South by southeast: the 14th Sydney Biennale avoided many of the excesses typical of international art festivals by showing fewer artists and newer, often specially commissioned works

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Lilly Wei

No longer quite so far away--22 hours from New York as Qantas flies--lies Sydney, Australia, where this past summer the 14th edition of the Sydney Biennale unfolded. The show was curated by Isabel Carlos, a Portuguese native born in Coimba in 1962, who now lives in Lisbon, Brussels and Sydney. She is an art critic, international curator, and founder and former deputy director of the Instituto de Arte Contemporanea of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. She is the first Latin and the second woman (after Lynne Cooke, curator of New York's Dia Center for the Arts, in 1996) to be appointed artistic director of a biennial that some consider to be second only to Venice. In fact, the Biennale of Sydney, founded in 1973 by Italian-born Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, was modeled after the Venice show and has been largely funded by Transfield, his family-owned, Sydney-based construction company. The Biennale is still a family affair, and its current chairman is Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, Franco's son.

The title and very broad theme of this year's exhibition, "On Reason and Emotion," was inspired by Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994), written by the noted--and sometimes controversial--Portuguese neurologist and philosopher Antonio Damasio. Carlos believes that Damasio's pioneering work on the neurology of emotions, which reassesses the importance of "cognition," has profoundly altered epistemological discourse, shifting the emphasis away from cognition to emotions. One of his premises is that ratiocination is dependent on emotion, as mind is on body. Therefore, reason and emotion, like mind and body, are not separate entities, let alone opposite principles, but deeply interdependent, both physiologically and psychologically, so that the Cartesian system, based on cognition alone, is incomplete. Ultimately, according to Damasio, it is emotion that facilitates choice and governs thinking. Carlos, whose ties with the Americas are through Brazil rather than the U.S., invests the south and southern cultures with a higher emotional quotient than the north, which she sees as rational, cooler. Carlos said she had expected Australia to be a "southern" country in this sense, purely because of its location. When she discovered that in fact Australian colonial history had trumped indigenous heritage and geography, she decided to make a "southern" show, one in which emotion was not presented as reason's inferior but as its other--inseparable from it, if not dominant. For Carlos, it seems that true north points south.

However dubious these notions might seem, as curatorial imperatives they did no harm. Whether or not "On Reason and Emotion" constitutes sound science, it provided a provocative frame work for looking at art. The Biennale's traditional preference for having a single curator encourages clarity and cohesiveness of vision, although some works were naturally more relevant to the theme than others. This admirably installed and integrated presentation, characterized by balance, solid viewing pleasures and comprehensible scale, resembled a major museum show more than the frenetic, fashionable fare of many international biennials. Refreshingly, "On Reason and Emotion" did not stress cultural displacement or cultural clashes as such, the frequent--and natural--subject of so many globe-trotting international artists. Neither was it didactic, theory-driven nor particularly enamored of sophisticated technologies. Carlos also did not seek out the sensational, and what erotic charge there was to the show remained subtle, a combination of body, mind and soul. She brought to Sydney a mix of several generations of well-known and lesser-known artists working in a variety of mediums--painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, sculpture, sound and performance--with the machine- and handmade equally represented.

Nearly every one of the 50 artists (actually 57, counting the members of collectives and collaborations, as well as one "unknown artist") was given what amounted to a room of their own. More than half the show consisted of new works, many site-specific, and several artists were seen in more than one venue--sometimes redundantly. Although Carlos claimed no interest in nationalities and waved no flags--just compass points--an international show by definition has nationality on its mind. In Sydney, 32 countries were represented, although a number of the artists included have dual residence. Europeans dominated. Australia and New Zealand had 10 strong participants, and the split between "northern" and "southern" was almost 50/50, even if the division got a little fuzzy, and a number of countries had historic ties to Portugal. There was also a nearly equal gender split. "To tell the truth," Carlos said, "I only counted afterwards." There were, however, disappointingly few artists from Asia this time and none from the Pacific Islands.

Instead of spending money on costly architectural renovations for the show, Carlos channeled available funds into the art itself, commissioning site-specific works for the Biennale and bringing artists to Sydney as part of her theme of connection. With the exception of Helena Almeida, Fernando Alvim, Bruce Nauman and Michael Sailstorfer, all included artists attended the show. The verdant, well-groomed grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens were host to six installations and connected the two principal venues, the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was turned over entirely to the Biennale, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which allocated its ample temporary exhibition space to the show. At Artspace, a center for experimental art, an additional four projects were shown. The forecourt of the Sydney Opera House was used for a performance by Native American Jimmie Durham, and the glass cube exterior of the Museum of Sydney displayed a nighttime video projection by New Zealander Daniel von Sturmer. Overall, the show was a concentrated walkabout, pairing outside and inside, banded by the sparkling waters of Sydney's famous bay and punctuated by the city's twin landmarks, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. The route was clearly marked, so as to minimize the number of stray biennial-goers wandering about in search of an installation. The circularity of the exhibition route was also emblematic of Carlos's theme, in which reason and emotion, north and south, were deemed to be interconnected. Carlos also emphasized that a biennial should take into account the place where it is held, not only as a "physical space but an economic, social, political and philosophical space."