Bill Henson images reflect the dark past at NGV

The Bill Henson exhibition at the NGV is far from the agitated and opinionated chatter his work sometimes attracts.

Detail of an untitled work by Bill Henson at the NGV. © Bill Henson

It was interesting, given the mood of our times, to see the National Gallery of Victoria announce last year an exhibition with the title The Right to Offend is Sacred. At around the same time or not long after this announcement, we witnessed the sinister farce of the Queensland University of Technology case, in which the claim to have been offended became the basis for a case that later failed in court. Surely the gallery would have to change its title?

Then there was the hypocritical and ultimately tragic attack on Bill Leak for laying bare an inconvenient truth. That was followed by renewed debate, in recent weeks; but suggestions that the legislation be changed to replace the excessively subjective and self-identified concept of offence with something more objectively defined have been met with apoplectic reactions from the left and claims that only bigots would wish to protect the right to give offence.

Yet all the while, at the NGV, the right to offend remained sacred because, as it turns out, that right is taken to be asymmetrical. It is acceptable for some people to offend others, but not vice versa; if you happen to belong to an officially accredited minority, you are allowed to offend anyone deemed to belong to the majority, while being shielded from the same treatment in return.

Detail from a Henson work that includes the Spinario in the British Museum. © Bill Henson

It may seem odd that the left is supporting censorship — that is, if you have forgotten the track record of leftist intellectuals last century — but the reality is that all ideologues are censors, because they are sure they are right; and if you are right, why should you tolerate the expression of mistaken and even morally reprehensible views? The case for freedom of speech rests on the recognition that we don’t know everything, that we may be wrong, that circumstances may change, and that we must leave the possibility of debate and discussion as open as possible.

As many, from Voltaire to Noam Chomsky, have observed, freedom of speech has to apply even to those with whom we fundamentally disagree. There is no more Orwellian and malicious mystification than the attempt to paint freedom of speech as a right-wing cause. It is the cause of free thinkers against all ideologues of the left or the right or of any form of religious zealotry or political dogmatism.

Censorship has also threatened one of the most distinguished artists in Australia today, Bill Henson. Henson’s work has often dealt with shadowy borderlands in the topography of human sexuality, and there were some criticisms of his use of young models and their mise en scene in the work of more than 30 years ago. But on the whole a certain moral ambiguity was accepted as a prerogative of art, and Henson’s retrospective in 2005 was seen by thousands of visitors without any complaints.

At the time, Henson was considered controversial only in the sense in which the term is one of art world approbation, implying that the work stands up against conservative prejudices. But then in 2008 a real and ugly controversy erupted when his gallery made the mistake of sending out a picture of a young, partly naked girl as an invitation postcard. All concerned should have realised that what may pass unquestioned in the privileged space of a gallery could evoke a different reaction in the outside world.

But above all, the public, egged on by the popular media, was by then gripped with a new paranoia about such matters, and several politicians made fools of themselves by rushing to express their moral outrage without having seen the works concerned. All of a sudden the waters were terribly muddied: hitherto, the issue of art censorship had generally opposed bohemians and aesthetes on the side of freedom to puritans and philistines on the side of repression; now even some in the art world were tempted by the cause of censorship, prefiguring the increasingly repressive and morally bullying mood we can feel around us today.

Nothing could be further from the world of agitated and opinionated media chatter than the stillness of Henson’s new exhibition at the NGV. It is a large space that we enter, fittingly enough, from another large gallery devoted to paintings of the Victorian period. The walls are hung with a single line of large photographic works, in which figures and landscapes emerge from deep chiaroscuro, in a world of nocturnes. Even in the lit areas, colour is muted to the point where flesh comes close to the quality of marble, harmonising the nude studies with the pictures of sculptures, each defined by subtle variations of warm and cool hues.

Statues and living figures are explicitly linked in the figure of the young boy sitting in the attitude of the Hellenistic sculpture known as the Spinario, the boy pulling a thorn from his foot. The best known version of this work is the bronze copy in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, but Henson has chosen to photograph the marble one in the British Museum because of the affinity of marble and flesh.

Detail of an untitled work by Bill Henson at the NGV. © Bill Henson

A much less well-known source today, though famous in the Renaissance and the subject of recent scholarly interest, lies behind the first work on the left as we enter: the torso of a young man with his arm hanging down and his face averted. The pose comes from an ancient relief that once belonged to Lorenzo Ghiberti, known as the Letto di Policleto, which inspired Titian in his Venus and Adonis, possibly Michelangelo in his Pieta and ultimately David in The Death of Marat. The hanging arm carries a deep connotation of sleep and even death. In another work, a second arm has similar associations: here a girl lays her head gently on its hand, recalling one of the holy women mourning the dead Christ.

As our eyes adjust to the low light level, we begin to perceive nuances of form and colour — for these images, for all their dramatic chiaroscuro, are also discreet and almost private — and the shadows of the figures to which they allude. Thus a girl sitting down on her haunches, braced on a long arm reaching down to the ground and playing with her hair, is a new incarnation of the Hellenistic Crouching Aphrodite, as though the ancient statue had come to life in the form of this touching young woman.

Figurative works like these, which invite an intense engagement because of our imaginative and affective response to beauty, are punctuated with landscapes that offer intervals of another kind of contemplation, a distant rather than close focus, an impersonal rather than a personal response, a meditation on time and space. We may recognise the Temple of Concordia at Agrigento in Sicily, the dark profile of the island of Capri, on the topmost point of which stood the palace of Tiberius, Villa Jovis, and the symmetrical cone of the volcanic island Stromboli, with associations from Homer to Roberto Rosselini’s film of the same name.

Two great rocks, standing like a gateway with a watery space between them, are probably the Faraglioni rocks in Capri, but the Mediterranean site, which may remind us of the clashing rocks between which the Argo has to sail, has been reinterpreted through the sensibility of a late romantic painter such as Arnold Boecklin. In these landscapes we can sense the inaudible presence of music, so important to Henson, perhaps particularly composers such as Mahler or Wagner.

Not all the allusions are classical. Among the most beautiful figures is one of a young girl leaning forward, in a pose that may recall Narcissus, but is even closer to the bathing women of Degas. One of the roles of art is to make the familiar strange again and invite us to rediscover what habit had concealed from us. Here, it is in an attitude that recalls the anatomy of a quadruped that we find ourselves wondering at the structure of the human body: the spine, the rib cage and the shoulder blade, the structure of the pelvic girdle and the iliac crest revealed in the way the light catches the swelling of the hip.

Nearby an elegant reclining nude seems a free allusion to the Grande Odalisque of Ingres, and like the painter, Henson seems to have elongated the torso of this figure, seemingly the only figure in which he has interfered significantly with natural anatomy, unless he has achieved this effect through selective lighting. But as in Ingres, it seems hard if not impossible to believe the model had such a long interval between her rib cage and her pelvic girdle.

There are some more casual or adventitious associations that are not examples of inspiration but must have been discovered in the process of planning and hanging the exhibition. The most prominent of these is the intense pair of a seated boy with a girl leaning over his shoulder. In a witty conjunction, this picture hangs as it were back to back with a similar motif in the adjacent room of Victorian narrative pictures: the pair of lovers in Burne-Jones’s The Garden of Pan (1886-87).

Henson’s pictorial world is an intensely, almost hypnotically imaginative one, whose secret lies in a unique combination of closeness and distance. He draws on the deep affective power of physical beauty, and particularly the sexually ambiguous, often almost androgynous beauty of the young body, filled with a kind of potential energy, but not yet fully actualised. Yet these bodies are distanced and abstracted by their sculptural, nearly monochrome treatment, and transformed by a kind of alchemical synthesis with the ideal, poetic bodies of art.

The exploitation photography that surrounds us in the commercial cultural environment aims to arouse the most superficial and appetitive response in the viewer; here it is the opposite. The figures are bewitching but withdraw like mirages, disembodied at the sensual level, only to be merged with the images of memory, the echoes of great works of the past, and to be reborn from the imagination as if some ancient sculpture were arising from darkness into the light of a new life.

Bill Henson, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Until August 27