The Australian artist Bill Henson is best known for his moody, cryptic photos of figures with purplish, corpse-like skin, shrouded in darkness.
He is also known for controversy: his 2008 exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney included nude images of a 13-year-old girl, leading to media uproar. (The photos were eventually given a PG rating by the Australian Classification Board and no formal charges were laid against Henson).
Lesser known is Henson’s long love of classical culture, particularly from ancient Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. So it was little wonder that chief executive of the Hellenic Museum, John Tatoulis, turned to him to bring to life a collection of treasures that had been lent to his museum by the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece.
The collection showcases artefacts from across 8,000 years of Greek civilisation, including Neolithic pottery, Cycladic statues, Minoan figurines, Mycenaean jewellery, Hellenistic sculptures and Byzantine icons and manuscripts.
Upon viewing them Henson says he was immediately drawn to the more “intimately scaled items” and wanted to couple them with a live person. A conservator from the Benaki Museum had flown down to help with the delicate shoot and together they spent a day carefully taking artefacts – among them an Ottoman-period choker with coins and a sabre belonging to the early 19th century Greek general Theodoros Kolokotronis – out of display cases for Henson’s model to handle.
Some of the items Henson picked are thousands of years old, including a gold myrtle wreath (fourth to third century BC), a gold ancient Greek drinking cup called a kylix (late 15th to early 14th century BC) and earrings from the Hellenistic period (250-200 BC) featuring pendant Eros figures.
Henson says as he’s grown older he’s become more interested in the perspective the past gives the present. When things that have been lost centuries or a millennia and are found again, they become a fragment of history imbued with a “sense of what once was but is no longer whole, is no longer comprehensible”, he says.
Henson says they become like memento mori (artworks that mediate on mortality) – not dissimilar to photography. “Combining that archeological interest with a relatively modern medium is always very interesting because you can make them sing together in a certain way, if you know what you’re doing.”
In this exhibition, ONEIROI, which will be permanently housed at the Hellenic Museum, the series of photos are not only classically Greek but classically Henson: sensual and evocative, with hints of narrative that ultimately leave their meaning obscured.
Guardian Australia: Was there any concern by the Benaki Museum that your work might cause damage to the artefacts?
Bill Henson: There was no issue with them being on a person’s skin or on their head but I think [that’s because] we were working in a controlled environment. The shoot took place inside the museum – it wasn’t as if you were outside, sweating in the sun. But as I understand from what [the conservator] was saying, they have all kinds of sealers and other things on this material to stop it from oxidising, so it was more a case of having them handled properly and moving carefully and slowly.
Some of these objects are so old and precious they’re almost sacred. Did the Benaki Museum ever feel handing these over to an artist might be considered sacrilegious?
When I proposed this idea to John Tatoulis he obviously went away and had a think about it and discussed it with various authorities back in Athens, and no one seemed to think there was any issue at all. Of course the model, if you want to call her that, is really like an armature for the pieces. The way in which I wanted to photograph this was to leave the human presence in the photograph fairly ambiguous. Although the pieces were against human skin, as they were originally intended, they weren’t overtaken by some kind of fashion shoot aesthetic.
I was struck by how these ancient objects came to life on a human body.
That was partly what interested me. It just grows out of the work that I try and make for myself anyway. On one level you want to hang onto all the tender, breathing approximate intimacies of the form in front of you, but at the same time suggest things which are distant and monumental and ultimately unknowable and perhaps even violent. You want both of those things, which are seemingly opposites, to be vibrating in the same space.
To have that kind of thing open up in front of you, where you have that closeness and also that far-ness, you get a very interesting space for the imagination to operate in. It also creates a sense of continuity – a sense of being inside culture and of culture being inside time.
In terms of aesthetics what qualities were you drawn to?
I photographed about half a dozen pieces that I selected from the exhibition. It’s more how they animate the speculative capacity, how you create something which is suggestive rather than prescriptive.
The great potential but [also] potential limitation of photography is that it prescribes things: we experience it as proof of something. But that evidential authority precedes any individual reading we have of the medium and so it’s a case of taking something which has some history and which has a definitive place in terms of archeology and museology and just allowing it space to become something else, or creating a space by treatment, that allows for you to go on a different kind of a journey – a more discursive and imaginative journey.
That emotional journey is different to the story a museum tells, which sketches a very specific and factual picture about periods of history.
Meaning comes from feeling not the other way around and the thing is if you don’t feel anything then it never really means very much. So the starting point is always based on aesthetic and how much you feel. If you feel something you are then going to ruminate on things, but if you feel nothing that’s far less likely. I think in the visual arts a lot of the time that’s forgotten.
As they say there’s no correct way of looking at a picture or listening to a piece of music, there’s just your way.
- ONEIROI opens at the Hellenic Museum on 8 April
