SOME
TIME AGO, the late Susan Sontag suggested
that the photograph ‘offers a modern
counterpart of that characteristically
romantic architectural genre, the artificial
ruin: the ruin which is created in order
to deepen the historical character of
a landscape, to make nature suggestive,
suggestive of the past’. On viewing
the retrospective exhibition Bill
Henson: Three Decades of Photography,
which was organised by the Art Gallery
of New South Wales and is now at The
Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery
of Victoria Australia (NGVA), this familiar
idea of the photograph as memento mori
struck me as peculiarly apposite. Although
the experience of Henson’s photographs
is not quite the eighteenth-century
one of sighing over ruins, the tone
of the exhibition is distinctly melancholic,
something like a syncopated elegy in
pictures.
Henson’s admirers, a number of
whose essays are republished in the
beautifully produced book that accompanies
the exhibition, Bill Henson: Mnemosyne,
have always celebrated what they regard
as the poetic strain in his work. As
the book amply demonstrates, Henson’s
photographs have consistently elicited
fine sentences from the likes of David
Malouf, Michael Heyward, Peter Schjedahl,
Peter Craven, Dennis Cooper and especially
John Forbes. In fact, poets and novelists,
rather than professional critics, historians
or curators, dominate the list of contributors.
This probably reflects a conscious decision
to include texts that are primarily
literary in tenor and that, en masse,
act as a poetic corollary or bulwark
to the photographs. It may also explain
why so many of these authors compare
Henson’s work with poetry.
Malouf, for instance, argues that Henson’s
photographs are ‘like poetry’
in the sense that they speak a private
language despite the fact that the poem
and the photograph both make use of
everyday means: speech and the camera.
‘As with each new poem we meet,
we have first to learn the language
… ’ The language of Henson’s
photographs is, however, a remarkably
consistent one. As the exhibition reveals,
his artistic concerns have remained
much the same over the course of three
decades. (Henson’s first solo exhibition
was at the NGV exactly thirty years
ago in 1975, when he was only nineteen.)
The most interesting photographs of
the exhibition — the ‘cut
screens’ of the series that begins
with Untitled 1992/3 and that
includes the works shown at the Venice
Biennale in 1995, when Henson was selected
to represent Australia — consist
of fragments, sometimes cut or torn
from earlier photographs, which have
been juxtaposed with other fragments
and pieces of white glassine or photographic
paper and then pinned or taped to the
support. The pale, occasionally gaunt
bodies of Henson’s young models
are depicted performing their obscure
roles against dramatically lit backdrops:
a mountain range, a dark wood, lowering
skies and a nocturnal cityscape. Perhaps
these scenes are ‘perfect crimes’,
as in Brancusi’s suggestion that
art, like crime, is committed in ‘austerity
and drama’. There is a deliberate
artifice, even an operatic quality to
the images, which have effectively been
staged twice: once for the original
images, and again when the pieces are
rearranged in new tableaux.
It would be too easy to dismiss these
photographs as simplistic variations
on hoary old Freudian ideas about the
interrelatedness of sex and death, which
gain whatever transgressive frisson
they may have from Henson’s predilection
for adolescent models. Although Henson’s
photographs at times tread the fine
line between pathos and bathos, I would
suggest that they generally avoid slipping
over into the bathetic. Above all, perhaps,
it is the sheer expressive power of
the photographs that overwhelms any
pat solution to their implications.
This is not to say that Henson’s
‘nostalgic, classical, romantically
despairing’ sensibility, as the
film critic Adrian Martin characterised
it in a negative review of 1985, will
appeal to everyone. The bleak landscapes,
apparent allusions to (sub)urban decay
and disenfranchised youth are non-specific,
apolitical and devoid of moral content.
Depending on your point of view, they
may seem blithely or stubbornly to resist
a moral position. Yet Henson’s
‘sensibility’, to use that
slippery term, can at least be located
and fleshed out a little, even if the
fugitive narratives of his photographs
often cannot.
If Henson’s language is poetic,
then it is the poetic language of elegy
that is his preferred mode. His photographs
elegise, which is what I take
to be the significance of the title
Mnemosyne, who in Greek mythology
is the goddess of memory and mother
of the muses. To elegise is to compose
a poem or song in memory of the dead.
The question, therefore, is: what or
whom do these images elegise or memorialise?
In his eloquent essay, Forbes describes
the cut screens as ‘shattered paysages
moralisés’ that evoke
the ‘transience of the body’,
recalling Sontag’s suggestion that
every photograph is a memento mori:
a witness to the passing of time and
to the mutability of things. Paintings
on this theme (Watteau’s are probably
the best known) present what seem at
first to be untrammelled Arcadian idylls:
perpetual dreams of midsummer nights.
Yet Arcadia, by tradition, is always
a threatened paradise. The poignancy
of its bitter-sweet pleasures is intensified
by the certain knowledge of the brevity
of the moment, even in the midst of
the idyll. This is the underlying message
of one of the greatest meditations on
the theme in visual art: Poussin’s
Et in Arcadia Ego, in the Louvre.
Arcadia, to be Arcadia, must be temporary.
Henson’s ‘cut screens’
would seem to belong in this tradition.
The numinous landscapes, cityscapes
and skyscapes that his models are posed
against imply a similar sentiment. He
may give us a junk-strewn and even junkie
version of the idyll, but the theme
remains recognisable and historically
informed.
Henson’s interest in early modern
European art has often been noticed.
There are numerous allusions to old
master painting in his oeuvre. Perhaps
the most obvious is to the work of Caravaggio,
which possesses the same contradictory
quality of theatrical realism, not to
mention dramatic chiaroscuro. Henson’s
most recent images also recall Rembrandt’s
experimental prints. In some of these,
the artist’s constant reworking
of the plate resulted in impressions
in which the figuration of the earlier
states is almost entirely sacrificed
to a veil of rich black ink.
The Paris Opera Project 1990/91,
installed in Room Five at the NGVA,
is full of references to European painting.
Characteristically, the series amounts
to a single extended work or ‘superpolyptych’.
It might be thought of as a kind of
expansion of the idea behind a photographic
triptych from the series Untitled 1983/84.
In the earlier work, a detail from Titian’s
Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro in
the Frari in Venice appears on each
side of the central image of a young
man’s face. Both of these ‘wings’
depict the boy Leonardo Pesaro, the
nephew of Titian’s patron, Jacopo.
Leonardo is the only figure in the Pesaro
altarpiece who looks out at the viewer,
making psychological contact with us.
In one of the photographs from the
Paris Opera Project, a young girl
of approximately the same age and with
more than a passing resemblance to him
also gazes out at us. As in Titian’s
painting, she is the only figure in
the room that acknowledges the viewer’s
presence. Henson’s other subjects
are absorbed in an event that we are
unable to see, presumably the performance.
In this sense, the Paris Opera Project
also provides a good example of Henson’s
self-professed preoccupation with the
paradoxical proximity and distance established
by the photographic image: a form of
‘intimate immensity’, to borrow
Gaston Bachelard’s phrase from
The Poetics of Space (1957).
In sum, Bill Henson: Three Decades
of Photography is an absorbing exhibition
and, as the first major survey of Henson’s
career, an important one. It reveals
an artist who over three decades has
maintained his focus on the same thematic
territory, one paradigm of which is
the melancholy Arcadia with its ‘artificial
ruins’ that serve to deepen the
allusiveness of the landscape; whose
principal mode is elegiac; and whose
‘sensibility’ is authentically
but somewhat anomalously Romantic. The
accompanying book is lavish and superbly
produced. My only real criticism would
be that in reproducing essays that have
mainly been published elsewhere (Isobel
Crombie’s valuable account of Henson’s
artistic practice has appeared more
than once in other places, including
the March–April 2005 issue of the
NGV magazine Gallery), an opportunity
has been missed to attempt a broad assessment
of Henson’s work to date. No doubt
that will come in time.
Catalogue:
Bill Henson: Mnemosyne
Scalo and the AGNSW, $150 hb, 501 pp,
3 03939 003 1
Exhibition dates:
Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Closes on 10 July
