Raphael Rubinstein 2001 (New York)
The most obvious thread running through Simon Henwood's wide range of creative endeavours is his interest in childhood and adolescence. Over the last dozen years, as he has moved among different mediums and shifting forms of diffusion, Henwood has remained focused on youth, it's experiences and consequences. Take, for instance, his gouache portraits, which have been shown recently at the ICA in London, Bronwyn Keenan Gallery in New York, and Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. These large, generally close-up views, which look to have been partly painted with nail polish, show mostly girls and boys in early adolescence. Their faces range form the postulant and wary (Daniel Age 14 Manchester) to the observant and vulnerable (Sophie Age 14 London to the rambunctious (Joey Age 14 Las Vegas). It seems no accident that the figures ages are specified in the titles of the paintings. Those numbers not only tell us that Henwood is acutely conscious of how old his subjects are but also remind us of the utter distinctiveness of each year of teenage development (think how little sense it would make to give the specific age of sitters in their thirties or forties). What's also striking about these portraits is how straightforward they are, not only in their style, which updates the poster like brightness of Alex Katz' s paintings with photographic detail and emotional nuance, but also in their obvious concern with capturing an individual face and personality. Paying more attention to the identities of his subjects than to what they might represent, Henwood doesn't submit these teenagers to any obvious artistic editorialising, nor does he seek to subsume their individuality into a world of media constructs.
Henwood has been exploring the nonadult world since the late 1980s, when he authored a series of children's books that were issued by prestigious New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Typical of these is A Piece of Luck (1990), an economically conveyed, visually dynamic parable of a man who is defeated by his own greed, the projects Henwood next undertook were less conventional. In 1993 he launched an illustrated periodical called Purr, which included contributions from figures such as erotic photographer Richard Kern and underground musician/author Henry Rollins. That year he founded a record label that issued recordings by musicians such as Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop, and he produced and directed Alice, a short film with a score by British punk-pioneer-turned-film-score-composer Barry Adamson. Since then Henwood has started a magazine (also names Alice) that chronicles how childhood is represented in art and the media and has become a publisher of artist's books and an occasional exhibition curator. He's even turned his have to designing wallpaper. For the last several years he has also been working intensively (as creator, coproducer and cowriter) on the project that is the focus of this exhibition, the animated film Johnny Pumpkin.
In the tradition of George Orwell's 1984 and Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, Johnny Pumpkin depicts a future gone awry, a dystopia that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the world in which we live today. The tale being told, via lightening quick graphics, is a dark one of capitalist exploitation, environmental disaster, and rampant fear, in which a gang of mis-fit kids battle an evil tycoon bent on world domination. Henwood brings new life, and biting humour, to this familiar scenario through his gift for creating striking characters and placing them within a world that is fully imagined and deeply bizarre. His marvellously strange inventions, such as the galloping draffesî that can be turned inside out, effectively capture children' s zany conceptual capabilities and their sometimes not-so-latent cruelty. Also enriching this singular cartoon are the subtle cultural references woven into the narrative. These range from the characters carefully calibrated English and American accents to the illusion of low budget monster films, a snippet of music lifted from Japanese cult faves Pizzicato Five, and visual echoes of British pop artists like Peter black and Patrick Caulfield. One of the interesting issues raised by much of Henwoods work and by Johnny Pumpkin in particular, if that of audience. While adolescence is a frequent theme in contemporary art - from Rineke Dijkstra' s photos of awkward kids at the beach to Amy Adler' s portraits of herself as a troubled teen to Takashi Murakami' s anime- and manga-inspired sculptures and paintings - little of this work has been targeted to adolescents themselves. It is, rather, aimed at the adults who frequent art galleries, visit museums, and read art magazines. As engaged as they might be by the subject of adolescence, the artists in question apparently have little interest in communicating through their work with the subjects of that work. From his early children' s books to Johnny Pumpkin, Henwood, by contrast, has proven his desire top establish a dialogue with a nonadult audience.
Critic Christian Haye has taken this artist' s multifarious activities as evidence that our society is quickly approaching that blissfully egalitarian moment when the mixture of culture and commerce isn' t an indicator of compromise. Another way of understanding Henwood' s wide-ranging entrepreneurial energy might be as a continuation of the child' s unbridled enthusiasm, a refusal to adopt the single-mindedness we take to be the sign of the responsible adult.
Some have speculated that contemporary society is obsessed with children because, in the words of Harvard' s Kiku Adatto, all the barriers between childhood and adulthood are breaking down, and we' re really unsure where this leads.î Are we, in fact, witnessing the rollback of the invention of childhoodî that accompanied the Enlightenment? Certainly - to cite a few striking developments - images of children in advertising and popular culture are becoming increasingly sexualised, and there is pressure on the U.S. justice system to prosecute minors who commit serious crimes (itself a growing problem) as adults. Simultaneously we hear reports of a rise in the early onset of puberty and menstruation, and we see school children subjected to mounting academic pressure and technological training at ever-younger ages. Henwood's work is fully cognisant of the anxiety and exploitation that currently surround childhood. At the same time, he reminds us that, even in a media-saturated society, even if the old myth of innocence has collapsed, childhood should remain a subject for celebration, not least because of its ability to function as a round-the-clock factory for the imagination.
Raphael Rubinstein is a senior editor at Art in America.
Christian Haye 2000 (New York)
Suburbia used to be the best place for resistance. The myth of conformity was the space where we were nonconformist. The creation, dissection and our attempted destruction of that space could be accepted as the industrial strength narrative of the twentieth century. The battle of normalcy has itself become mainstream. Later for suburbia that took too long. The same war happens instantaneously in cyberspace and it is won and lost in the blink of an eye. This is an age so dependent on recycling that yesterday's rebellion becomes tomorrows fashion at an astonishing speed. In the western world a new millennium has brought with it a tragic question. With no opposition to seemingly anything, what is there left to rebel against? Simon Henwood is no the answer (unless you're that bored) but Henwood ecstatically reanimates the question. A painter of spoiled adolescents and humanoid blobs, an illustrator of sanguine gothics tales for children, an animator of fantastical visions of worlds eerily like this one but not close, a publishers of indie magazines that bring together the cacophony of voices that hover between the marginal and the traditional, a collector of high and low cultural artefacts and an ever growing media presence who neither bites nor strokes the hands that are feeding the uber-producer: Simon Henwood.
To begin to unravel Henwood' s cultural production would probably induce the schizophrenia that might appear to be at the roof of that production. But Henwood is actually very simply stated a saviour of the root of that production. Melancholy mixed with spurts of joy and exaltation attempting to break out the coffin of boredom in that oft related tale of pubescent angst. What Henwood does brilliantly is locate that angst to the pint that an 80 year old will feel it as if it were acne, and the endless quest for something new to do was a disease of the elderly and not the young. In the paintings we discover mellifluous snapshots of all the moments that define this stage paired with anthropomorphic realisations of those moments. They bring a delicate balance of horror and seduction that Henwood will then spin out into narrative. In Johnny Pumpkin for example a creature seems to exist solely to tempt children with an orifice that one they enter they turn said creature inside out. What lurks in the mind of the madman is eerily similar to what is lurking in the mind of everyman. In Henwood' s entire opus the evidence of everything is gingerly peppered about.
Accessing the pop culture database is a mammoth task and Henwood is a maestro. References collide like American trains throughout all the narrative work. Star Trek, Johnny Quest, Ed Gorey. Men in Black, the Betty Pages, Kirby (both Jack and the Nintendo icon), manga and Steven Spielberg all sit comfortably in the tableau of Johnny Pumpkin for example. The encyclopaedic knowledge it would take to read all of the references would make Derrida happy but also serve to point out the populist sentiment at the heart of this body of work. Unlike some of his colleagues however Henwood isn' t simply borrowing the culture but his conscious choice of diversifying his output to include comics and television, let' s say, as well as paintings separate him from the herd. This is also why the books, especially the catalogue for Spoilt Children and White Kitten, prove so invaluable. They contextualize the work in a normally problematic format: reproduction. The interesting thing about Henwood is that the reproduction provides simply another opportunity to read the work instead of a shadow of the original.
Larry Clarke and Takashi Murakami come to mind when musing the production of Simon Henwood. Clark' s investigations of childhood sexuality have brought him to the edge of America's fascist moralism. In Europe, for the most part, kids are acknowledged as sexual beings. While the women in Henwood's labour and not solely relegated to babeland, it is not unusual to find a Betty Page type lurking around not so casually forever emasculating a pure excuse for masculinity. Murakami' s cultural output comes from the same self-produced hyper-machine that Henwood must access. Murakami produces his own line of manga inspired sculptures crossed with an anime X-rated presence which finds women playing jump rope with their own breast milk or boys using their cum as lassoes. So innocent is the boy! Henwood has yet to go so hardcore preferring to maintain the bubble of fragility that softcore embodies. Although, I've seen the naughty bits lying around his flat and would not be surprised if a Henwood red light district pops up somewhere in his universe.
From Damien Hurst to Puff Daddy is has become evident that the best way to leave cultural production untainted by the big machine is to be ones own machine. The unrealised potential of the Internet as a place where anyone can be anything has already been diluted by the fact that very few people want to be everything. The next millennium is not about artists as cultural producers but cultural producers who make art. A breakdown of class structure is inherent in the elevation of mass entertainment and the devaluation of the temples of culture. This is the age of hypernation. One role is no longer enough if ever it was. The misnomer of Renaissance man applies to Henwood in only the capacity of someone who does many things. The reality of the situation is that Henwood is doing the same thing in all available formats. Visually narrating the moment just before that boring switch gets turned and we become adults (some of us, anyway). Sometimes this will call for a painting and sometimes and elaborate animation. Typographic interventions carry the same weight as bold brushstrokes fraught with the weight of philosophic dilemmas in a true democracy. We are quickly approaching that blissfully egalitarian moment when the mixture of culture and commerce isn' t and indicator of compromise. The future is Henwood. Open up and swallow it.
Christian Haye is a contributor to Frieze magazine and curator based in LA and New York
Mikato Saito 1999 (Tokyo)
One pop girl' s group made a million in the music industry with their commercial pop-movie - it went on a road show last spring, and next season, it was sold as a video in the shops. This year, however, they had already stopped working as a group and started on their own solo careers. When an important person dies, the world has a moment to express its grief, though after a month the death will be forgotten in society as if nothing has happened before. The newest blockbuster SFX movies are made and flooded everywhere by the rapid endless development in technology that consists of perfectly analysed data from the past. The most brutal crime ever is frequently reported all over the world, and it is like the creation of world records won by athletes.
On the other hand, the world has now started compressing the history of human beings which is almost 2000 years too much. The Cyberspace environment, for example, the Internet, eventually turns an individuals brain into an Internet terminal. Information has become accessible in an instant anywhere in the world, and when it is not necessary any more you can get rid of it at the push of a button. Everything becomes compact and pragmatic in Cyberspace, and because of that we find it difficult to dream in out world. Digital technology has plundered mystery in the world and all events are categorised like data in a library. Through that step the world is decreasing more and more. It does not even miss capturing and dissolving the expanding history
You are the media - it is the only one way of not being sunk or disappearing amongst the digital age but to live as vivid individuals. It is important not to fit yourself into a stereotype but to make yourself as media which is not anyone or anyone else.
Simon Henwood is a good example of a talented artist who keeps creating work ideally in the idea of self-media art. His works are very much related to something very dark and black. Alice - is the art comic magazine that decodes life and death - icons in children' s picture books understood from a subcultural context. Poor Johnny Pumpkin - the story of a boy called Johnny Pumpkin whose skin is not strong enough against the UV light and so he only can play with his friends in the shadows. Purr - is a visual magazine that defines crime as a pop culture as if it is the same as pop music.
Yet, what makes Simon's ideas in his art new is that because he does not used disliked images of life and death. He successfully combines the darkness and hip together. Fuck, death and more pop! - these words, his internal slogan, are distinguishing Simon Henwood from hundreds of other underground artists. The sensitivity in his memory of his childhood also has an inevitable effect on his art world.
In the last three to four years, creators from my generation, tend to look back at their own childhood. For example, Hero from the children's TV programme in the '70s has become a popular character for TV commercials now. By looking at them, we can experience the same emotion and feeling. It is because what we already have in our memory that it gives us a stronger message/impact (excerpt from H magazine, March 1998 Japan).
This phenomenon is not only in the UK but also in the USA and Japan. For example, the fact that the young audience for Austin Powers all over the world, can share, understand and enjoy the humour of a parody of ' 007. This shows the fact of a common memory amongst young people whose experiences have been created by the media. It is a typical phenomenon in the decreasing
world. This art book, White Kitten, describes/shows the portraits of these mediarised young people captured in cool-downed brush strokes. It' s still the models who have an uneasy expression and anxiety in their eyes towards the world. We won' t be absorbed by the media! - young models' silent message, it is the best concept of the self-media artist, Simon Henwood.
Mikato Saito is editor-in-chief 'H' magazine. Tokyo, 30th July 1999.