Naked Youth - Bill Henson

ArtForum, Feb, 2002 by Dennis Cooper

Until recently, being an American admirer of the photographer Bill Henson was a lonely and rather painstaking chore. Apart from a small survey of his work at the Denver Art Museum in 1990 an a few photographs included in a 1984 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition of Australia art, he has been almost impossible to find in the Unite States, less unknown than antiknown--a sub-subcult figure even within circles devoted to contemporary photography. Given that his work has been a staple of the European art world since 1981 and that it occupied an entire pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Henson's invisibility is bizarre enough. But when you consider that his photographs of the '80s and '90s predict and arguably outclass much of the personal, edgy portraiture currently in fashion and ubiquitous in galleries, you have to wonder (or at least I do) whether Henson's effect on contemporary art isn't much larger than his reputation in the States reflects.

My own discovery of the forty-six-year-old Australian photographer was a weird stroke of luck. While house-sitting for art-critic friend in the late '80s, I fished a thin catalogue of Henson's work from the shelves of art books and gave it a scan. At that time, auteurish, confrontational photographers with a taste for the fucked up and taboo were near the center of the critical dialogue, as well as the hippest things going. Not only did the dozen or so images in Henson's catalogue hold their own against the work of better-know artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Bernard Faucon in terms of their refined transgressiveness; but just as interestingly, their plush, cinematographic look and romantic, almost melodramatic tone had a radically old-fashioned gorgeousness that raised fascinating questions about the strengths and limitations of his contemporaries' lower-key, sketchier--or, in Mapplethorpe's case, serenely rigid--styles.

Just prior to the appearance of that catalogue, a permanent realignment had taken place in Henson's work In the '70s and early '80s he was known for his black-and-white, mock-candid, quasi daguerreotype images of self-absorbed individuals lost in crowds or striking solitary expressive poses in gloom-shrouded voids. In the mid-'80s he began to produce color photographs focused almost exclusively on introverted, compellingly beautiful teenage outsiders and the abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and deserted back roads that formed their turf. The catalogue featured a then-fresh series of diptychs and triptychs that juxtaposed portraits of naked, dirt-smudged teens looking almost like coal miners with images depicting the interiors of palatial homes filled with antiques and old master-ish paintings. The teens appeared to be addicts, prostitutes, and runaways snapped at moments of intense self-mourning. Unlike the subjects in Clark's or Goldin's similarly populated work, Henson's figures were approached with such unreserved empathy and preserved with such an artfully impersonal, elegant visual luster that they became strangely interchangeable with their lavish architectural counterparts. The dichotomy between luxurious empty decors and undressed tormented characters was over the top, to be sure. Yet there was a purity of intention that turned these heavy-handed gestures into acts of moving, even desperate complicity, the way an opera's rigorously expelled emotion can turn its overstated musical phrasings into profound instruments.

The experience of being haunted by reproductions of contemporary artworks, with no real hope of comparing them to the originals, or investigating the work's context, or having even a small library of criticism against which to check one's opinions, constitutes an odd and not unpowerful dilemma--one that living in the art-importing center of the world normally prevents. In 1995, there was a rare Henson sighting in the form of another catalogue for the photographer's aforementioned Australian pavilion exhibit in Venice. By then, his work had phased into something more sexually explicit and emotionally diffuse. In place of the multipanel photographs from the '80s there were autonomous, single-frame images containing pictures, violently cut-up and then collaged, of young, pale, faceless bodies fucking, sometimes in large groups, in dark, apparently cavernous locales. It was as if the orgy in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point had gone on past the point of exhaustion and into some posterotic realm where sex was the only cure for unquenchable loneliness. Again, as in Henson's almost too blatant parallel between the superficial spoils of the privileged and the ruined internal lives of the young and disenfranchised, his aggressive cuts and reassemblages bordered dangerously on a dumbass, obvious way of signifying his subjects' interpersonal agonies; yet some depth of understanding and level of finesse at which the reproductions could only hint left an almost addictive longing to search out these pictures and deconstruct their effect.