Goldsmiths
Henry Bond was born in Upton Park, in East London in 1966. He attended Goldsmiths at the University of London, graduating in 1988, from the Department of Art, with fellow alumni Angela Bulloch, Ian Davenport, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume and Michael Landy...each of whom was to participate in the YBA art scene. Bond attended Middlesex University in Hendon studying for an MA in Psychoanalysis, where he was taught by Lacan scholar Bernard Burgoyne. Bond was a research student at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham Spa, England between 2004—07; he received a doctorate in 2007.
East Country Yard
In 1990, working together with Sarah Lucas, Henry Bond organized the "seminal" Docklands warehouse exhibition of contemporary art East Country Yard Show which was influential in the formation and development of the YBA art movement. In July 1990, reflecting on the East Country Yard Show and Gambler...a concurrent Goldsmiths-oriented warehouse show...in The Independent, art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon said, "over the past few months ... in terms of ambition, attention to display and sheer bravado there has been little to match such shows in the country's established contemporary art institutions."
Exhibit A
In 1991 Bond was invited by Julia Peyton-Jones to select an exhibition for the Serpentine Gallery; a curatorial project that became the May 7...June 7, 1992, exhibition Exhibit A...a show on the theme of evidence and the scene-of-the-crime. One of the works on view was a slide-installation, shown in a darkened room, by artist Mat Collishaw, which presented the viewer with a rapid-fire sequence of stills of Jodie Foster dancing as she appeared in the "rape scene", in Jonathan Kaplan's 1988 movie The Accused. Writing in Volume II of the exhibition catalogue, art historian Ian Jeffrey said, "Exhibit A crystallises a turning in the art world away from the egotistical celebrity mode towards impersonality ... its premises are anonymous, fluent, vertiginous, wary of values."
Selector and screenings
In 1990, Henry Bond and fashion photographer Richard Burbridge guest edited a double issue of Creative Camera showcasing emerging British photographers..."The New New" issue, October-November 1990; the selection they made included the first published examples of photo-based artworks by Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst. Bond's collaboration with the magazine continued as an ongoing series of artists' pages that ran as "openers"...appearing on the inside front cover and contents page. One spread, created by Hirst, depicted the mutilated corpse of a young man with wounds to the eyes, and was captioned 'Damien Hirst: Fig. 60 Self-inflicted injuries...'; another introduced Fairhurst's self-portrait 'Man Abandoned by Colour.'
In 1993 through 1995, Bond organized a series of screenings of experimental film and video, Omron TV. The screenings were presented in bookable-by-the-hour Soho film preview theatres...including De Lane Lea (Dean Street) and The Soho Screening Rooms (D'Arblay Street); the project included presentations of works by Merlin Carpenter, the German artist Lothar Hempel, and the Slovenians Aina Smid and Marina Grzinic.
Visual Art Practice more less
Appropriation and pastiche
During the 1990s, Bond made numerous artworks which used appropriated visual material; in particular a series titled One Hour Photo which presented typical snapshots collected from wastebins of High Street photo-processing labs, across London. Bond also exhibited a collaboration with artist Sam Taylor-Wood, titled 26 October 1993, in which he pastiched the role of John Lennon as he had appeared naked, in a photo-portrait with Yoko Ono...shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz...a few hours before he was assassinated. In 1995, Bond was included in a group exhibition at the ICA, in London, titled Institute of Cultural Anxiety, in which he presented all the archival material from the vaults concerning the events at an experimental gig by Einstürzende Neubauten which took place at the ICA in January 1984, and during which the group used jackhammers to drill into the stage. Examples of Bond's work were included in several museum exhibitions, such as Brilliant! a survey of YBA art held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995, and Traffic, an exhibition introducing the Relational Aesthetics tendency, which took place at musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, through February and March, 1996.
Video works
In 1993, Bond's short video work OTB was included in that year's "Aperto" section of the Venice Biennale...a survey of international contemporary art. The short...which was looped and shown on a multi-screen system...showed grainy black-and-white footage documenting a flâneur's-eye-view of the day-to-day coming and going aboard the plethora of crowded "Vaporetti" or water buses, in Venice; Bond's deliberately down-to-earth perspective depicting humdrum daily life in the city was intended to oppose the iconic glamorized images of gondolas, etc. Bond's video works were included in the 1995 Biennale de Lyon survey exhibition. Between 1993 and 1994, "Bond made eight hours of video footage documenting his walks along the river Thames, resulting in a 26-minute film shown at the Design Museum, reformatted as inserts on Channel One, and finally as a book of stills, Deep, Dark Water."
From July through September 1994, Bond's video works were showcased in an eponymous four-person exhibition at De Appel an art centre in Amsterdam...i.e., Deep, Dark Water (1994), Torch (1993), On the Buses (1993), Hôtel Occidental (1993), Big Shout (1993), The Burglars (1992/4), The Softly Softly (1994), Walked (1994)...which was selected and organised by curator Saskia Bos (now Dean of The School of Art at The Cooper Union, in New York). However, writing in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud said, "video, for example, is nowadays becoming a predominant medium. But if Peter Land, Gillian Wearing and Henry Bond, to name just three artists, have a preference for video recording, they are still not 'video artists'. This medium merely turns out to be the one best suited to the formalisation of certain activities and projects."
Fashion photography
In the late-1990s and early-2000s, Bond contributed fashion editorial stories to The Face, i-D, Self Service, Purple and the now defunct Nova. One fashion photograph made by Bond, originally published in the March 2000 issue of The Face, depicted the model Kirsten Owen revealing her panties in a manner typical of the derided and recently criminalized (e.g., in USA and Australia) voyeuristic Uppie or Upskirter. In 2001, Bond was chosen by company director Roger Saul to photograph the commercial advertising campaign for a brand relaunch of Mulberry, a leather goods company...for which he used actors and celebrity couple David Thewlis and Anna Friel, as models. In 2008, examples of Bond's fashion photographs from this period were included in an international survey exhibition of contemporary photography selected by Urs Stahel, Darkside: Photographic Desire and Sexuality Photographed, held at Fotomuseum Winterthur...the Swiss national museum and collection of photography.
The Cult of the Street
Bond's large book, The Cult of the Street, was published in 1998 by "posh West End gallery," Emily Tsingou Gallery, London. The 274 photographs included in the book depict daily life in London, the British capital, in the mid-1990s. The fashion writer and commentator, Tamsin Blanchard, described the book as, "a rich social document of the way we dress...rather than the way fashion designers like to imagine we dress". Many of the photographs included in the book were originally taken by Bond whilst shooting commissioned features for the now defunct fashion, style and culture monthly The Face...during the period it was under the creative direction of Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding, 1995...1999. The book includes a foreword essay, "A Response to the Photographs," by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader. It has been suggested that the title of the book is a reference to the 1926 Siegfried Kracauer essay The Cult of Distraction.
Writing in his commentary on the influence of the YBAs or Britart artists, High Art Lite, the art historian Julian Stallabrass said, "The Cult of the Street is telling of many characteristics of High Art Lite and its engagement with mass culture and the media. It takes as its subject not just the conventions of the street but youth and their modes of display in shops, clubs, parties, restaurants and even private homes ... they don't do much, Bond's people; they shop, of course, persistently, and present themselves to each other and the camera, dance sometimes, but the book is composed above all of an intricate fabric of exchanged glances and gazes." Writing in Art Monthly, critic David Barrett said, "values and meanings are constantly on the slide, be they the meaning of wearing brown instead of black, Airwalk instead of Airmax or including the subject's shoes in full-length photographs instead of cropping them. Bond sets out to document these fleeting social codes while also attempting to ride roughshod over the accepted conventions of photography." Several years later, in 2002, a group of large-scale printed examples from The Cult of the Street were included in the Barbican Centre survey Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970 and these were shown again, in 2004, at the Museum of London, in an exhibition titled, The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk.
Documents Series with Liam Gillick
Between 1990 and 1994, Bond collaborated with artist Liam Gillick on their Documents Series a group of eighty-three fine art works which appropriated the modus operandi of a news gathering team, in order to produce relational art. In order to make the work the duo posed as a news reporting team...i.e., a photographer and a journalist...often attending events scheduled in the Press Association's Gazette...a list of potentially newsworthy events in London. Bond worked as if a typical photojournalist, joining the other press photographers present; whilst Gillick operated as the journalist, first collecting the ubiquitous Press kit before preparing his audio recording device. The series was first shown commercially in 1991, at Karsten Schubert Limited and then, in 1992, at Maureen Paley's Interim Art ...two of the galleries that were pioneers in the development of the YBA art movement. The series was subsequently exhibited at Tate Modern, in the show Century City held in 2001, and at the Hayward Gallery, in the exhibition How to Improve the World, in 2006.
Street photography
Beginning in the late-1990s, and continuing for approximately ten years, Bond's chief activity was street photography...which has been discussed in relation to the dérive (literally: "drifting"), as theorized by Guy Debord and the city walks of the flâneur or psychogeographer. Monograph books of Bond's street photography include Point and Shoot (Ostfildern: Cantz, 2000), La vie quotidienne (Essen, Germany: 20/21, 1999) and Interiors Series (Antwerp: Fotomuseum, 2005). Characterizing his conception of street photography, in a 1998 interview, Bond said: "it is parallel to the psychoanalytic session, in that anything can be mentioned, anything can come up and indeed what seems too minor or too stupid is precisely the key to something significant. Like the urban flow of pedestrians and traffic, it really doesn't matter what passes through, because what is important is how you are perceiving the events. And that is often divergent from any initial aim or strategy."
Point and Shoot
Bond's book of street photography Point and Shoot, was published by Hatje Cantz, a German publisher, in 2000. It won Bond a Kodak Deutscher Fotobuchpreis in the same year. The many images reproduced in the book rely on photo-techniques associated with genres of photography that are often derided or taboo, such as voyeurism, surveillance, and paparazzi photojournalism...hence the book emphasizes the photographer as intrusive, vulgar, prying, a nuisance.
Writing in The Japan Times, in 2000, journalist Jennifer Purvis said, "Bond elicits a film noir quality from a city that prides itself on the worst side of its nature. It is contemporary London in all its banality and beauty, portrayed in heavy, highly contrasted black-and-white photographs that evoke nostalgia more keenly than an old movie ... the images all speak of the life, London life, captured by a peering, voyeuristic Londoner." Reviewing the book in Frieze, the critic Benedict Seymour said, "Bond jumbles up his subjects...street scenes, shop windows, night-clubs, posh parties, backstage fashion shows, intimate portraits and sex club sybaritics...as well as the composition, with the apparent intention of throwing our will to categorise, and so comprehend the image, into disarray." Printed examples from the book were exhibited in both commercial and museum gallery exhibitions, including a survey...selected and organized by curator Eric Troncy...which was on display at the contemporary arts centre Le Consortium in Dijon, France, March through May, 1999.
Bond's follow up Interiors Series was published in Belgium, in 2005, by Fotomuseum Antwerp. The photographs included in the book explicitly and deliberately invade the privacy of the subjects, who are captured...unaware of the presence of a photographer...at leisure, in their private dwellings. Writing in an essay accompanying the photographs, Bond said, "for me voyeuristic 'fixation' and the 'photographic act' have become inseparable. It is the sense of 'the illicit' that these photographs are leveraging. I must not be caught taking them, and in a way, the viewer of the photograph is included in my anti-social activity, they too are looking when they should not be."
Lacan at the Scene more less
Lacan at the Scene is a work of non-fiction by Henry Bond, published in 2009 by The MIT Press. The book consists of annotations of police photographs from twenty-one murder scenes from the nineteen fifties, in England. It is simultaneously an application of the theories of Jacques Lacan in relation to forensic investigation and an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography. The book considers the effects of photography on the spectator, the photographer and the photographic "subject". The book contains a foreword essay The Camera's Posthuman Eye by the Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj ?i?ek. Bond refers to a wide range of contextual material in his "investigatory process," including: "J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj ?i?ek ... and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others." Many of the photographs reproduced in the book are sexually explicit...they depict murder victims who were raped or tortured before the killing. Describing his research, in a 2007 interview, Bond said, "the press reporter's access to a crime scene is restricted, it is literally blocked by the ubiquitous black and yellow tape emblazoned with the exhortation: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The photographs that I have worked with are documents made in a place that the press photographer or reporter cannot go."
Critical reception
The critical reception of the book includes Emily Nonko's observation that, "Lacan at the Scene ultimately presents a complex dynamic between both psychoanalysis and medium of the camera, the way that photography permits the viewer to delve into both the murder’s mind and the victim’s corpse, the psychological as well as the corporeal." Daniel Hourigan, writing for Metapsychology Online Reviews said, "for the vast majority of the discussions in the more applied third, fourth, and fifth chapters, Lacan at the Scene enjoys a lucid and precise execution. The early chapters help to bring together the theoretical, discursive, and political elements that make these later chapters capable of pursuing such a rigorous and insightful project." Writing in Time Out New York, Parul Sehgal said: "While Bond’s interpretations occasionally strain credulity, his sensibility enthralls. His goal isn’t police work per se, but to reveal how humble objects at the margins of crime scenes become powerfully allusive and lend themselves to a narrative." Writing in the peer-reviewed academic journal Philosophy of Photography, Margaret Kinsman said "Bond’s exploration ... reminds us of just how used to order we are and how shocking and easy its dissolution is ... his approach evokes a kind of aesthetic pleasure, which unsettles even as it satisfies."
