Biennale: a breath of fresh air flowing through a stuffy, closed room

 

AMONG the wittiest, most irreverent items in an unusually irreverent Sydney Biennale are Ben Vautier's message paintings, lurk­ing like a time bomb in the basement of the bond store in Windmill Street. "If life is art," says one, "i shall stay at home." In a comment on his fellow exhibitors: "If life is art, what's 'all this junk doing here?" Best of all: "If life is art, why not go for a beer?"
When I was taking a second look at the Biennale on Anzac Day, most of Sydney appeared to be following Vautier's advice. Lots of beer was being guzzled in the pubs around Millers Point and the Rocks, although the drinkers didn't seem to be too weighed down by the problems of art.

If life is art, then we are all artists ­as Joseph Beuys kept repeating - and Anzac Day might be considered a great national happening. Nevertheless, if Rene Block's Biennale is making a brave attempt to break down the barriers between art and life, will many take up the challenge? Art may be easy: we may all be artists, but some are more artists than others. Although there are always exceptions, such as the semi-leg­endary Bronte Edwards and the Art Army of Mount Gambier, who have dedicated themselves to doing worse versions of bad but famous contempo­rary artworks (don't underestimate the difficulty of this task), most people are probably happy to leave art to the professionals and get on with their workaday lives.

So far so good, but I wonder how many of the artists in the Biennale actually believe we are all artists. How many would see this idea as a threat to their livelihood, no matter how much lip-service they might pay to it?
Contrary to my worst expectations, the Sydney Biennale still seems inter­esting and entertaining — even after almost three weeks! Although some folks are lamenting the lack of texture, the lack of conventional painting or sculpture, on Rene Block's terms the exhibition is internally consistent and satisfying. This is not to say that everything is wonderful and above criticism. On the contrary, the provoca­tive nature of many of the Biennale exhibits should be seen as a stimulus to discussion. So when one reads Giu­seppe Chiari's slogan on the catalogue cover "all music is the same", perhaps the desired response is an emphatic: "No, it is not!" However, all Muzak sounds the same, and we might draw a distinction here between Muzak and music.

Lots of historically momentous events seem to have taken place on November 11. One you might not have heard about happened on that day in 1964, when Joseph Beuys and some of his mates staged an action entitled: The silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overesti­mated. This was a live broadcast from a television studio in Dusseldorf "aimed at combating the cult of genius and the uncritical reception of artists."
In light of this it is ironic that both Duchamp and Beuys are now figures of reverence, who are credited with establishing new aesthetic traditions which provide historical legitimacy to many contemporary works in the Biennale.

While there are works in the show which stand directly in line from the iconoclasm of Duchamp and Beuys ­none more so than Fischli and Weiss's absurd installation of airline photos and plaster statues of stewardesses, or Alain Fleischer's orgiastic circle of telephones all talking to each other ­there are also a good number which seem completely at odds with this ethos. As ever, one should not be deceived by appearances because, in contemporary art, the things which seem most confronting are often the most conformist; the most superficially radical works can be the most institutionalised.

For instance, Joseph Beuys may have set out to combat "the cult of genius", but an artist like John Nixon is vitally dependent on such a notion. If Nixon isn't a genius then he is a complete mediocrity, since his work largely consists of rehashed ideas from Beuys, Rodchenko, Malevich and other histor­ical giants. His Biennale piece is a cupboard full of identical jars of conserves surrounded by pieces of bare masonite. This gesture is buoyed up by a long list of famous names and dates in the catalogue, presumably underlining the historical legitimacy of his activi­ties. The only reference he leaves out is Monty Python, who also did a famous sketch on storage jars.
But if Rene Block's avant-garde "tradition" exists, it is predicated on criticism and a free exchange of opinions, not on a quasi-religious belief in the unquestionable brilliance of an artist's intentions. Beuys invited criti­cism and discussion, Nixon, as I've often discovered, demands acceptance and adoration. This I can't supply.

The problem of criticism versus unquestioning faith in contemporary art and anti-art recurs with many Biennale exhibits. To leave the visual arts slightly to one side, one of the best discussions of this question is to be found in that indispensable book, The Musical Com­panion, where Julius Harrison observes: "A great composer may well suffer from the misunderstanding of critics but his art will eventually conquer the public. But in a climate where non-art, indeed artistic phenomena that proclaim themselves non-art, meets a response equal to that of a work of art proper, the effect on a serious composer is infinitely more destructive. Anti-art works only in relation to an art accepted canon of "proper" artworks. When anti-art becomes the norm, as occasionally happens in this exhibition, then our standards for judgment are hopelessly overturned. It's fun for a brief, cathartic moment, but would be incredibly tiresome in the long haul.
The Biennale might most flatteringly be considered as a kind of purgative to a sick art system or as a breath of fresh air to a stuffy, closed room. It should open us up to an expanded definition of "art", not simply replace one orthodoxy with another.

One of the most open and intriguing pieces is by Tony Cragg, who recently completed a residency at the Art Gallery of NSW. His installation Suburbs consists of three rounded wooden shapes attached to thick rubber bases. These objects are vaguely humanoid but also look a little like furniture. There are even echoes of the blank-faced mannequins in the meta­physical paintings of De Chirico and Carra.
Something similar could be said of Ken Unsworth's piece Tokonoma — a polished concrete trough surmounted by a large granite boulder. Inside, one finds a pool of olive oil and a blue butterfly. While there are hints of recent Japanese art, the piece works well as a self-contained, poetic idea. In the same vein, an even simpler and more serenely beautiful piece is Simone Mangos's Soundings — a double grid made up of pieces of white chalk installed in a doorway on the top floor.

Artists such as Richard Dunn, Jill Scott or Ian Hamilton-Finlay offer us works which invite a more rational decoding and repay the time spent on them. Ian Carr-Harris from Canada stands half-way between poetic and rationalist positions — his installation is like a deserted stage set where clothes have been flung in all directions and a book lies open on the table. There is a very subtle relationship established between the text and the strewn objects in this multi-layered work. Arthur Wicks has also been unusually subtle. Spend a few minutes in front of his two installations and you will notice the light beginning to change. This must be a reference to his interest in the solstice which, apart from cosmological aspects, the dictionary defines as "a turning point."
Finally, a word of praise for the installations of Montien Boonma from Thailand and Joo Moon from Korea. Both these countries are outside the usual contemporary art circuits, but these artists are among the most interesting exhibitors in the bond store. Boonma has crafted a kind of surreal allegory for the transformations of village life out of pieces of leather: Moon has linked an actual boat, a metal wire boat frame and large cibachrome photos into an ambitious but very delicate configuration.

Incidentally, in a statement attached to the wall, Joo Moon has coined the word "arted" — a past participle for the word "art". It may be an accidental invention, but it is a useful one. After wandering through the Biennale exhib­its in the Art Gallery of NSW and five floors of the bond store, viewers may feel that they are well and truly arted.

 

John McDonald
Saturday, April 28, 1990
The Sydney Morning Herald

 

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