Arty Party Time

Chryssy Tintner, the former Director of Viscopy explained to me that one of the reasons visual artists had been so ineffective in fighting for their copy rights, compared to musicians and writers, was that they were inherently lonely, garret people who actually disliked getting together about anything!

You wouldn’t know it at Biennale time. It’s party, party, party as the great event opens – two years of isolation overcome in a single week. Or is it? Are those really artists packing out the echoing vaults at Sydney’s two major galleries and the even larger one in the Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island? I think the odd one or two must have crept in along with the overseas curators and the really important people who are Friends or join Foundations to keep an event like the BOS or an organisation like the MCA going; for someone just behind me in the crush kept up a running and derogatory commentary on the Lord Mayoral speech at the MCA Opening last night. And it couldn’t have been a critic, could it?

Coming Too Soon?

The first BOS party I heard of was on Saturday night – just 5 days before the public got to see what the hype was all about. And it was at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery – which did, after all have something to celebrate with return of the Bill Henson photos by the over-politicised plod. But was a champagne and bagels event brushing against those sensitive images really the way to go?

Then on Sunday, Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – henceforth known as CCB – made her first speech of the season to open the new Anna Schwartz Gallery at Carriageworks – a brave venture for the Melbourne galleryist in ungentrified Eveleigh. But the combination of the two dynamic ladies filled the largest commercial art space in the Southern Hemisphere to the gunnels – or was it the Mike Parr exhibition with which Schwartz opened? For there were a few (including a prominent doctor) who commented unfavourably on the relative pornography of gigantic photos of a bloodied Parr harming himself and Henson’s untouched subject-matter.

Playing Chicken

Ironically enough, the plod themselves came out again yesterday to check a 1970s Parr film of harm done to a chicken in the BOS – not caring a cluck about damage to the artist!

Back at the MCA party, it’s clear that the Museum has the best invitation list in the arts – for young and old were bundying the Bimbadgen like there was no tomorrow; and another 50% was actually looking at the art! Will they all (or only half?) head out to talk about hanging horses and the jet propelled Jesus – for that’s precisely what the chattering classes are there for?

Just as well they weren’t partying on Cockatoo – well, not until tonight! For the most dispiriting party in the Biennale has to be Lara Favoretto’s Macchine del divertimento – a troupe of gas cyclinders even lonlier than an artist in his garret, glumly blowing party whistles by numbers. It made the Internationale sound like a hip-hop dance tune by comparison.

But more of that later – when the partying’s over.

Jeremy Eccles has been writing and broadcasting about the arts since 1983, with an increasing specialisation in indigenous arts and culture. He’s currently an editor on the Aboriginal Arts Directory website.