Flattery

Last year in his Los Angeles MoCA show we saw Urs Fischer’s life-size, photographic rendition of artist Josh Smith’s studio. That experience has been now eclipsed by the installation Fischer presented at the Gwangju Biennale. Although it was a real mission to get there, planes and boats and trains (ok no boats really) this one work alone would have made it all worthwhile. 

The first thing to be said for it is the sheer ambition of the installation - a huge 3D set representing Fischer’s 600 plus square meter New York apartment. It's got around 11 rooms, a super-sized hallway and so much storage it's scary. As with the Josh Smith studio the walls of the set are covered with 1:1 scaled photographic wallpaper of each room as it exists with all the furniture and fittings rendered in detail and in colour. You want to know what DVDs Urs Fischer watches, what spices he uses or the brand of his toothpaste, it's all here in this work 38 E. 1st St. 

In the Gwangju installation there's the terrific addition of actual works by other artists selected by Fischer and either hung over the ‘wallpaper’ or free-standing in the space. The two gold George Condo works are a knockout.  This is starting to sound complicated we know, so we've put a short movie we took here on OTNSTUFF to make more sense of it. Ambiguous, thought provoking and disturbingly fascinating, this installation insinuates each of us into the role of voyeur.
Images: Top one of the room's hanging a painting by Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris. Middle only the chairs table and fire hydrant are not photogrphic and bottom outside the set construction.

Another brick in the wall

Ok, in the end we did see a compelling work in the Sydney Biennale. It was such a simple set-up: a couple of screens set at right angles showing text with some heart pounding sound. It turned out that the words were transcribed from a police interview so one side showed the words of the police interviewer and the other those of the suspected murderer. The slow revelation of desperation, uncertainty and collapse was astonishing in this dance of manipulation.  The artist was Ignas Krunglevicius from Lithuania who was in fact trained as a composer. This perhaps helps explain the work's chilling sensitivity to sub-text.

And there was more. After peering across a long brick wall to locate a set of minute Matt Hinkley works, another brick wall came as no surprise until with a big smack in the side of the head we saw it was ripped. Now that was one of the big visual surprises of the Biennale. It turned out we were looking at a ‘brick’ wall that had been constructed and painted as part of the set for X-Men Origins: Wolverine that was filmed on Cockatoo Island in 2008.

Images: top, Interrogation by Ignas Krunglevicius. Second row searching for Matt Hinkley and bottom, the Wolverine wall.

The black box Biennale

How much longer must video serve as the go-to guy for padding out the over scaled spaces Biennales have devoted to them? It certainly does the heavy lifting in the current Sydney Biennale. Too often experiencing the various venues demands a trudge from bench to bench in one vast dark room after another. Even wall texts are sacrificed to the Lords of Darkness. At one of the venues people were resorting to the torch function on their phones to light up the labels and commentary.

And in mega exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale, the curatorial framing through labels matters hugely. Faced with artists most of us have never heard of, the labels are essential to help figure out what we’re looking at and why. In this case we were poorly served by grand claims and abstractions. 

Poor old Douglas Gordon’s 2011 piece Phantom (a grand piano and slow-mo film of an eye) was touted as “a room brought to the brink of emotion” It wasn’t. When we were there four of the seven people with us were doing things on their phones. NZ’s sole representative Shannon Te Ao also suffered from label blight. He was well placed in the Art Gallery of NSW but the video of him reading poetry to animals was undercut rather than elucidated by the claim that it showed “the potential of the poetic to reignite our social and interspecies imagination”. Try telling that to the mellow donkey who drifted in and out of shot or, better still, the large white bird who slept through the whole thing.

One big plus for the event had to be the triumph of phones - or cameras as we call them now - especially in the Biennale’s audience-pleasing set pieces. The Jim Lambie room was a huge win for Instagram and Facebook with lots of people having a lot of fun posing and taking photos of each other. This was probably enough in itself but but no, the label was a big downer of “inward portals to the psychic world of dreams and the unconscious: an internal desire made manifest.” 

Come on curator people are we talking cool fun or deep messages? If the Biennale of Sydney is anything to go by you can’t have it both ways.

Images: top, Jim Lambie gets the FaceBook treatment and bottom Shannon Te Au talks to the animals.

Line of credit

Talking to some Australian art people the other day, we heard a few names of Australian artists selected for the next Sydney Biennale. We have already posted the rumour that Len Lye has been selected from New Zealand, although there is no official confirmation. The 2008 Biennale is being "Artistically Directed" by Carolyn Christov-Bakargeiv, an Art Provera specialist. Her theme? “The impulse to revolt. Revolving, rotating, mirroring, repeating, reversing, turning upside down or inside out, changing perspectives." That being the case, and hearing from the Aussies that Bruce Nauman is central to the show, we’re picking that Simon Denny is a contender. While checking the Biennale web site, we came across the pic above of Christov-Bakargeiv standing in front of sculptures by Francis Upritchard. The photo would have been taken when she was in Auckland selecting the Walters Prize winner. As the Biennale web site doesn’t bother to credit Upritchard’s work, we're figuring she probably won’t be selected.
Image: Sydney Biennale web page featuring Balata Figure sculptures by Francis Upritchard