'I am utterly pessimistic about the prospect of any event within the teacup-whirlpool that is the Australian art world having an affect, good or ill, on anything whatsoever... ...Artists should forget about art a little and start wondering about what they were born onto earth for, where they stand in relation to everything that's happening in this world, whether what they are doing is as meaningful in a total sense as, say, planting a row of beans or cabbages, building a chicken coop, or going for a walk in the bush.''
-Mike Brown
(Sourced from Natural Selection Magazine)

'Ultimately, it is worth trying to turn the art world into somewhere you would want to be rather than submitting to an existing idea of its limitations.'
-Lucy McKenzie
(In a catalogue essay on Martin Kippenberger)

The fascinating politics of the Manifesta 6 cancellation in the city of Nicosia

From one point of view, it would be nice if Australia’s representation in Venice embodied a deft handling of contention and risk, in the name of cultural salvage. Let’s wait and see.

‘In any case, how can art remain politically significant without assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become social activism? For the moment, I am exploring the following axiom: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.’
-Francis Alÿs

Ones of Ontact

A lot of people are having a bit of a whinge about the Biennale of Sydney. There are a lot of protracted pieces of video art, the sites of the biennale are scattered and sometimes obscurely located, there isn't much painting in the show. To me, though, the difficult nature was strongly appropriate to the theme - I don't know enough about Charles Mereweather to know if I am giving him too much credit, thinking that he deliberately curated difficulty into his biennale... but for a biennale dealing with points of cultural intersection and transferral of information in this media-syndicated, politically corrupt (well, particularly politically corrupt; for 'politically corrupt' is surely a pleonasm) world, I thought density, difficulty and complexity were appropriate as common aspects of the works included - as opposed to the one-liners and visceral sensationalism more commonly expected from biennales.
My key criticism of the Biennale was that for all its huffing about contact, it failed almost completely to engage with its own site, being Sydney. It was more about presenting political art from other places, forgetting to answer to the contextual relationship. It felt like this biennale was a nebulous cloud of ideas floating above Sydney - it could have been staged anywhere, it would make no difference. Zones of contact as formalised abstraction? I am not so sure this works.
The film 'Bade Area' showing at the Asian Australian Arts Centre was a magnificently slow, considered film, a broken narrative tracing the re-functionalisation of a building seemingly condemned to functionlessness by bureaucracy, economy. And it is as though the characters embrace this assigned condemnation in order to override it; amassing piles of coaster-footed office chairs in the empty halls, eschewing the wheels and dragging them on their backs; perching atop the building's humped roof sipping hot tea and laying electrical wires. Mamma Andersson's paintings at AGNSW also held a quietness, adults attending night classes to learn new skills and new understandings of their places in life. A glowing, incredibly painted depiction of a stack of televisions 'the best story teller', the sweet paradox of these captivating paintings and their layered narratives co-existing with a bevy of video pieces which often required a greater investment of time to become engaging. That said, though, there were some great pieces of video art. Calin Dan's video on the ground floor of the MCA about the architect of the Estonian olympic stadium was compelling, likewise on the top floor Jayce Salloum's interview with Soha Bechara was fascinating and worth spending the forty minutes with.

But how dependent is the reading of art on its context? Doesn't it vary depending on what the art is addressing? It seems, for instance, that the works included in SafARI, a series of shows at Artist Run Initiatives running concurrent to the BOS, are accorded some level of integrity not for what they are, but where they are. Of course there is the matter of curatorial intent alongside this, whether the show has been curated as a hit parade trying to wow the passing shoal of international curators, or whether it has a more interesting basis. But there is this overriding difficulty with work in an institutional context – why? Because it is seen to have become a part of ‘the establishment’? Do we need more of a dialogue, or a new point of exchange where artists can engage with the institution on an even keel and hold it accountable?