ABC Local Radio 702 is Sydney’s second highest rated radio network, just a few points behind that behemoth of talkback, 2GB. Sally Loane , who hosts the weekday 9am to Midday shift, is a woman who has stamped her personality all over her show – conservative, blinkered and prone to moralizing. Henry Mulholland comes in once a week to talk art and for the most part he talks about painting in a way that would make Sydney Morning Herald readers comfortable – colour, texture, light! – and concentrates on old school, old world galleries and artists. Once in awhile he’ll wander off topic into photography or a big show like the Art Gallery of NSW’s Bill Henson retrospective. That way lays trouble…
SL: [welcoming tone] You’ve been a very busy young lad!
HM: [excited] There’s a fair bit on at the moment. Not least of all the enormous Bill Henson exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW with its 3.6 kilogram catalogue –
SL: [tone changes, darkens] Hmmm.
HM: – accompanying it. You look at the catalogue and you think, my god this is a big show. Not everything in the catalogue is in the exhibition I hasten to add however but it is still an enormous show.
SL: [strained politeness] Now these are the photographs of… adolescents, moody kind of photographs?
HM: That’s right. [A pause, perhaps recognising trouble] A lot of his work from the mid-80s onwards does feature adolescent kids.
SL: [serious] Did he get permission from the local council?
HM: He got permission from the parents I’m told. All the models in the photographs are paid and I don’t know if they’re relatives or friends or whatever… Yes, they do have the recognisable features that have come to pass of the Henson photographs are the ones of the figures. The earlier work did focus a lot on naked figures but they weren’t presented in this Romantic light. The first part of the show is a lot of quite academic studies of male torsos and almost emaciated people. The week I saw the show was the week that marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps –
SL: Hmmm.
HM: – in Poland –
SL: [In background, very serious] Hmmm.
HM: It was a bit of a coincidence there but with all the imagery coming around that anniversary it was quite difficult to separate a lot of that early work from that period, that rather dark period of our history. Later on in the 1980s he [Henson] started creating [the photographs] in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, he goes out in the bush and drags car bodies and things out there and it all gets dramatically lit and he sets up these photographs with these naked youths.
SL: [Sarcastic seriousness] What’s he trying to do? Romanticise youth? Romanticise squalor? Romanticise kids who find themselves… down and out?
HM: He’s getting quite close to Romantic painting. I see him very a much as painter, like that well worn cliché, a painter of light…
[Mulholland goes on to give a fulsome explanation of Henson’s connection to Romantic painting, the Renaissance, Romantic subjects such Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, particular paintings such as The Raft of The Medusa – including its composition, scale, location in the Louvre, treatment and allegorical meanings – and Henson’s collage and Venice Biennale sequences. The explanation lasts some 2 ½ minutes].
SL: Hmmm – yeah. People have divided feelings [about Henson]. I must say I haven’t seen the exhibition and I don’t have much desire to see it, I have to be honest about that, but a lot of people don’t like it and don’t like the images for whatever reason…
HM: It’s not all the naked adolescents… [Scrabbling for something else] There are a lot of… the car crash ones that were first shown at Ros Oxley in the 1980s…
SL: [Deep sarcasm] Jeez, that’d be nice to hang on your wall.
