2008 Biennale of Sydney.

Various venues, Sydney AUSTRALIA June 18 * September 7, 2008

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"Is it too much to ask for just one Sydney Biennale that looks at the sheer hedonism and consumerism of its host city?" That was Brisbane artist Scott Redford late last year, bemoaning the dominant soft leftism of biennales worldwide and more than a little exasperated by the advance publicity for Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's 2008 Biennale of Sydney, "Revolutions--Forms the Turn." On balance, it probably is asking too much. For all its crass obsession with real estate, celebrity chefs, and general big-city posturing, Sydney likes to think that its excesses come down to cosmopolitanism and connoisseurship. Wet liberalism is, accordingly, the order of the day.

But wet liberalism is a slippery beast. That the particular political orientation of these exhibitions is not undifferentiated--or, rather, that their ideological framework allows for a certain leftist Catholicism--is borne out in a comparison of the artist selection in "Revolutions" with that of its predecessor. Where "Zones of Contact," Charles Merewether's 2006 Biennale of Sydney, was admirably global in its outlook and explicitly concerned with the effects of globalization, the artist list from Christov-Bakargiev's edition is unapologetically Euro-American, contextualized by a "constellation" of historical works drawn almost exclusively from the avant-gardist and neo-avantgardist canon. If this seems out of step with the geographical and economic reality of Sydney, it nevertheless speaks to the latent Eurocentricity and unreflexive romanticism of Australia's aspirational inner-urban culture.

Tempering this continental bias is Christov-Bakargiev's inclusion of a high proportion of local artists, a popular decision that has paid dividends. Not least among these are the significant and provocative contributions by Aboriginal artists, notably Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, and Gordon Bennett, whose presence lends validity and gravitas to attempts by the likes of Sam Durant, Michael Rakowitz, and 16 Beaver's Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas to come to terms with Australian race relations. Other Australian artists fare particularly well, with Mike Parr's confronting performance work profiled in an appropriately disconcerting retrospective, and TV Moore making his most interesting work in years by getting back to what he does best: filming young men running (or in this case riffing on the sound of running).

Refreshingly, the other key point of difference from "Zones of Contact" is this biennale's sensitivity to visitor experience through Christov-Bakargiev's assured installation and strong selection of contemporary works. Pacing and timing is key to the exhibition's unfolding, with works ranging healthily from the grandiose (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's 100-channel extravaganza The Murder of Crows (2008) and Pierre Huyghe's 24-hour installation of a forest in the Sydney Opera House) to the miniscule (a mere postcard from Hans Schabus at the MCA). There is even room for the genuinely subversive, rare moments when the biennale transcends its soft leftism in Gordon Bennett's audacious (and unrealized) proposal to hang indigenous works in the Art Gallery of New South Wales' colonial and twentieth-century galleries, and Tony Schwensen's indictment of the event's reliance on free artistic labor with a sausage sizzle titled Fundrazor (Fuck you pay me) or Who gets to sit at the pointy end of the plane (2008)?

The exhibition is weakest when it literalizes the two connotations of the word "revolutions" implied by its title-rupture and rotation-and in the occasional overly formal juxtaposition of the contemporary with the historical, as when Maurizio Cattelan's suspended horse, Novecento (1997), joins a cluster of Rodchenko mobiles and a Calder. Its strongest points, on the other hand, occur in its exploitation of site, with Christov-Barkagiev's use of Cockatoo Island, a former prison and shipworks in the middle of Sydney Harbor, the undisputed highlight of the exhibition. Works by 35 artists and collectives are scattered throughout the decrepit, historically resonant buildings of an island rarely visited by Sydney-siders, remarkably untouched by the city's brash gentrification.

Much has been made of the relationship between biennales and tourism, both in the historical origin of the form and its contemporary relationship to local political agendas. What Christov-Bakargiev's biennale makes clear, particularly on Cockatoo Island, is the proximity of tourism to exhibition making in general. Both actively engage their subjects in an economy of desire, providing a shared confluence of knowledge and pleasure, of anticipation, information, and experience. Even the ritual of the vernissage replays tourism's peculiar performativity through the embrace of cliche, active self-caricature, and the need "to see and be seen," as Danish critic and curator Simon Sheikh has recently put it. For such a specific site, there is little site-specificity on Cockatoo Island, the rare exceptions to this rule--works by TVMoore, Vernon Ah Kee, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Susan Philipsz--providing some of the more memorable moments of the biennale.

To give Christov-Bakargiev the benefit of the doubt (and there is no reason not to), this might be the critical function of the biennale, its true reflection of its host city. Every city deserves the biennale it gets, and on the surface of it, Sydney has been particularly well behaved in the past two years. "Revolutions--Forms that Turn" is an undeniably good show, and despite the odd inevitable flaw, perhaps the best Biennale of Sydney in a while. At the same time, it serves its purpose of showing the city in its best light--the harbor views available from every venue are no coincidence--flattering it with the suggestion that it might be avant-gardist to boot. Revolutionary even. But in doing so it underlines that self-representation is nothing more than self-representation, that Sydney might have little substance other than as a touristy conception of itself, blissfully ignorant of the history of exploitation--colonial and industrial--on which it is built. This is certainly the lesson that the racist graffiti on the walls of Vernon Ah Kee's "reclaimed" workers' toilet block, Born in This Skin (2008), has for the city. Rather than the strains of Philipsz's melancholic rendition of The Internationale (1999) haunting Cockatoo Island's cavernous turbine hall, it's Gang of Four's song At Home He's a Tourist (1979) that comes to mind when thinking of what the average hedonist, ultra-consumerist Sydneysider might make of all this: "He fills his head with culture/ He gives himself an ulcer."