At risk of sounding like an absolute philistine, conceptual art, like I’m sure it is for most average folks, has never ‘done it for me.’ But I’m trying. Today’s excursion to the Museum of Contemporary Art was certainly a new kind of personal aesthetic experience. I quickly jumped on a tour with a helpful volunteer, who provided that necessary background information for interpretation. While the tour was kind of rushed, it enabled one later to wander through that old bureaucratic labyrinth with compass and map, soaking up at one’s own pace the various artistic oddities.

One of the many themes, it seems, was movement in sculpture. A particular piece of Alexander Calder, whose title I have forgotten, stood as the prototype. Indeed the leisurely movement of the constructed mobile was in some abstract sense intensely beautiful, like some kind of extraterrestrial hieroglyphics floating in empty space. Many of the other pieces spoke similarly, but less effectively, to this same abstract conception of form, and their meaning largely derived from experimentation and resistance to inherited modalities. The problem here was that an affective content was missing. This was especially true by Julie Rrap’s piece entitled BUST(ED) which is ‘a subversion of western artistic traditions and the gender politics they reflect.’ This piece featured the arse of a woman, in plaster of Paris, or some kind of material that suggested the marble busts of ancient Rome, arising from a dark base, composing deconstruction of the classical form. Of all the pieces this was the most conventionally unconventional, in its very heavy-handed play, and as such the most dull of all the MCA exhibition.

The most striking piece was Maurizio Cattelan’s Novecento. An actual taxidermied horse suspended from the ceiling representing the failure of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century. The horse - the very embodiment of swift movement - dead and embalmed, had come to symbolize the stagnation and eventual death of communism. Indeed it was amusing that our guide ensured us that the artist actually purchased the horse after it died, and that for all intents and purposes, it had had a happy life running around on some Italian farm in the early 1990’s - a pre-emptive strike if any of the old ladies in the group were militant PETA activists - but also interesting considering the artist’s place in the historical nexus; i.e. after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The first prize for me was Attila Csörgő’s Slanting Water, for its simple surrealist jolt. The photograph hangs on a wall in its own room. The lighting is dark except for a focused beam on the picture itself. Two glasses of water face each other, with the liquid inside of both slanting away from the centre of the table, giving the peaceful effect of two men bowing at each other in humbled amiability. Apparently the effect was created by attaching the glasses to a table which was then spun, ’so that the water was pictured in centrifuge.’ In defying the fundamental law of gravity, the picture calls for a suspension of the everyday norms that exist in a present dysfunctional society, while providing a utopian glimmer of what society might be like beyond those laws. Its subtle thoughts of revolution, friendship and community are wrapped in a beguiling and mysterious aesthetic, and the photograph represents one of the rare instances in the MCA exhibition where form and content perfectly find each other.

For all the confusion and alienation the conceptual art brings to the mind of the non-specialist visitor, Slanting Water is the one piece that seems to transcend this unfortunate predicament. For an novice like myself, this is the most beautiful, most interesting and most political work at the Biennale’s MCA exhibition.

Philip Jones
Baulkham Hills NSW

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