Monday, July 26, 2010

The Sydney Biennale


Sydney town eh? Mostly I have disliked my trips to Sydney. Something horrible seems to happen every time I go. Nothing outrageously bad, just something slimy and gross and kind of upsetting, but leaving no visible marks. Its hard to explain. And while these things are happening Sydney kind of looms above and around, like a dark, creepy phantom endorsing these bad experiences. Is it that I am absorbing the resonances of a place soaked with misery past? Is it just that I am trained into the predicable safe straight lines of Melbourne and find the convoluted ways and byways mysterious? I don’t know.

So I headed to Sydney trying really hard to keep my mind open. I was determined to force it open with a crow bar and then keep it propped ajar with aforementioned crow bar if need be.

Turns out the need didn’t be.

I found myself in a summer paradise, after weeks of cold and grey in Melbourne, Sydney was blissfully frolicking around in a green, lush, perpetual spring of twenty degrees. I had never realised before why my father, who is from Sydney, was always pining for it during the Melbourne winters. Now I know. T-shirts, trees that didn’t realise they needed to drop their leaves yet, bare feet on Bondi Beach, and sun, sun, sun. The twisty, kooky streets and buildings seemed funny and adorably quaint. Strange nooks and hilariously incongruous attachments, the jumbled mix of old and new all seemed like something from an animation by someone trying really hard to make a place that couldn’t really exist in real life.

And the art?!? The thing that i risked my life and sanity by traveling Tiger airways to see?

It was ok. You know, same old same old. Wearing the obligatory contemporary art uniform. Instantly recognisable... ‘I am art!’ it says, before qualifying it with, ‘I am contemporary Art’. Ok, thanks. I heard you.

The Biennale is an awesome thing. Some of the best and most contemporary art in the world travels all the way to Sydney Town. How can that not be Rock and Roll. But somehow is wasn’t. Maybe I was just tired. I seemed to do an awful lot of walking, up and down hills, stairs, more stairs and then a hill. Maybe I needed to concentrate on using the crow bar for the part of my mind that processes art, not the bit that judges cities. Maybe I was so blissed out on sunshine that I forgot to be wowed by art. I admit that for a sun deprived, solar powered chick the art would have to be extra-ordinary. There were some really good peieces that made me smile an sigh, and say 'Hell Yeah!', but there was only one that made me swoon and want to spend an entire day immursed in its glory.

The MCA had some winners; Pearlescent pins made into bonnets, lavishly indulgent ceramics of rudie nudie bits that were so over the top braroque-esque that you had to laugh, peasants discussing old masters, dead and dying languages. I liked all of these. They were good. They all made me want to laugh, or touch them or I was jealous that I didn’t think of it. I like art that makes me jealous. It is one of the ways I know it is good. I also like ones that make me think... shoot me off into a little frenzy of connecting dots and drawing parallels. Cockatoo Island of course had some great ones; the flying sparking cars, the bigger than human sized purple deer with a sharks jaw gaping ravenously out of its stomache... We went there on our last day in Sydney, and after four or five days of sun it had clouded over and gotten cold. Remember it is the middle of winter? oh, yeah! And remember yu are about to go home? yup, thanks.

So after starting to accept that not much there was really going to blow me away... It happened. Maybe i just need cold miserable weather to truely appreciate art, but i think i would have loved it anyway. It was.... duh da da duuuuh: ‘The Feast of Trimachio, Part 2’ by AES+F... Sigh.... Gush. Love.

I think it was the music as much as anything. Mozart and Beethoven stand up and take a bow. But it was the music and the visuals... Did I already say sigh, gush, love? It certainly was a feast. Beautiful people, beautiful computer animated scenery, and the birds. They had obviously filmed the people on a blue screen and then superimposed them on the landscape and on each other. And the same people did the same things over and over, but to someone else, in a different setting. It was poetic, profound, indulgent, and generous. It made me think and it made me want to sing and dance, a friend of mine did dance! It was a resort, a paradise for the exhorbitantly wealthy, these people arrived with their white day suits and white luggage and then spread out over the island. It had a feeling of a strange kind of eden, inhabited by gods. Not the one big stern fella, but the old Nordic or Greek gods who loved and had sex and fought and lived. But are not human. More perfect and more faulty. Eternal. It was intense and distilled and erotic, it was menacing and pointed and political, but above all it was lushious. The people moved in ritual formations, repeating and repeating again, seeming to touch each other but really not at all, slight blurrings at the edges told us they did not really touch. Once a servant, next time master, one time leaning in, another time reclining away. Repeating seemingly endlessly, race, class, gender, age all used and subverted. Moments of army like unity as they run in their glitchy ways on treadmills. Other moments of splendid individuality, or duos and trios of predestined interaction. Progressively getting darker and more creepy. Until we watch the end of their world. Aliens, out of control weather, people fleeing accross now hostile landscapes. One little boy who at the start had slowly lowered himself down onto a day bed, this time lowers himself down with an arrow in his chest, red seeping accross his white shirt. And all the time this music is lifting you up and filling you up.

I watched and felt swept away, rejuvinated, touched. Yes, I like to be touched. I walked out and did not want to see any more art. Good thing I saw that one on the last day!

Conlusion: I highly recommend travelling to Sydney for a weekend in the middle of winter. The Biennale is a great excuse to do it. Go to the beach, check out the art and enjoy yourself. And maybe on the last day when the sky is overcaste and you are starting to remember that it is winter after all, you will get swept away and find that one piece that makes you not want to look at any more art for a while.



Photos by Erin Voth