Biennale of Sydney Part 3 - Cockatoo Island

My last stop at the Biennale of Sydney had much the same result as my previous visits to other venues. The only difference was that the apathy was on a much larger scale. This time it was an island full of works I found uninteresting, uninspiring or plane irrelevant. And again, it was a real trek (mentally, and this time physically) to find any works that I actually liked, or found interesting. But there were some.

Serge Spitzer’s ‘Molecular (SYDNEY)’ was a simply executed work in which small metal balls randomly covered the floor of the roofless Guard House at the top of Cockatoo Island. While you could not walk into the stone-walled structure, standing at its entrance and gazing down at these thousands of dark grey balls brings about the feeling of vertigo, of falling into and being encompassed by this work. It’s a claustrophobic feeling which starkly juxtaposes with the openness and expanse of the top of the island.

By far the most confronting work I’ve ever encountered is Shen Shaomin’s ‘Summit.’ I couldn’t even walk into this room. Upon approaching the entrance to the black-curtained room, I realised that what lay inside were four corpses and one dying body of the world’s most significant communist leaders. Now of course they were merely life-sized creations arranged in a pentagon shape, having a hypothetical meeting akin to the annual G8 Summit; but the verisimilitude of their forms and the fact that these figures were not presented as living, in their political prime, but rather deceased, relics from the past, was too much for me to handle. I stayed at the entrance, looking from afar, and silently moved on.

My favourite work in the entire biennale has to be Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa suspended colanders hanging from the ceiling of Building 74 down by the docks of the island. This work, simple in its concept, yet majestic in execution captures the very essence of what contemporary art should be. The biennale text explains that Hwa’s “playful practice comments on the privileged environment of art institutions and questions the prized status of artworks amidst a consumer-frenzied world.” What better objects with which to make such a statement than one of the most overlooked, yet ubiquitous , pieces of the quotidian – colanders. Joined together to create strings of different-shaped balls, the colanders hang delicately from the ceiling to transform the audience from the old abandoned dock building to another, more ethereal place, if only for the briefest of moments as you walk through this enchanting forest of plastic. It’s a beautiful paradox, and one which has universal relevance. [The image show here is of the work on another site. But just imagine it in a warehouse-type setting.]

Overall, however, the over-riding theme of this biennale seems to be, not distance, but rather quantity and scale. With over 400 works, a large percentage of which were video works, this biennale was, in a practical sense, impossible to get through. And though there may be a select group of art aficionados out there with the dedication and patience to sit through all those hours of video works, there is, without a doubt, an overwhelming majority who just would not be bothered. I’m part of the latter. Even Cockatoo Island, a place that technology has long since forgotten, was swarming with video works in the most unlikely of niches and crevices. And while the installation and innovative arrangement of the videos was very unique and impressive, the awe and amazement soon subsided once the works were found. In fact, the act of exploring the island and discovering art works and the unlikely locations of video works was a whole lot more interesting than the works themselves.

This exhibition was touted on the publicity trail as the largest in the series of Sydney Biennales. And it is. But unfortunately, that’s all it has going for it. For it seems that, in the fervour and ambition of trying to create the biggest biennale, artistic director David Elliot forgot about what should have been the more important goal – to create the best compilation of contemporary art works. At this, the 17th Biennale of Sydney has failed. [Image from http://www.boudist.com/. While it is not the image of the artwork  to which I refer, this work, titled 'Hubble Bubble' was placed at the Opera House and is quite similar to the one at Cockatoo Island. It was just bigger.]