A Biennale is the only big, public space left where we can play around with the idea of revolution. I have loved BoS 2008 and been provoked by little revolutions across all the venues, in the curatorial approach, the art and occasionally in problems they create.

Australian artist Mike Parr’s MIRROR/ARSE presents 17 of his works in the broken building that was formerly the sailors quarters and ‘academy’, on Cockatoo Island. Like a revolutionary pamphlet, he yells at us to see the world and be angry. Judging by the way people flinched but persisted to view videos of him mutilating himself or killing chickens, he clearly turned heads and hearts.

Parr sprays his works around the building like some great dog, urinating its territorial claim. On one wall he scrawls a quote from the godfather of Australian conservatism, The Hon Robert Menzies, boasting that “none of our leading artists produce freak pictures”, only landscapes of “sunshine”.

You smell the art in the Junior Sailors Change Room before you get there, to find a row of buckets containing Parr’s pee. On the day we were there, the smell was horrid. The lavatory next door has speakers playing Senate debates, resting on toilet bowls, taking the political piss with seditious force; off with their (dick) heads!

The Biennale’s icon event, A Forest of Lines at the Sydney Opera House, was revolutionary despite itself. It intended to be aesthetic and sublime, not revolutionary or ecological. There were indeed hundreds of plants in the Opera House, mostly taller than a person, which was impressive. But many were sorry specimens, with attendants scurrying about pouring water into their black plastic tubs. The artificial clouds had an acrid smell and you felt the thrum of machinery through the wooden floor.

Caption: ‘Some plants were so poorly they had to be removed from the “reality” of the artwork.’

I vox-pop a dozen viewers who had exactly the experience Huyghe intended. The only conflict was between the vast majority who thought the pot plant collection was realistically ‘like’ a rainforest and the woman who claimed it was “a surrealist experience”, with no referent to anything outside the unconscious.

The faux-forest was tragic and fake compared to other indoor forests like Melbourne Museum’s, let alone the real thing. It took the climate and ecological debate to end-game, when nature is smashed, cities collapse and the weeds take over the human opera.

To claim A Forest of Lines says nothing ecological is like staging a gourmet food fair in Darfur and feigning no relationship to the starvation going on all around. The audience’s somnambulism was the revolutionary moment here.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are involved with 16 Beaver (16beavergroup.org) and spent some weeks travelling in Australia “on the search for a possibility of revolution”. Their talk to a Biennale audience at Artspace was partly explanations of their theory and practice and partly a documentation report back on the Australian revolution.

Disappointingly, most of the film was of themselves speaking to camera, not the people they met along the way. Their conclusion was not about current possibility rather a recitation of past baggage - Australia is racist, founded on dispossession etc. In response to questions about the ongoing environmental ‘revolution’ to save the climate, they accused it of racism or misanthropy, a line usually run by silly right wing commentators, not artists.

Ross Gibson’s Conversations II creates complete presence between him and a self-nominated member of the public, who make an online booking to converse with Gibson, in a special booth in the foyer of the AGNSW. This was far more raw and open to possibility than the edited, doctrinal reportage of Gabri and Anastas.

Unlike the unspectacular spectacle of Huyghe, which acted out but said nothing, the conversations were contained and articulate. It delivered an authenticity sought after by everyone from marketers and politicians to artists and performers.

In the opaque eddies of mass-mediated conversations and their Twitter-size thoughts, it was radical to have a forty minute conversation that was was private/public, yet not staged within a ’system’ such as power, money or psychoanalysis.

Last word goes to Gordon Bennett because he made a grand, coherent insurrectionary proposition. An urban indigenous artist, Bennett proposed to swap the art in AGNSW’s indigenous gallery with the colonial-era art, which would then suffer the indignity of being hung upside down. Architectural models of the revolutionised galleries were on display, with a note explaining that the proposal was supported by BoS artistic directer Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev but vetoed by AGNSW director Edmund Capon.

Bennett’s brilliance is to say what is necessary, even if it means going Gonzo and upsetting the rules of genre. In order to deal with something a profound as colonial dispossession, Bennett literally re-grounded, moving the paintings around. Like so many other revolutions, afterwards it looks inevitable, like common sense or plain speaking.

My wager is that revolutions are happening all around us in 2008, largely through local connections and conversations. Art can denounce (Parr), connect (Gibson) and reorganize (Bennett) our thoughts and the world. But its clear that if it tries to be revolutionary about something as real as indigenous dispossession for example, it take a bold person to rennovate the Bastille.

When Biennales acknowledge the changed climate and subsequent ecological revolution, it will expand their relevance and leverage. This shift is probably inevitable, since no matter how evasive art and its audiences are (pace Huyghe), there is no getting around it - everything that happens, happens on the Planet.

Dan Cass
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I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62)