Naked Youth - Bill Henson

ArtForum, Feb, 2002 by Dennis Cooper

Despite the Biennale exposure, it would be another six years before I would see Henson's work in America. And by the time he had his long-delayed solo gallery show in 1999 at Karyn Lovegrove in Los Angeles, the experiments with collage and multipaneling had given way to large framed photographs that engaged even more unobtrusively with the psyches of his young subjects. In this recent work, boys and girls stand, sit, and lounge around alone or in seemingly romantic couplings, their averted faces revealing emotions so deep, mixed-up, and masked in achy casualness that one searches the photographs' compositions and patina for the aesthetic system that makes such intimacy possible. What becomes apparent when you see Henson's work in person is the importance of the almost pitch-black darkness that, in whatever formal context he has devised over the years, always cloaks his forlorn, defiantly unneedy subjects, giving their run-down urban environments the look of remote desert outposts. It's a black that seems both to be caked on the surface of the photographs, like tar or centuries of soot, and to recede infinitely into the background. It looks as solid as lead, a physical threat to the teens it blankets, and at the same time it's as if the blackness were exuded by their bodies, forming a kind of paranormal manifestation of some feeling too intense and guarded to register in any other fashion. In its own peculiar way, Henson's black is as unique an achievement as, say, Robert Ryman's white. It gives the similar impression of an idea refined to a point of such complexity that it can only be communicated through a suggestion of its absence. Were it not for Henson's primary, almost devotional need to elicit empathy for his troubled human subjects, there's a feeling that nothing would prevent that black from completely absorbing his attention and extinguishing the work.

Bill Henson's photography is far too reclusive within the world of its own concerns to fit comfortably into the kinds of categories that make a writer's job easy. Characterizing it as a forebear of the new portraiture practiced by younger artists like Anna Gaskell, Tracey Moffatt, and Collier Schorr is helpful in distinguishing its more forceful, less attenuated pursuit of emotional truth, just as viewing it in light of Henson's transgressive contemporaries' work puts a useful emphasis on the unabashed classicism and painterliness of his style. While these associations flatter him and create a reasonable introduction to his work, the map they form gives only the vaguest directions into the matter of Henson's achievement, which lies not so much in the twist he gives to the subject of disenfranchised youth but in the almost pretmodern beauty he conjures from such a familiar and clinically post-postmodern source.