17th Biennale of Sydney - Cockatoo Island
Wednesday 26 May 2010
The most satisfying Biennale work for me on Cockatoo Island is also one of the most deceptively minimal. Kate McMillan's spare, semi-ephemeral work Islands of Incarceration is both structure and image, a large curtained enclosure printed on the outside with an apparently continuous image of a forest. Inside its meditative space, senses are heightened: exterior sounds as well as the low, growling hum of the soundtrack seem more particular; the gentle movement of the curtain in the breeze creates a surprisingly powerful sense of presence; awareness of place becomes sharper and relationships between interiority and exteriority coalesce. This is amplified by the work's siting in a slatted-wall space open to the elements which neither protects nor encloses but alludes to both. While the work has been made with particular set of histories in mind (Cockatoo Island's earlier convict prison period and a massacre of indigenous people in a Western Australian forest), it transcends this specificity and achieves a universal poetic of presence, absence, desecration and commemoration.
The AES+F group's massive multichannel video installation in the round The Feast of Trimalchio got the kind of substantial sponsorship that lets work be seen the way it's supposed to be, in this case cinema-standard with a comfy banquette. The images are transfixing, with their seductive high-end qualities toughened by stilted animation and minimal digital backgrounds. Airless, moving tableaux of uniformly beautiful models in Lacoste-white ensembles - like glossy high-fashion magazine advertisements come jerkily to life - present surface as meaning and actions offering no consequence. If, like me, you've only seen still photographs from this group previously, this spectacular work is a surprise worth trudging across the far reaches of any puddled post-industrial landscape for, and did I mention the comfy banquette?
Most disappointing for this committed fan:
Yvonne Todd's expert redeployment of the outposts of 1970s vernacular portraiture, normally so addictively unsettling, lose much of their usual creepy power from being dispersed throughout the small rooms of a semi-derelict cottage. The ruined domestic setting, which must have seemed like such a good fit for this artist, made me long for some nice white walls, a tight hang and, especially, gallery lighting.
Hiroshi Sugimoto's overwrought presentation of lightbox photographs of electricity in the island's cramped and crammed power station required viewers to ascend a specially built staircase with an ancient Buddhist sculpture at its apex. Trouble was, I didn't feel holy, I felt needlessly manipulated. The photographs themselves were, as usual, formally restrained, inventive and elegant, unlike the chaotic, dangerous mad-professor environment they competed with and ultimately lost out to.
