Sydney:Voices from the Zone. Eora at SLNSW. London: Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon at Gagosian

Sydney:
Biennale of Sydney 2006 – Zones of Contact

“I hear humanity amiss in a sad plethora of print” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, c1965

The long-awaited, Charles Merewether-curated 15th Sydney Biennale has finally kicked off, with credit due to all concerned. Le Flaneur has seen about half of it so far, and there’s too much, too new, for a detailed critique, even if I wanted to provide one, which I don’t. - there will be megabytes of words written by others in the coming weeks.

Le Flaneur’s overwhelming impression, to paraphrase Ferlinghetti, is “I hear humanity amiss in a sad plethora of video art and installations about dislocation, dystrophy and despair”.

Of course, there are some extraordinary standouts – the above is more a comment on Biennale-land, internationally, and I suppose I should be at the symposiums discussing the topic, instead of blogging about it, but … somehow the high seriousness of it all becomes relentless and headachy. Loose Projects (above Mori in Day Street), opened on Thursday with a group show called Cones of Zontact – I have to confess to not having made it there yet, but I’m sure it will be interesting, as will safARI, a loose collection of ARIs currently operating as a sort of fringe event.

Back to the main event though, which is pretty fringey and edgy in its own right, being overwhelmingly made up of artists from the Second and Third Worlds, with a major component from the Middle East and West Asia – not often seen here.

The standout, on scale alone, is obviously the majestic Anthony Gormley installation of 150,000 fired clay figures at Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay (above). Adding a powerful dimension of meaning is the frieze (around the other half of the top floor) of close-ups of hundreds of faces – the Chinese villagers who made the figures with Gormley – with next to each face a photo of a figurine made by that person – all in black and white. I spent a long time looking at these mainly thoughtful, serious and beautifully photographed faces, many of them children, and went away profoundly moved by the whole thing.

Other standouts so far:
• Meschac Ghaba’s (Benin) giant kids’ game Le Maison (MCA)
• Brett Graham and Rachael Rakema’s (NZ) beautiful ceiling installation UFOB (MCA)
• Tawatchai Puntusawasdi’s (Thailand) slate ‘drawing’ series Dwelling (MCA)
• Milenko Pravacki’s (Yugloslava>Singapore) huge mixed media paintings (MCA)
• Navjot Altaf’s (India) video/DVD installation with floor mirrors Lacuna in Testimony #1 (MCA)
• Mamma Anderson’s (USA) beautiful and mysterious paintings (AGNSW)
• John Reynolds’ (NZ) installation in the reception area at AGNSW
• Alfredo Juan Aquilizan & Maria Isabel Guadinez- Aquilizan’s (Phillipines) poignant installation of piles of migrant workers meagre belongings In Transit (Ivan Dougherty Gallery)

This last piece has strong superficial similarities with Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro’s work, showing at GBK Danks Street, but in my view has a ‘ritualised’ power that is lacking in the slightly-too-clever work of Healey and Cordeiro. Perhaps because I felt the genuine poignancy of these poor collections of things that one wouldn’t want – actual people’s things, used and even cherished, neatly arranged in pristine cubes, in a pristine ‘white cube’ – orderly, quiet, sanctified as art… as ironic as it gets.

Finally, what to say about the Biennale Artists’ party at Pier 2/3? For and event where invites were supposedly like hen’s teeth, every art student and ligger in Sydney (including Le Flaneur) seemed to be there – to the event’s advantage – scarved and starved, devouring the tottering boards of thin-crust pizza and freshly carved slabs of ham like there was no (meal) tomorrow. Le Flaneur thought the setting, with Adrian Paci’s giant chandelier as a spectacular centrepiece, and the sight and sound of thousands of panting young artists high on art and the pospect of hot sex, was how Sydney should be every week. The only gripe heard was the fact that there was a paying bar, and prices were far from art-student budgets, with bottled beer and nasty wine at $7.

More Biennale, and especially the fringe, next week.


Sydney: State Library of NSW
Eora: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney

Left: Nouvelle - Hollande. 'Gnoung-a- gnoung-a, mour-re-mour-ga' (dit Collins.) by Barthelemy Roger (1767-1841) after Nicolas-Martin Petit (1777-1804), Engraving, from 'Voyage de découvertes aux terres Australes' by François Péron, 1811.

Launched on the same night as the Biennale, with a VERY different crowd, is this beautifully curated (by Ace Bourke and Keith Vincent Smith) and designed historical survey of documents, maps and images recording the early interaction between the Sydney basin’s original Eeora clans, and the colonists.

There is virtually no ‘documentation’ from the Eora side, so the show is very largely dependent on colonial documents, and the thankfully enlightened attitudes of a series of colonial governors – Phillip, King, Bourke et al, and the fact that they thought it worthwhile to make a visual and verbal record of the culture of the Eora. And there are of course some very vivid and well-known Eora figures – Bennelong, Bunjery and their families, whose ‘assimilation’ (or not) is an integral part of the story.

I agree with Marie Bashir, who opened the exhibition – every Australian child and adult should try to see the show, which is on for several months, and perhaps come away knowing a few Eora words.


London:
Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon at Gagosian Gallery
Opens June 20 2006

Left: © Damien Hirst 'A Thousand Years' (installation view), 1990
Steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, insect-o-cutor, cow's head, sugar, water
84 x 168 x 84 inches (213 x 427 x 213 cm)
Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

It hasn’t escaped LF's notice that these two – one living, one dead, both equally famous – are opening at Gagosian’s London gallery at the same time, on June 20. I also read today that Damien Hirst is now Britain’s richest artist, with a worth of $100 million or more.

Gigabytes have been written about Hirst, much of it hostile, and his firmly ironic post-modern grasp of the zeitgeist (like Jeff Koons’) probably does annoy a lot of people, but there is no denying that he is one of the most profound artists working today – the natural successor to Joseph Beuys dare I suggest? Featured in the London show will be the seminal 1990 vitrine One Thousand Years, you know the one – decaying cows head, insects, insect-o-cutor. Like Beuys, Hirst brings “the powers that exist in the word” (Beuys) into the gallery and the museum without walls, in a horrific and disturbing meditation on mortality, life-cycles, time, and the organic nature of the living world. This work was apparently seen and admired by Francis Bacon in his final days, and Hirst also acknowledges his debt to Bacon, with his own Triptychs (to complement Bacon’s), including a new work The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer. Sounds like a must-see, or at least a ‘must talk-about’ for the chattering classes.

A tout a l’heure.

Brown and Green at Grantpirrie, Destiny Deacon at RosOxley, Souliere at G&A, Capricornia at Belvoir

Sydney
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, GrantPirrie
Confidently riding the ‘new realism’ (my sloppy term) surge in painting so prevalent among younger Australian artists are this somewhat older duo (PhDs and academics both), who make large detailed and closely-worked oil paintings which are not quite trompe-l’oeil enough to categorise as hyper-realism, but are skillful enough to render apparently collaged elements in paint. Such commentary on different types of picture-space, common to so much of this ‘genre’, are not in themselves revelatory – some would say just another manifestation of the eternal preoccupation with ‘questioning the act of painting”. However the subject matter, among it a whole series of small canvasses depicting different views of Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’, an elderly Aboriginal woman holding a white baby, and other repreated motifs of no doubt personal significance, burrow down to new layers of possible meaning in a way which I think transcends and extends the ‘plasticity’ of the medium. Though stylistically and conceptually somewhat different, the work evokes for me Tasmanian James Morrison’s remarkable and obsessively painted friezes which seem to narrate both personal and cosmic stories in minituarised ‘history’ or ‘narrative’ paintings that one could well imagine blown up to giant murals, Diego Rivera style.


Rolande Souliere: G&A Studios
G&A is arelatively new ARI, and generally interesting, usually mounting either group or 2-3-person shows across their two large rooms. I was quite taken with Rolande Souliere’s confident intsllations, particularly Materality#2, conisiting of a series of large wall-mounted cylindrical shapes or vessels, with knitted wool insides and and exquisite layering of bird feathers (different kinds on each vessel) on the outside. It didn’t feel necessary to know what they mean – they have an obsessively crafted, ‘ritualised’ quality that had me going back to gaze at them again before leaving. Watch out for Souliere at an ‘emergent’ show at a public gallery soon.

Hany Armonius: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
I’m a fan of Armonius’ ironic and often hilarious pieces, but this show of 3 or 4 small installations/tableaus/machines feels perfunctory and all wrong in the space. Installations need to have a transformative presence that exceed the mere space they occupy, and though the discared sheets of paper from one of the works appear to do this, it is all quite visually dead somehow, and fails to ignite or charge the space with any added resonance or poetics. The same works would be very different no doubt in their own lit and more isolated context. Plonking them all in a white cube, sculpture-style, may be the ironic intention, but the show doesn’t transcend the sum of its (amusing) parts.

Destiny Deacon: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Destiny rides again, with a new show of recent photomedia works titled Totemistical – large prints blown up from snapshots and/or polaroids, defiantly low-resolution and fuzzy, depicting a series of bizarre miniature tableaus often involving dolls, children’s toys, kitsch souvenirs and household items. These are delightfully colourful, even lurid, as if the saturation knob has been turned right up, and feature the usual deadpan and ironic titles, Continuing her ‘documentary’ strand (with Virginia Fraser), featuring the dressing-ups and antics to camera of young Indigenous children within her large extended family, is the short DVD Shark Dreams which, knowing the children a little over the years, I found fascinating.

Capricornia: Belvoir Street Theatre
To Belvoir on Cleveland (the soul-less Seymour Centre) for Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, adapted 2 decades ago from the famous Xavier Herbert novel of class, race and tragedy in a semi mythical top-end town of Port Zodiac (Darwin). Though long, Wesley Enoch’s simple staging keeps the narrative moving along at a good pace, and good acting, particularly from Luke Carroll as the the main protagonist (the mixed-race Norman Shillingworth) carries it the rest of the way home. Ursula Yovich as the feisty mission-girl ‘Tokkie’ is also a stand-out. There aren’t too many plays where Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky rubs shoulders with a traditional Indigenous language, and I liked the non-didactic way in which numerous themes very relevant to Australia now are woven together in a piece of good storytelling.

Melbourne: Clinton Nain 'a e i o u', Lorraine Conelly-Northey at the NGV

Melbourne:
Clinton Nain: Nellie Castan Gallery
Contemporary Commonwealth, LandMarks: NGV Australia, Federation Square

I saw the almost completed work in Clinton Nain’s studio a few weeks ago for his just-opened show 'a e i o u' at Nellie Castan Gallery, and was once again blown away by the way this artitst’s work continues to evolve. I think this will be seen as his most powerful and resolved show to date, but it is very much a progression from the multiple themes and metaphorical use of materials for which he is well known. The recurrent use of words in his work moves centre stage as he comments on the 'tyranny of English’ (my expression), as colonial langauge, and also as an arbitrary sign system, mindset and coloniser of thought processes. Nain's linguistic references are compemented by his own recurrent language of personal symbols - the cross, the 'mission' dress, the target, the winding road – and metaphorically through his chosen materials – such as bleach, bitumen and PVA “house paint” in Aussie 'heritage colours’. This is an important exhibition. For a full and excellent review by Robert Nelson go to The Age : http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/clinton-nain-a-e-i-o-u/2006/05/31/1148956385544.html

Nain has a large bitumen on canvas work titled Erub has a bitumen road now in LandMarks, an Indigenous show on a theme of (obviously) relatonship to the land. The show is curated by Judith Ryan, and well worth seeing, but could be much better – both hung and conceived. The relatively few contemporary ‘urban’ works (for instance Julie Gough’s amusing Indigenous heads as soaps-on-ropes) seem somehow ‘tacked on’ to the show, and not very convincingly. Standout for me was a vitrine of tiny woven baskets in many different materials by Lorraine Conelly-Northey, who also has a large, whole-room installation upstairs at Contemporary Commonwealth which is a must-see if you are in Melbourne, with a huge and cutting-edge screen-based component at ACMI next door. Conelly-Northey exhibits a fascination with transformation of materials and meaning, and while her work is coming from an Indigenous tradition, it would not be out of place in Catalan Spain, that land of blood and rusted, twisted iron. Beautiful stuff. Both shows at NGV are on for just a few more weeks (June 25).