Not to Beat Around a Dead Horse…

PhotoShelter’s own Daniel Boud shot Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the Director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art for Time Out Sydney recently. As you may recall, there was some hullabaloo over this horse piece from Sydney’s recent Bienale.

Macgregor addresses this controversy in the interview, as well as the recent Bill Henson conflagration. Some excerpts:

That work (Novecento the Horse) has drawn complaints. Was that the plan?
People
get quite hot under the collar about animals and they’re wearing
leather shoes! Novecento is a dead animal – a horse that died of old
age and would have ended up at the knackery. Yet as art it’s an
extraordinary piece – the immobility of it, the fact it’s looking back
at the 20th century and the revolutions that went nowhere. Nobody
complains about the stuffed hide of Phar Lap…

So you’d never show a controversial work to stir up controversy?
No,
but it is in the back of my mind. I’m always careful not to do things
for the shock value because people very soon see through that. That
said, at the MCA for Biennale we’ve got how to make a bomb, the
Cattelan horse, Jesus Christ on a bomber – any of these things could
trigger a discussion, a debate, outrage or controversy.

Where do you stand on the Bill Henson saga?
Henson’s
work, is triggering apprehension in the community at the moment yet
five years ago it didn’t and in five years time it might not. I believe
very strongly in what that artist is trying to do and I’m prepared to
defend it. The whole Henson issue was about the police actually seizing
the work. But in my opinion, 20 police going into a small gallery and
seizing art already cleared by the classifications board as PG, is an
overreaction.

I must say, this portrait is rather arresting. Boud talks about snapping it on his blog.

He’s kind enough to include a shot of his assistant standing in. Love that. He should have been in our contest.

The story of the shoot:

“I took along some lights and Craig
for some assistance. After scouting around the MCA for a bit we decided
the best and most obvious place to photograph Ms Macgregor would be
underneath the taxidermied horse which has become a focal point for the
Biennale. It’s a work called Novecento by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

After firing off some test shots with Craig we waited for Elizabeth
to arrive. I ended up shuffling the lighting at the last minute to make
the back light more even and add a bit of a hair halo effect. After she
arrived i snapped off about a dozen shots and it was all done and
dusted.”

Giddyup.