Luminous

If Purcell or Buxtehude had collaborated with Vermeer or George de la Tour, could they have created a hybrid art form to rival the masterpieces of Baroque opera? Even such geniuses would be severely limited by the mechanics of their media. But the ways that the arts are delivered to audiences have since been enlarged by technology so that two great artists of our own time, Bill Henson and Richard Tognetti, can present a collaboration in a format that the Old Masters could only have imagined.

Luminous was first performed in 2005, and again last year at Slovenia's Maribor Festival, of which Tognetti is artistic director. The voice this year is jazz songstress Katie Noonan. "When Richard first approached me with a proposal that we might do 'something' together, neither of us, I think, had any idea of what that might be," Henson recalls by email. Agreeing on pieces for Tognetti to perform with his Australian Chamber Orchestra wasn't difficult (they include Britten, Piazzolla and Janácek), but what images should Henson add, how, when and where? "It came to me quite suddenly: I would use a movie camera to film my still photographs – preserving the evidence of the original work whilst through the movement of the camera, echoing the passage of music in time."

The project seems an incongruous clash of characteristics: the brilliant and decisive movement of string players standing on their feet, and behind them on a screen in the darkness Henson's frozen, uncertain, moments drawing out buried emotions. But the resulting work is unsettlingly successful. "With images, things become more liquid, more dream-like and trance-like," Tognetti says.

Henson's imagery – cloudscapes, shadowy urban wastelands and adolescent figures – move glacially, while the ACO's strings wail and plead, sometimes with a plaintive voice and lyrics added. "At times you're not sure what you're looking at," Tognetti says. "You think it's something industrial, then the camera pulls back to reveal a person, naked or otherwise." There are also long passages in darkness, where Henson chose to add no image.

As a conductor Tognetti is used to setting the pace for his audience, something photographers can't do.  "When you walk through an art gallery there are so many people that you may not look at something or not take the time to absorb it," he says. "What we've done is to make this visual artwork time-dependent, so we tell the viewer how long they will spend. We're able to create an architecture that transcends the normal art gallery experience."

Tognetti has a passion for the shadows of Henson. "The most exquisite things about Henson's images is that in this sun-drenched, bushfire-fried land, they're so dark," he says. "We need to explore dark in this country. Just facing a simple dark space is not very Australian."

Henson says he shares with Tognetti "an ongoing and deep concern for the fate of the arts in this country. In Australia it sometimes seems as if culture has a rather tenuous grasp on the landscape and, like the topsoil, is fairly thin and easily blown away – either by fashion, by political expediency, or perhaps an pernicious combination of the two. What I want here is a place that is safe for art which comes, as it must in the end, through the medium of love and as a form of compassion."

Tognetti sees love and wanting at the core of art. "I think that everything in Henson, and everything in good art, there is a desiring quality: you want to inhabit that space. Henson is a genius because he deals with these things that we're not very good at communicating verbally. The Anglo spirit and mind shudders, quite simply shudders, when it's aware of the tingling presence of Eros, so when they see something like this they immediately put it in the same category of illicit, immoral and therefore to be banned. It's not about the ridiculous, blathering, moronic response in the tabloids; it's to do with aesthetics. There's no valid currency to discuss that in the political arena. The only question there should be about harm and legal issues. And there has been no harm."

Luminous plays at the State Theatre on Fri 3 and Sat 4 Apr.

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