A Little Wit Missing?

I sneaked out of Biennaled Sydney to visit the Melbourne Art Fair last week – and was struck by the difference between the commercial and the aggressively unsaleable offered by BOS. In fact, the only meeting point I found was on the Annandale Galleries stand where William Kentridge had pride of place following its ‘Telegrams from the Nose’ show in Sydney.

It almost made me ask how he’d made it into the Biennale! It also made me ask myself whether I’d ever be able to actually buy one of his sculptures, acquatints, collages or anamorphic tables in their static condition. For on Cockatoo Island, we’d been treated to an amazing 8-screen complexity of moving images and music which had simply blown my mind. I wanted his still noses to rise up and envelope Stalin’s face (and pipe); his Giacometti horses to strut and then amaze by twirling their constituent parts independently.

Revolting Kids!

And that was only my first visit – the second was enlivened and enriched further by the inclusion of Kentridge on the ‘Revolting Kids!’ pirate tour (another bit of word-play on that Biennale theme!) in which a treasure map lead fully decorated offspring (and their plain parents) to various appropriate artworks – including Kentridge, with the instruction: “Can you find a drawing that moves in a circle? What is happening?”

Full marks to anyone who answered “The Italian invasion of Abyssinia”!!!

Other things they were lead to included Javier Tellez’ ‘Trumpet’; but would they have hung around 11 minutes for the man being shot out of a cannon? - Jin Kurashige’s ‘Rubik’; learning how to become fanatical about something inherently unimportant – and Brian Jungen’s suitcase animal mobile; might they have missed his globalisation message? As one father offered his child the doubtful comfort of “Another TV screen?”, I thanked the lord that the map had declared “Wrong Way : Go Back” before Mike Parr’s snuff videos!

The Uncaring Visual Artist

What a pity, though that the revolting ones weren’t guided to my favourite Mark Boulos’s twin-screen juxtaposition of the comparative madness of Nigerian guerrilla and US oil broker rituals. For this clearly achieved a level of actual engagement of an audience through sheer intrigue that was so often denied by other Biennale video-makers. Can it really be right that the difference between a visual and a performance artist is the duty of the latter to create for an audience; while the former blithely presents a work without a care for its reception?

And perhaps that’s where Kentridge triumphs for me; he’s really a performance-maker with the visuals as a witty spin-off.

And I’m sure he’d have been delighted by the added imagery provided by a kid holding a helium balloon in silhouette in front of his work, simply adding to the surreal complexity of pieces that threw up commentaries and doubt about constructivism, Stalinism, apartheid and man’s exploitation of man accompanied by a circus-like musical mix of Shostakovich and Soweto. Gogol’s 1830 play ‘The Nose’ became Shosta’s opera a hundred years later; I assume Kentridge is now designing a production of that. Someone should buy this octet of films, for we’re unlikely to see the opera performed live; and you’re unlikely to find comparable wit anywhere else in the Biennale.

Transformative Art

But will those films live outside the raddled room where they were performed on walls textured by their own history of exploitation? The transformative power of great art means that Kentridge will always be imprinted on that room; as Pierre Huyghe’s tropical forest will always be missing on future visits ot the SOH Concert Hall. I know this has been a contentious issue in the Blogosphere, but I have no doubts that my imagination was lifted by the steamy dark, the smell of humidity, the sound of water (no birds?), the miners’ lamps of befuddled humanity and the incongruity of finding the Choir Stalls seats left like a ruined civilisation amongst the rampant palms. I wonder whether the artist got his idea from the view of those shells looming through the Botanical Gardens palms, as seen from the Conservatorium?

Maybe Huyghe was helped by the freezing rain falling on the Utzon’s shell above us; and, as I struggled through that rain, by the shop sign in King’s Cross synergistically quoting Einstein as saying, “Logic will take you from a to b; imagination takes you everywhere”!

PS: Efforts like ‘Revolting Kids’ – recruited largely via Channel 7’s ‘Weekender’ program, by the way, not from dedicated arties keen to introduce their offspring to the avant-garde – had boosted BOS numbers by 50% as of mid-July according to CEO Marah Braye.

Image: William Kentridge, I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008, performance for the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at Cockatoo Island.
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; and Annandale Galleries, Sydney. This project has been made possible through the generous support of John Kaldor and Naomi Milgrom Kaldor.
Photograph: Greg Weight