Vienna Parreno picks favourite works from the Biennale of Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art…
David Medalla, Exploding Galaxies.
In the preface of Exploding Galaxies, the title of Guy Brett‘s monograph on David Medalla, Dore Ashton speaks of “impractical visionaries”, and proceeds to ask- was there ever a practical visionary? It’s a kind of apology in the tone of someone who knows full well that the word “visionary” has gone out of vogue. The way words such as “revolution”, “lyrical” and “soulful” seem to have gone out of hip usage as well. She proceeded to write a wonderful essay on him anyway, seeing value in reclaiming or rather, standing by the concept.
David Medalla, Cloud Canyon.
Cloud Canyons is probably one of Medalla’s most well known work, a seminal piece in kinetic sculpture. His practice has always been protean though (performance, participatory installations, land works, drawing, painting, impromptus, ephemerals and so on) perhaps out of necessity to prevent a certain boredom from settling in, or in the context of a semi-nomadic migrant artist (born in Manila but based in London, New York and Paris) the conscious strategic rejection of pinning down that can quickly turn into death by mannerism or cultural stereotype and classification that is easy to digest and therefore easy to discard.
Miroslav Tichy – his daily inventory of a hundred soft and badly cropped images taken with various homemade cameras. Ultra low-tech made from bits of pieces of string and cardboard with a work practice producing possibly some of the worst archival quality prints known to man. A crazy old charismatic bat of the first order (the hour long documentary is a must) – oblivious to fads and trends, possibly this Biennale thing he’s in. Actually forget the photographs – he’s the artwork.
Do you like this Biennale? Yes. A lot. Despite the nostalgia? Probably because of it…
