Seeing these two (well three really) people work together on their tour of Sydney is one of those moments that only a Biennale could create.

2. Lines of Trees Pierre Huyghe

This one off work was a magical and engaging experience - viewed very early in the morning this was like opening the door to Narnia.

3. Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Murder of Crows

This work was one of the most emotional and engaging works in the Biennale of a special moment in sound installation in Australia.

4. Mike Rakowitz white man got no dreaming

Seeing Michael’s Rakowitz social architecture and art project first hand demonstrated what great art and great humanity are all about.

5. Cockatoo Island becomes a Biennale of Sydney venue - (once again).

Cockatoo Island was absolutley a crowd favourite and it was great to see so many people enjoying this amazing Sydney landmark and some great art as well.

Edith Moss is a young Sydney writer and has written articles for a number of national and local arts publications. Edith’s main area of interest is contemporary art, design and architecture, she seeks to write about these areas for a broad audience and make contemporary art more open to the public.

Only 5 days to go and I just received the following from the BoS, “Liam Gillick has decided to transform the lecture format of a public conference into a series of personal discussions with the audience over email and/or the telephone. If you would like to be included in Gillick’s new project of individual talks, I encourage you to authorise the Biennale to send the artist your name and direct contact information, if you have not already done so.”

Gillick was previously scheduled to actually meet the public, including drinking sessions at the pub, in a series of lectures called Relations of Equivalence: Three Potential Endings. I guess these have been cancelled, please confirm with the Biennale office and adjust your diaries if need be.

It seems likely that he is no longer is coming to Australia making remote “conversations” the only possibility. (This is pure conjecture on my part.) However, regardless of the reason for this “transformation” I find it a little troubling.

Can private tet a tets with a select few (I know how I made the list, but how does anyone else get on it??) really replace an event that was open to the public at large? Would it be more equitable to just cancel the whole idea? Or is elitism in art OK, just another manifestation of the status quo?

Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong and he’ll chat to all comers? Why not contact the BoS and see?

Tracey Clement is an artist and writer, who currently lives in Sydney. Some of her recent artwork can be seen at www.groundfloorgallery.com

Not sure how active Yoko is with her NY/Sydney phone calls. To let you know I spoke to her on Saturday August 23rd 08. Weird experience but very exciting. It was definitely her! wish I had had something insightful to say….but we did talk about Tokyo….
Diane

p.s. by the way, Cockatoo Island is FANTASTIC..and as my 5 year old says “do we have to see william Kentridge AGAIN…!”

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Image: Yoko Ono, Telephone Piece, 1997/2008, telephone and designated line, to receive telephone calls from the artist

The montage, for lack of a better word, of different scenes in which monarchies are attacked by the lower classes is fascinating. The different stages that take place from coronation to dissent, to fear to violence is poignant when represented through various incarnations of Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution portrayed on film. This very much contributes to this undercurrent of “upper-middle class” guilt and fear of the lower classes presented in these films as the well arrogance and ignorance of the monarchy.

These films when pieced together present a sort of blueprint for REVOLUTION similar to the stages of grief. However with the different democratic structure in Australia the film represents fear much more than reality. Australia’s are increasingly both security and finance focused. The big bad recession is much more of a fear for the average Australian. However this is not to say that this film doesn’t relate to current life – not getting ahead of yourself or too big for your boots is very Australian.

Similarly the tradition of convict entrepreneurs in Australia means we are very wary of too much power and wealth. The tough thing is that we want our fellow Aussies to succeed. Just pretend that you are not too successful and no villagers will be at your door wielding torches.

Tracey Moffat’s First Jobs Series, 2008 is currently showing at Roslyn Oxley9 until the 13th of September.

Edith Moss is young Sydney writer and has written articles for a number of national and local arts publications. Edith’s main area of interest is contemporary art, design and architecture, she seeks to write about these areas for a broad audience and make contemporary art more open to the public.

Image: Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento,1997, taxidermy horse, metal frame, leather slings, rope  Collection Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin; Gift Amici Sostenitori del Castello di Rivoli. Installation view at the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Photograph: Ben Symons.

Now I trust a few of my smarter readers have recognised the quote above straight away. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, of course, one of the greatest comedies ever written. And the recipient of that instruction is the overwheening Malvolio; he’s reading a letter purporting to come from his boss, Olivia – in fact it’s from his enemy Maria.

In most productions of the play, poor old Malvolio turns round at that point – as you would! But, just last week on the Phillip Adams program (ABC Radio National), I learnt to my joy that the old Bard didn’t have anything as mundane as circular movement in mind at all. He understood ‘revolve’ to mean “Think about it real hard”!!!

So, How Many Artists in the Biennale Got it Wrong Too?

For, of course, we have to assume that the highly literate Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev knows her Shakespeare, and fully intended her 2008 ‘Revolutions’ Biennale to be about matters of the mind, not mere movement. For she sure wasn’t offering us simple beauty – apart from the exquisite Alexander Calder at the MCA!

Or did she take the odd short cut???

For I used the opportunity afforded by the symposium on the Shandong Buddhas that are opening at the AGNSW as the Biennale closes, to revisit that Site of Revolution – to find an audience still pursuing BOS 2008 with an assiduity that denied its 3 month residency in a Sydney that’s notorious for noshing only on novelty. My memory was that the august Art Gallery had most of the best old art in – a great addition to the new art that is the usual BOS fare. You know – Malevich and Tinguely, Beuys, Klein and, above all Duchamp. They’re still there, of course; but there are also a rum lot of artists who simply took CCB’s challenge literally.

So here’s an admittedly callow list of them,

though it doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel by including that mass of video art as revolutionary just because the tape or film goes round – starting, of course, at the end of the Gallery:

1. Yoko Ono’s old-fashioned phone with a revolving dial – did she ever call??? because you couldn’t call out. Useless? Art? Perhaps she was chosen for her reversible surname alone?

2. Slavko Tikec’s ping-pong balls on water – fairground stuff

3. Gordon Bennett’s plan to revolve the Gallery’s art – from room to room and upside down; rejected by the Powers that Be

4. Rebecca Horn’s 1992 revolving pointer that cuts through a number of doors. Hey, it’s still working – so good engineering. But art?

5. Michael Snow’s De La – like Horn’s it still goes round and offers new insights into the Art Gallery ceilings. Wow!

6. Jean Tinguely certainly wasn’t at his best when he came up with the clanking machine that gives both farm machinery and kinetics a bad name.

7. Atsuko Tanaka’s paint splodges may revolve to order – but surely too slowly to create any visual effect of interest.

In fact, the only thing going round that works beyond its technology is Tinguely’s Meta-Malevich – though it ought to have been placed closer to the Malevich sketch so we could see the one come to life in the other. And what genius gave this most modest example of sumprematism such a glorious silver frame – turning a piece of artistic arithmatic into an icon?

Which leaves just two Revolutionary works that might have satisfied the Bard – making you think more than making you gawp/yawn. The late Mick Kubarrku is strangely out of place in the Gallery foyer’s debating booth. But his eternal, unmoving spiral of python/serpent seems to go on for ever off its bark base, carrying my thoughts about the mysteries of Aboriginal religion with it. How intriguing if it had been juxtaposed with Marcel Duchamp’s equally unmoving bicycle wheel to stimulate their own circularity and debate – the numinous versus the mundane, the idea of the snake as god versus the idea of the wheel as art, etc – rather than the terribly obvious bike videos that were chosen to bracket the old Dadaist.

Talking about odd associations,

some of the juxtapositions in CCB’s catalogue are as delicious as anything in or on her galleries, facades, dank rooms, toilets and tunnels. A useful primer for tyro revolutionaries lies hidden in its considerable depths (why was the AFP bothering with Dr Haneef?). But Tracey Moffatt looks to have self-imploded her film called Revolution by including a still from one of the greatest parodies of the regime-change genre in the imperishable person of Sid James as the Purple Pimpernel in Don’t Lose Your Heads! Definitely a tome that will assist this Biennale to live and provoke on.

But there’s still a week to go – with a new energy appearing like the cavalry over the bluff: talks and films firing off in all directions – even Mike Parr scheduled, though he didn’t bother to show last time round; a night session on Cockatoo; an auction for the Indians at the MCA; and, pace my first blog, parties everywhere – well actually mostly at Customs House! See you all at the closing party, Sunday night, 7^th September.

But will we be introduced to The New Man, David Elliott then? And do we really want to meet a man so careful as to declare, re BOS 2010:

“The central subject will be contemporary art

and why it is one of the most important activities in which we can be engaged. This is, because if it is any good, it balances enjoyment with wisdom by offering creative, free and open perspectives that are desperately needed in complicated times. I will, of course, take into account the state of art across the whole world today and how this may relate to that made in Australia and the regions around it.”

Hey David, “Think about it real hard”!!!

In total there five different prizes given in four different categories. The prizes are:

* Overall Award - $40,000 prize
* the Telstra General Painting Award - $4000 prize
* the Telstra Bark Painting Award- $4000 prize
* the Telstra Work on Paper Award- $4000 prize
* the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award (sponsored by Telstra)- $4000 prize

You can see a list of the winners here:
http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/museums/exhibitions/natsiaa/25/pdf/room_brochure.pdf

What does the Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards have to do with the Biennale I hear you ask, well, the winner of the general painting award was Doreen Reid Nakamarra (see bio details here) who happens to be one of the artists who created a work for the biennale. The work that won the $4,000 Telstra General Painting Award (image 1) is an untitled work that depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Marrapinti, west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia. “The lines in the painting depict the creek at the site and the sandhills that surround it. In ancestral times, a group of women of the Nangala and Napangati kinship subsections camped at this site during their travels towards the east. While at the site the women made nose bones, also known as marrapinti, which are worn through a hole made in the nose web. During ceremonies relating to Marrapinti, the older women pierced the nasal septums of the younger women who were participating in the ceremony. Nose bones were originally used by both men and women but are now only inserted by the older generation on ceremonial occasions. Upon completion of the ceremonies at Marrapinti, the women continued their travels east passing through Wala Wala, Ngaminya and Wirrulnga, before heading north-east to Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay)”. (description from Papunya Tula Artists)

For the Biennale, Doreen has painted an extremely beautiful work that, just as the Telstra Award winning work, depicting designs associated with the rockhole and soakage water site of Marrapinti, west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia. What is unusual about this work is that it is being displayed horizontally on a sort of plinth in order to accentuate the 3d effects created by the patterns in this work. According to the Biennale website “Her pictorial style is based on repeated gestures and lines that build up a three dimensional optical field suggestive of specific stories associated with her land, but possibly also of movement generally – immaterial waves that move the world continuously”

I never fail to be amazed by the work being produced by Australia’s indigenous artists whose work is not only visually spectacular but culturally, historically and artistically significant.  I think that congratulations are in order for Doreen Reid Nakamarra for being chosen to part of the Biennale and for winning the Telstra Painting Award.

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Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications.

Russolo was born in 1885 in Portogruaro, Veneto, Italy. Russolo’s father was director of the Schola Cantorum in Latisana and organist at their local cathedral. After moving to Milan at the age of sixteen, Russolo attended Accademia di Brera (the Academy of Fine Arts, Brera) where he studied drawing and painting. In his early works, Russolo employed a divisionalist, almost pointillist technique to depict the increasingly industrial landscape developing in Italian cities at the time.

The theories of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published in his Futurist Manifesto (1909), encouraged the creation of new cultural phenomena to manifest and predominate over all earlier forms. To Marinetti, social evolution could only be achieved through initiatives of modern man including the destruction of museums, libraries and any institutions that looked to the past. The young painter and musician, Russolo became ensconced by Marinetti’s futurism and in 1913, he published his treaties L’arte dei Rumori (the Art of Noise). Russolo began inventing and constructing Intonarumori (literally, Intoners or Noise Machines), a musical instrument capable of replicating the sounds of every-day modern life. Unlike the orchestral instruments familiar to Russolo, that could only play music which echoed the past and tradition, his noise machines delivered a symphony of the noises of modern, industrialised progress.

Unfortunately for Futurism, its close affiliation with fascism, a friendship forged by Marinetti and Mussolini, dictated its eventual demise. The original Intonarumori created by Russolo did not survive World War Two but from their original designs and photographs, they have been recently reproduced and are exhibited in this Biennale at Pier 2/3.

When viewing these works, it is important to acknowledge how Russolo perceived the changing sound scape of his contemporary world. From Russolo’s perspective, throughout history, man was dominated by his natural world and this form of nature was silent. However, in the nineteenth century, the industrialisation of Europe had witnessed man’s manipulation of nature for progress and the key consequence of this was noise. His new conception of music as noise and Intonarumori attempted to erase the boundary between sounds and noise. Abandoning his formal musical training in favour of the noises he perceived to be progressive, Russolo created sounds of engines and machines.

In the year 2008, Russolo’s ideas and Intonarumori may seem eccentric and almost parochial in terms of their influence on contemporary culture but in the context of a modern city, in which these noises are the public sound scape, Russolo’s speculations may be viewed as intuitive and accurate. If only Russolo could have witnessed our contemporary preoccupation of drowning out these noises with mobile telephones and portable media players, what would he have thought?!

Beyond his contribution to this Biennale, his legacy continues with the Luigi Russolo Prize in Electro-Acoustic Music, a prestigious annual international competition awarded by the Russolo-Pratella Foundation of Varese, Italy.

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Australian artist Mike Parr’s MIRROR/ARSE presents 17 of his works in the broken building that was formerly the sailors quarters and ‘academy’, on Cockatoo Island. Like a revolutionary pamphlet, he yells at us to see the world and be angry. Judging by the way people flinched but persisted to view videos of him mutilating himself or killing chickens, he clearly turned heads and hearts.

Parr sprays his works around the building like some great dog, urinating its territorial claim. On one wall he scrawls a quote from the godfather of Australian conservatism, The Hon Robert Menzies, boasting that “none of our leading artists produce freak pictures”, only landscapes of “sunshine”.

You smell the art in the Junior Sailors Change Room before you get there, to find a row of buckets containing Parr’s pee. On the day we were there, the smell was horrid. The lavatory next door has speakers playing Senate debates, resting on toilet bowls, taking the political piss with seditious force; off with their (dick) heads!

The Biennale’s icon event, A Forest of Lines at the Sydney Opera House, was revolutionary despite itself. It intended to be aesthetic and sublime, not revolutionary or ecological. There were indeed hundreds of plants in the Opera House, mostly taller than a person, which was impressive. But many were sorry specimens, with attendants scurrying about pouring water into their black plastic tubs. The artificial clouds had an acrid smell and you felt the thrum of machinery through the wooden floor.

Caption: ‘Some plants were so poorly they had to be removed from the “reality” of the artwork.’

I vox-pop a dozen viewers who had exactly the experience Huyghe intended. The only conflict was between the vast majority who thought the pot plant collection was realistically ‘like’ a rainforest and the woman who claimed it was “a surrealist experience”, with no referent to anything outside the unconscious.

The faux-forest was tragic and fake compared to other indoor forests like Melbourne Museum’s, let alone the real thing. It took the climate and ecological debate to end-game, when nature is smashed, cities collapse and the weeds take over the human opera.

To claim A Forest of Lines says nothing ecological is like staging a gourmet food fair in Darfur and feigning no relationship to the starvation going on all around. The audience’s somnambulism was the revolutionary moment here.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are involved with 16 Beaver (16beavergroup.org) and spent some weeks travelling in Australia “on the search for a possibility of revolution”. Their talk to a Biennale audience at Artspace was partly explanations of their theory and practice and partly a documentation report back on the Australian revolution.

Disappointingly, most of the film was of themselves speaking to camera, not the people they met along the way. Their conclusion was not about current possibility rather a recitation of past baggage - Australia is racist, founded on dispossession etc. In response to questions about the ongoing environmental ‘revolution’ to save the climate, they accused it of racism or misanthropy, a line usually run by silly right wing commentators, not artists.

Ross Gibson’s Conversations II creates complete presence between him and a self-nominated member of the public, who make an online booking to converse with Gibson, in a special booth in the foyer of the AGNSW. This was far more raw and open to possibility than the edited, doctrinal reportage of Gabri and Anastas.

Unlike the unspectacular spectacle of Huyghe, which acted out but said nothing, the conversations were contained and articulate. It delivered an authenticity sought after by everyone from marketers and politicians to artists and performers.

In the opaque eddies of mass-mediated conversations and their Twitter-size thoughts, it was radical to have a forty minute conversation that was was private/public, yet not staged within a ’system’ such as power, money or psychoanalysis.

Last word goes to Gordon Bennett because he made a grand, coherent insurrectionary proposition. An urban indigenous artist, Bennett proposed to swap the art in AGNSW’s indigenous gallery with the colonial-era art, which would then suffer the indignity of being hung upside down. Architectural models of the revolutionised galleries were on display, with a note explaining that the proposal was supported by BoS artistic directer Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev but vetoed by AGNSW director Edmund Capon.

Bennett’s brilliance is to say what is necessary, even if it means going Gonzo and upsetting the rules of genre. In order to deal with something a profound as colonial dispossession, Bennett literally re-grounded, moving the paintings around. Like so many other revolutions, afterwards it looks inevitable, like common sense or plain speaking.

My wager is that revolutions are happening all around us in 2008, largely through local connections and conversations. Art can denounce (Parr), connect (Gibson) and reorganize (Bennett) our thoughts and the world. But its clear that if it tries to be revolutionary about something as real as indigenous dispossession for example, it take a bold person to rennovate the Bastille.

When Biennales acknowledge the changed climate and subsequent ecological revolution, it will expand their relevance and leverage. This shift is probably inevitable, since no matter how evasive art and its audiences are (pace Huyghe), there is no getting around it - everything that happens, happens on the Planet.

Dan Cass
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I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62)