The Do-It-Yourself Biennale

A full seventeen pages of the mighty BOS2008 Catalogue list the many people and organisations that have given something to bring this year’s Biennale into being - from the Malabar Art Unit at Long Bay Jail to the Maccarone Galllery in New York, and from Transfield Corporation to Mary Zournazi. Only one and a half pages of that are Australian government bodies; this is a highly privatised operation – with one consequence being that this is one of the most impoverished biennales in the world – Chairman Luca Belgiorno-Nettis claiming that its budget for 2008 is matched by most of the single artist shows at curator CCB’s Turin art institution.

Which perhaps helps to explain why one gets the impression that a lot of the international artists are CCB’s artistic mates and why there’s such an emphasis on her speciality, the Italian arte povera movement from the mid-60s (when even I was revolting – but did arte povera and I actually change anything?) and why Italian government agencies have been particularly generous to BOS2008.

The Curator Cares

This is not a complaint, I hasten to add. It’s vastly preferable for a Biennale curator to do something s/he really cares about and understands rather than trawling the world expensively for the latest sensations or fads. And CCB has given us something very personal, allowing teeth to be dug into many aspects of an event which is all-too-often so abstruse and bitsy you can’t even nibble.

Hey – but what will John McDonald, arch-BOS hater say this weekend in the (media sponsor) SMH???

Will it be as biting as Alan Sisley, Director of the Orange Regional Gallery in NSW, who, two years ago, opined: “Much of the work seen in the current Sydney Biennale looks as though some seriously paranoid young bus ticket inspectors were given a corner of Clint’s Crazy Bargains and told to make some art. The result is likely to include record players and umbrellas obsessively jumbled with cut up photographs, five hundred cocktail glasses, a TV set droning on about the weather and glass cases filled with Chinese spectacles, all apparantly placed without regard for any sort of traditional composition. Such work may impart a frisson of amusement and puzzlement as one endeavours to make sense of its random associations, but is almost completely devoid of meaning to anyone other than an obsessive theoretician of art”!!

Is that unfair to bus ticket inspectors? Anyone spotted a cocktail glass or an umbrella this year yet? No marks for a TV set, though.

Who Should Pay for the Cutting Edge?

But seriously, this commonly held viewpoint does raise the the question as to why such out-there and inherently unpopular art has to rely on private patronage when both the Biennale’s experimental and international prestige surely justify solid government backing?

What does Neil Balnaves, a delightful, down-to-earth man who made his money from very, very popular television programs, get out of paying for half of the ferries taking people to Cockatoo Island – where they encounter such delights as a film of Mike Parr having his face sewn up in a room filled with buckets of stinking shit? Or a four hour film about the Romanian Revolution – in Romanian? Or a rectangle of pale light on the floor of a darkened room that a label promised would eventually contain the “abstract cross” (is that possible?) of a window frame???

The other half of the free ferry cost, by the way is being met by the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, which has a real interest in attracting people to Cockatoo, one of the sites it manages. And on Sunday they hit pay-dirt with overflowing ferries all day long.

Pissing on Lenny Bruce

But even the Chair (and Major Partner) Luca Belgiorno-Nettis was forced to admit to me that the night at the Opera House when a performer impersonating Lenny Bruce, the American comedian who never got to present his show in Sydney in 1962 before being given the bum’s rush, attempted to prove that a word’s suppression is the only thing that gives it power by saying “Nigger” over and over again, had discomforted him and his table of Italian guests. It was less the Nigger theory than the threat of Bruce “pissing on you in the ring-side seats” that had done it, I believe. This time round, of course, Bruce (or artist Dora Garcia, at least) would have only been deported if he’d actually done that!

So I fear we won’t be able to get Richard Bell deported back to Charleville for his stream of Nigger and Boong jokes in his silly film on Cockatoo Island. But at least we’ve now had his reassurance that “I’m not an artist, I’m an activist”. I’m glad that’s clear; and trust it excludes his efforts from future Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Prizes.

A final thought: don’t let me stop you going to Cockatoo. For you’ll also find there the most complex artist in the whole shebang, William Kentridge. Worth the trip on his own.

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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.