A Revolution with Harbour Views

So while we're on the topic of the Biennale of Sydney, it turns out I wrote quite a lot about the 2008 edition, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's Revolutions – Forms that turn. I dashed this piece off in the first couple of days for a crazy deadline from Art & Australia, who wanted a quick overview for the Spring 2008 issue. It's chirpier than I remember, but I got snarkier as the show sunk in.

If one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of biennales concerns the format’s complicity with global spectacle culture and local political agendas alike, another is that at the apparently straightforward level of visitor experience, the vast majority of biennales have not been particularly engaging. The practice of biennale curatorship is, after all, a relatively young one, still finding its political and methodological feet. But so too are biennale criticism and spectatorship, practices that continue to struggle with the vastness of the biennale enterprise, both in terms of the scale of individual exhibitions and the apparent limitlessness of their much-discussed proliferation. The attendant phenomenon of ‘biennale fatigue’, an energy-sapping combination of jetlag, overstimulation and critical inertia, has created a demonstrable jadedness toward the format, one that anticipates, and treats as inevitable, viewer disappointment.

Perhaps this is why the mood around Sydney was so buoyant after the opening of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Revolutions — Forms that Turn. Let’s face it: despite numerous high points, no Biennale of Sydney in the past decade has been declared a resounding success by the critical community. Whether resigned to disappointment or suspicious of grand claims, it seems that this time around, the Sydney art world and visitors from around the region have been pleasantly surprised. If initial responses are anything to go by, Christov-Bakargiev’s attempt has at the very least reinvigorated the institution in the local mindset.

Christov-Bakargiev’s much-publicised curatorial intention has been to re-semanticise the word ‘revolution’, problematising its strictly political reading by drawing on its etymological connotations of turning and revolving. While this approach immediately throws up several questions — not least how anyone seriously advocating radical social change at a structural level could view art, and its catalogue of compromises with state and commerce, as an appropriate site to stage a revolution — there is a dynamism with which Christov-Bakargiev invests both senses of the term that is played out in the vitality of her installation.

Crucial to this is her employment of a strategy, last explored in Rene Block’s 1990 Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang, of juxtaposing new and recent efforts by contemporary artists with historical works from certain ‘revolutionary’ periods in the twentieth century. While Block’s biennale constructed a non-linear history based around the iconic figure of the readymade, Revolutions — Forms that Turn seems more directed toward the performative. While it is tempting to view the inclusion of work with kinetic or revolving elements, such as a Tinguely Bascule, Michael Snow’s De La or a rotating canvas by Atsuko Tanaka, as overly literal, they retain an allegorical aspect that is more productive in consideration the real revolutionary impact of avant-garde art, and by extension the social role of art in general, functioning less in terms of tangible social change and more as a performative gesture, a rhetorical rupture in a prevailing symbolic order.

It is this linguistic performativity, rather than the isolated formal operation of turning, that finds the greatest resonance among the contemporary artists in the exhibition — Renata Lucas, for instance, whose use of an outmoded sliding wall system at the Art Gallery of New South Wales subtly disrupts the very fabric of the exhibition, indeed incorporates it into the fabric of her work; or Geoffrey Farmer, presenting a play of sorts in the storage spaces between the MCA’s walls; or Tony Schwensen, appropriately turning sausages outside the Museum of Contemporary Art to implicate the biennale itself in the construction of a class system among artists. Most audacious is Gordon Bennett’s unrealised proposal to include works by Indigenous artists in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s colonial and modern collection hangs.

Such approaches are reflected in the exhibition’s staging. Its installation across all venues is competent yet playful, refreshingly sparse in some places, engagingly chaotic in others, and, in the case of a confronting but timely retrospective of Mike Parr’s performance documentation, appropriately disconcerting. Of equal importance, though, is the choice of venues, all of which are blessed with harbour views, topped off by the biennale’s innovative use of Cockatoo Island, a former shipping works in the middle of Sydney harbour, accessible only by ferry. Unlike the MCA, the Art Gallery, Artspace and even Pier 2/3, Cockatoo Island possesses precious little history as an artistic venue in the public imagination; the experience of spectatorship is further complicated by the time and effort required to locate and view the exhibition.

Importantly, though, the biennale does not disrupt the spectacle of the major exhibition, as some advance publicity had boldly claimed. If exploring an island filled with compelling works of Australian and international art on a clear Sydney winter day seems all too perfect, it’s because it is too perfect. The 2008 Biennale of Sydney’s great innovation is that it does not attempt to elude the spectacle of intellectual and cultural tourism endemic to its format. Rather, it embraces the sense of adventure and the pleasure of knowledge central to tourism’s economy of desire and uses them as a platform to present an engaging but critical exhibition. And it is an exhibition after all, a show, a spectacle with many, many standout experiences on offer — and a quick roll call would include, but not be limited to, works by Gerard Byrne, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Sam Durant, Harun Farocki and Adrei Ujica, Dan Perjovschi, and Susan Philipsz — but a spectacle all the same. It is from this platform, the process of its creation and its reception, that any revolutionary experience associated with it will be had. Whatever that might mean, of course.

Contact and contamination: 2006 Biennale of Sydney

This is some angry young bad art writing. Some context is probably necessary: it was written for Zones of Contact: a critical reader, which I edited with Natasha Bullock for Artspace in July 2006 (another version appeared in Broadsheet a couple of months later). This was part of a series of such volumes that Artspace produced as quick responses to each edition of the Biennale of Sydney. Writers were given 5 days to view the biennale and come up with a quick 2000 word essay on some aspect of the event, and the book was designed and printed up to be on the shelves within in month. Ricardo Filipe's tidy design meant that it sold like hotcakes, but also gave the book far more authority than I think it deserved. Natasha and I wrote an introduction, and I threw together some thoughts by way of conclusion. Looking back, I'm certain I wouldn't express myself this way now – the tone is bratty and arrogant, and quoting an essay by the exhibition curator from two decades earlier was a gratuitous move – but I agree with the gist of it: the 2006 Biennale of Sydney was a very good exhibition badly installed, let down in large part by limitations of the biennale structure.

We’re a tough bunch to please aren’t we? After all, the overwhelming sense of relief that after a series of misfires, the Biennale of Sydney has finally delivered a sensitive, well-researched and above all coherent exhibition comes tempered with a degree of suspicion about the role of the event within the broader context of Australian society, and its positioning within the global flows of cultural capital. Perhaps this was because things got off to such a shaky start, with none other than Biennale chairman taking to the floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition launch to remind the audience present — the MCA’s usual blend of artists, curators and gallerists — of exactly who was paying their wages. This intervention came after a decidedly jejune speech by the Howard government’s Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan — who was really only present for ceremonial reasons as the sitting MP of the day — was drowned out in chatter motivated as much by ennui as by genuine political objection. Seizing the microphone unannounced, the Biennale chairman took the liberty of introducing himself before instructing the talkers in the audience that while Coonan was the representative of a conservative government, this was the conservative government that initiated the Myer Inquiry in the Visual Arts and Craft, and whose structural reforms to a sector apparently neglected under Labor had delivered a Biennale we could all be proud of. Coonan had, in his logic, given us all a reason to be there.

There is of course a litany of banalities that might contradict such claims as to the Howard government’s genuine concern for the arts — among many others, the compounded delays in the delivery of the inquiry’s report; the failure to implement a significant portion of the report’s recommendations; the recent restructuring of the Australia Council for the Arts; and the consistent sniping at ‘elite’ arts around election time.  Or indeed a failure to resource the Biennale adequately enough to have such an ambitious exhibition ready and operating in time for international visitors — an increasingly key audience for these sorts of events — to actually see before they jetted off to their next stop on the global art circuit.

Validating political meddling in ostensibly independent arts-funding bodies and politicising the presence of a bureaucrat at an opening, as if we should have been grateful that the arts minister had even turned up, is, moreover, quite obviously ethically fraught. Yet aside from these very valid objections, the Biennale chairman’s intervention had an unexpectedly critical function: it drew attention to the broader social and political context in which the Biennale was being presented, to its role — and, by extrapolation, that of other forms of artistic practice and presentation — in the contemporary spectacle.

It is worth acknowledging that Zones of Contact, the 2006 edition of the Biennale of Sydney, is an exhibition deeply aware of this context and probably didn’t need its chairman to draw attention to it in such an indelicate manner. Artistic director and curator Charles Merewether has produced an exhibition whose reflexivity in this regard is apparent even without — and, truth be told, in spite of — the buzzword-laden publicity that surrounded it. For the first time in a decade, relationships constructed in the process of selecting art and artists for a Biennale of Sydney have actually produced an engaging thread that runs consistently through the entire exhibition, and which furthermore seems in every way to have reflected the artistic director’s intentions. Here Merewether’s Biennale distinguishes itself quite markedly from no less than its last four successive predecessors. Jonathan Watkins’ 1998 Everyday, despite a prescient selection of artists in terms of subsequent trajectories, didn’t quite tease out the political and ontological complexities of its subject, opting instead to project a polemical, quasi-metaphorical model of simplicity against perceived theoretical loftiness, a distinction not borne out in the selection of works. Its successor jettisoned curatorial thematics — not to mention a title — altogether in favour of what seemed like a organisational profile-raising exercise complete with a star-studded line-up, a big-name curatorium and even a few collector’s corners. These were followed by two vaguely-titled exhibitions, Richard Grayson’s (The World May Be) Fantastic and Isobel Carlos’ On Reason and Emotion, both of which, for different reasons, would have been more suited to the smaller and more focused format of an institutional group show, and both of whose premises were frankly too brittle to stretch to the considerably larger and more broad-ranging model currently being commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney.

In contrast, Zones of Contact is a biennale intent on engaging in dialogue with the global proliferation of biennales — a phrase so well instituted as to approach cliché — about the patterns and effects of globalisation, fully aware of the problematics of this proliferation within the context of globalisation, that is, as a cultural lubricant for the flow of transnational capital. It is in a sense one big tautology; intent on both emulating and critiquing a particular strand of exhibition making that has come to dominate the post-Soviet era, exemplified by such widely discussed presentations as Magiciens de la Terre, America: Bride of the Sun, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Documentas X and 11, and the Cities on the Move series. Drawing on the postcolonial theory of the 1970s and 80s in addition to increased, if often forced, mobility, as well as rapid advances in communications technology, these exhibitions — all of them blockbusters and canonical fulcrums for critical discussion — were marked by a distinct politicisation and an inclusive approach toward artists practising or at least originating from outside traditional Euro-American centres (even if this occasionally manifested itself as an orientalist fetishising of otherness and identity, inclusiveness in some instances serving as an end in itself). Increasingly however, they have also demonstrated a certain reflexivity, due in no small part to the influence of the more speculative, less didactic ‘laboratorial’ curatorial strategies that emerged in response to developments in artistic practice toward collaboration, engagement and conviviality during the 1990s. Zones of Contact sits squarely within this tendency — and self-consciously so — as a truly international biennale, light on Western European, North American and even Australian content, and invested with a rigorous theoretical approach through culture to the synthesising and homogenising effects of globalisation on culture.

In the foreword and preface to a catalogue packed full of elegant design and provocative contributions, the Biennale’s chairman and outgoing managing director respectively put the coherency of Zones of Contact down to Sydney’s apparently distinctive strategy of consistently appointing a single curator — ‘an individual’ — this year operating with increased funding from the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy to realise 'a personal vision and process'. Quite aside from the rather patriarchal tone of this formulation and its reliance on a questionable ontology and dubious ‘heroic’ authorial model — biennale as one man’s quest — these introductions make clear even to readers unfamiliar with publishing schedules and the editorial process that their catalogue contributions were written well in advance of the exhibition’s installation. For while Merewether’s much-publicised ‘framework’ is certainly solid and reflected beautifully in his cogent selection of artists, the physical placement of the show’s constituent works often and unfortunately falls short of its promise.

This is especially obvious in the two larger institutional venues, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, where potentially fruitful dialogue is truncated by isolating certain works that would benefit from a little more flow-through and conversation, such as complex installations by Ruark Lewis and Daido Moriyama, in discrete rooms dictated by existing architecture; or leaving them largely overlooked in transitional spaces, a fate that has befallen Akram Zaatari’s, Zarina Bhimji’s and Olga Chernysheva’s contributions, the last stretched over two venues, around a corner and over an elevator door. Or dialogue is over-simplified by forcing other works into incongruous juxtaposition, such as the head-scratching pairing of Imants Tillers and Lidwien van de Ven at the MCA — aestheticised indexical appropriation juxtaposed with sensitive interrogations of the representation of place — or a frustratingly over-packed room at the Art Gallery of NSW squeezing together works by Savandhary Vongpoothorn, Lu Qing and Ghada Amer. The tendency towards imbalance is no more clearly demonstrated than at Pier 2/3, where Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, centred around 180,000 clay figures produced by three hundred and fifty ‘helpers’ in China’s Guandong Province and largely reliant on epic scale along with romantic notions of the individual amongst the masses, takes up the entire upper floor of the one hundred and forty metre building — and the lion’s share of press attention — while fragmented across the entrance to the floor below and therefore difficult to appreciate in its totality is Cao Fei’s What are you doing here? — a wittier, more playful and ultimately more sensitive collaboration with Osram factory workers from the same region.

Thus, while coherent and productive dialogues occur across the biennale as a whole, they seem unable to articulate themselves on ground level. This isn’t so much of a problem in the myriad smaller venues scattered across Sydney, the experience of which is mediated through the process of negotiating one’s way around the city to see modest presentations of provocative and challenging art. But it certainly comes to the fore in the larger venues where a lack of spatial dynamism and some jarring transitions have the fatigue-inducing effect of a salon-style hang, much to the detriment of some truly exhilarating work. As a colleague of mine conjectured, it is as if with the artists and venues in place, the placement of the work had been approached like a jigsaw puzzle.

But is this not unavoidable when an exhibition of such scale operates under the control of a single curator and a visibly stretched support staff? After all, while the injection of funding thanks to the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy has certainly enabled an expansion of the Biennale’s scope and ambition, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in much of a bolstering of the structure of its managing organisation, such that an exhibition designer or a team of assistant curators could be commissioned to oversee the exhibition’s installation at its many and varied venues. In this sense, the Biennale of Sydney as an organisation is caught between the weight of, on the one hand, a combination of certain historical associations with ‘major’ venues and its perceptions of its own rationale, and, on the other, the day-to-day logistics of coordinating a large-scale exhibition on a budget which, despite obvious improvements in the last couple of years, is still far from comparable to that of other international art festivals. And unfortunately this tension translates into visible disjunctures in the flow of an otherwise coherent exhibition.

Which brings us back to Helen Coonan’s apparent right to introduce a Biennale of Sydney, whose framework is for the most part structured around addressing precisely the kind of dispossession effected by her own government’s policies. For what the biennale chair made clear is that the exhibition — and by association the Australian art world as a whole — depends largely on the ongoing patronage of the state and the civil relationship that entails. And, unintentionally, that the question of what we can realistically expect from a state-sanctioned exhibition is inextricably tied to the broader question of what we can realistically expect from the state. To take the liberty of radicalising the point somewhat, this question should extend not just to the governance of any particular party — an ideological position all too easy to stop at in a two-party system — but to the very structure of the state itself. As a reflexive take on postcolonial exhibition practices, Zones of Contact is a biennale premised to some degree on interrogating the politics of representation — of cultures, of conflicts, of the land — and there is no reason that such an interrogation should not extend to representational politics. This is not so much a matter of 'How do we want to be governed?', recently posed as the title of a travelling exhibition by Documenta 12 curators Ruth Noack and Roger Buergel, but of 'How do we want to govern ourselves?'

Quite consciously, Zones of Contact operates in a cultural landscape defined by 9/11 and its aftermath. Anyone involved in any kind of activism in the past decade will remember the excitement generated by the new forms of autonomous organisation and engagement being explored — for all its whims and complexities — by the anti-globalisation movement, followed by the sudden decline, at least in the West, of these activities in the wake of the events of 9/11. In the past five years, the mobilisation of liberal democratic societies against more retrograde, concentrated forms of spectacular organisation, be they theocratic, dictatorial or simply terrorist phantasms, has gone hand in hand with an intensification of internal policing, culturally as much as juridically, to a point where any position outside of the dialectic of terrorism and state is presented as marginal. As Hou Hanru writes in one of the many insightful contributions to the Biennale catalogue, 'this reality is exerting a huge impact on every affair in daily life and social organisation, including on cultural institutions.'

Why, then, does a biennale so acutely aware of this state of affairs need to default to the hierarchical model of a single artistic director in pursuit of a unique vision, especially when a more fluid, integrated structure would do much to overcome many of the current organisation’s logistical shortcomings? There is no compelling reason why the Biennale needs to stay moored to the major institutions, at least in the present form of that arrangement, where significant gallery space at the MCA and the AGNSW is given over when smaller, more surprising engagements with their often difficult architecture would suffice. Or that there should not be more consultation and collaboration over a longer period of time with smaller venues, who could actively facilitate direct and sustained contact between visiting artists and their own diverse constituencies and local communities. Or that the biennale cannot extend this collaboration into still smaller spaces, the artist-run initiatives and other autonomous projects that lend a tangible richness and vitality to Sydney’s cultural life. Hou writes that to 'propose solutions as to how contemporary art should develop through the constant reinventions of its infrastructure', it is useful to conceptualise a viral model of communication through self-organised 'collaborations, exchanges and mutual support for alternative forces'. In Hou’s articulation, 'Mutual contaminations among different self-organisational practices have proven highly fruitful ... A major event like a biennale or triennial should take this advantage, and turn itself into such a "zone of contamination".'

Despite Charles Merewether’s valid assertions on the Biennale’s role as a framework by which to expose local audiences to new international art, and the numerous ‘contacts’ between works, and between works and audience that occur across the breadth of his exhibition, Zones of Contact retains a somewhat generic feel. This sense derives in some part from the Biennale’s awkward installation, as if it could have been configured for any given space or city, but also from its overall structure as a spectacle that we can only view and never really engage. There’s no real specificity here, no opportunity for genuine, ongoing dialogue, only fleeting encounters. Writing in 1984 in the catalogue to his exhibition Art & Social Commitment at the Art Gallery of NSW, Merewether noted that the Great Depression and the rise of fascism constituted for many artists a shattering of the ethical order that was 'everywhere symbolised by visions of the modern city, the "city of dreams", where the beliefs and ideals of humanity would be progressively realised, unfolding into a future of harmonious accord.' In a strange way, the Biennale of Sydney, in its current form, symbolises Sydney’s own dreamlife as a global city, open-minded, open-bordered, sharing the international stage with a host of other metropolitan centres from other affluent nations.