Biennale
- art show in Bond Store 3/4 and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney,
Australia - Reviews
ArtForum, April, 1993 by Charles Green
An examination
of borders--of conditions at the edges of culture, politics, and science--is
clearly timely, given the dubious credibility of cultural convergence.
The Ninth Biennale of Sydney indexed the strategies of postcolonial
art: bricolage, mimicry, and hybridization. Curator Anthony Bond focused
on art about boundaries and transgression, stressing recombinative
bricolage as crucial to border art. Romero de Andrade Lima constructed
androgynous cult figures from composite parts; Orshi Drozdik combined
medical props and theories of cultural control in a literalization
of the gendered subject's borders; Guilio Paolini's installation of
chairs and canvas L'Ospite (The host, 1992), elegantly constructed
the illusion of reflected space seen in reverse, suggesting an affinity
between arte povera and the marginal. On the other hand, Narelle Jubelin's
Dead Slow, 1991, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena & Coco Fusco's The Year
of the White Bear, 1992, destabilized the idea of borders using metaphors
of intercultural mobility. Jubelin recorded the links between Bombay,
Scotland, and Australia by tracing the intertextuality of sewing manuals
and translating these sources into painstaking petit-point embroidery.
At the Australian Museum, Gomez-Pena & Fusco exhibited themselves
as caged Amerindian savages from a recently discovered island in the
Gulf of Mexico. As a reenactment of the scandal that greeted the discovery
of New-World cultures in 1492, The Year of the White Bear resonated
with a different set of associations in Australia: awareness of comparatively
recent trade in aboriginal bones intersected with, in Gomez-Pena's
words, an affront to contemporary "cultimulturalism."
The Biennale
also inadvertently marked the probable demise of installation as a
means of rewriting identity. Though installation, bricolage, and the
ready-made have a long tradition as "survival practices"
in peripheral societies, the most interesting installations in this
exhibition were by artists with considerable reputations. Ashley Bickerton's
Seascape: Floating costume to drift for eternity, 1991, was a lifeboat
made of fiberglass, webbing glass, and an embalmed Christian Dior
suit. Melanie Counsell's glassed-off warehouse space defined borders
as the almost imperceptible framing edges of art. For these artists,
as for Paolini, the border represented an aspect of Duchampian tradition.
If boundaries were everywhere present, transgression was remarkably
absent, with the exception of Swedish artist Dan Wolgers' wall of
smashed windows--shattered glass littered the gallery floor. However,
sanc timonious conformity often smothered the Bond Store's vast space:
the illustration of social activism tends toward sentimentality.
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reading of bricolage through assemblage artificially limited the range
of the Ninth Biennale. Fiction and deliberate misinterpretation emerged
as the most challenging aspect of contemporary border art: Wim Delvoye's
Labour of Love, 1992, continued the artist's displacement of Flemish
decorative tradition. In an allusion to Dutch East-Indian colonial
furniture, Delvoye hired traditional Indonesian craftsmen to carve
roadworks equipment. Like Narelle Jubelin, Delvoye examined the complex
networks of global trade; art represented the fantastic overexpenditure
of an Other's labor. In an impressively manipulative, expressively
eclectic critique of museum spectacle, Gomez-Pena & Fusco addressed
the instability of the identities conferred upon them as Hispanic
Americans. As in Labour of Love, the deliberate outcome was cultural-border
kitsch in which straightforward complicity was avoided. Similarly,
The Year of the White Bear, savages hi-tech joggers, supermarket kitchen
ware, lap-top computers, and exotic native headgear. The "native
Americans'" availability for representation coincided with their
exploitation of the audience. Delvoye, Gomez-Pena & Fusco rewrite
authenticity as border art.
COPYRIGHT 1993
Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
