Darkness on the edge of town
Bill Henson’s work has frequently been characterised as baroque, romantic or sublime in sensibility. That is to say, it has been aligned with other spheres of artistic activity (such as painting, literature and opera) as well as traced back to the generating consciousness of the ‘author’ or ‘artist’ as experiential being. In this sense, perhaps, it can seem out of step with the relentless cycling of self-consciously theorised pictorial models that characterises the history of much recent Australian photo-based art. Yet the sheer psychological presence of Henson’s images in all their overt aestheticisation and pictorial mannerisms has always come hand-in-glove with a sophisticated dialogue with current and historical models of image-making in photography and cinema most particularly. Henson’s work has also always manifested an intense examination of the representational possibilities of photography as a material practice.
We need only look to Henson’s ‘cut-screen’ works produced from 1987 onwards to recognise this merging of aesthetic ‘vision’ and representational experimentation. In the earliest of this work Henson began to collapse the multiple image form of a number of his previous series into single structures by cutting up and then reconstituting images as one-off, large scale works. In so doing he drew attention to the materiality of the work at the expense of any photographic illusion of unified or ‘real’ pictorial space. This practice culminated in Henson’s work for the 1996 Venice Biennale, in which torn and cut sections of photographic paper—including blank white sections of the back of the paper—were stuck together with pieces of black tape to create monumental scenes of what Helen McDonald has described as ‘baroque carnality’.1 Groups of naked and often soiled figures were strewn about dramatic... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline