Hellenic Museum CEO John Tatoulis understands what a great privilege it is to have secured these items, which represent key historical developments that have impacted on the world we live in today. Tatoulis says Gods, Myths & Mortals is a locomotive, explaining that locomotives contain a number of carriages also capable of generating interest and activity. This is precisely how he views ONEIROI, a newly commissioned installation from acclaimed Australian photographer Bill Henson.
“I wanted to have a great Australian artist engage with the Benaki artefacts and create something new,” says Tatoulis. “There were a few that came to mind, but Bill Henson was on the top of my list. I’m a huge fan of his work, have been for years, so I got in touch with him, explained what I was hoping to achieve, and it took all of two minutes for him to say yes.”
There are manifold reasons that make ONEIROI a unique installation. Perhaps most significantly, Henson was permitted to get behind the glass cabinets of Gods, Myths & Mortals in order to create original artworks utilising the Benaki antiquities. The millenniums old objects are fascinating in and of themselves. However, it’s no surprise to see that an artist of Henson’s calibre hasn’t simply presented a series of inanimate portraits.
After Tatoulis approached Henson, the artist spent 12 months developing the concept. While Tatoulis stayed in regular contact, he gave Henson freedom to pursue his own conceptual vision. Once he’d honed the idea, Henson required a model to appear in the photographs. A series of auditions proved fruitless, but then Henson spotted a young woman with the perfect look having dinner with her family in a Melbourne restaurant. A conservator flew over from the Benaki Museum to ensure the objects weren’t mistreated during the photo shoot, which was conducted inside the Hellenic Museum (a wonderful Victorian building in Melbourne’s CBD, formerly home to the Melbourne Mint).
ONEIROI gets its name from Greek mythology, and loosely translates to dreams. Tatoulis says the overarching conceptual aim was to depict the “eternal nature of beauty”. Now, the word eternal might be a bit of a stretch, as the understanding of beauty seems somewhat contingent on culturally relative value systems. However, what the Benaki objectsexpose is that our core values – including the appreciation of artistic beauty – remain closely linked to those established in Ancient Greece.
That aside, Henson’s works aren’t centred on purely glorifying the Greek antiquities. The majority of photographs in ONEIROI feature the young female model either wearing or interacting with the Benaki objects – she’s seen in a delicate gold wreath from the 4th-3rd century BCE; wearing beautifully designed gold earrings from 250-200 BCE; drinking from a gold cup from approx. 15th century BCE; and wielding a Turkish knife from 300 years ago. Henson’s interest in gaining intimate connections between the model and the antiquities meant he completely bypassed the exhibition’s Byzantine section, which is largely composed of ecclesiastic artworks. However, to add extra dimension to the installation, he included a few landscape photos he’d taken years earlier.
All of the photographs are successful in blurring the distinction between dreams and reality, having more in common with Georges Seurat’s post-impressionist paintings or J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour landscapes than depictions of unadulterated reality. There is one photo that features the model’s eye looking out at the viewer, but it too conveys a surreal hum.
The model’s age is difficult to discern. She’s young and exudes an air of purity, but she’s not at all childlike. Many photos possess the stillness of a statue, and yet each one gives off a sense of profound intimacy. In the show’s media release Henson says that for him, “Ambiguity is always at the centre of an interesting experience, because this causes us to question, to wonder why a thing holds our attention”, and it’s a sentiment that most definitely applies to ONEIROI.
A crucial function of art is its ability to question established values and provoke feelings that don’t wholly cohere with what we’ve come to understand as right or good, classic or factual. Gods, Myths & Mortals is indeed an enlightening exhibition, however given its strong historical and cultural ties, it’s hugely significant for a daring artist like Bill Henson to have engaged with it. ONEIROI not only shines a different light on some of these antique objects, but also encourages unique emotional responses.
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
