A Summer Place

Art in America, June, 1999 by Lisa Liebmann, Brooks Adams

The spectacular harbor of Sydney served as a backdrop to the city's 11th Biennale, a sprawling show of works by 101 artists displayed in 10 far-flung venues. Undaunted by the intense heat of an Australian summer, a pair of intrepid American critics encounter art of the "Every Day."

Imagine it is a very hot, humid morning in Sydney, Australia, on the second full day of our first visit to the antipodes. From the plane, the initial approaching and descending view of the brute headlands that define the mouth of Sydney's huge harbor has thrilled and lastingly perturbed us, and we have yet to recover from an essentially sleepless 50-odd-hour day, within which an entire Monday completely disappeared, forever unlived, at least by us. It was during the final stretch of that kaleidoscopic day that we met quite literally everyone we were destined to meet in our new host city. Only now we am having trouble remembering who they all were, and our one friend in town--the one who gave the hallucinatory party in our honor on the evening of the day we arrived--has already flown off to familiar old Europe. Unfamiliar new Sydney is teeming with unleashed children, the harbor with small craft: it's October, and spring break.

We had come, of course, to see an exhibition of contemporary art: the 11th Biennale of Sydney, for which works by 101 artists from 28 countries were installed at 10 scattered venues, including two major museum buildings, two noncommercial galleries, an alternative space, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the adjacent Government House, the grounds of the Sydney Opera House, a pier and an island in the harbor. A quick first tour of the most august and central of these venues, the Beaux-Arts-style Art Gallery of New South Wales, had been less than galvanizing. Au equally cursory walkabout in the Art Deco building that houses the Museum of Contemporary Art, located between the Rocks (formerly Sydney's raunchiest district, now a high-end touristic zone) and the Circular Quay (the city's main ferry hub), had seemed only a bit brighter. We elected to make Pier 2/3, in nearby Walsh Bay, our next port of call.

There--dazed, daunted and schvitzing--we immediately found ourselves amidst Hammocks, a magnanimous installation by the American artist Patrick Killoran, of approximately 20 modified but perfectly functional string beds attached to pillars, in the shade of the pier's lovely old industrial arcade. Lisa immediately caught the spirit of the piece and hurled herself into one of them for a late-morning siesta. Brooks removed his shoes (for the first of many times that day) and in his own hammock began taking notes. This, dear readers, was our first wholly positive diurnal experience of a Biennale titled "Every Day."

It turns out that Killoran's mercifully lackadaisical Hammocks in many ways encapsulated the virtues and shortcomings of the 11th Sydney Biennale as a whole--a low-key, mildly hedonistic affair that did a solid job of filling a number of big gaping spaces and made deft use of some of this spectacular city's most atmospheric and scenic locales. Like Killoran's Hammocks, the show in general had a neo-Conceptualist, process-oriented bent within which artistic strategies and systems were emphasized, along with viewer-interactivity. The deconstruction and/or recycling of ordinary objects--used clothing, for example, unraveled and reknit by the Canadian artist Germaine Koh, at the alternative Artspace-formed one major leitmotif. Various physical impositions and temporal demands on viewers, including darkened projection rooms, obstacle-filled spaces and mechanized sculptures morphing slowly over time, constituted another.

In "Every Day," furthermore, low-impact authorial identities, even a certain egolessness in art, were the norm. Lisa was quick to pick up on this, for instance, in the work of Ignasi Aballi, from Barcelona, who was represented by two disparate pieces--an accumulation of dust on a windowpane at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and, at Artspace, No Movie, a witty and surprisingly gripping videotape, about a half hour long, consisting entirely of rolling screen credits appropriated from a wide range of existing movies.

At the small, laid-back Artspace, an old industrial building on Woolloomooloo Bay, the Biennale component provided a veritable hotbed of artistic egos in states of flux, subversion or denial. Lisa found the varied production of the Toronto-based Koh to be among the standouts in the show. Koh's Self-Portrait, in progress since 1994, consists of a single, constantly reworked painting, with documentation of each phase of likeness along the way. Also on view were: a rack of the sort of postcards she's been making since 1992, using other people's lost or discarded Fotomat prints; a stack of miscellaneous business cards acquired while on the road; and a pile of classified sections from the Sydney Morning Herald, wherein she had placed terse, daily, diaristic ads.

At Artspace, Brooks felt as if he were discovering something new and nearly invisible in the string and wood installation by the Brazilian Fernanda Gomez, which was quite accurately evoked in the Biennale catalogue as a "three-dimensional drawing" and "poetic whisper." We both interacted with the installation of Chumpon Apisuk, a performance artist and AIDS activist from Thailand, who provided a chair, a desk, a lamp, a diary in which to note impressions, and a casette recording of the artist's voice. A daily fax arrived from Apisuk in Bangkok, and we were invited to respond, via the notebook or fax. At different times we each sat down and listened to the voice of Apisuk along with that of a simultaneous translator, talking about HIV saturation in Thailand. The effect was both chilling and banal, far-off and close-at-hand. (Thai artists were a big presence in this Biennale, and there was an essay on the Bangkok art scene by Thai writer and editor Phatarawadee Phataranawik in the catalogue.)