The 21stBiennale of Sydney ran from March 16thuntil the 11thof June. The show had seven locations, featured 70 artists with 300 works, and was seeable in three long days.
Despite the fact that the Biennale of Sydney never seemed to add up to the sum of its parts, or even to have as much punch as similarly sized shows, its curating was amazing. The show’s focus was on seeing subjects from different perspectives. Mami Kataoka, the biennale’s artistic director, wrote in the show’s guidebook that these perspectives were meant “to resonate with distinguished histories.” And so, much of the biennale was made up of contemporary works that made sense when viewed from the perspective of modernism, site-specificity, abstraction, figuration, or a couple of these different historical perspectives at once. In fact, the show often pushed together opposing perspectives. These different perspectives could exist within an individual work, or a work’s perspective would shift us away from our habitual ways of seeing its subject. One example of this was Ruins of the intelligence Bureau(2015), an amazing film by Chia Wei Hsu. Its subject was the fate of a group of Chinese anti-Communist soldiers who worked for the CIA in Thailand during the Vietnam war. Normally, we would see their story through the history of Vietnam, China, or Taiwan. Instead, the film saw it through a Thai myth. This shift allowed the work to express the interconnectedness of the histories of the countries in this region. The show’s best work, Francisco Camacho Herrera’s film Parallel Narratives (2015-17), while exploring a possible historical connection between China and the Americas, argued for this type of shifted perspective because it allowed us to imagine different futures. It encouraged us to facilitate this by creating less-realistic historical representations, preventing us from being transfixed by one perspective, and thus making it easier to move from one to another. This type of reframing has long been an obsession of the art world, and the show’s consistent application of it led to interesting but sometimes uncomfortable results, especially with regard to Aboriginal art. The show’s display of Roy Wiggan’sIlmaswas an example of this. Wiggan was an Aboriginal artist; his Ilmasare objects created to be held in one’s hand during a ceremony. Mounting them on the wall of the exhibition space invited us to read these beautiful objects in terms of Western abstraction. And though there is a long and perhaps problematic history of carelessly shifting Aboriginal work into this frame, it is hard not to believe that at the biennale it was an intentional extension of the show’s interest in perspectival shifts.
Much of the biennale’s work asked to be seen simultaneously through multiple perspectives, such as Luciano Fabro’s Every Order is Contemporaneous of Every Other:Four Ways of Examining the Façade of the SS. Redenstores in Venice (1972), which offered us four different readings of the building’s facade. The show seemed especially interested in this type of work. Mami compared this ability to sustain multiple readings to the scientific term superposition, and gave the example of light that exists both as a wave and as granular particles. Light cannot simply be reduced to either one of these states. But the work in the biennale would almost always be resolvable sooner or later into one of its multiple perspectives. These resolutions did not come from some dialectical synthesis, but when closer readings would reveal that only one of the perspectives—one of the frames—was appropriate to its subject. However, sometimes while the work obdurately lingered between two mutually exclusive frames, we experienced tantalizing moments of impasse when the work seemed for a brief moment to tear our art historical categories at their seams. Sam Fall’s work was an example of this. His series of paintings were briefly readable both in terms of modernism and site-specificity. This was because, while physically resembling Louis Morris formalist, modernist, color field paintings,they have been written about in relation to the three site-specific works inRosalind Krauss’s Notes on the Index, Part 2, with Fall’s works using the index in their production. I found myself reading Fall’s works in terms of these two frames. But at least, according to Krauss’s article, it is not possible for Fall’s work to be both a formalist modern painting and to function like the works on site she writes about. Though initially, and this is important for our appreciation of the effect that the show wished to have, it seemed like Fall’s work did.
Indexical marks have an existential connection to the objects they represent, like a shadow’s relationship to the object that casts it, or a photograph’s relationship to the scene that it captures. Krauss’s article showed that, despite having a diversity of styles, the works from the 1970s, particularly those that appeared in PS1’s opening exhibition, were profoundly the same: they all functioned like an index, operating like Roland Barthes’s description of photography, in which a photograph presented viewers with “a being there of the object” that it represents. Or, as Krauss quotes AndréBazin, writing, “The photographic image is the object itself….” And so beside being cropped, reduced, and flattened—the normal effects of photography—the object is in no other way transformed by it. When Krauss shifted from writing about an object to writing about a scene, which often meant a site, it was clear that they were not transformed either. But Fall’s series of paintings transform the site that they represent. To create them, Fall cleared leaves and branches off a painting-sized area around his childhood home in Vermont. He laid down a canvas, replaced the leaves and branches, and spread pigment around them, with the objects’ outlines being fixed to the work by mist and rain. Repeating this process, Fall created paintings with dense layers. However, when Fall returned the branches and leaves to the canvas he seemed to have arranged them in order to create a formal composition. His process does not seem to have captured the initial reality of the site; instead, his representation has transformed it, introducing a formal language into his image. This, along with the work’s intense colors, gave Fall’s painting the quality of a Morris Louis color field. This transformation prevented Fall’s paintings from operating like the works Krauss wrote about. Fall’s works were beautiful, the moments that they spent suspended between Morris and Krauss’s artists was engaging, but eventually their connection to modernism was unavoidable. Many of the works in the exhibition with multiple perspectives fluctuated between modernism and site-specificity. Often, when they were resolved, they would be readable only in terms of modernism. This made the show seem to turn its back on the arguments that had transformed the art of the 1960s and 1970s. And though we no longer believe in the Enlightenment’s version of progress, the show’s return to modernism could feel a little like a retrograde motion.
The thing that really set the biennale apart was the way opposing perspectives existed throughout the entire show. It was not a show where many works elaborated a single theme, or where unrelated works were haphazardly jammed together. Instead, the show nimbly turned around a number of different subjects, creating swirling, disarticulated contemplations on its themes. The first floor of Cockatoo Island, one of the show’s central locations, was filled with works that had different perspectives on the tenets of modernism, with the first work that viewers encountered being Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Reconstruction: Five Enemies 1(2018) which in some ways resembled Fall’s works. Beside invoking site-specificity (it was made from debris from the exhibition site), it pointed to modernism by transforming this debris into a formalist sculpture. This seemed to reference modern art’s belief that an artist’s genius can transform anything into art. Reconstruction was placed next to Yukinori Yanagi’s Icarus Container(2018), which, as opposed to Reconstruction’s celebration of human creativity, pointed to the dangerous outcomes that man’s creation can have. Icarus Container, a labyrinth of shipping containers, used the story of Daedalus’ labyrinth and Icarus’s fall to point to the dangers of nuclear technology, and thereby to the dangers of man’s creative genius. To Reconstructionand Icarus Containerwas added Anya Gallaccio’s Beautiful Minds(2015-17), a work that played with man’s obsession with creation by pointing to Devil’s Tower, the mountain where the aliens land at the end of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the film, Roy Neary, Richard Dreyfuss’s character, obsessively sculpts the mountain in clay, eventually leading him to the actual mountain and to his encounter with the extraterrestrial creatures. In place of the Dreyfuss character’s obsessive creation, Gallaccio puts a robot, a primitive form of 3d printer that prints the mountain in clay. This work was reminiscent of the gestures that critiqued modernism by replacing human creativity with a machine’s production.Next to Beautiful Mindswas Tawatchai Puntusawasdi’s Super Moon(2018), a sculpture meant to both shape our perception of the space around it and also to have a human being, the artist, replace with his own mind the computational power that we now obtain from machines. Shaped like a full moon, the work was formed out of hundreds of small, complicated pieces bolted together, all of which was not only built and designed, but the computation it took to create the shapes was carried out by hand. The installation contained drawings in which the artist showed the geometry used to create each piece of this complicated puzzle. After having seen other works that showed computers replacing the artistic genius of a human being, this work presented the viewer with the image of a human being replacing a machine.
These spaces of swirling and disarticulated meaning, this cacophony of voices and perspectives, these conflicting arguments forced into close proximity, seemed intended to open up conversations about the increasing levels of difference in the contemporary world. This had the great advantage of representing difference as real, profound, and intractable, and stood in stark contrast to the usual reductive visions of difference that fill the media–where difference is reduced to the many flavors of food at a food court. But then, true to form, the show turned on itself. At the heart of Cockatoo Island, the show’s most established artists who showed the biennale’s most monumental works presented disconcerting visions of unity, with SuzanneLacy’s The Circle and the Square (2016) creating an image of community which aimed at unity, and Law of the Journey (2017) by Ai Weiwei, advancing a humanistic position based on the idea that we are all fundamentally the same.
Lacy’s project was created in Pendle, a district of northwest England. It was intended not only to strengthen the relationship between different groups, unifying the district, but also to create a film that represented community. The Biennale of Sydney showed the film and other documentations of the project, which allowed biennale viewers to judge, if not whether the project’s effect on Pendle was profound and enduring, at least the image of community created by the project. The Circle and the Square turned its back on the conservative idea that only a homogenous community can live together. It created a new myth, appealing to a past where different races and religions were happily integrated by what was once the district’s largest employer, the Brierfield Mill that closed in 2007. By combining two musical traditions, Lacy replaced the image of a homogeneous community with a harmonious one. The first of the two traditions was an English/American form of congregational singing called “shape note,” performed with singers arranged in the shape of a square. The second was Sufi zika chanting where the singers often sit in a circle; thus, the work’stitle. The two groups singing together gave the work its impact.Along with the visual image of the groups of people in the forms of a square and a circle, the work’s focus on music reinforced its portrayal of community as unified.But in a show like the Biennale of Sydney, with all of its difference, it is perhaps possible to wonder whether a unified or harmonious image of a community is the best or most accurate way to represent it.Another interesting fact about The Circle and the Square was that Lacy only occasionally appeared in its documentation. Her absence seemed to suggest that the community had organically formed itself, as opposed to showing the role Lacy played in creating it.
Ai’s work Law of the Journeywas about the refugee crisis. He often appeared in the work’s films and photographs, filming or photographing refugees on his iPhone while his actions were captured on a much larger camera. His presence was as problematic as Lacy’s absence. Ai’s role as the empathetic witness of the suffering of others suggested that his audience could only feel for the refugees through their relationship to him. This seemed to authorize the project’s over-generalization of the refugees, with the center piece of his project being a monumental inflatable raft filled with huge, extremely simplified inflatable refugees. Their lack of any features reflected this over-generalization. Nothing about them was specific. Even Ai’s insistence on Twitter that “There’s no refugee crisis, only a human crisis,” seemed to contribute to this over-generalization. This focus shifted away from specific local conditions and obscured the fact that different institutions and countries have dealt with the crisis differently. It even masked the fact that the Biennale of Sydneyitself has in the past been criticized for its connection to Australia’s problematic treatment of refugees.
Lacy’s and Ai’s monumental projects occupied an important place in the biennale. Yet their focus on unity was no match for the show’s embrace of difference. This was the show’s greatest strength. It did not titillate us with pretty colors, spectacular content, or reductive representations of the other. Unlike Krauss’s observation about artists from the 1970s whose difference was simply a question of style, the Biennale of Sydney’s emphasis on works that seemed to sustain multiple readings allowed us to see difference as profound and intractable. Its engagement with multiple perspectives, its emphasis on moving from one perspective to another gave us tools to try to understand those who see the world differently from us. Its focus on different perspectives asked us to match the show’s acuity, to be as nimble with our reading of the show as Mami was with her creation of it.
©Vincent Pruden