Less Is More: 21st Biennale of Sydney

Ai Weiwei, Crystal Ball, 2017, © Ai Weiwei, crystal, life jackets, photograph by Document Photography

April 2018

The 21st Biennale of Sydney is on right now here in my home town until June 11th. The Artistic Director is Mami Kataoka and its theme, well, what can I say, the usual pointless, well-meaning, pretentious mumbo jumbo. This time ‘round though they dispensed with the over-priced, under-read catalogue and instead went for a pocket-sized guide for five bucks with just the salient stuff, so maybe next time the theme will go the way of the catalogue. This Biennale has been considered disappointing for failing to attract more artists, but I for one was delighted by this. Less is more. I want quality, not quantity. And now, without further ado, here are my top three which I have divided into three sub-categories: Global Catastrophe, Redemption in Congo and The Intimate I.

Global Catastrophe

Ai Weiwei

Law of the Journey (2107), Cockatoo Island; Crystal Ball (2017), Artspace

Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey, 2017, © Ai Weiwei, reinforced PVC with aluminum frame, photograph taken by Zan Wimberley

There are 65.6 million refugees on planet earth right now. 65.6 million is the number Ai Weiwei wants you to remember as you gaze upon his vast lifeboat full of over-sized pvc figures in life jackets. Faceless, nameless, anonymous refugees. But as Hannah Arendt says in one of the many quotes that circle around the base of the lifeboat:

In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees.

At the far end of the old industrial shipyard where this monumental piece is exhibited are a set of stairs which lead to a viewing platform. From above you can see what from the ground is invisible. The children. Balled up between the knees of the adults that may or may not be their parents.

On a wall to the side of the lifeboat are a row of screens with videos relating to the crisis. The most interesting of these films, Ai Weiwei Drifting, is a documentary about the artist making this series of works about the crisis. In addition to the work on display at the Biennale, Ai Weiwei has also made a feature length documentary film called “Human Flow” (2017). In the New York Times Review of the film, Manohla Dargis writes:

“What Mr Ai seeks is to go far beyond the nightly news; he wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying world-swallowing immensity.”

But what is 65 million? It is a number so vast that the mind seems to baulk at its immensity. That number only feels real when you see the people and hear their stories. In a particularly moving moment of the film, in the midst of a squalid camp, the artist conjures a piano for a Syrian refugee, a pianist who has not played for three years. You see her sitting at the piano in the rain, as the crew hold some plastic sheeting over her and the instrument to keep them dry. Barely a note is sounded. She’s forgotten how to play.

In a much less moving moment of Ai Weiwei Drifting we see Ai playing soccer with his son and Ai making dumplings with his son. We hear Ai meditate on fatherhood and on being a refugee himself, which although technically true nevertheless rings hollow given his revered international art world status. Why include these things? For what reason? Because the art world cannot resist glamourizing and star-fucking. But this is a quibble, back to the art now, back to those quotes placed around the base of the lifeboat.

The quotes are as geographically wide-ranging as the home countries of the refugees. From the Koran and Homer to James Baldwin, which I re-quote here as it stood out, not for its pathos but for its sense of agency:

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given.

Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

The Franz Kafka quotes, three of them in a row, are all situated to the right of the piece, at the front of the lifeboat. This one, from “The Trial” (1925) seems to cut to the essence of the crisis and why there is no end in sight:

Logic may indeed be unshakeable,

but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

The other Ai Weiwei piece at the Biennale of Sydney is much smaller and more intimate. Crystal Ball, on display at Artspace, is literally a crystal ball atop a pile of life jackets. Old life jackets, leached of colour by the sun and salt. The juxtaposition of these two objects, the perfection of the glass sphere, the ugliness of the jackets, make Crystal Ball a perfectly wonderful piece of Surrealist art. But just as numbers tattooed on an arm will never again just be numbers tattooed on an arm, the life jacket has come to symbolise something greater than itself. The crystal ball reminds us of the terrible uncertainty of the future for the refugees. That they are as much victims of the unbearable circumstances in their home countries as they are of blind, Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/

Redemption in Congo

CATPC with Baloji and Renzo Martens

Still from the 2018 video, CATPC - The Artists from the Plantation. A portrait by Baloji, © CATPC

CATPC stands for Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise. Baloji is a Belgian-Congolese rapper, MC, hip-hop artist and director. Together with Renzo Martens they have made 9 minutes of redemptive, post-plantation magic. Early on in this film, that immediately draws you in with its upbeat music and idiosyncratic aesthetic, two Luc Tuymans paintings make a stunning appearance. One of them, a full-length portrait of a military man, is called Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000). The portrait is held upside by an unsmiling character on a chair. No one smiles much in this film, or even says a word, and that is because action speaks louder than words, and this film is all about action, about taking action. That upside down portrait is the key to this film. It signifies a clear intent to upend history and re-write the story of the plantation as told by the artists. The other Tuymans painting, Lumumba (2000), re-enforces this sense of agency as it is of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of independent Congo.

A sense of ritual purification pervades this piece from start to finish. Fire, water and smoke, lots of it, are all present. A young girl in a costume of leaves and over-sized goggles hacks into a bust made from cocoa and proceeds to eat it. Another sculpture of a miniature man is licked, spat at and set ablaze. This sculpture is called The Art Collector. In another scene a man holds up the New York Times arts section with a review of the collective’s work. And in yet another scene, a white cube appears in the midst of the plantation fields. This ultimate symbol of Western hegemony in the art world has been transplanted and re-imagined, a world away from where it originated.

Since 2014, the artists, plantation workers and ecologists of CATPC have been building a new creative economy by selling art to the international community. Namely sculptures produced in clay and cast in chocolate grown on their plantations. But even if you know nothing about the rich and complex background to this piece it succeeds because its imagery is so startling, so fresh. The costumes, props and sets seem to be built entirely from plantation bounty. Except perhaps for the pregnant woman in white, who sits encircled by pumpkins, wearing a virtual reality headset. She is the future. They are the future. One other prop stands out perhaps because it is not a prop. A grim-faced man in a uniform holds a gun. The collective will defend their rights. The symbolism is rich throughout, but full of warmth and playfulness too. In one startling scene a mysteriously clad creature lumbers across a field dressed head-to-toe in leaves. A basket protrudes from its head, part snout, part homing device.

Late in the film, a ritual takes place in the white cube. There is fire, the participants are masked, there is frenzied dancing. Are they inaugurating the white cube? Or are they mocking the beautiful white man, the art collector, who still secretly covets the noble savage? In the final tableaux, true to its theatrical, democratic spirit the participants gather together backlit by a blazing red light, part heart, part sun, uniquely theirs.

The Intimate I  

 Geng Xue  

The Poetry of Michelangelo (2015)

Geng Xue, still from the 2015 video The Poetry of Michelangelo, © White Rabbit Collection, Sydney & Geng Xue

 Away from global catastrophe and the sickening injustices of history, away from people, there is the solace of work. In The Poetry of Michelangelo, in just 19 minutes, Geng Xue sculpts a life-size man from clay. Each step in the creative process is numbered and broken down into the practical language of the craft, subtitled in both English and Chinese calligraphy. The instructions are interwoven with passages from Michelangelo’s sonnets.

Step by step we watch as mute blocks of clay are assembled onto the bench 'til they roughly resemble the outline of a man. Then the artist straddles the blocks, barefoot, applying all her weight to the clay, using her thighs as much as her hands to make it yield, to soften it, so that from the undefined whole the details can emerge. She works precisely and quickly, her face only fleetingly visible. For the most part we just see her hands. Her movements are both brutal and tender. Early on when she makes his eyes, she reaches her fingers deep inside his head and rips out his flat clay eye, rolling it between her fingers until it makes a perfect sphere. She then re-inserts it with the precision of a surgeon. At each step in the process the artist asserts control of her medium. Beneath her decisive hands a life-size clay man emerges and watching this process is a riveting experience. The music is spare and dramatic and sometimes includes just the sounds of heartbeats. The space in which she works is intimate. The palette is a restrained black and white throughout.

At Step 7, the instructions read: “Adjust the details, breathe life into the sculpture”. Geng Xue bends tenderly over her creation and kisses his perfect mouth. Breath ripples through his torso. The artist has been deified. She can give life, but in the very next step, she shows that she can take it too. She is instructed to cut the sculpture into pieces to prepare for the firing. Geng takes a wire into her hands and chops up her clay man, limb by limb, starting with the neck. Here again she is both brutal and tender, both master and lover. In the very last step, Step 9, the music cuts. The final instructions are: “Ensure sculpture pieces are kept moist and clean up the work area.” In the silence you hear the artist’s cloth moving across the bench where she has worked, circling around the severed limbs. This prosaic little act is nevertheless deeply satisfying, even humbling to watch.

The sense of discipline and restraint that pervades this exquisite film - which is actually part of the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney - is nothing short of inspirational. It beautifully captures the sense of intimacy in those spaces where we make art, that most human, most intimate expression of ourselves. It also captures the eternal two-step central to the making of all art. The eternal dance between control and its mysterious, poetic opposite. It does so with an elegant double mirror, through both the text and the action. Taken as a whole this film feels like an elegy to the creative process.   

In the final tableau, we see the silhouette of the body parts assembled under a damp white cloth. If you just walked in you might think you were in a morgue. The poetry is melancholy, about an artist for whom art is no longer a consolation, who dreams of the eternal embrace of Christ. But sitting there in Artspace watching this, seeing that final tableau, it didn’t feel like death, it felt like life.◊