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Reviews EIGHTEENTH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
EIGHTEENTH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY The Magazine
October 2012 Written by Jessica Horton 0 Comments
Art In Architecture
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Art Matters
ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, MUSEUM OF Berlin Art Scene
CONTEMPORARY ART AUSTRALIA, PIER 2/3,
Cornerstone
COCKATOO ISLAND · Sydney, AU
Cover Story
A s Terry Smith points out in the introduction to his 2009 book What is Contemporary Art?, the
conventional response to the eponymous question is that it cannot be answered. Appearing at
Editor's Letter
the end of grand European and American narratives of modernism, contemporary art appears so
diverse as to elude definition. In place of a singular model of what art is, we are invited, over and over
again, to the “snapshot” that is the art biennale. Comprised of a long (but usually familiar) list of
Features
international artists, biennales invite us to wander through a haze of jetlag and scratch our heads over
In The Studio
what precisely the works on view have to do with the themes confidently announced by the curators.
18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations breaks the mold in small ways. Instead of forced assertions Inside Out
that the 220 artworks exhibited by more than 100 artists across 4 venues share a theme, style, or
sensibility, artistic co-directors Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster propose a model for how
Newcomer
they might relate to one another without conforming to a singular agenda: a conversation. They
Poetry in Motion
explain that all our relations “begins with two curators in dialogue. This matrix of conversation extends
to both artists and audiences in a multi-vocal correspondence.” Like any good partner in conversation,
Pulse
the works have in common a willingness and capacity to converse, to take turns sharing and
listening. They do not judge or opine. Departing from modernist principles of criticism, antagonism,
Reviews
and disruption, all our relations undertakes the positive work of stitching the world — however
imperfectly — back together. The Collector
Three participatory works that incorporate sewing help visualize the model the artistic directors have
in mind. In The Mending Project, 2009-ongoing, by Lee Mingwei, visitors to a thread-strewn station at
the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCAA) sit down for a chat with the artist while they hand
over a damaged textile and choose a color of thread he will use to mend it. Importantly, the finished
job is anything but neat. Garish, uneven stitches leave their mark on the item, functioning as a visual
metaphor for the imperfect resolution of any conversation between individuals. Visitors to Erin
Manning’s Stitching Time, 2008-ongoing, in a sprawling atelier at the spectacular Cockatoo Island
venue (formerly a penal colony and shipyard) are invited to embellish and wear gauzy scraps of fabric
pulled from hanging nets while enjoying a leisurely cup of tea. While viewers typically rush through
biennales in order to see everything, here they were encouraged to step out of the fast lane in order to
gift their time and stitches to the work. Finally, in The Scar Project, 2005-ongoing, by Anishinaabe
artist Nadia Myre, also at Cockatoo Island, visitors take up twine and scissors to manifest a scar —
be it physical or psychological — on their own miniature canvas and then write the story to go with it.
The growing, seven-year-old “body” of The Scar Project absorbs the images and stories, holding
together both the individual and collective aspects of trauma and healing. As the ragged stitches on
canvases, sleeves, and scraps attest, the gesture of coming together in all three works is partial and
imperfect, falling short of creating a seamless totality.
artvoicesmagazine.com/2012/10/eighteenth-biennale-of-sydney/ 1/3
2. 2/1/13 EIGHTEENTH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY | Artvoices Magazine
Insisting on a framework in which difference is legible, all our relations participates in a postcolonial
vision of art after modernism. It carries on the legacy of the groundbreaking documenta 11 in 2002,
which helped to standardize the inclusion of art from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But all our
relations quietly and matter-of-factly goes a step further, making room for an unprecedented number
of indigenous artists from the “Fourth World,” especially from Australia and the Americas. For Light
Painting, 2010, Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (of the Gumatj clan) scanned 110 gestural drawings in white
paint pen on clear acetates into a custom computer program, which randomly layers 3 images in an
endlessly changing projection on a wall of the MCAA. Here, an instance of globally familiar Australian
Aboriginal painting morphs into an irreducibly unique encounter between visitor and work. In
Prophetstown, 2012, Alan Michelson (a Mohawk artist) displays eight models of colonial log cabins in
a darkened room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, drawing upon sources as diverse as the
Frontierland ride at Disneyland and Home in the Woods, 1847, by American landscape painter
Thomas Cole. Michelson shows cabins to be more than the architecture of colonial assimilation by
layering their surfaces with text related to histories of Native American survival. The inclusion of a
c.1850 Australian miners’ prison puts the American cabins in dialogue with Australia’s own histories
of settlement. It may be tempting to attribute the high instance of indigenous-made art to McMaster’s
Cree heritage or to the tremendous impact of Aboriginal art on contemporary Australian identity. But
innovative work by Yunupingu, Michelson, and others converses so adeptly with their contemporaries
that identity politics finally seem beside the point.
All our relations is a very serious exhibition. The co-directors invite sincere relationships and
conversations without irony. It is a relief, then, when humor — an important mode of cross-cultural
communication in its own right — glimmers through. Since only animals are invited to board
Rehearsing Catastrophe: the Ark in Sydney, 2012, by Lyndal Jones, human actors wearing animal
masks wait in vain before an enormous wooden ark protruding from an old shipbuilding shed at
Cockatoo Island. Also on the island, Museum of Copulatory Organs, 2012, by Maria Fernanda
Cardoso and Ross Rudesch Harley, gives us a break from big, human themes in order to dwell in the
microscopic world of insect sex. Elegant, intricate sculptures of salamander sperm and bean weevil
penises are punctuated by schoolyard jokes written by hand on makeshift labels: “The spikiest penis
in the world,” and “It’s not size that matters, it is shape.” Relating to animals is, like everything else in
the exhibition, unfinished business. But we are invited to keep conversing with earnest optimism and
an occasional chuckle.
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