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

Another New Zealander, Melbourne-based artist Daniel von Sturmer, showed a video installation titled The Truth Effect (2003), a blindingly white and immaculately conceived work that was as streamlined and sleek as an iPod. In a techno-formalist commentary on perception, von Sturmer in effect relocated the gallery wall, utilizing a great white horizontal plane on which he propped his "painting," that is, where he projected his pictorial images--five small, white luminous screens that displayed cleanly defined minimalist forms in motion on a white field. All the images, however, are of ordinary objects--a roll of colored tape, for instance, which turns into a circle within a circle, a figure 8, an infinity loop, refreshing the familiar language of abstract paintings.

Museum of Contemporary Art

Since 2000, the Biennale's main venue has been the financially troubled Museum of Contemporary Art, located off the Circular Quay, one of the city's prime tourist spots. On entering its spacious galleries, one discovered two ambitious photographic displays. "My Weather Diary," by Jari Silomaki (Helsinki), is an ongoing project that was initiated in 2001 and mounted in Sydney as a grid that filled an entire wall, several years of work apparent at a glance. Silomaki takes a picture every day, wherever he happens to be, under different light and weather conditions, often with a low horizon line and without people, then handwrites on the print the name of the place, the date and a laconic observation--that day's major political event, a personal situation, a thought, a feeling. Although the strategy is familiar, the work has an unexpected, cumulative poetry.

The mood of another enigmatic series, "White Goods" (2001-04), by Derek Kreckler (Perth), is more psychologically fraught, as the banal and the satiric mask incipient violence. Clean, crisp Cibachromes, quite large, feature a battered white refrigerator--sometimes two--as the protagonist(s) of his posed dramas. One scene shot at night spotlights a cluster of ordinary folk near a stand of trees; from bare branches dangle two refrigerators, each suspended from a rope. The image suggests a lynching scene, and bears a disturbing resemblance to photos of such events once snapped as souvenirs in the American South.

Nearby was a handsome, stage-setlike installation by Mario Rizzi (Berlin/Rome). A re-creation of C.G. Jung's office, its sound components, activated by motion-sensors at the viewer's approach, murmured excerpts from the diaries of Sabina Spielrein, Jung's lover, and letters written by her, Jung and Freud. A distraught Jung, worried about his relationship with Sabina, his patient, consulted Freud on the matter. The spoken passages record the eventual shift from passion between doctor and patient to an equally intense intimacy based on the exchange of ideas. In The Sofa of Jung (2004)--in Jungian analysis there is no "couch"--Rizzi investigates traces of emotions and thoughts, constructing a playlet out of fragments of text and voices.