Walking into the Art Gallery of NSW was something of a surprise – there’s all this contemporary art in there! Then we remembered – Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney still has little while to go. Finishing up on the 27th of August there’s still time to scream around all the venues and sample the delights of the best of the best of contemporary international art.
Actually, we remembered the prediction that artist Patrick Swann had made upon sighting a prepublicity Biennale image, that photo of Raeda Saadeh with her head in a shopping basket. “I predict that this will be the worst Biennale in living memory,” proclaimed Swann with a slight shudder. We were far more optimistic than Swann that the BOS would live up to Charles “Floyd” Merewether’s brilliant pre-opening publicity blitz and took heart that a man as busy as he would find time to talk to blogs, students, tour groups, pissed up party goers and anyone else who couldn’t get away. Say what you like about a lack of the “dialogue” we were promised by the BOS hype machine, Merewether seemed determined to make it happen, even if he had to go solo.
Raeda Saadeh, Basket [Performance Still], 2003.
Courtesy: the artist and Biennale of Sydney.
There were a number of issues about the Biennale that troubled us, not the least of which was the measly inclusion of just SEVEN Australian artists. There was a sense of incipient parochialism in the suggestion that there should have been more Australian participation, and perhaps even a party-pooper cynicism recycling 30 year old protests of set quotas, genders and nationalities, but like watching a big Hollywood special effects movie with a hangover, it would hardly have mattered if the Biennale had just been entertaining. We managed to find a few decent works but it was like watching art house cinema – worthy ideas, lovely execution, absolutely no razzamatazz. We still like the chandelier, we still like the Russian guy in the ice, we still like the hanging speakers, we still like the terracotta army, but come now – where was the knockout?
There is one level however where this Biennale should be considered a complete failure. Our plan was to cover in depth the Australian artists in the show as we had done back in 2004. Unfortunately, this plan came to nothing because – with just a week and a half left until the end of the show – there are still no images of the works in the Biennale by Tom Nicholson, Rose Nolan, Ruark Lewis, Julie Gough or Imants Tillers available to the media. Although the BOS promised via their PR people that a stream of new images would be made available as show progressed, the only images of work by Australians in the actual show are those by Savandary Vongpoothorn and Djambawa Marawili. If you were wondering why you kept seeing images of the same handful of Biennale art works over and over in the mainstream media, this is why.
Along with the unavailability of images, we keep hearing stories about the disaster that is the Biennale catalogue. Perhaps we’re old fashioned in believing that a catalogue should be record of the artworks in a show but if the works illustrated are of pieces the artists has done in years gone by, and if the accompanying essays are actually speculative pieces about what the artist might be doing, we are left to wonder what the purpose of the catalogue actually is. The word is that Merewether wanted to keep his options open to the last minute and if the catalogue was going to be ready during the actual run of the show the images of older works would have to be used. Like many people, we have a visual memory, we remember what an art work looks like but probably forget the name of the artist. The way around this is to refer to the catalogue by flicking through the pages and finding the art work in question. Well, you can’t do that with this catalogue. The more troubling aspect of this unrepresentative catalogue is that once the show has closed, is there any public record of what was shown?
Some questions have been raised recently as to why the Biennale continues to show work in far flung galleries such as the regional spaces in Campbelltown and Blacktown, as well as scattered around in galleries such as Artspace, Australian Centre for Photography and the Performance Space. The argument is that the BOS spreads its wings and flys out to meet the people in their own neighbourhoods. You might be living in Cambelltown and, perhaps on your way to Sizzler, decide to stop in and see three video installation pieces. Easy. The problem is that if you live in inner Sydney, or say somewhere else far far away from the outer West, the Biennale is asking you to drive for three hours [more by train or bus] for three videos, which doesn’t seem much like good value and rather more like punishment. Either have the whole thing out there or offer free transport for punters.
We heard a fantastic story about a well known gallery director taking international guests out to see the Campbelltown installations and being embarrassed by the paltry offering – we can just imagine how they felt. The demand on time and resources is ridiculous and if, like us, you prefer the one-stop-shop art exhibition, these additional venues are simply never visited. More perplexing is why the BOS insists on diluting its offering. The answer seems to be that its due to an historical anomaly. You can read some fascinating background history to the BOS at Ian Milliss‘s blog where his article History/Herstory, written with Vivienne Binns, details the lobbying of Sydney artists for equal representation for gender and nationality quotas for the 1979 BOS. It seems from this article that the then BOS director Nick Waterlow, reacting to the self-appointed artists group’s demands, offered up these alternative venues as a sop to Australian artists. And so it has been ever since.
Meanwhile, critical reaction to the 2006 BOS has been slow in coming. Given the time it takes for most magazines to commission and receive reviews and critical appraisals – usually longer than it takes for ice sheets to melt – we won’t have a chance for real feedback for about six months. However, Natasha Bullock and Reuben Keehan deserve some sort of prize for editing Zones of Contact: A Critical Reader which hit the bookshelves in the first weeks of the exhibition. Especially entertaining is Lisa Kelly’s essay Grasping The Thistle, an account of the hype vs. the reality of what it was like to experience the BOS as a working Sydney artist with a few pertinent questions to ask. The Artspace publication is just $11 but if you want to read Kelly’s essay pronto, it’s now available for downloading.
