New light on home ground
Bill Henson’s photographic images evoke the pathos of suburban life.
In his review of the Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire coined an expression often repeated but not always understood: l’heroisme de la vie moderne, the heroism of modern life. The poet did not mean to suggest that the daily lives of bank clerks and shop assistants were particularly admirable or inspiring; what he did mean was that the drama and pathos of human life — expressed in love and hate, friendship, enmity and betrayal, joy and sadness — were timeless and could be found in a world of boulevards and suits as much as in more picturesque historical periods.
How this was to be done was made clearer in another piece, almost 10 years later, his review of the art component of the Exposition Universelle of 1855, France’s response to the Great Exhibition, the first of its kind, which had been held in London in 1851. This was the occasion when Gustave Courbet decided to pull out of the show because they accepted only 11 of his pictures, and didn’t have room for the monumental L’Atelier du peintre; instead he hired his own gallery and showed a personal retrospective of 40 paintings.
In reviewing these exhibitions, Baudelaire spoke of the imagination as la reine des facultes, the queen of our faculties of knowledge or understanding. For imagination, in this conception extrapolated from earlier romantics like Coleridge, is the ability to see through the surface of things to their deeper moral and spiritual meaning.
This is what allows us to see pathos where others see only banality, and thus to discern the “heroism of modern life”. And it was on these grounds that Baudelaire came to the conclusion that both his former friend Courbet and the by now arch-conservative Ingres, though they were giants in their different ways, were engaged in une guerre a l’imagination, a war on imagination. One created a hard surface impervious to feeling, while the other was drawn to superficial sensuality, ignoring deeper moral significance: “Two opposite obsessions lead them to the same immolation.”
Imagination, in exactly this sense, is the key to understanding the work of Bill Henson, and the principle is perhaps especially important in looking at those of his works that do not deal with overtly exotic, dark or neo-romantic subjects. It is particularly striking in looking at these images of suburbia: the early series Untitled, 1985-86, in which Henson photographed the suburb of Glen Waverley where he himself grew up, and now a sequel, commissioned by the Monash Gallery of Art, in which he revisits the same area more than three decades later.
Henson, perhaps needless to say, is not engaged in the “celebration of suburban life” that seems to be a recurrent theme in Australian culture: a world of big houses and backyard pools and four-wheel drives and barbecues and fathers taking sons to football while the mothers take daughters shopping and initiate them into the rituals of female consumerism, and boys and girls gradually turn from hopeful, lively and curious little beings into caricatures of their sex and class.
Of course, not everyone who grows up in suburbia is like this. Henson, for example, escaped into an entirely different world, and so have many others. But the general pattern of contemporary suburban life is deeply marked by conformism, materialism — or the evangelical Christianity that is the religion of materialism — and incuriosity. And ultimately a life of desires and fears without self-knowledge is a life of suffering.
Henson evokes this world poignantly but indirectly. Some of the most memorable pictures are of houses seen at night or at dawn or sunset. The homes are silent, introverted and self-absorbed, while above them clouds mark the unfolding of time and meteorological systems that we barely understand. The dramatic splendour of the sky and the silhouettes of trees form a spectacle that surrounds but does not seem to penetrate the houses.
In other cases, the roofs of bungalows are silver in the moonlight, as though touched from outside by a kind of transcendence of which those inside are unaware. At the same time, Henson alternates these suburban images with shots of the columns of ancient Egyptian temples, juxtaposing grandiose edifices that have stood for thousands of years with flimsy dwellings that were the first things ever built on virgin land.
Figures are used sparingly but significantly in this series to recall what is perhaps the most important function of suburbs — as indirectly suggested in the wall texts — as the nurseries of new generations. It is here that the young are bred and raised until the point at which they mature and then break free to make their lives in the wider world.
Three figures of girls play crucial roles in this respect, embodiments of an incipient awakening that is organic and instinctive, yet still unconscious and unreflecting. And it is particularly the way they are framed by nonfigurative subjects that sets up quasi-narrative thematic associations of ideas.
Thus in one image a naked girl lies asleep in her bed, as always dim and elusive rather than literal; on the left of this picture is another in which the orange of the evening sky is echoed in the light in the windows of the house, suggesting the presence of some kind of inner life, while on the right it is clearly night and there are no lights on in the house.
In a second sequence, the head of a girl, glancing to one side in surprise or anxiety, is flanked by the view of a colonnade in Egypt (perhaps a temple near Luxor) on one side and on the other by the silhouette of a suburban bungalow, whose thin veranda posts underscore the contrast with the grandeur of the temple architecture. There is the sense of an organic destiny unfolding as in the life of a flower, whose trajectory is both predictable and ultimately perennial.
A less serene version of such a trajectory is evoked in another sequence: a pretty but seemingly slightly unsettled girl, her skin glistening with oil or perspiration, is shown between a picture of the kitsch illuminated sign of the Billabong Family Bistro and another of a soulless house seen from the point of view of a vacant block. But as we have seen in other exhibitions, these individual photographs are charged but ambiguous images that can be arranged in various orders to elicit different associations and meanings.
In Henson’s new works, revisiting Glen Waverley after some 35 years, we might expect to find the suburban sprawl denser than before, or replaced by blocks of flats and shopping centres but, on the contrary, there is hardly a sign of human presence in these pictures, apart from an apparently abandoned armchair in the middle of the woods in two of the images. On the contrary, the emphasis now is entirely on the life of nature that mysteriously subsists in pockets in the middle of an overbuilt environment. But since the earlier work was also about the deeper and ageless rhythms of life, both in nature and in human beings, that surround and flow through the narrow cultural world of suburbia, there is a greater continuity between the two series than may at first appear.
Roads — unsealed dirt paths through the woods — are an important motif, suggestive of a moral or spiritual journey, for many of them end in light. But absorption in the life of nature is everywhere evoked through the density of trees and undergrowth, and Henson’s way of playing with depth of field to bring some elements into focus while leaving others to envelope us in a dreamlike way.
The earlier pictures were all shot with an analog camera and printed on photographic paper, but the most recent ones are digital, and indeed the earlier series is also represented here by digital prints of the original images.
Digital images, depending on their level of resolution, are subject to breaking up in a way that analog images are not, and although Henson could have any level of resolution he wanted, he deliberately plays with this phenomenon, combined with the use of soft focus, to allow the texture of images to break down into patches of colour that from close up seem to float free like dabs of paint.
In this regard he is recalling the experiments of the great pictorialist photographers of the late 19th century, and it is hard to believe his view of a pond is not a deliberate homage to Edward Steichen’s famous The Pond — Moonlight (1904). We are further invited into a pictorial absorption in these works by a device that may not be immediately obvious. Each image is internally framed by a black border, discreet because of the darkness of the pictures themselves, which has a soft outer edge and thus avoids a sharp boundary between the pictorial world and the white of the paper on which it is printed.
This slightly ragged edge, like the way fine printmaking paper is torn and not cut, is particularly visible in the handsome publication that accompanies the exhibition, and which includes the full 1985-86 series whereas the exhibition can only cover a selection. The sequences are not identical to those in the exhibition, but as there are more images, the same quasi-narrative elements form even more complex configurations.
Most of the pictures are in pairs on facing pages, but some are left with a blank page opposite. The variation in layout allows some images to be set in dialogue — like a young male nude matched with a relief of the hawk-headed god Horus — while others are left to resonate, as it were, in the silence.
The Light fades but the gods remain is an artist’s book rather than the work of curators, and avoids their bloated disquisitions. Instead there is a brief introduction by the gallery’s director, and a concise introduction by its curator, citing several musical and literary references relevant to an understanding of Henson’s work.
The only other text is a poem, evidently of the artist’s own choosing: The God abandons Antony by CP Cavafy (1863-1933), the great poet of Alexandria, and a man who like Henson himself was acutely sensitive to the poignancy of the erotic and at the same time steeped in the memories of ancient culture, from the Greeks to the Romans and even Byzantines.
The poem was published in 1911, the same year as his famous Ithaca, and the two share certain themes: in Ithaca to understand the destination as merely the occasion of the journey, and here not to dismiss what is lost as never having been: looking out over Alexandria for the last time, Antony must not escape into imagining that his story was all a dream, but take pleasure in the beautiful city and have the courage to bid it farewell.
The Light Fades but the Gods Remain by Bill Henson is published by Monash Gallery of Art/Thames & Hudson Australia, 165pp, $100 (HB) or $150 (signed slipcase).
Bill Henson: The Light fades but the gods remain
Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, until September 19
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