One last gasp

For those of you reading this blog, please be understanding about my spellin. I am actually an appalling typeest and have traded 10 words a minute at 100 percent accuracy for 100 wrods a minute at 10 percent accururuacy........you get the drift.

So in summing up, I was glad I made the trip down if only for the Cockatoo Island venue, but I was extremely sad to see so much "old" work pulled together under an extremely tenuous curatorial rationale. Cetrainly not my fave uberartXhibition in the last few years.

I will sum up my feelings by describing one work:
at the MCA there was a room that you entered from the side and riht down one end there was a single artwork: a small photo of two glasses of liquid with the liquid on a slope. Not a particlularly interesting photo nut I suppose it makes you think how it is made.
According to the blurbit is by an artist from Budapest called Atilla Csorgo and this is a key early work from 1995 and it is foundational for all his later practice which "presents the reality of systems and phenomena that we do not normally admit"'.
Still wasn't sure of its relevance till i read that " it was not an illusion but created by spinning the table which the glasses were on and the camera". ..............................o!........................the round thing..............................that makes all the difference and makes sense of the whole room thing.................not.

Sorry cybernauts. Maybe I am an ART SNOB, but these are my thoughts.

The selectione of works at MCA were not as dissapointing as those at the Art Gallery NSW< but still underwhelming. Again, the curatorial rationale was stretched thin with a photo of a ferris wheel being for me the lowest moment.

There were some highlihts though. I am a fan of Tracey Moffat and her new video with Gary Hillberg is another great work returning to her filmcutup technique. I also loved hte work by Tamy Ben-Tor. I was not familiar with this artost's work and this was a perfect example of discovery. Mairizio Cattelan's hanging horse sculpture was very popular with the schoolchildren as was the nail sculpture/painting by Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

Mark and I walked through Darly to the National Art School Cell Block Theatre to see a performance by the legend Joan Jonas. O dear. Sometimes work a la 1970 does not translate in these highly techno world. Mark described it as "performance in aspic.....a little rinky dink." There were some lovely moments but the whole was not a sum of its parts.

A founder of video and performance art, Joan Jonas was originally a sculptor who began to participate in experimental dance workshops and in 1968 held her first performance. Since then, her work has explored the transformation of the performing body through perception, space and media. Her use of masks and mirrors, as well as her adoption of different mythological and contemporary personas, point to her exploration of identity as fragmentary and contingent. Reading Dante (2008) is inspired by Dante’s early-fourteenth century Divine Comedy, incorporating elements from ‘Inferno’ and ‘Paradiso’. In this work, Jonas combines scenes from the woods of northern Canada, a performance in Italy, a modernist ruin built in a lava field in Mexico City and 1970s footage of deserted New York City streets. Unlike in Dante’s medieval universe, here we experience a world full of connections, and no person or place alone can represent heaven and hell; this is Jonas’s infernal paradise.

Feeling a tad fractured today after the night before. Shouldn't mix my drinks and bum so many ciggies!! Will I never learn.

Late start and off to a mate Mark Trevorrow's fab Macleay Street apartment for a squizz. Great view!! Great coffee!!

Then off to Fatima's for a wonderful feast!!

Another Brisbane party girl (moved to Sydney).

PARTY PEEPS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!

there were camera phones snapping aplenty as opening night goers enjoyed jewel mackenzie's installation.

London artist Melanie Manchot's Security 2005 was very popular. Could it have been the buff bods stripping? o cynical moi!!

Josh Burry came down from Brisbane for the party/opening. This is his work Inside/Outside 2007

I had seen Kristof Kintera's Revolution 2005 at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and loved it so it was wonderful to see it in Australia. A sad little figure in the corner who suddenly bangs its head very loudly on the wall. Frightening and dynamic. If you want to see more of this exciting artist go to http://kristofkintera.com

Rob Kelly from RawSpace in Brisbane had curated a show entitled Uprising and it opened at Horus and Deloris in Pyrmont. The lovely Jewel Mackenzie was in fine form.

Francis Alÿs Choques, 2005–06 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

There were some works which I enjoyed including the small video works high on the wall by Francis Alys. Also Rebecca Horn. I had seen a huge reprospective of her work in Berlin, but not this one, and I thought it captured her oeuvre. I am a great fan of Fischli and Weiss but these were not their best in my opinion, but then I have been very lucky in that I saw a large show of theirs in teh Tate Modern in London.

There seemed to be quite a contingent of Arte Povera artists as well as early works by Carolee Shneeman and Bruce Naumann. Nedko Solakov hired local students to paint the entry hall of the gallery black and then white over that etc etc etc. I thought it added something a bit different to the show, but the ladies at the desk hated it.

Peter Fischli / David Weiss The First Blush of Morningfrom the Equilibres series, 1984

Copyright © Peter Fischli David WeissCourtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

The Gallery of NSW component of the Biennale08 illustrates all that can go wrong with a themed show in my opinion. With the title revolutions - forms that turn it seems that

all the art had to be in this bit was round or moving round to be in it. O yes, and preferably the artist be DEAD!

I only started travelling in the last few years, but have managed to pack in Biennales in Venice (3) Shanghai, Sao Paulo as well as Documenta, Munster and a great deal of art in between, and one of the joys of a Biennale is to discover new, contemporary, cutting edge art which I choose to love or hate, but importantly to be challenged.

One of the problems I had with Documenta 2007 was that so much of the art was old: historical contextualisation or something, BUT, in Sydney, there is Duchamp's wheel for f&%$ks sake. I know it is round, but surely we don't need to go back that far to get the show "rolling". And throw in Jean Tinguely, Joseph bloody Beuys, Yves Klein for good measure.

AND then it was off to the Gallery of New South Wales. HOW DISAPPIONTING!!!
I can't believe how bad this section was. I was sooooooo upset I will have to have a rest before I comment. Suffice to say, I SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

UP EARLYISH and first stop ARTSPACE. There were 8 works including this video.

Marcellvs L. spree, 2007
Courtesy the artist and carlier l gebauer, Berlin

Marcellvs L.’s videos focus the lens on small, often unobserved, events, and his works seem to slow down time. A rope suspended in water that slowly moves with the swell, leaves blown by the wind, or a man walking down a street, are all captured with a prolonged gaze that foregrounds details usually gone unseen.
Marcellvs L.’s work is an extension of temporality itself, shifting our attention away from narrative to the experience of a palpable staging of time. In spree (2007), a building seems still – yet, after a moment of viewing, it appears to be slightly moving. The title of the artwork reveals that the gentle bobbing movement of the recorded image is caused by the fact that it was filmed from a houseboat on the River Spree, never pictured. It is a vertiginous dialogue between two architectural forms – the houseboat and the house on the river.

Then it was back on the ferry and back to the hotel and pizza and a beer and cable and feet up in preparation for a big day Saturday. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz z

Emily Sundblad is an artist, curator, singer, actress and co-founder of the artists’ project and gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. The gallery operates as an ongoing performance project and vehicle for her exploration of the multi-faceted production of art. Sundblad has curated a film program as her artwork for the Biennale. She is showing two films she has made with fellow artist and collaborator Amy Granat (Gun and Cake, both from 2007), as well as two hard-to find films that have been influential in her artistic practice: Daddy by Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle (1973), and Les Maîtres Fous by Jean Rouch (1955). Sundblad will also present one-time screenings of the PBS documentary American Experience: Mary Pickford (2005, USA, 90 mins), Ecstasy of the Angels (1972, Japan, 70 mins), a documentary about the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing titled Asylum (1972, UK, 95 mins), and a selection of short performance clips.

Venezuelan and Spanish artist Javier Téllez’s works investigate notions of normality and pathology, power and exclusion, both in contemporary society and through its cultural history. In his exploration of marginalised segments of society, such as the mentally ill or illegal immigrants, Téllez also reveals the structures put in place to curb or control them. His artistic work is characterised by site-specific and unorthodox collaborations. For the Sydney Biennale, One Flew Over the Void (Bala perdida) is a video of his collaboration with a Mexican psychiatric hospital. The performance event Téllez organised with inSite San Diego shows a gathering of the patients, dressed in costumes and animal masks, to witness and celebrate David Smith, the world-record-breaking human cannonball, launching himself across the Mexico–USA border.

Another mate from Brisbane Riachard Bell is in the Biennale with a new work Scratch an Aussie (2008). IT IS BLOODY FANTASTIC!
For the Biennale of Sydney, Bell has created a new video installation in which prominent Australians are psychoanalysed by the artist, who charades as a black Sigmund Freud.

The upper leve was quite different to the lower level and had a great view.