That seems a great pity. It makes the decision by the National Gallery of Victoria to mount a show of Henson’s recent work appear simultaneously courageous and squarely in line with the fulfilment of its core mission. The exhibition (until 27 August) is hauntingly beautiful. It comprises twenty-three large-scale, deeply shadowed colour photographs with bright white borders and black frames hung against the darkened walls of a single spacious gallery in the NGV’s St Kilda Road building. Works by Balthus, Bacon, Degas, Rembrandt, Rubens and Ribera are just around the corner. Henson was given his first show at the NGV when he was only nineteen, and the gallery owns more than 100 of his works. Twenty-one of the images in the exhibition were acquired as a suite by the collector William Bowness and given to the NGV. All were made between 2008 and 2013.
For those who may have seen isolated reproductions of Henson’s work but are unfamiliar with his exhibitions, this one reveals, again, what a gift he has not only for creating singular, indelible images but also for combining and arranging them in suggestive, soul-stirring ways. One is struck by the scale of the works, and by the care with which Henson manipulates colour and tone in the printing process, and afterwards. Cumulatively – by force of strange juxtaposition – as much as individually, the photographs break through the carapace of the contemporary, image-saturated mind to admit older, more beautiful and death-haunted recognitions.
Some show ancient sculptures (and in one case portions of a late painting by Rembrandt) in dim museum interiors, where onlookers surround these venerated objects. Blurred and arbitrarily cropped, the living people are captured just as they are. But the camera’s alchemy also transmutes them into insubstantial spectres, here one moment, gone the next. The effect is to make the obdurate, centuries-old art objects feel, by contrast, more tremblingly full and alive.
Or is it that they seem more anciently other and dead? The confusion opens up a new susceptibility in the heart.
Other photographs here show solitary nature. A volcanic island asserting its presence against veils of sea and mist. Cascading water arrested – and silenced – in the midst of its roaring vertical plunge. An odd-shaped promontory silhouetted against sea and keening sky. A bosky Italian landscape poised between sensuous invitation and indifference. In the last, Henson choreographs alternating passages of light and dark as the eye moves up the picture plane and the landscape itself recedes. The effect is to reinforce this poetic dynamic of access and obstruction – a dynamic that is in many ways at the very core of his whole sensibility.
Others still show young naked figures, male and female, in states of silent self-absorption – sometimes in what appear to be excruciating agonies of pleasure, often expressionless, always unknowable. Set against pitchy darkness, their bodies float and twist or recline. A young woman’s head is propped up by jackknifed elbows. A hand comes to her mouth in a gesture of feeling and thought in transition. (The same gesture, with similar implications, obsessed Degas for a period in the 1860s.) A boy emerging from the left side of another, remarkable image is suspended in space, foreshortened, one arm dangling.
Seen at close quarters, the knees, hands, necks and thighs of these youths (two of whom appear together several times in poses of great tenderness) have an almost wretched pallor, one that paradoxically evokes great age. One thinks of oxidised metal, weather-damaged marble, or the extraordinary amalgam of coloured oil paint Rembrandt used to describe veins, arteries and ageing skin in his late paintings. One powerful image shows a girl gracefully squatting (the pose suggests a goddess of the hunt on the prowl), with one richly mottled hand pressed to the floor beside her foot.
Perhaps the most beautiful photograph shows the same girl, made slender and insubstantial by encroaching shadow, resting her head on the boy’s wrist, which is hinged at the end of a still more slender forearm that mysteriously enters the picture from the right. (Nothing else of him is shown.) Thus unified, the two bodies, each under the spell of what Katherine Mansfield called our ‘profound and terrible’ desire to make contact, traverse the horizontal picture plane like some giant pictogram from a forgotten language.
Indeed, like a calligrapher brushing white ink on black paper, Henson finds ever new ways to set pale skin and flesh against deep rectangles of black. Some poses echo ancient sculptures – most notably the so-called ‘Spinario’, a much-copied bronze of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Some – the reclining head turning away into darkness – are familiar from countless earlier works by Henson himself.
It would be ideal, at this point, to sign off, as does the Swiss writer Robert Walser in his charming short piece ‘A Discussion of a Picture’, by saying, ‘And with the assumption that things are approximately as I have described them, I shall step away from this picture that I believe I have presented to you with a modicum of grace.’
But such grace eludes me, and so I interrupt our current programming to mutter the smallest of misgivings. The spell of Henson’s work is broken for me – shattered, if I’m to be honest – when I become too conscious of his studio lighting. This happens only in three works here: the boy in the pose of the Spinario, the boy seated and embraced from behind, and the younger blond boy turning his forehead into warm, golden light.
It’s tremendously hard to speak of how and why a spell is cast, or broken. Can it really be as simple as a shift in the lighting, or a change in surface tension, such that the skimming stone no longer ricochets off the surface but plummets to the deep?
I’m really not sure. When you know what you think of art and how (more or less) to put it in words, it’s often because something in the work itself is lacking. The connections between image and feeling or meaning are too obvious. The mind is left with nothing to do but check boxes.
When the reverse occurs, it can be either because you are struggling to make sense of something new or because old, anticipated intensities of feeling elude you. Which can, confusingly, produce its own kind of intense feeling: ‘And we,’ wrote Rilke, in the last of his Duino Elegies, ‘who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls.’ And this feeling, too, is in no way foreign to Henson’s visual poetics: one astute writer has detected a quality of self-mourning in the faces of Henson’s models, as they emerge from childhood into adulthood, with all its attendant pains.
I have always been aware of the artifice in Henson’s work and in most cases succumb instinctively to his invented worlds. As he himself is always saying, art is artifice. And yet when he manipulates his lights to gild shoulders and thighs from behind, setting strands of hair ablaze or picking out patches of perspiration, it sets my teeth on edge. It may simply be that this warmer, golden light clashes (in poetic terms) with the cooler, almost moribund blue and white light in his other works, or that it betokens an aesthetic rhetoric, as of gods descending, or perhaps just high-end fashion photography. In any case, it feels dissonant, and instantly banishes me from Henson’s floating world, jamming the signals, as it were, in my heart.
Never mind. All truly affecting art walks a tightrope, and it’s never clear what will make either artist or viewer lose balance. Plenty of artists conjure with images from the history of art, but none has been so ambitious in their attempt to marry the immediate, over-brimming present with the haunted past. And the fact remains that no other living Australian artist has produced as many images so full of tenderness, silence and longing.
Towards Joy
Anwen Crawford
I once heard a distinguished American poet quote a Lady Gaga lyric as an example of perfect iambic pentameter. ‘I want your psycho, your vertigo schtick’ – ten syllables, five feet of metre; he wasn’t wrong. I was sitting in a classroom in New York City, and the poet was leading a course on prosody, which is the study of poetic metre but might also concern itself, to quote Ezra Pound, with ‘the articulation of the total sound of a poem’. Gaga’s line was from her 2009 single ‘Bad Romance’, one of the songs that launched her on a trajector
y towards superstardom. She would become, for a time, the most famous contemporary pop musician in the world.
‘I want your psycho, your vertigo schtick.’ What is the line doing, apart from keeping the metre? I want: the very bedrock of pop music. Pop music is about many things, but it is mostly about the things that we might want to do with our bodies: playing, dancing, singing, sex of all sorts. Skin and sweat and noises. The repeated o of psycho and vertigo is a sound that might be pleasure, might be pain, might be both at once. It’s the sadism of Alfred Hitchcock, who took pleasure in making his beautiful blondes – Janet Leigh in Psycho, Kim Novak in Vertigo – suffer violent deaths. Lady Gaga was a blonde, and she placed herself in this lineage: beauty, danger, tragedy etcetera. The superstar’s schtick. As she sang she savoured the phonemes of ‘schtick’.
But ‘Bad Romance’ proved most effective when language broke down – when phonemes, set free from meaning, bloomed across the song like a rash. ‘Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, ro-mah-ro-mah-mah,’ sang Gaga, repeatedly. Pop music is about what we feel more than what we say, what goes unsaid, what can’t be spoken. I want. ‘Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah’ put Gaga at the edge of language, right where Little Richard was when he shouted, ‘A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom.’
Poetry and pop lyrics are forms that share a fascination with language as a material: how can you push it around, or break it apart? And what might that sound like? Through attention to rhythm, and through devices such as rhyme, alliteration, consonance and dissonance (these last two terms also describe harmonic functions within music), the poet produces an array of sensory effects. Language becomes sound, pulse, colour and texture. Pound again: ‘Some musicians have the faculty of invention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets.’ Poetry is the literary form that comes closest to music, but literature isn’t music, and pop lyrics aren’t poetry.
To be fair to my aforementioned teacher, the American poet, I think he knew all this. We shared a fascination with Lady Gaga and a deep dislike of Bob Dylan, or, to be more accurate, a dislike of what Dylan had come to represent: pop music as canon-building, as the reverence of institutions. Once, in that same classroom, we had an argument with another poet, who was determined to convince us that Dylan should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. That was in 2009.
This past October, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Plenty of people were made happy by the announcement, but others were disgruntled: why should a pop star be given the Nobel Prize? Underlying such criticism is the assumption that pop music is a lesser form than literature: less serious, less substantial, less deserving of reward or analysis. I was annoyed when Dylan was awarded the Nobel, but my annoyance sprang from an opposite source. I wondered what literature had done to deserve pop music. How is literature, with its hierarchies of genre and judgement, its snobberies and exclusions, worthy of annexing pop to its territory?
I don’t hate literature, honestly. (I wouldn’t be a writer if that were so.) But I do resent efforts, no matter how well intentioned, to make pop music fit the criteria of an entirely different art form. ‘[Dylan] can be read and should be read,’ commented the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Sara Danius, in an interview after she announced the winner of this year’s prize. Well, no. Literature should be read. If you want to give Dylan his due, he should be listened to. Listen for the melodies, the vocal timbre and expression, the rhythmic interplay of voice and instruments: all of the things that make lyrics an element of music, not something that can be considered separately from it. I can scarcely think of anything more joyless than reading a lyric sheet as if it were a book.
Judging a lyric by its coherence as a written text – the Nobel Prize website cites a long list of printed Dylan works, beginning with the Bob Dylan Song Book (1965), before mentioning any audio recordings – is a poor way of assessing its effect. There is no less useful move in an argument over the worth of any popular musician, Dylan included, than to quote their lyrics out of context, purposely ignoring the musical setting. ‘Get sick, get well / Hang around a ink well.’ Of course it reads like rubbish on the page.
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, from which the above quote is taken, is as good an example as any in Dylan’s catalogue of a song that had an enormous cultural impact not because the words were separate to the music but because the lyrics functioned as part of a larger artefact. Musically, the song borrowed a lot from Chuck Berry’s 1956 single ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ and a bit from Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie. A big part of Dylan’s significance in the ’60s was his amalgamation of rock and folk styles, and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was the sound of this. It was the opening track to his album Bringing It All Back Home (1965), which was the first that he recorded using electric guitar.
Some listeners felt that Dylan’s switch from acoustic to amplified instruments was a betrayal. Folk was the music of the people, authentic and political, while rock and pop were the sound of vulgar commercialisation, or so the argument went. But folk enthusiasts faced a problem: commercial music forms were the more genuinely popular. Dylan grasped this. The effectiveness of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ had everything to do with the swaggering, gutsy arrangement and Dylan’s mordant vocal; if folk music was defined by its wholeheartedness, then this was something else, and it sounded much cheekier.
Dylan also recognised the visual potency of pop culture. ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was one of the first songs to be accompanied by a promotional film clip, shot in black-and-white by the documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, who used it as the opening sequence for his tour film about Dylan, Don’t Look Back, released in 1967. Dylan stands in an alleyway, holding up cue cards to the camera, and on the cue cards are handwritten fragments of the song’s lyrics, along with some deliberate misdirections. It’s funny because of the gap between what we hear and what we read, with the cue cards – ‘Bed, But’, ‘Man Whole’ – making absurd snippets out of what, in song form, is an unbroken diatribe. And then there is Dylan’s deadpan expression, his natty waistcoat, his nimbus of bohemian curls: oh yes, he understood the power of an image.
I’m not convinced that awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature does anything to expand the parameters of literature. Instead, I think that by dragging Dylan into the realm of the literary, by emphasising lyrics as a writing and reading practice rather than a verbal and musical one, we lose what is interesting about him as a performer, and what is compelling about pop music as a whole.
Judgements regarding literary worth and posterity tend to assume that what is valuable about literature are those qualities in it that cannot be wholly measured by the marketplace, and this is good and right. But pop music is an art form that depends upon commodification. There’s no getting around that. It relies on mass distribution and advertising (and, decreasingly, on mass manufacture), on the association between buyer and seller, and on the allure of the star system, which is a key part of what is being bought and sold.
Some of the most evocative, transformative and brilliant pop musicians have addressed the tensions between art and commerce in their work. (Dylan certainly has.) But the tension is inherent to the form, uniquely so. Not even cinema, which is expensive and cumbersome to make and to distribute, and has therefore often been tied to the fortunes of commercial studios, is quite so enmeshed with the existence of consumer capitalism. Indeed, sophisticated systems for cinematic production have existed outside of capitalist economies – Soviet Russian cinema is the paradigmatic example. But pop music? Pop music trades in the effects produced by consumer capitalism: alienation from our labour, estrangement from our desires, isolation from any real sense of community. Literature (or cinema) might make subjects out of these conditions, but can and does function without them. Not so pop music. This is the form’s power, and its limitation.
When I lived in New York, I came to love the various ways in which pop music shaped the collective life of the city, attuning its inhabitants to one another. It meant that eight million of us were
sharing a cultural location, alongside a physical one. From my tiny bedroom which faced onto a busy Brooklyn street, I could pick out the hit songs and about-to-be-hits by the regularity with which I heard them being played from passing cars. ‘Bad Romance’ was one of them. The song was unusual, in the context of an American musical landscape that had weathered more than thirty years of hip-hop’s loping rhythms, for sounding so stiff. It had no funk at all. The song’s rigid beat and grimy, synthesised bassline created a mood that was industrial, almost android. This strange impression was only heightened by the song’s video clip, in which Lady Gaga and her dancers emerged from coffin-like pods, like a cluster of aliens.
In October 2009, when ‘Bad Romance’ was released, the unemployment rate in the US hit 10.1 per cent, the highest in decades. Hopelessness was in the air. ‘I want your ugly, I want your disease,’ sang Gaga. Like all truly effective pop stars, she both mirrored an existing social mood and modelled a refutation of it. In her songs, malfunction and inadequacy were cherished. Her fans took to calling themselves ‘little monsters’, which suggested a negation of prevailing systems but also a robust, fighting appetite. I want.
How tedious it is, then, when pop stars descend to the level of politicians, costuming themselves in the approbation of institutional power. Political endorsements, knighthoods, Nobel Prizes: just say no. There was Gaga, speechifying for Hillary Clinton on the final night of the US presidential campaign. ‘Hillary Clinton is made of steel,’ she said, which might make an interesting line in a song, but fell flat as a real-world observation of Clinton’s character. Politics is remote and abstract, in so far as the machinations of power feel like something that we have little or no ability to alter. But pop music holds out the promise – an elusive, illusory promise – of transformation, and of transcendence, through means of total delight.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 34