The panelists were very interesting and it was good to get perspectives from PEN, theatre, law, television, literature and visual arts perspectives.
I hope you do get it off the ground, NAVA are in the process of creating guidelines for the visual arts sector for dealing with censorship, hence my suggestion you phone Tamara.

It is an important project as many creatives feel disempowered by the lack of readily available information on where they stand. It has to go way beyond the issue of art v porn too, as this is only a small, albeit popularly discussed aspect.

The censorship (plus extortion and blatant falsification) was performed by a highly respected non-mainstream arts organisation that prides itself on openess to ideas – and resulted in the destruction of several careers of artists.

- censorship can leap out from under the most surprising rocks, in our circumstance years later we still can’t identify what was the mechanism or circumstance that triggered an irrational censorship response. Perhaps your research will reveal the underlying factors of how such events can occur.

These scandals also have quite an overlap with the problems of our anti whistle-blowing / keep your head down / dont rock the boat culture.

I’m happy to email you further details of our for your research if you wish.

Background reading … Max Harris & Geoff Dutton … Australia’s Censorship Crisis … a paperback from the 60s on Australia’s long list of banned books (provocative inclusion of ‘extracts’). You’ll probably also find a few issues of Media Information Australia helpful (you know, the media studies journal … they’ve run feature issue on this a few times over the last decade or so with good analysis of recent cases and policy) … might have to go to the libarary for that.

If you look at the Piss Christ case, be sure to also check out the Serrano portfolio that ran in one of the international art magazines & showed at a private Melbourne gallery at the same time. I recall picking up the art magazine in the Queelsland Art Gallery bookstore (no warining label, no shrink wrap) and being rather surprised by one image – “Red Pebbles” (a photograph of a naked woman fondling the erect penis of a small pony). Lots of fuss over a photograph that claimed to be an image of a crucifix in a jar of urine vs. barely a mention of the other.

Recall also the fuss over something as tame as Madonna’s Sex book. I remember seeing a nice moment when Richard Stubbs joked that it was a big heavy book that needed two hands to hold it open, so it must be art, not porn … you might find that as a nice bit of old TV footage.

My feeling is that while some areas have become more liberal … saying Fuck on TV, for example … while … newspapers still rarely print the word … other issues seem to have tightened up … for example the fuss last year over Henson & the subsequent Art Monthly cover.

If you feel like being really clever, you could go way back and look at the fact that until the 1710 copyright satute, copyright and censorship were combined under church law in the UK … so the issue isn’t just censorship by government, but control of knowledge and information … in fact, if you were to broaden your scope in this way, you’d have a really different kind of program, but one which might challenge the usual ways of thinking about the issues. On the history you might find a book by Saunders, Hunter & Williamson called On Censorship (a book that proudly notes that it contains not one single bit of censored material … yep, it can be done.)

good luck with it … Peter

This is also a form of censorship.

I’m not sure if this is any help, but I’m writing about SLAPP “Strategic litigation against public particpation) suits at the moment. They were massive in the US in the 80s, but have since been legislated against in most American states. I’ve been looking into their history in Australia – the trend caught on in the early 90s. Corporate censorship through abusing defamation laws, which were designed to protect people’s (ie human beings’) reputations, has all sorts of consequences for democracy and free speech. Anyway I think you know a couple of SLAPP defendants like Heidi Douglas.

Cheers

Liesel