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ARTLOOK #7 | December / January 2004/2005
Photo Bill Henson
Column: Visual Art
Teenage lust under Australian skies
Like in a dream, this boy's angel back and legs are smooth and white and the hair under his arms suggests he's about 16. He's swigging from a bottle and showing the bush of hair at his crotch, his eyes reflecting in the night like a cat's. Above a glimmer of stars, which are blurry sulphur street lights, she floats; her gown and arm hang limply and she's levitating.
Australian artist Bill Henson's works are brooding, often cinematic in effect, at times erotic in a voluptuous way, self-consciously evocative and alluring, luxurious in their tonality. Henson's work has always had a sultry feel. Even his 'crowd' images from 1979 are softly toned, composed as though Henson's camera is moving across a sea of faces and bodies, telephoto lens fixed, so that each shot appears to bear the trace and slight blur of movement of extreme close range. His untitled series from 1977 depicts a slim naked adolescent boy standing or reclined, looking asleep or dead. Here Henson presents a photographic image that is as tangible as the softness of this boy's skin, and as ephemeral as his shadowy surrounds.
The softness of Henson's photographs seems to allow the intense sexual nature of his subjects rather than to create it. The realness of a naked pubescent girl with the mere suggestion of pubic hair, or an adolescent boy in shadowy contraposto with large hands and tumescent penis, occupies a mental space that is directly connected to our own experiences of youthful physicality-experiences that are constantly tugged away from us into the realm of memory or imagination.
Bill Henson is regarded as one of Australia's most important contemporary artists who happens to work with the medium of photography. Since he came to prominence in the late 1970s, Henson's work has been included in major exhibitions in Australia and overseas, including the 2000 Biennale of Sydney. In 1995 he represented Australia at the prestigious Venice Biennale, and he regularly exhibits in Europe and the USA. Henson's work can be unsettling but it is also supremely evocative and sensual. His work is always compelling, from the shadowy and silvery black and white images of the 1970s and early 1980s, to his recent darkly-saturated colour images. Henson's recent images of surburban landscapes at night and dreamlike environments populated by sultry youth are darkly romantic, brooding and often erotically charged.
'Henson is a titan in Australian photography, of so distinct and powerful a vision that he has stamped a style of urban and natural landscape with his own name,' says writer and lecturer Edward Colless. Henson's current and recent practice spans the production of photographic prints, and large-scale works constructed from fragmented photographs. The results are in dramatic conjunctions of imagery that have the power of Romantic landscape painting and the intimacy of the idea of your lover inside your head.
A major retrospective of Henson's work will be shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, from 8 January to 3 April 2005. While it's not coming to Canberra it's close enough, and important enough, to warrant a summer trip to the evil city. Might as well treat yourself to some oysters and martinis, a bus trip to Bondi and a swim too.
Chris Chapman is a writer, lecturer and artist.
