentally impoverished one. Our responses to a given work of art might surprise and disturb us; nevertheless I contend that these responses are an essential constituent of moral thought and reflection. What is disturbing in art can show us much, for example, about the nature of human desire and our fear of that desire, about our humanity and our avoidance of it.