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

Exhibition Openings

I have my show coming up VERY SOON (scary!) So lately I have been paying as much attention to how people are presenting the show as I am to the artwork involved in the show.

Most openings are pretty standard, you have drinks, occasionally there is food as well, people stand around and drink and talk and if it is a really successful night you don't really look at the artwork at all because there are too many people blocking your view! There are price lists on a table somewhere, sometimes a blurb about the artist and the work as well... and if they can afford it a glossy brochure with coloured pics. People can organize speeches, but not everyone worries about this...

Occasionally people do things differently, incorporate elements of performance or audience participation. For example Marco Luccio recently had an opening at Steps Gallery on Lygon St and he had an opera singer perform! It was wonderful; an extra element of entertainment never goes astray. But it must be admitted that by and large they are just that – entertainment, creating atmosphere or ambience, but not significantly value adding to the work or my experience of the work.

A good friend of mine, Jenny Mitchell, recently had an exhibition. She did the whole lot food, drinks, performance… and somehow managed to create a whole other level of meaning for me.

I have been friends with her since doing the diploma together, so I have been privy to a certain extent to the thought process she went through in planning the show, getting the works ready and organizing the opening night. We have sat at Lentil As Anything at the Abbottsford Convent sipping tea as she ran ideas by me, though I can't say I contributed much except to say 'Wow, that sounds great Jenny!’

In the last few weeks before the show I was snowed under with concerns of my own so I wasn't able to help her in the final stages. When I went to the opening night I thought I knew what was coming and what to expect... and I did, as the plan hadn't changed much, it was the way it came together that blew me away. And, as so often happens, I think I actually found more/different meaning in it than Jenny had consciously chosen to communicate.

This is what I knew:
Jenny has been learning the cello in the last year or so and she wanted to play it on the opening night. She would play it while a digital slideshow was projected onto a wall next to her, a collage of quotes and images and an exploration of her thoughts about life, art and the journey she has taken over the last year in recovering from a severe breakdown. After that she would pull back a wall of fabric that had been hiding the room that actually held her paintings and people would be able to enter and see the works.

This is what I experienced:
The slide show gently drifted between images of her artwork, as yet unveiled, shown in abstract fragments, overlaid with snippets of poetry and her own words... elegant, restrained and yet so generous. She managed to talk about the darkest times she has had in the last year, she did not hide it, but neither did she fall into an indulgence of self-revelation. For me she hit a perfect balance. The music she had chosen was a most beautiful and haunting piece. These two alone (if the music had been played by someone else or on a CD player) would have been moving enough - but what really resonated and created for me a much more profound experience was all of this in combination with the physical reality of a person I hold dear to me, who I know has gone through hell in the last year, creating that music as we watched.

As she sat in front of us moving the bow and creating those resonances in sound, I became intimately aware of the other levels of movement and lived experience that it took to create the artwork, and write the words. I could see her in her studio moving the brush, mixing the paint. I could imagine what it must have been like to live the everyday (and every night) experience of a breakdown. The struggle to keep moving at all.

As the music progressed it moved into a more hopeful and gentle passage as Jenny neared the end of slideshow with words of hope and recovery. What the music and moving images did was not just move me to a deeper connection to the lived experience of creation, but it also tied in with a theme Jenny had been exploring in her words, which was the perception of and experience of time.

I have pondered the nature of music, art and time prior to this show. It has fascinated me how music is so linked to time. A painting or work of visual art is still; traditionally it is complete when presented to the public. You look at it and even if you spend time with it, and your thoughts move and shift in response to it, it in itself remains still, the same as when you first started looking at it. Music, on the other hand, is dependant on time. You cannot experience it without time, one moment follows another and one note follows another. The preceding notes set us up to experience the next. A gentle progression or a dramatic divergence from what went before helps create the mood. The way it takes some time to digest the stimulus of sound and our capacity to remember what went before allows the music to take us on a journey and tell a story. This experience is much closer to the reality of living life than the absolute stillness of a painting.

I think this is perhaps something to do with why I often enjoy creating paintings and going on that journey through time and colour to the finished product, more than I do looking at the finished work in a gallery. I suppose also that when my own works are finished they still resonate with that story that was told in the creation, something that the viewer does not have access to. I think, also, this is one reason how it can be that I love one painting so much and not another – yet people looking at them often have a very different connection.

So I think what happened for me was a wonderful fusion of all of those thoughts and feelings. It powerfully brought home the physical reality of her life. What we were reading was a lived experience for this person in front of us. The actions and movements of her mind, soul and body physically created the artwork we would soon be seeing. In exactly the same way as the cello was being played, in that moment and the next... and the next. And so too would her life go on, this show was just one in a long progression of lived moments. They would all slide into and onto each other like the notes of the music. It is a testament to her skill as an artist that she could take the experiences and memories of her life last year, I’m pretty sure many of which were not at all pretty or graceful, and shape them into something so poetic and beautiful.

The most poignant part, that which opened the door even wider to all of these thoughts and feelings, was that she did not play it perfectly. She played it astonishingly well, considering she had only been learning for a year. But every now and then a note was a little frail, or a little wobbly or a little short. That imperfection spoke volumes about the fragility of human ambitions. It spoke of the nature of learning (another journey; a thing that can only happen over time) and it described so perfectly the difference between what we aspire to and what, in our humanity, we achieve. I felt so much tenderness for humanity in that moment, for our attempts, our dreams, our limitations, our little and our big failings… and our courage in the attempts we make.