Biennale#2: Cocakatoo Island - a beautiful desolation

Biennale of Sydney
closes Sunday 7 September 2008

There are just 5 days of Sydney Biennale remaining, and the trip out to Cockatoo Island is well worth taking if you haven't already. Free ferries leave hourly from in front of the MCA at Circular Quay, stopping at Wharf 2/3, and take about 30 minutes. Allow 3 hours on site. It's worth it for the William Kentridge rooms alone. LF thinks he may be the most intersting artist in the world today - 'son et lumiere' at its most basic, and magical. Mike Parr's whole block (appropriately the old Weapons Workshops) retrospective of video/film works is stunningly well conceived, whatever you think of the individual works, exhuding a dank and dangerous aura, complete with reeking buckets of urine, natch. Vernon Ah Kee's graffitti'd washroom explores parallel territory, and his large pencil portraits on canvas, in one of the turbine halls, have a quiet majesty. Jannis Kounellis' nearby sails installation is one of the few works that really feels 'site-specific', but apart from some boring videos, the standard is high throughout. If you've done no Biennale this year, then skip the MCA and AGNSW and Get On that Boat!

Some impressionistic images, ©Le Flaneur 2008.
Courtesy the artists and Biennale of Sydney

Blacktown: Western Transgressions

Bent Western
Blacktown Arts centre
8 February – 12 April 2008
Ron Adams, Lionel Bawden, Liam Benson, Drew Bickford, Michael Butler, Karen Coull, Jose Da Silva, Christopher Dean, Tim Hilton, Marius Jastkowiak, Erna Lilje, Arthur McIntyre, Jessica Olivieri, Kurt Schranzer, George Tillianakis, Anastasia Zaravinos.

Left: © Karen Coull, 'Soft Touch' 1994 | Latex gloves, rose thorns | 32 cm x 30 cm
Courtesy the artist and Casula Powerhouse and Liverpool Regional Museum

A retrospective review alas, but one worth doing we hope. This group show coincided with Sydney's 2008 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival, and those who made the trip west encountered a subtle and varied exhibition of... well, let's just say 'transgressive' art, with its creative locus in Western Sydney, yet addressing resonant and universal questions of sexual and cultural identity.

Many commentators (including LF) demur at the notion of sexual preference as a curatorial criterion, indeed the exhibition catalogue is at pains to undermine any simplistic notions of this being a compilation of Western Sydney artists that happen to be homosexual. In a thoughtful catalogue essay David McInnes (Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages, UWS) writes: Bent Western is not about gay art. Indeed, refuting anything as neat or as clear cut as ‘gay’ is part of the agenda both of the artists’ work and the exhibition’s curatorial framework.

Curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham (El Ubiquito!), writes in his catalogue introduction:
The idea for Bent Western emerged from an essay by Christopher Dean called 'Mollies of the West'. Published in the catalogue for Western Front (Blacktown Arts Centre, 2005), Dean uses ‘molly’ as a descriptor for gay Western Sydney artists. Since the early 1990s, the term ‘queer’ has been used to refer to contemporary cultural expression by non-heterosexuals, so I found his use of an antiquated term like molly rather curious. Was molly an old word for queer that could be recontextualised in a contemporary regional setting like western Sydney? According to Dean it could:
"Mollies were often depicted as bawdy or licentious social satirists who often cocked a snoop at the establishment while remaining committed to the values of their working class origins. Significantly, many of the original mollies were transported to Australia as convicts and presumably some of them would have made their way to what is now Western Sydney (2005: 7) "
The terms we use to describe ourselves and our cultural expressions are important, even if they elude fixed meaning. Whether we use ‘queer’ or ‘molly’ or any other term to describe who we are or what we do, ultimately you can be sure these names will always be contested. Bent Western settles on queer as the most convenient classification for the work surveyed even if it does not always provide the perfect fit. It seems that branding culture queer legitimises the margins, rendering queer vulnerable to cooptation once assimilated into more mainstream cultural forms. Once queer is made visible through knowledge and discourse formation it is subjected to a conceptual erasure, rendering queer unqueer.
This exhibition resists trouble-free answers as to what queer should mean in this specific time and place. The artists in Bent Western have lived, worked or studied in Western Sydney and made important contributions to queer cultures in the region and beyond. The ‘mollyism’ Dean describes harks back to fairly bent and illicit anti- establishment behaviour. Interestingly, many of the artists in Bent Western emerged from an establishment that no longer exists. The art school at the University of Western Sydney, which has been abolished in recent times, produced many important queer artists including ten artists in Bent Western who studied Fine Arts there.

It's hard in such a stylistically varied show to single out particular works, but some LF faves include Lionel Bawden's 'objects of desire' 1998 (dildoes - gasp! - made from his characteristic compressed coloured pencils), Karen Coull's thorny gloves (see above), and George Tillianakis's videos, including 'Always a Blank Fucking Canvas & The Ghetto Jesus of Blacktown' 2006.

Seeyalayda then

Sydney: Old Blood for New: Louise Bourgeois at Kaliman Gallery

Louise Bourgeois
Kaliman Gallery, Paddington
until 29 September















Though done some years ago, 96-year-old Louise Bourgeois' exquisite 36-page fabric book Ode à l'Oubli (Ode to memory), 2 pages of which are pictured, is the hottest thing Le Flaneur has seen this week, and is a must-see. It is a complete set (#9 of an edition of 25), with each 'page' separately framed. There are also some excellent etchings and drawings.

The wonder of Louise Bourgeois is that her practice is steadfastly personal, refuses to indulge in facile art-historical or social references, yet sits at the hip pinnacle of late 20th century art, and she is revered as one of the most important 'feminist' artists of her age. This upper-class frenchwoman (who is reputed not to have left her New York apartment for a decade) has for sixty years pursued her intensely idiosyncatic work with single-minded purpose, producing extraordinary sculptural tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, distilling her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. It is this quality that quietly imbues Ode à l'Oubli. It may be interesting to know that her well-to-do family had a Left Bank tapestry gallery in Paris in early 1920s, and that the young Louise used to make drawings for tapestry restorations, but this knowledge is not required to appreciate the work. Go see.

Vasili Kaliman deserves special praise for bringing this exhibition to Sydney, and for a fine cataloque. At a mere $500K for the set, we predict an Australian insitiution will purchase this work, especially with AGNSW and MCA so flush with new benefactor funds. I wonder who'll get in first?