It’s been a weekend of ideas. Firstly, the Archibalds at the NSW Gallery of Art generally failed to connect with me this year. A few highlights, of course, but not really stuff that inspired a lot of reaction from me. That’s what I look for in art: the ability to invoke reaction. Some people argue this is what’s meant by ‘the sublime’.

But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

In the end, I voted for Deborah Trusson’s huge self-portrait, Naked, in which she does, indeed, pose naked. And not ‘I’m just naked & standing here, rigid & haughty, like a monolith’. Trusson’s Naked is very suggestively masturbatory, reclining with one hand wrapping a breast, one hand dug into her thigh. It could be argued she’s not *quite* masturbating, but that argument might be a bit of a, *ahem*, wank. I mean, an unsustainability. I know my gallery-visiting-buddy, T., found Trusson’s portrait a bit too confronting & anxiety-provoking, but I thought it was lustful & gorgeous, & an impressive technical achievement to boot. The realism of the skin tones (& Trusson does say it was an exercise in skin tones) is remarkable. How glorious to see the marks, the discolourations, the puffs of flesh where her bright red nails dig into her leg, the veins in the roll of breast caught by her elbow. Also, that damn painting is _remarkably_ huge! Something you just can’t get a real sense of online.

Also I liked the way it’s a painting of a reclining woman, and yet it’s powerful, and yet — & this is important — it’s not aggressive.

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“What is that face, breaking our hearts, but a momentary configuration of molecules taking form and changing form and losing form, as night falls.”
– Peter Scheldahl, 1989

There is something fragile in Bill Henson’s art, something that implies loss even as it offers substance. Perhaps it’s the way he works with images of age, contrasting the faces of child and adult. Perhaps it’s the way he uses adolescents, with their bodies snagged between youth and maturity.

Perhaps, instead, it’s in his use of light. And in his use of dark.

It is — perhaps — all these things, & it is the very fact he manages to straddle this tension of opposites that gives his art a sense both of stillness and movement. He works in ambiguities & the spaces in-between. He can make crowd scenes look intimate and intimate scenes look oddly impersonal. He can give still moments a sense of drama and suspense, and yet despite the easy fluidity of his images, there is a weightiness there. As though fate or history is pressing down.

“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 the black in his photographs from completely absorbing his attention and extinguishing his work.”
– Dennis Cooper

Henson apparently spent 5 weeks working full-time at the Art Gallery of NSW to create this latest exhibition, & what I found at least as interesting as the art was the way he presented it. He built shapes with the frames across the wall. He modified the gallery lights one by one so that they spotlighted parts of the photos, creating shadow and glare alternately. The result was one of energy. I wanted to stand still to drink in his beautiful images, but reflections in the glass meant I had to move back & forth, only ever seeing the picture incompletely. It was a kind of meta-art, forcing me to interact with the strangers in the photos.

I found a lot to like in the exhibition. Henson’s preoccupations parallel my own: light & dark, tragedy & beauty, momentariness, narrative, contrast.

But the thing that has really stuck in my head is not Henson’s tragic, beautiful portraits where people seem forever frozen in a moment before they speak. Nor is it his colourful and empty landscapes. It is the fact his work is apparently not sexual.

More on Henson and art and the questions it left me with.

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