The images in Bill Henson's cinematic book The Liquid Night come from work the acclaimed artist photographed on 35 mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989. They form a kaleidoscopic nocturnal journey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a vanished America.
“Made as formal 35 mm frames, these pictures awaited an artistic resolution that fascinated Bill Henson. He has now found it digitally, creating a compendium of new art that recapitulates a world faded like an almost-forgotten dream. It haunts the mind as an array of animated emblems that no longer exist in contemporary reality.
“They revisit, in the artist's memory—and as strange images in the viewer's—a world that embodies lost time, recoverable only through memory's restorative function.
“Think of a hypnotic moment. A jazz bar near Washington Square. The gin and tonic brought to you like a ritual, the sacrament of an ancient religion, and the way you were moved so Tony Bennett could sit closer to the piano that captivated him. Then back to the Algonquin, where at midnight, when the doors closed, you had to negotiate with the bellhop, whose hair turned grey and then white, and with Matilda, the seemingly eternal cat, from the autumn of an era into the winter of old age.
“Originally, the idea was a collage. Now, in The Liquid Night, the picture pages possess their own intelligibility, belonging to the past. Sometimes they are organised through enlargement. Only in recent years did Henson realise how they could be shown. He came to appreciate their detail, their iconoclasm and the ways they converged. At first, no solution occurred to him. Gradually, it became clear that he had to show the negatives to leave a trace of the life that once existed. Moving through the images, sometimes in extreme close-up, he rediscovered that it was the extraordinary beauty of film itself that he wanted to reproduce.
“It was a version of Francis Bacon's familiar epiphany: the discovery of the artist's characteristic, self-defining form. The apparition took the shape of an untamed extreme of nostalgia, the kind that haunts Tarkovsky, intense and unfathomable. Bradley's jazz bar no longer exists; only its ghostly silhouette remains, forever inseparable from a sense of loss.
“Many years have passed since art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who wrote so eloquently about Henson, began a lecture by suggesting that Eric Fischl might be the first great painter of American civilisation's decline. That wry, almost whimsical pessimism—that desolate joke—speaks to Henson through the extraordinary, mysterious sense of loss these images reveal. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where is anything, where is everything? All is gone, and the technology is gone too. The very language of the world remembered in The Liquid Night has disappeared. The advertisements shown here are for cassette tapes.
“This is the work of a brilliant photographer recreating the disposable mystery of his past.”
— Peter Craven
