Bill Henson
Untitled 1983 – 84
6 Dec 1986 – 5 Apr 1987
Drill Hall Gallery
Australian National University
Bill Henson, Untitled 1983/84, 1983-84, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1988.
About
Bill Henson has consistently worked in large series of photographs. Untitled 1983–84 comprises 121 images, all of which are exhibited in this installation by the artist. The photographs on display are in the artist's collection and have been loaned to the Australian National Gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
This exhibition was held at the Australian National University's Drill Hall Gallery.
Brochure exerpt
One needs infinitely distant sentences that one barely understands, as a mainstay over the millennia.
The work might begin with a fleeting impression from first-hand experience or in a piece of music I am always drawn back to or perhaps in a paragraph of writing I cannot forget — and then it takes its own course. I become like a participant in some larger process I happen to be fascinated by. It seems inevitable that at those times when one is most involved in the work one is also most detached. The momentum of things becomes self-sustaining.
Of course one may know, or think one knows, exactly what is required in terms of the tone, the articulation of mood, but all energy lies in the visualization of this. There is no precise moment of beginning any piece of work or of ending it. Particular sequences, collisions of images, thematic harmonies and incongruities start to form and form again. And the work has its own impact — what I end up having produced will never precisely resemble what I imagined much earlier. Nothing is accidental but there must always be room for accidents to occur, where things unforeseen can present themselves.
One always looks for what is necessary, for those elements in the work which the content demands and which are indispensable to its dynamic. Sometimes the most apparently outlandish or exotic thing will prove essential, will become part of the work's own rigour. This may sometimes confuse people who see only the moments of seeming excess and perhaps not the pattern which provides for this. With the work Untitled 1983–84, I wanted to present the images — of architecture, of children — evocatively, in ways that would challenge the viewer's imagination. If the subject is allowed its most full and intimate presence it will never become merely familiar. In any sequence no photograph can be extraneous — the entire series should in fact amount to one 'image' which has been articulated into a complex of images. For this reason I take some trouble over the installation of a work — everything having its place yet the possibilities remaining inexhaustible.
Bill Henson
November 1986
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