$76.70
- Hardcover
- 120 pages
- 295 x 295 mm
- ISBN 9781913288655
- 2023
The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new book The Liquid Night, derive from work the highly acclaimed artist shot on 35mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989. They present a kaleidoscopic, nocturnal journey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.
They were shot as formal 35mm frames and served as images in quest of an artistic resolution which Bill Henson became besotted with and which he has now resolved in digital terms creating a compendium of new art which is a recapitulation of a world that has vanished like an all but forgotten dream that tugs at the mind as a set of animated emblems that no longer exist in contemporary reality.
They revisit in the artist’s memory –– and as strange images in the spectator’s –– a world that is the instantiation of time lost and only to be recaptured by the restored function of memory.
It’s many years now since the art critic the late Peter Schjeldahl (who wrote so eloquently of Bill Henson’s work) began a lecture by announcing that Eric Fischl might just be the first great painter of the decline of American civilization. And that wry, all but whimsical pessimism, that bleak joke speaks to Bill Henson with the extraordinary uncanny sense of loss these images disclose. Where are the snows of yesteryear, where is anything, where is everything? It’s all gone, and the technology is gone. The very idiom of the world recollected in The Liquid Nighthas disappeared. The ads shown here are for cassette tapes.
"This is the work of a photographer of genius recreating the discardable mystery of his past."
-Peter Craven
