Reviving the fantastic. (Reviews).

Biennale of Sydney 

International Festival of Contemporary Art

Sydney, Australia

May 15 - July 14

The Biennale of Sydney has always tried to distinguish itself from the myriad of biennales that have sprung up like weeds in the past ten years or so. Yet despite the Biennale's long history, beginning with its inauguration in 1973, it has never really managed to find its niche, unlike the critical dumpfest that has characterized the Whitney Biennale, the Miss Universe-like pageantry and competitiveness of Venice, or even the mammoth scale of Sao Paolo. Too many times, it has Paiggybacked off the findings of other curators, appearing bland and even overtly derivative. This year's artistic director, Australian-based artist Richard Grayson, along with advisors Janos Sugar, Susan Hiller and Ralph Rugoff, overhauled the Biennale in favor of a more expansive and flexible one and a great number of the 57 artists invited were not the usual panoply of biennale regulars. The result was an exhibition that was quirky, refreshing and thankfully broke free from the opinions, obsessions and standards of the rest of the art world. Put simply, this particular incarnation of the Biennale of Sydney was a joyful and riotous meeting of the mad.

Despite this year's suspiciously whimsical theme of "(The World May Be) Fantastic," with all of its suggestions of frothy, insubstantial anarchy, a surprising number of the works succeeded in making a convincing rejoinder to the idea that contemporary art must necessarily toe the didactic line to be considered serious. Without the straitjacket comprised by the interference of too many ideological posturings, the organizers of the Biennale were able to stage a show that was pleasantly open-ended and inclusive of aspects missed in other large-scale exhibitions such as humor, imagination and an unwavering belief in the potential of the mundane. One might even argue that this year's Biennale was the antithesis of other' biennales (the "anti-Documenta") as it confirmed that levity has not lost its value, despite a global discourse that insists upon the necessity of having a solemn agenda to validate one's claim for existence.

To be sure, this Biennale, as with any large group exhibition, was predictably uneven and in many respects was a cross between an overloaded buffet and an unsatisfying sampling. In some cases, works that were originally conceived as part of a series appeared in bits and dribbles, which frequently made for a half-baked presentation. Series that fell short due to curatorial editing included Gang Xin's photographs, depicting the artist as he licks various objects, like Great Wall. Beijing. China (2000), and the brilliantly apocalyptic saga of paintings by the late Henry Darger, entitled "The Story of the Vivian Girls," of which only a few panels were shown. More problematically, a number of works seemed forced within the parameters of the exhibition theme, or not sufficiently thought out to invoke a convincing sense of the fantastic. There was a plethora of strategies that were decidedly pedestrian as the notion of the fantastic was often misconstrued as synonymous with the look of hyperrealism, the occult or th e spectacle. Many works, particularly those relying on their ability to simulate the real or those that made excessive use of technological aids, came across as gimmicks that were entertaining but eminently forgettable. Olaf Nicolai's Portrait of the Artist As a Wee ping Narcissus (2000), in which the artist rendered a true-to-life vision of himself apparently weeping into a pond, was a latter-day take on George Segal's mimesis of actuality but without the understated pathos. Patricia Piccini's lifelike girl, playing with what appeared to be pieces of human flesh shaped like fecal matter in Still Life with Stem Cells (2002), seemed to be vying with Jeffrey Vallance's conspiracy theories, including a work about images of clowns "found" on the Shroud of Turin titled The Clowns of Turin Found on the Holy Shroud (1998), for the dubious honor of being "weirdest of show."

Similar to these hyperreal or sci-fi works, but somewhat more engaging, were works that attempted to fake the actual; such as the confounding imitations of well-known art objects and paintings from seminal exhibitions in the early twentieth century made by Salon de Fleurus, an anonymous group. Others were more inventive to the extent that they involved deft execution; e.g. the remarkable flying contraptions of Panamarenko, like Bernoulli 1 (1995), which had some of the spark of the mad scientist. Many works, however, began with a high "wow" factor, but ended with the viewer's initial, reflexive response. Even the cleverest of works, such as Aleksandra Mir's chain of photographs Hello (2000) linking the famous, the infamous and non-famous, was but an exclamatory fragment; the collection of photographs in which a figure in one photograph appears in the next, thus forming a visual depiction of the six-degrees-of-separation cliche, is astounding in scope, but one sensed a missing premise behind the readymade (and pallid) explanation of "connectivity" being offered.

Far more interesting were those works that shied away from registering the "wow" or the "weirdness" factor at all. These included Vibeke Tandberg's series of photographs "Dad #1-6," (2000) in which the artist took pictures of herself dressed up in her father's shirt and pants. The clothes are obviously oversized for Tandberg, but the dwarfing of her female form is less the point than the facial expressions in each of the photographs. The face she presents is not her own, but a composite of features mixing her own with those of friends and family. Consequently, the face changes dramatically from frame to frame. In one, she resembles a gamine, androgynous youth, in another, a stern master of the house, and in yet another, she wears the resigned expression of a harried housewife. These multiple personalities beg comparison with Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman and many others, including several in the Biennale itself, such as Eleanor Antin's masquerade as her prima donna alter ego Eleanora Antinova in Loves of a Ba llerina (1986), and Vasco Aranjos's disguise as an opera singer in La Stupenda (2001). Tandberg, however, did not appear to be courting multiplicity for its own sake. These drastic differences of expression, all achieved by the subtle manipulation of a few features, point to a rupture in the conception of ordinariness. It is something familiar, but disturbing.

Bringing this potential of what is presumed as ordinary to another level was Katarzyna Jozefowicz's Carpet (1997-2000), which is comprised of hundreds of rows of celebrity faces cut out from various magazines. A concept too low-tech so as 1:0 trigger disbelief in viewers accustomed to the symbiotic relationship between technology and technique, the accumulation of these thousands of faces combined to form a vast metropolis of sorts. One could even sense the passage of time, as one walked beside this carpet, teeming with bright-white smiles, toothy grins and sullen artiste-scowls. The light shining from the ceiling became a metaphor for the sun, illuminating each row in turn. It was remarkable to see how easily these celebrity photographs could be transformed into something beyond their inherent function as signage--cheaply reproduced to satisfy the whetted appetite of the city for the eminently consumable.

If Jozefowicz's stunning installation expanded the metropolis to a sea of cutout faces, Shirley Tse's Polymathicstyrene (1999-2000) reduced it to a series of geometric inscriptions in perhaps the most emblematic of city refuse, that of Styrofoam. These inscriptions and patterns included conical imprints whose duplicative quality insinuated the instant gratification and subsequent disposal that affects most cities. Another prominent pattern was the intermittent and insistently wayward zigzag lines seemingly representative of streets and avenues refusing to conform to the gridded set of perpendicularities imposed by city planners. There was nothing breathtaking or shocking about the images that Jozefowicz and Tse produced other than their ability to transform the effluvium of everyday life without fanfare, technological wizardry or dense theoretical platforms. Notwithstanding, it takes a good deal of thought to achieve such a transformation, and it is an ability purportedly in demand but sadly lacking in supply within the circus-act framework of most biennales.

In other parts of the Biennale, the banal became transformed to dimensions no short of breathtaking. Loosely reminiscent of the optical illusions of M. C. Escher, Paul Noble's Public Toilet (1999) was an uninhibited glorification of the banal. Here the toilet is re-envisioned as a tower from a Bosch painting, piercing a coronet of clouds in all of its unassailable and deeply ironic majesty. These epic drawings were materializations of the absurd, which is the excess of fantasy. And it was this excess that made these drawings fantastic, because they refused to confirm what is an enduring skepticism about the possibilities of the unreasonable or the irrational. The works of Noble, along with the more compelling works of the show, seemed to take leave of the realm of the skeptic and that of reason by means of their sheer accumulation of embellishment, and of excess that refuses to stop.

This Biennale posed the disconcerting question that is made so by the fact that it wreaks havoc upon the neat and almost clinically elegant structure of crystallized categories. It could be argued that the absurdity of many works constituted a kind of post-Dada mentality, but Dada suggests reaction or resistance, which implicitly elevates the target of reaction to a position of privileged centeredness. The star of Joao Penalva's Mister (1999) a talking shoe, cared nothing for this, or any other kind of resistance. Surrounded by garish colored lights in a darkened room and encased in a tent resembling a booth for a revivalist meeting, a worn oxford shoe preaches relentlessly for about half an hour. Beginning with the unlikely opening of "I was born a woman...," the shoe narrates the grim tale of its owner whose body was destroyed or amputated bit by bit until nothing but the shoe remains. This pathetic tale, which is related by the talking shoe in a strong Irish accent, is the perfect carnival freak-show. It i s mildly repulsive in its crude vulgarity, but strangely and inexplicably alluring.

If any metaphor, implied by this disjuncture between the allure of a work and its level of grotesqueness, could accordingly be applied to the Biennale, it is that of the tunnel, hollowness, or of the hole. Such metaphors indicate the non sequitur nature of the works which conveniently elude the usual paradigms of resistance or subversion but are misleadingly used to explain away absurdity. In Miwa Yanagi's "Grandmothers" (2000-2001) series of photographs, where silver-haired women seemingly in their 70s and 80s are lushly photographed in various surreal scenarios reflective of the imaginings of young women interviewed by the artist. The instant reading applicable to the works would be one that resists the preconceptions concerning the elderly or eternal youth. Yet the surreal effect of some of the most striking in this series, such as a supermodel with the face and wrinkles of an octogenerian but the body of a twentysomething mincing upon a catwalk that is actually her own grave, is sheer make-believe. There are narratives accompanying each photograph that relate the story of each of the grandmothers, but the lyrical, axiomatic quality of these texts only serve to emphasize the otherworldly aspect of the visceral photographs.

The "hole," or the gap, and oddly enough, the depth, of these photographs is that the make-believe is transparent. There is no other layer that is duplicitously embedded in the blend of guilelessness and sophisticated execution that is Yanagi's fantasy world. We must take it at face value for there is no torment beyond the exuberant grins, coy smirks or contemplative musings of any of the grandmothers. The proclamation of fantasy, uninhibited by any awareness of issues, agendas and other real-world concerns, is the sole point. It is possibly this proclamation that is also the point of this year's Biennale of Sydney: that sensation can take precedence over explanation. Reworded, it is perhaps the case that what we serendipitously evoke from the vast well of our unconscious, reflexive imaginary is far more fantastic than anything we might conjure from the conventions of logic and deliberate thought.

JOAN KEE is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Culture at the University of Hong Kong.