The Liquid Night

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Publisher's description

The images in Bill Henson’s new book, The Liquid Night, derive from work he shot on negative film what can seem a lifetime ago in the New York of the late 1980s. 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.

Think of a hypnotic time. A jazz bar near Washington Square. The gin and tonic they would bring you like a ritual, the sacrament of an old-time religion, and the way they would shift you so that Tony Bennett could be closer to the piano which he was obsessed by. And then you would make your way back to the Algonquin and at midnight (because they closed the doors then) you would have to be let in by the bellhop whose hair turned grey, then white and Matilda the cat who endured everlastingly, through the autumn of an age into the winter of senescence.