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

On the next level were the lyrical, expansive "Parwalla" paintings (1999-2002) of Elizabeth Nyumi Nungurrayi, an aboriginal artist. Composed of pointillist dots, commas and lines arranged in a loose pattern that refers to the desert region where she grew up, these are the largest canvases she had ever painted. The textured subtleties of her pastel pinks, yellows, reds, whites and ochers dashed here and there with blue were a variation on the sterner, more parched palette of her community.

In the next space was AES F, a collective from Moscow, which contributed several striking inkjet prints on canvas that were literally the poster children of the Biennale: a cadre of mixed race and multiethnic, scantily clad, prepubescent teens who, armed with handheld futuristic weapons, clearly have more than video games on their mind as they reconnoiter barren territory, digitally inserted fighter planes flying in close support.

Video

Then came a number of videos that began with La Tache aveugle (1978-90), by James Coleman (Dublin), another of Carlos's initial choices. Projected onto the wall of one of the museum's largest galleries, this absorbing work consisted of 13 frames from James Whale's film The Invisible Man (1933). Many viewers were puzzled at first by the work's almost unchanging image, which would seem to have little need for all the technical apparatus devoted to its display. What had originally passed in a half second of screen time was now on continuous loop and slowed to a virtual standstill. This 13-frame shot, which resembled a painting, became a laconic but absorbing examination of the structure and principles of cinematic narrative and history. Coleman's influence on a number of notable younger artists, such as Douglas Gordon and Stan Douglas, is apparent.

Bruce Nauman (New Mexico) was represented by a single-channel video installation, a version of his Mapping the Studio (2001), on loan from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. He has shown several versions of this work previously, including a quietly spectacular, nearly six-hour long, seven-projection installation in New York at the Dia Center for the Arts in 2002. As a dedicated slice of real time, Mapping functions in exactly the opposite fashion from Coleman's piece. By using an infrared camera to film his studio at night, when mice and other desert wildlife from time to time make an unannounced appearance, Nauman presents a skeptical voyeurism that examines the nature of chance, ambiguity and art-making. Mapping is a hermetic but hypnotic construct that is simultaneously candid, contrived and mesmerizing.

The Point of Departure (2004), a sensuously seductive 26-minute film by the collaborative team of de Rijke/de Rooij (Amsterdam), was installed in a gallery similar to Coleman's. The artists scheduled it to run once every hour, with a half-hour interval so that the viewer could also experience the architectural space as part of the work. The subject is a carpet, which the camera eye examines in obsessive detail--from a web of its individual threads to a slow pan of the entire surface, section by section. The pattern is seen first as aggregates to assemble in the mind, information acquired bit by bit, as in reality. In the end, the camera pulls far back to reveal the entire, vividly colored Azerbaijani rug, which is rotated until only a thin line remains, then flipped to reveal the underside. Receding quickly, it diminishes in size until it disappears, like the magic carpet it is. Metaphorically it has just traversed three centuries of Dutch art--well known, of course, for its prodigies of descriptive detail--leaving intimations of colonial and postcolonial subtexts in its wake.