Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
Arts Hub Australia, 16th June 2008
The 2008 Biennale of Sydney will be spinning to the theme of Revolutions – Forms That Turn. Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev explains how art makes her world go around.
Even filtered through lengths of fibre-optic cable, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s entire being seems in perpetual motion – of thought, deed and, one imagines, gesture.
This inner tumult of theory, energy and inspiration has led to the Biennale of Sydney Artistic Director molding a long-incubated curatorial theme to the sixteenth Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions – Forms That Turn is an exploration of cyclical movement, inhabiting the space created by the etymological backflips of its title’s former half.
Christov-Bakargiev is fascinated by the paradoxical fork in the word’s journey from definition of that which “re-volves” – turns twice, thus returning to its starting point – to that which essentially turns only once, engendering radical and irreversible change, and wished to examine the now contradictory cohabitants of the dictionary entry “revolution”.
However, as is encapsulated in the theme’s title, a curious reconciliation between the two is possible$$s$$ there is a direct suggestion of political content and change, harmoniously contrasted with the alternative definition of cyclical movement. Christov-Bakargiev has her own pet analogy: “If you change your point of view and look at the fact that the song [on a record] moves forward through a cyclical movement, you reach a way of philosophically reinventing the use of the word today that might be more interesting also in terms of its political and social repercussions,” she says.
“The world seems to think that revolutionary practise in [its historical] sense is over and you can’t do that anymore… There have been so many periods when that’s been said over and over again,” she continues with only a passing bite of irony.
Citing the political mindset of the ancient Greeks, Christov-Bakargiev explains that revolution in both of its modern senses – being radical change followed by a return to the original status quo, in perpetuum – is an entirely necessary component of societal development: “At times, you cannot change the politics within the rules that the politics have set up$$s$$ you have to break the rules and make a new political system,” she states. “In my work with art, I’m interested in the… intellectual and psychological roots of the impulse to revolt. Artists, writers, filmmakers and intellectuals generally push the limits of the rules in a society and they always have. I believe that all good art is revolutionary.”
Christov-Bakargiev – Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy since 2001, and a jury member of the 49th Venice Biennale in the same year – had little chance of falling short of her vision for a refreshed perspective on revolution and contemporaneity. The Biennale comprises many of these revolutionary moments, both historical and present-day, through the assembly and exhibition of new works as a “frame” for earlier ones. Adherence to the convictions that history is not linear, and that “contemporary” refers not to what is most recent but to anything that enters into our visual or cognitive fields, informs much of her approach: “It’s a consumer-culture idea to cut out what is of now as opposed to what is of before. No good artist will ever think that [Marcel] Duchamp is not contemporary or that… a cave painting is not contemporary because… if you come out of a philosophical framework of scepticism, only that which you perceive is existing. Everything that’s not in the here and now is not contemporary, it’s part of memory.”
With this in mind, Christov-Bakargiev has envisaged the Biennale as a “constellation” of works both historical and modern, spanning decades and celebrating the dynamism of the theme’s complex question of language and meaning.
One such constellation will be housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the work of several artists is exhibited in close proximity and connected or separated by young Brazilian artist Renata Lucas’ series of moving walls. The walls, which are shifted along their tracks to reconfigure the exhibition space, connect kinetic arts from the fifties and sixties with contemporary visions of kineticism. The concept is not simply behind the artwork, it is the artwork.
One thing which Christov-Bakargiev emphatically clarifies in her explanation of the constellation is that her intention is not to juxtapose, but rather to create a dynamic set of relations. Juxtaposition, she states with some fervour, is something you do in a book, not in a gallery.
Pursuing the theme of revolution as forward momentum is Spanish performance artist Dora García, whose self-produced tours of some of the Biennale’s key works at the Museum of Contemporary Art are designed to highlight the behaviour of exhibition audiences. Indeed the tours are entitled What A F*cking Wonderful Audience, a reference to American comedian Lenny Bruce’s abortive Australian live performance in 1962, when he was arrested on obscenity charges and swiftly escorted from our innocent soils, never to return – and all for the opening utterance of those five words.
Shocked by the revelation of such puritanical hysteria – especially given that admiring Australian promoters had taken the trouble of inviting and accommodating a performer of whose style it appears they were blissfully ignorant – García not only devised the tours, but an entire reimagining of the show that never was.
With Harli Ammouchi as a swaggering Bruce, Just Because Everything Is Different, It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed is a revisitation of that evening when the limits of our tolerance constricted us into sputtering outrage. García’s work is, as the title quite plainly suggests, an exploration – and interrogation – of just how much those limits have slackened in over forty years.
If the recent frisson of righteous indignation that trembled through the country in response to artist Bill Henson’s exhibition is any indication, it would seem that our restrictive waistbands have been only minimally elasticised. In a disconcerting echo of the Bruce incident, the Henson works never even saw the light of camera flash on champagne glass as, following the distribution of the offending invitations, Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery was forced to cancel the exhibition before the doors even opened.
Certainly for many in Australia’s artistic communities, the shock and dismay expressed both popularly and politically at the content of the collection was mirrored at their own extreme. As Christov-Bakargiev noted, “all good art is revolutionary”$$s$$ at any given moment, artists are stretching the boundaries, but this does not mean that the general public is ever going to keep pace.
For her part, the Biennale’s Artistic Director trod very carefully around an issue whose context is an unfamiliar one. Though the timing of the Henson witch-hunt was sheer coincidence, Christov-Bakargiev is aware of the bruises with which it has left Australia’s artistic community, and the inevitability of comparisons to works programmed into the Biennale well in advance of the rise of censorship’s very plain head.
“I believe that Bill Henson is a very important artist, a very major artist, and one of the most respected artists from Australia in the world, and I was very surprised,” she says frankly. “I don’t understand why and how this could happen$$s$$ it doesn’t make sense to me.”
Seeking a conclusion, she cites the long since forgotten, strategic addition of fig leaves to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, seemingly shrugging: “I can assure you that I think [it] looks a hell of a lot better without the fig leaves!”
Described as “a celebration of defiant spirit”, this year’s exhibition features over 180 participating artists and 50 new works displayed alongside iconic masterpieces of the 20th century, across a range of venues. Expected to attract more than 250,000 visitors, it precedes a handful of similar events set to kick off in the Asia-Pacific region in September – namely the Shanghai, Gwangju and Singapore Biennales, and Yokohama’s Triennale.
Whilst Christov-Bakargiev’s carefully composed constellations and provocative explorations of perception and experience may not cause Sydneysiders to overthrow the government, like a spinning record, they may just be prompted to wheel around and advance the music. With any luck we’ll all jump hard enough to skip a couple of tracks.
The Biennale of Sydney 18 June – 7 September 2008
