“If This Fall into they Hand, Revolve”!

Now I trust a few of my smarter readers have recognised the quote above straight away. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, of course, one of the greatest comedies ever written. And the recipient of that instruction is the overwheening Malvolio; he’s reading a letter purporting to come from his boss, Olivia – in fact it’s from his enemy Maria.

In most productions of the play, poor old Malvolio turns round at that point – as you would! But, just last week on the Phillip Adams program (ABC Radio National), I learnt to my joy that the old Bard didn’t have anything as mundane as circular movement in mind at all. He understood ‘revolve’ to mean “Think about it real hard”!!!

So, How Many Artists in the Biennale Got it Wrong Too?

For, of course, we have to assume that the highly literate Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev knows her Shakespeare, and fully intended her 2008 ‘Revolutions’ Biennale to be about matters of the mind, not mere movement. For she sure wasn’t offering us simple beauty – apart from the exquisite Alexander Calder at the MCA!

Or did she take the odd short cut???

For I used the opportunity afforded by the symposium on the Shandong Buddhas that are opening at the AGNSW as the Biennale closes, to revisit that Site of Revolution – to find an audience still pursuing BOS 2008 with an assiduity that denied its 3 month residency in a Sydney that’s notorious for noshing only on novelty. My memory was that the august Art Gallery had most of the best old art in – a great addition to the new art that is the usual BOS fare. You know – Malevich and Tinguely, Beuys, Klein and, above all Duchamp. They’re still there, of course; but there are also a rum lot of artists who simply took CCB’s challenge literally.

So here’s an admittedly callow list of them,

though it doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel by including that mass of video art as revolutionary just because the tape or film goes round – starting, of course, at the end of the Gallery:

1. Yoko Ono’s old-fashioned phone with a revolving dial – did she ever call??? because you couldn’t call out. Useless? Art? Perhaps she was chosen for her reversible surname alone?

2. Slavko Tikec’s ping-pong balls on water – fairground stuff

3. Gordon Bennett’s plan to revolve the Gallery’s art – from room to room and upside down; rejected by the Powers that Be

4. Rebecca Horn’s 1992 revolving pointer that cuts through a number of doors. Hey, it’s still working – so good engineering. But art?

5. Michael Snow’s De La – like Horn’s it still goes round and offers new insights into the Art Gallery ceilings. Wow!

6. Jean Tinguely certainly wasn’t at his best when he came up with the clanking machine that gives both farm machinery and kinetics a bad name.

7. Atsuko Tanaka’s paint splodges may revolve to order – but surely too slowly to create any visual effect of interest.

In fact, the only thing going round that works beyond its technology is Tinguely’s Meta-Malevich – though it ought to have been placed closer to the Malevich sketch so we could see the one come to life in the other. And what genius gave this most modest example of sumprematism such a glorious silver frame – turning a piece of artistic arithmatic into an icon?

Which leaves just two Revolutionary works that might have satisfied the Bard – making you think more than making you gawp/yawn. The late Mick Kubarrku is strangely out of place in the Gallery foyer’s debating booth. But his eternal, unmoving spiral of python/serpent seems to go on for ever off its bark base, carrying my thoughts about the mysteries of Aboriginal religion with it. How intriguing if it had been juxtaposed with Marcel Duchamp’s equally unmoving bicycle wheel to stimulate their own circularity and debate – the numinous versus the mundane, the idea of the snake as god versus the idea of the wheel as art, etc – rather than the terribly obvious bike videos that were chosen to bracket the old Dadaist.

Talking about odd associations,

some of the juxtapositions in CCB’s catalogue are as delicious as anything in or on her galleries, facades, dank rooms, toilets and tunnels. A useful primer for tyro revolutionaries lies hidden in its considerable depths (why was the AFP bothering with Dr Haneef?). But Tracey Moffatt looks to have self-imploded her film called Revolution by including a still from one of the greatest parodies of the regime-change genre in the imperishable person of Sid James as the Purple Pimpernel in Don’t Lose Your Heads! Definitely a tome that will assist this Biennale to live and provoke on.

But there’s still a week to go – with a new energy appearing like the cavalry over the bluff: talks and films firing off in all directions – even Mike Parr scheduled, though he didn’t bother to show last time round; a night session on Cockatoo; an auction for the Indians at the MCA; and, pace my first blog, parties everywhere – well actually mostly at Customs House! See you all at the closing party, Sunday night, 7^th September.

But will we be introduced to The New Man, David Elliott then? And do we really want to meet a man so careful as to declare, re BOS 2010:

“The central subject will be contemporary art

and why it is one of the most important activities in which we can be engaged. This is, because if it is any good, it balances enjoyment with wisdom by offering creative, free and open perspectives that are desperately needed in complicated times. I will, of course, take into account the state of art across the whole world today and how this may relate to that made in Australia and the regions around it.”

Hey David, “Think about it real hard”!!!