Restless: The Adelaide International

David Corbet's review of Restless appears in edited form in the July 2012 Issue of Art Monthly Australia

Above: Nancy Spero, Maypole: Take No Prisoners II, 2008 (detail), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (March 3-May 2, 2011), © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones.

Victoria Lynn’s second Adelaide International, titled Restless, left some people feeling a little … well, restless. The disquiet focussed on venues and presentation – I heard it remarked that Restless struggled to achieve thematic ‘momentum’. Some suggested this wasn’t the best work from some very distinguished artists, for example a decade-old video work (Gringo, 2003) by celebrated Belgian/Mexican artist Francis Alÿs. Spread across four widespread venues, none of them ideal, this selection of eighteen international artists had none of the advantages of the Biennale at AGSA (see article), i.e. a contiguous, dedicated space and a generous production budget.

Do such second-hand gripes have a place in any serious critique of contemporary art? Probably not, but in any discussion of ‘critical culture’ the popular response has a place. Exhibitions once the preserve of scholarly journals are now regularly critiqued by the mainstream press – indeed it’s been decades since Carl André’s bricks (Tate Britain) made the front page of Britain’s Daily Mirror (‘Whaddaloadarubbish!’). Which isn’t to say that all contemporary art gets a bad press – British art thrives on a kind of tabloid notoriety (think Tracey Emin), and Australia is gradually getting the hang of it – you only had to witness seniors chortling over Wim Delvoye’s anal kisses at MONA to appreciate this. If once it was old masters or impressionists who could reliably drum up the crowds, we now live in the age of the contemporary crowd-pleaser, Christian Marclay’s hugely popular The Clock (MCA Sydney) being an excellent example. Attendance figures are pored over as never before, and state tourism bodies fall over each other to compete for contemporary kudos – I recently heard MONA described as ‘Hobart’s Bridgeclimb’. Viewed in these terms, it’s perhaps not surprising that the International’s quiet seriousness might fail to connect with the public taste for sensation and spectacle. But enough with the popular zeitgeist, let’s get to the art. And to the ideas – the Artist’s Week forums were an important part of the overall visual arts program, of which more below.

Samstag hosted the greater part of Restless, and the downstairs space featured the late Nancy Spero’s major opus Maypole/take no prisoners (2007), alongside N.S. Harsha’s Extraction (2012) and Lisa Reihana’s PELT (2010) series. This room was the closest thing to spectacle offered by Restless, and Harsha’s engaing whole-wall painting, of figures falling towards installed piles of stone, rope and sugarcane, was rendered in naïve style and bright, flat colours. The notion of extraction was most readily apparent in the juice leaking stickily from the crushed sugar cane, but the artist talks in more general terms about the human need to ‘extract meaning’. Spero’s majestic maypole, each strand culminating in a 2-D severed head cut from plate aluminium, dominated the room, but would have benefited from a dedicated space, and more dramatic lighting. The 200 heads, graphically rendered in paint and collage, represent the victims of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and are stylistically evocative of Goya’s Misfortunes of War etchings, and also of Dadang Christanto’s severed heads.

Lisa Reihana’s large photomedia works are described by the curator as “interpretations of imagined beings presented in digitally-rendered utopian landscapes” and the artist invokes the Maori concept of an ‘under/other’ world. The works, depicting alabaster-white women glamorously adorned with animal pelts, explore the vocabulary of idealised fashion images, but the titles (Aquila, Camarillo, Sabino, Pilosus) refer to horses, monkeys and eagles, all powerful totems in many Indigenous mythologies. Reihana is well known for her powerful depictions of Maori figures, and these works expand her themes into an interrogation of hybrid cultural identity. Greek/Cypriot Socratis Sacratous also uses photomedia in his series Architectural Strategy series (2011). These images initially read as abstractions and could, at first glance, have been computer rendered, but are in fact photographs of shards of metal and wood thrown into the air and frozen in time. For the Athens-based artist, these are evocations of social upheaval and civic disorder. They left me emotionally cold, but perhaps that is the point. I do get their liminal allure, and it’s interesting that a Socratous work was the key image for the International’s marketing.

Everything else at Samstag was video, and this may explain the lukewarm response. However it was here that I found the curatorial themes resonating most strongly, with three works of particular note: Anri Sala’s Answer me (2008), Danae Stratou’s The Globalising Wall (2011) and Saskia Olde Wolbers Pareidolia (2011). Albanian/German Sala’s claustrophobic and aurally unsettling piece was shot under an echoing (Bucky Fuller) dome, once a Soviet-era ‘listening station’ in Berlin. In his words “A woman tries to end a relationship, her companion refuses to listen and plays the drums fiercely to silence her. Next to her, the drumsticks resting on a vacant drum play to the echo of his drumming”. Stratou, an Athenian woman, has compiled a grimly compelling, rapid slideshow of stills taken in the shadows of walls in Berlin, Kosovo, Palestine, Kashmir, Korea, Northern Ireland, Mexico and California. Wolbers’ (Netherlands/UK) piece is truly strange in the best sense of the word. Computer-generated plant/bird-like forms are intercut with shots of Japanese interiors, but it is the soundtrack that equally beguiles, drawn from the book Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel. Alÿs’s work, referred to earlier, features a low-res re-enactment of a dog attack encountered on one of the artist’s marathon walks, in the Mexican province of Hidalgo. Alÿs has said how he “instinctively used the camera … as a shield to protect myself from the dogs’ aggression”. The work sat well within the International’s dystopian undercurrents, but nevertheless struggles in its own terms to be more than a record of a banal incident, quite possibly the artist’s intention.

At the Flinders University City Gallery, the Indigenous USA collective Postcommodity presented an excellent multi-channel work: With salvage and my knife tongue (2011-12), in which American and Australian Indigenous people speak direct and close-up to camera, their utterances digitally comingled and iterated into an absorbing meditation on global indigeneity. ACSA presented three artists: Chosil Kil (South Korea), Rabih Mroué (Lebanon) and Jinoos Taghizadeh (Iran), with selections evidently restricted by space limitations. Kil, a renowned large-scale installation artist, presented a series of smallish ‘three-dimensional’ geometric paintings. Mroué and Taghizadeh showed wall-hung works with strong stylistic similarities – both working in low-res graphic montage, around documentation of the missing and displaced.

Finally to AEAF, and Teresa Margolles – perhaps the component that exemplified the problems faced by a project like Restless. To a critic armed with a knowledge of Margolles’s ouevre, 127 cuerpos (127 bodies, 2006, installation with remnants of autopsy threads), it was a case of ‘De que otra podremos hablar?’ (What else can we talk about?, the title of her 2007 Venice Biennale installation). To the uninitiated it was a grubby string (actually 127 short pieces tied together) suspended across an otherwise empty gallery. Margolles’s refusal to engage in facile spectacle presents an age-old curatorial conundrum – how to present difficult but important conceptual art in an accessible way? A showman like Delvoye makes death kinda fun and shiny, but Margolles presents its aftermath, in an unadorned, if strangely elegiac style. Hers is the language is of the mortuary, and her long-term collective SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service) implies a no-nonsense investigative role in her country’s frightening culture of narco-slaughter.

Many writers have discussed the apparent disconnect between the contemporary art of North and South, and the critical/curatorial discourses around it. For me this crystallised during Artist’s Week, in keynotes by two extraordinary thinker/curators –  Jan Verwoerd (Netherlands/Germany), and Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico) who curated Margolles’s Venice pavilion and is director of Manifesta (Genk, Belgium, from 2 June). Both delivered absorbing presentations, dense with critical allusion and cultural detail, but I had the sense they were speaking of, and from, different worlds. Verwoerd’s methodology of ‘radical empathy’ is a resonant one. In a tour-de-force that began with Adorno (on mimesis) and ended with a joke about a chicken and a frog borrowing library books, he spoke with originality and humour for an art that reconnects us with natural energies, with magic, with psychic wholeness (not his term). Co-convenor Nick Papastergiadis spoke of it as a kind of paean to ‘the sublime’. Medina took us in a different direction, on a journey into the art of ‘the New South’ – urgent, social, political; engaged with dislocation, murder and mayhem, blood and belonging. “Debates about art”, he said in response to a question from Verwoerd “are the business of the North”.

It seems evident that much of the art of the ‘old’ North is largely self-referential, suffering terminal mannerism and loss of relevance, and spends its time navel-gazing at its own decline. It is engaged in a kind of search for a lost authenticity, and looks for it increasingly in the work of Southern artists. The South just doesn’t get the agonizing. It has emerged, vigorous and vocal, from centuries of colonialism and cultural marginalisation, with its own language of global assertiveness. Straddling this cultural faultline, in the shadow of the wall if you will, is the problematic work presented in Restless. Australia may be miraculously immune, but out there much of the planet is in social turmoil. Like all evils, injustice and oppression have their banalities, and some of their more dispiriting cultural manifestations can feel like a blow upon a bruise. We may not be temperamentally inclined to confront Diaspora and despair as subjects for contemporary art, but in its quiet way Restless brought these things to us. It’s not a relaxed or comfortable feeling, and it’s not supposed to be.