(The World May Be) Fantastic - Biennale of Sydney, 2002

[The biennale] focuses on artists who use fictions, fakes, invented methodologies, hypotheses, subjective belief systems, modellings, and experiments as a basis for their work. These approaches celebrate the potential of the creative act to generate alternative worlds of to offer alternative readings of this world and so suggest that our everyday belief systems may also be changeable, constructed, hallucinatory, slippery and various. - Richard Grayson, curator.

We may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white) hegemony � but we aren�t there yet, and we won�t get there until we see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule. Richard Dyer

Sydney Biennale 2002. Think outside the square. Gaze down on a carpet made of hundreds of thousands of photos of celebrity-heads, painstakingly cut out from glossy magazines mounted along cardboard box panels, rising into swells like tombstones on hills of a gently contoured cemetery. Almost trip over a parade of plastic monster and superhero figures marching in protest for their rights on the gallery floor - escapees from confinement in cereal boxes, potato-chip packs and McHappy meal containers. Take a seat in a cane chair and watch a video of a generously pierced, naked white male body swaying seductively to Hawaiian intonations of �Aloha�, in a room filled with Oceanic kitsch and photographs pairing famous figures including Frida Khalo and Ned Kelly. This strange and seductive mis-en-scene comes to you courtesy of the extra-terrestrial �Pope Alice� who ��fell to Earth from the Doomed Planet Metalluna and declared: �Planet Earth is the cosmological equivalent of a provincial town� [and proceeded to] transform through consciousness-raising rather than colonization.� Then be confronted with compelling evidence of �The Clowns of Turin�- examine detailed diagrams explicating four clown faces just discernable in the stains on the Holy Shroud. Enter a darkened room and check out what seems to be an airline safety video, but turns out to showcase the craft of two Houdini-inspired escape artists. On another screen enclosed within slabs of stringy-bark (like some trophy souvenired off the set of Gilligan�s Island) watch as two enormous dice are delivered by truck, hoisted onto the top steps of the Sydney Opera House and cast down by the artist. Encounter a naturalistic sculpture of a young girl in the middle of another room, playing with misshapen but undeniably human �life� forms. Enter another room to find small, spherical, silver speakers hanging from wires in a darkened room, each telling stories of UFO sightings in different languages. Then have your ethnographic curiosity thwarted by photographs of the residents of a small Malaysian coastal town whose heads are entirely covered in masks of different tropical fruits. Be amused and confused as a park scales the side of a building in architectural models of mobile and impossible spaces. And get up close to scrutinize meticulously painted three-dimensional brushstrokes constructing semi-abstract portraits, in a mockery of abstract expressionism�s painterly ideal.

Overall I found the 2002 Biennale extremely refreshing in its refusal to engage empty formalist worship, theoretical posturing and/or romantic nostalgia for vaguely defined �pre-modern� values of �craftsmanship� or �spirituality� refreshing. Curator-artist, Richard Grayson, has put together a theoretically informed and clearly thought-out exhibition, which stimulates reflection thought about the role of conceptual art in a global context shaped by the values of neo-liberal capitalism and xenophobic nationalisms. In the Australian academy (which is where I do cultural studies) these values manifest themselves in now-institutionalized processes of economic rationalization. Politically engaged qualitative research is the prime casualty of this process, while quantitative research, which takes the nation-state and it�s imagined community of �ordinary� (read white, middle-class and heterosexual) Australians as givens. As debates in the first decade of last century over how to stem the declining white birth-rate are eerily replayed, I predict we will be seeing much more funded academic research on �family values.

In higher-education institutions where transparency, accountability and efficiency are recited as mantras to justify politically motivated funding cuts, thinking differently has its costs. And academics like me may need to be reminded more than ever of the importance of creativity-in-thought and thoughtfulness-in-art. So if this were the sole criterion on which the Biennale is judged, I would not hesitate to proclaim it an outstanding success. Yet I must admit to a lingering suspicion that I enjoyed the show both for some of the right and some of the wrong reasons and that this is inextricably connected to my standpoint as a beleaguered cultural studies academic in the brave old world that is John Howard�s Australia. So after exploring some themes and concepts that were successfully challenged and/or reinvigorated by the Biennale I will return to discuss these misgivings.

Ec-centricity

He was odd, ec-centric, gruff. We thought he was insane or shell shocked. But he wasn�t violent and I never had any problems with him. He never drank or smoked. He always paid his rent on time�He had paintings all over the room � In the back of my mind I always thought that those paintings might be crazy enough to be worth something to someone someday - Mary Catherine O�Donnell remembers Henry Darger in the 1940s

There is a strain of benign nuttiness running through several of the works on display. This is epitomized by drawings and paintings by Henry Darger. Works by this Chicago ec-centric and one-time janitor are included to celebrate an idiosyncratic intellect obsessed with systems of its own making. Never exhibited in the artist�s lifetime, Darger�s exquisite and esoteric images were created to illustrate The Story of the Vivian Girls, his 150,000 page, 12 volume adventure story about an extra terrestrial war between a nation of evil child-enslavers and the Christian nations fought by warrior princesses.

Loopy History

What if the seventeenth century were to erupt into the present, in a place, which had never experienced the seventeenth century as such? A place which may have lived, a time which existed unchanged for centuries, possibly millennia, and which was untouched by Europe and its seventeenth century until the eighteenth? - Ann Finegan

Another group of works deal with alternative histories, highlighting the loopholes perforate every attempt to construct a seamlessly coherent account of human pasts presents and futures. In Salon de Fleurus and the Last Futurist exhibition 2001, the Fiction Reconstruction Project collective curated by Slovenia artist and critic, Marina Grzinic uses copies and fakes to restage the respective iconic sites of Western and Eastern European art history. My grandmothers, Miwa Yanagi�s photographic series, projects the images and narratives of young men and women into a futurist vision of old age. Using extensive make up and computer techniques, her subjects are instantly aged and placed into various fantasy scenarios. One of these images features a grandmother flying over the Golden Gate bridge in a Harley side car driven by her youthful lover - cigarette in one hand and diamond tooth flashing victoriously in the sunlight.

Science-ism

New York (Hot) is essentially a big brass boiler that functions as a barrel organ playing John Philip Sousa�s �Stars and Stripes Forever� at an excruciatingly slow speed over the work�s sixty-hour run � it operates via a system of slide valves that open and close, transferring steam to an arrangement of eighty-six brass 1935 Buick car horns, each tuned to a different note. - Katy Seigal on Paul Lincoln�s work.

�Scientism� is a term used to denigrate those who use the language and apparatuses of science for what are perceived to be non-scientific ends. I have used the term �science-ism� to describe a group of works which problematise this artificial dichotomy between science and non-science - on one hand - and highlight the science-y character of everyday life and popular culture - on the other. These include Joyce Hinterding�s spectacular displays of electricity in the plasma wave instrument Air time and Chris Burden�s Bridges in which meccano pieces are used to make bridges that actually work - an achievement testified to in photographic records of their weight bearing capacity. Other examples of science-ism are purpose built machines by Kim Adams, Paul Lincoln and Patrick Corrillon. In Toaster Work Wagon, Adams welds together bits and pieces of car and trailer panels to create a shaded container in which to store and later release a herd of kids� bicycles. Corrillon�s Le Trotteusses are ingenious prosthetic devices made to enable viewers to walk while reading different sections of an interlocking narrative based on Arabian Nights.  Animation

In making her stem-cells so compellingly real Piccinini makes it impossible for us to shy away from the very problematic realization that stem-cells are living organisms - lives, but not as we know them - Juliana Engberg on Patricia Piccinnini

As concept and practice, animation is approached in some interesting ways in works such as Still Life with Stem Cells, which takes embryonic stem-cell research as a point of departure. Juxtaposing a sculpture of small girl with fleshy lumps of human-ish matter jolts us into reflection about deeply held cultural notions of deformity and perfection, which guide stem-cell research. Philippe Parreno�s work examines animation in relation to consumerism and individualism points where Eastern and Western values both converge and collide. The creators purchased the rights to a �minor� Manga character, AnnLee, the shell of which they re-animated as a self-reflexive character, which muses: After being sold, I was redesigned! Funny! I can even say now! Look! � And I will never sell anything, how can I? �Cause I�m the product � I belong to whom is ever able to fill me with any kind of imaginary material.�

Alter-Egos

�Robert Pene� � gives the artist permission to look again, to rearticulate, and to deny knowledge of past narratives and histories as - from the position of 1947 - many of these developments are yet to come�. - Richard Grayson on Robert MacPherson

Alter-egos derived from past, present and future, proliferate in the Biennale, and seem to simultaneously recognize and challenge the much-mourned �death of the artist�. Alter-egos enable the artists to elaborate inter and intra-subjective narratives and theories, engaging questions of �becoming� rather than upholding the individual authorial subject as a static �being�. Examples include: Susan Triester�s installation of artifacts of her time-traveling alter-ego Rosalind Brodsky, Vasco Araujo�s video-installation of Diva La Stupenda �A woman who is capable of facing it all and whose nose matches her face�, Luke Robert�s extremely queer Pope Alice and Robert MacPherson�s 1000 Boss Drovers - a series of drawings by the forth grade primary school boy Robert-Pene,

Unreal Spaces

Vito Acconi takes alienating, faceless, urban sites and transforms them into idiosyncratic spaces that encourage play and interaction, often in surprising ways. An example is Courtyard in the Wind � wherein a courtyard garden is slowly transformed into a turntable. An underground wheel driven by a wind turbine moves slowly under your feet, making it impossible to walk in a straight line.

Many of the artists seek to extend beyond the limited scope of rationalist understandings of mapping and space. Shirley Tse�s installation in polystyrene mounted as a ledge across three sides of a room illustrates the beauty and complexity of the borders, lines and other markings with which we divide physical and conceptual space: my initial impression of the work was as a hybrid of a computer-motherboard and the control deck on the Star trek �Enterprise�. Kelly Prendergast�s maps of famous world cities blur the distinction between subject and space: her finely executed drawings reconfigure the city as a brain capable of bending rigid architectural and engineering grids to fit the actual requirements of physical, social and economic circulatory systems.

Tasteliness

Cang Xin began using his tongue to lick various objects as early as 1996�The objects he has licked include: books, cups, carved seals, exhibition catalogue, paper money, cameras, light bulbs, bricks, shoes, even portraits of Sarte and Nietzsche, not to mention the great wall, the forbidden city and the ground in Oslo, Norway. - Zhu Qi on Cang Xin

Often achieved through the use of humour [Chris Brown�s] work undermines the portentous and cherishes the lowly� Naughtiness is a theme that runs throughout Brown�s work, a desire to misbehave with the facts of history, play games with value and taste, and question what is truly acceptable. - Stephen Hepworth on Glenn Brown

As Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist who died earlier this year, argued in his groundbreaking study of patterns of cultural production and consumption: �Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.� In other words: taste is never �innocent� of the socio-economic interests of those who purport to most value it. Grayson�s Biennale successfully avoids pandering to elitist aesthetic tastes, with an abundance of works sourced from kitsch and popular culture, as well as copies and fakes of works taken straight from the high art canon. The Biennale�s stance on matters of taste could be exemplified in the work of Cang Xin, an artist who has licked things and persons all over the world. His photographic and performance practice suggests that - rather than constituting a property that counts as �cultural capital� in Bourdieu�s analysis - taste might be a form of spiritual exchange between animate and inanimate matter. In this way, the artist moves us beyond �taste� as a form of property possessed by some and lacking in other social subjects to consider what �tasteliness� might be. 

(The World May Not Be So) Fantastic

Every word I tell you is stupid and false �All in all I'm a pseudo, that's my characteristic. - Marcel Duchamp

For those in power in the West, as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone both defines normality and fully inhabits it. - Richard Dyer

The process was very, very partial and subjective. There was no intention (or ability) of making a definitive statement, or of even being global. The exhibition is a proposition rather than a definition �One of the reasons I thought that the theme might be interesting right now was because of the tedium that�s set in with this hegemony of economic rationalism [after the collapse of communism] where there seem to be no alternatives. That grey uniformity may force us back into the spaces of the imaginary.

From the ashes of post-communist and postmodern nihilism, then, Grayson�s exhibition presents flickers of revived hope by showing artists who are saying �Yes I know we can�t do grand narratives any more, but lets pretend we can.� And this is the crux of the problem for me. I�m not sure that denial is necessarily the most productive response to postmodernism�s critique of grand narratives. I�d suggest that the �grey uniformity� Grayson ascribes to art after the fall of the Berlin wall is accurate only insofar as the postcolonial is excluded from the domain of contemporary life and artistic practice. For the work of contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous artists from Australia, America, Africa and Asia-Pacific provides a compelling demonstration that the death of grand narratives has provided an opportunity and space for narratives of their own making. And I�d suggest that what makes these Indigenous and/or post-colonial works so compelling is that they don�t aspire to universal domination but, rather, eloquently describe the grounds for resisting grand narratives.

So I want to highlight the Eurocentricity of the nostalgic response to the collapse of grand narratives, which figures so prominently in the Biennale. Grayson openly acknowledges this Eurocentricity:

There is a lot of rhetoric that claims Biennales are great Utopian spaces where we can set up resistance and critiques of globalization. That�s actually absolute bollocks! This show is less global, partly because that didn�t start off as the position, partly because I am not in that circle of international curators whose everyday knowledge includes what is going on in Beijing at the moment. But also because of the theme: the fictional and fictive, with their strong literary and linguistic underpinnings, tended to favour artists within my language group, so that there are more Americans and Britons than there might otherwise have been. Then that became the position: if the project is openly partial, why should it be global? Fragility and subjectivity are what I wanted to foreground.

The problem with the rationale offered by Grayson here is that a very real tension exists between the Eurocentricity of the Biennale - on one hand - and its claims to value subjectivity and partiality - on the other. And this tension is a product of a deeper contradiction between universality (that claims to be racially neutral but is by default white) and particularity (that is supposed to be racially unmarked but which is in practice usually attributed to non-white cultures and individuals). Within this racialized schema, the two terms universal/particular are not simply opposed to one another but are also hierarchically ordered, with privilege firmly attached to the former.

The fact that many of the artists celebrating partiality and subjectivity in the Biennale are white men might be seen to problematize the connections that Eurocentric discourses routinely draw between irrationality, women and non-whites. Before too hastily applauding this move, however, we need to remember that the cultural productions of �Others� have provided a fertile field for white male aesthetic appropriation over the past hundred years or so. So the celebration of partiality and subjectivity is all very well but the question also needs to be asked: who has the power to define what is partial and subjective in the first instance?

Now I�m not arguing that Grayson should have included more art by non-white �Others� to provide �equal representation�, a patronizing and counter-productive gesture extended by innumerable curators over the past three decades. And it needs to be acknowledged that Indigenous and/or post-colonial artists are included in the Biennale, as works by Indigenous Australian artists HG Wedge and Darren Siwes and Maori artist Michael Parekowhai attest. The problem is that these works are exhibited in isolation without sufficient reference to the post-colonial struggles from which they have emerged. And this makes them seem peripheral in the context of the Biennale�s otherwise Eurocentric focus.

On one hand this might be justified as a simple reflection of the Eurocentric pre-occupations of the international contemporary art world. But the problem with this argument is that it fails to recognize the important pedagogical role of international art exhibitions such as the Biennale. In a single afternoon when I visited the Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art, several school groups went through the exhibition. Notwithstanding curatorial protestations about the show�s partial and subjective character, in this pedagogical context the Biennale becomes a synecdoche for everything important in contemporary international art theory and practice. To redress this situation an explanatory framework addressing the gaps and exclusions was required.

The fact that Grayson failed to account for the important body of contemporary postcolonial art that was excluded from the show is perhaps due to his partial recognition of the responsibilities that come with the curatorial role. In her interview, Jacqueline Miller asked Grayson: �How do you think being a practicing artist has inflected your curating of the Biennale?�

I think perhaps what I bring to curating as a practicing artist is a greater willingness to accept contingency (even though I do not accept that curators are artists). I am willing to be more fluid and more floppy, not wanting to make the authoritative statement. To me, curating is far more like making a piece of work...that is, �What happens if?�, rather than, �This is.� Perhaps there�s a greater willingness to-�take risks� is not quite the right phrase-rather, a sense of being on the outside of curating as an institution, and therefore not ruled by the need for authority, or overwhelmingly concerned with the immediate placing of the exhibition. Artists are just curators who don�t know as much as curators!

I would disagree profoundly with this self-effacing assessment. It�s not so much that artists don�t know as much as curators but, rather, they have an irritating tendency to play dumb when the political heat is on. Grayson�s reflections in this interview demonstrate the extent to which he does recognizes the exclusive character of his Biennale. My question is: why wasn�t he able or prepared to make the Eurocentricity, which necessitated the exclusion of certain artists and art works a topic for exploration in the exhibition itself? I can only guess the reason might have been that his (art) �world� would have seemed slightly less �fantastic� as a consequence�