OLD AND NEW ROMANTICS: THE 17TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY

THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: SONGS OF SURVIVAL IN A PRECARIOUS AGE

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The 16th Biennale of Sydney in 2008, ‘Revolutions—Forms that Turn’, was always going to be an extremely hard act to follow. That exhibition will remain a high point in the thirty-seven year history of the event. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the 17th Biennale of Sydney. This year’s biennale does not have the intellectual rigour, visual acuity, or breadth of vision of the previous one curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. David Elliott’s biennale by comparison, is unremarkable. There are, of course, some very interesting works, as one might expect given the immense scale of the event. According to the Biennale press release, this year there are one hundred and sixty-seven artists in the exhibition and supposedly there are more Australian artists than ever before.

While Christov-Bakargiev’s biennale was incredibly carefully choreographed, with a theme that was well-focused and articulated, Elliott’s selections seem comparatively much more random and unsystematic, and the whole exhibition has a rather slapdash or thrown together quality. In terms of individual venues, the works gathered together at the Museum of Contemporary Art seem particularly disparate, while the works in the Turbine Hall at Cockatoo Island are much more thoughtfully assembled and installed. No doubt some people will like the loose, grab bag approach, regarding it as less doctrinaire, less scholarly, and more open to a range of contemporary practices. To me, however, the exhibition as a whole comes across as simply the result of rather wooly thinking.

This is manifested first of all by the cumbersome title: ‘The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age’. The two parts of the title are hard to reconcile into a coherent idea or theme. Both parts... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004. Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes, dimensions variable. Collection of Seattle Art Museum. Gift of Robert M. Arnold in honour of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Installation view at Shawinigan Space, National Gallery of Canada, 2006. Courtesy Cai Studio. Photograph: Kazuo Ono.

Isaac Julien, Green Screen Goddess No. 1 (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Endura Ultra photograph, 180 x 240cm. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.