Indeed, walking through the MCA (one of many venues of the BoS) was like that very familiar experience of walking through a generic, mainstream supermarket (a common metaphor now linked with the experience of many international biennials). I mainly browsed through the aisles, quickly taking in what was on offer – the ordinary ‘fillers’ that take up a lot of shelf space but really are unnecessary – lingered on the interesting items, and only stopped to pick up the really good things. In fact, amongst all 285 works, I only really enjoyed works by three artists, and absolutely detested one.
Christian Jankowski’s ‘Tableaux Vivant’ was one work which absolutely delighted me, and that’s saying a lot given my intolerance for video works. This was a clever, complex, yet humorous exploration into the many processes behind creating a biennale art work. In this, Jankowski has brought together the main television networks, along with some very big names in the art industry, into his quasi-documentary of the creation of this work, ‘Tableaux Vivant.’ The work goes through all the processes of art making in a television context, with real-life journalists reporting on all aspects of the development; from conceptual inception, to filming and editing, publicity, even the mid-work angst an artist feels when they are immersed in their work and can’t find a way out.
Funnily enough, another work that I loved was also a video work, and something very different from Jankowski’s. The artist is Thai-born Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, and if you think her name is a lot to take in, her video work is even more overwhelming. ‘The Two Planets Series ‘ is enclosed in a room where three walls make up the screens for three different videos playing simultaneously. The clips showThai peasants conversing over canonical works of modern art. Manet’s once-controversial ‘Luncheon on the Grass’ is controversial again, while van Gogh’s ‘The Midday Sleep’ and Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ elicit conversations about farming, village talent quests and what ‘those people’ do as opposed to ‘us’. The work is an intriguing and unique approach to exploring the whole ‘planet’ of difference between the two worlds of the ‘cultured’ West and the rural East. If not for its revelation of such vast differences, then the work is worth staying and watching just to listen in on the hilarious conversations between the villagers.
Kent Monkman’s beautifully painted and grandly scaled works challenge the very entrenched and deeply distorted Euro-American history of colonialism. These paintings, magnificently composed and encompassing a vast spectrum of natural and artificial colours combine mythical, homo-erotic beings with an appropriated colonial style in a clever parody on the widely-accepted, yet quietly acknowledged one-sided history that such ‘New World’ paintings originally told. Here, the painter’s immense skill is presented with stinging socio-historical commentaries on the traditional ‘Cowboys and Indians’ stories. The paintings are magnificent.These anomalies aside, the other 280 works in the MCA were mainly interesting at best, ordinary and uninspiring at times, and completely irrelevant at worst. Perhaps I would have found more inspiration in more works if I wasn’t so bombarded by the immense amount of artworks. So far, the over-ambitious scale of the MCA has fallen short of realising the theme of the Biennale. Stay tuned to see what the other venues have in store. [Images from http://www.artnet.com/, http://blog.cofa.unsw.edu.au/, http://bos17.sitesuite.net.au/]
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