Carnival capers

IS it possible for contemporary art to be pretentious and populist at the same time?

IS it possible for contemporary art to be pretentious and populist at the same time?

Oddly enough, the answer is yes, and indeed this is the main lesson of the rambling circus that is 21st Century at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. Neither pretention nor populism is compatible with real seriousness -- think of the Joseph Kosuth exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, reviewed here a few weeks ago -- which is why the better works suffer in this setting, but that is another matter.

As you enter the gallery, you are confronted by a pair of enormous tubular slides installed in the central atrium. Children go up to the second storey, then whiz around the curved tubes to the ground floor. There is a minimum height requirement to get on the slide, and while I was there a little boy who was shorter than his brothers missed out and burst into tears.

With free slides -- but art slides, of course -- the place is full of families, and there are activity areas for children all over the gallery. In the central hall is an enormous work by Olafur Eliasson, included in the Museum of Contemporary Art survey in Sydney a bit over a year ago, in which the audience -- parents and children -- make cityscapes out of white Lego blocks. Opposite this is another audience involvement work by Rivane Neuenschwander, in which visitors write a wish on a piece of paper, roll it up, tie a coloured ribbon around it and insert it into a sort of pegboard that extends the whole length of the wall.

Mostly it is girls and young women who queue to write their secret wish and then, with sad, hopeful or even slightly shamefaced expressions, press forward to push them into the wall. The sight is rather pathetic; it takes the place of lighting a candle in a church for a generation spiritually adrift, irreligious but sentimental and even superstitious. As G.K. Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Families in shorts and leisure wear, children and teenagers: the gallery is probably delighted to attract all these new customers, but they're mostly here for the carnival, not to look at the art with any attention. They glance momentarily at the obvious displays with the customary exclamation "cool", registering a micro-second of attention before moving on to another attraction. While I was watching one of the more interesting video works, Robin Rhode's Promenade (2008) two teenage girls passed, one saying "That's s--t boring" -- on the basis that it was black and white and slow -- before according it another micro-second and adding, "Oh, it's moving."

It is a kind of achievement to lure such people from the shopping centre to the art gallery, but they have to be entertained with gimmicks and bright colours. They love things like the false swimming pool in which you seem to see people walking around under water, until you realise you are looking through a thin layer of water to a room below. There is not much else to this work intellectually or imaginatively -- it would make a clever installation at an aquarium -- but it is telling that everyone wants to go downstairs and walk around in the imaginary underwater space.

One room is filled with colourful and meaningless things, including a set of enormous balls or eggs painted lurid colours with spray paints (why is this interesting?) and a more sophisticated work in neon colours that conceals its insignificance behind the pretext that it reproduces the quality of light in the entrance to the cave at Lascaux. (Sounds highbrow, but again, why?) Projected on to the wall, meanwhile, is a tripartite cartoon animation of John Lennon, Susan Sontag and Joseph Beuys, with simultaneous recordings of three well-known addresses they each gave.

This work, by Kota Ezawa, repays a moment's attention, for all its triviality. Three almost randomly assembled figures who all happen to be more or less modern cultural gurus are turned into pop cartoons. They are talking presumably because they had something to say, which is the basis of our interest in them, but here they are speaking softly and simultaneously so that their words are neutralised and inaudible. The result is that they are turned into something that mass consumers understand or at least something that shapes and orients their existences with or without their understanding: Lennon, Sontag and Beuys all become brands and even logos.

All three partly deserve this fate, since they played up their public images, but they would still be appalled to realise that they had been subjected to such a mindless reduction and such a systematic evacuation of meaning.

The other side of this phenomenon is, significantly, the claims made for meaning that is nonexistent. The same room has, suspended from the ceiling, an enormous chandelier-like mass of what turn out to be coloured plastic bags. The wall label refers to this as a "monolithic assemblage" -- perhaps they don't quite know what a monolith is -- and assures us that it is an ominous spectacle of consumerism that hangs from the ceiling. But it isn't really any more ominous than it is monolithic; it's just a big flowery pompom. Cool, say the visitors as they walk by to another momentary visual entertainment like Thomas Ruff's enormous swirl of abstract colour, digitally manipulated from internet images of Japanese manga, but for all that no more than a large, decorative surface.

Speaking of flowery things and unsophisticated tastes, Ai Weiwei's set of Han vases painted in pastel colours is another interesting candidate for deconstruction, including deconstruction of the nonsense written on the exhibition labels. We are assured that he is questioning the art market's love of Chinese antiquities or something of the sort. But the twin ironies here are all too easy to spot: the first is that he has bought some relatively inexpensive Han pots and turned them into a more expensive commodity; and the second that he has taken humble but honest pieces of craftsmanship and made them into objects of art fetishisation.

Later Chinese ceramics of much greater value are the subject of a large and strangely smug photograph of accidentally broken vases at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Why we should be interested in this is as puzzling as the almost embarrassingly platitudinous label informing us that the title, Landing, refers not only to the level between two runs of the staircase but to the fall of the vases.

The same kind of fundamentally obtuse urge to be clever is in evidence of a photograph in which bunny ears are superimposed on the colossal statues of Easter Island. The gesture is childish and inappropriate; the statues are not pompous, triumphalist monuments crying out to be punctured by a post-dada gesture but remains of an extinct culture and stark reminders of human folly without this futile intervention.

There are a few better things, among them Hu Yang's series of photographs of Shanghai residents in their apartments, almost all small but ranging in comfort and quality from the luxurious to the squalid.

The series was included in the China Project exhibition in 2009 but is as interesting as ever here. Another striking photographic series is by Guy Tillim and is titled Avenue Patrice Lumumba, after the politician who fought for Congo's freedom from Belgium and who was later overthrown in a coup and executed in obscure circumstances.

This reference situates the political context clearly enough, but the pictures themselves, mostly interiors of administrative offices in post-colonial African states, are the more effective for being free of any overt ideological content. Instead we are made to look at the dilapidated structures, the shabby furniture, the dispirited employees, all seen with a matter-of-fact realism that is balanced by the elegance and simplicity of composition and the quiet and subdued sense of colour; the tone is delicately poised, at once critical and elegiac. Such discretion is seldom in evidence, and even when political and art-historical themes remain implicit, as in the masks made of old plastic containers by Romuald Hazoume, the gallery label makes sure that everything is spelled out in the crudest terms. The essence of political correctness is feeling good about yourself for holding right-minded views, and that is why GoMA is determined not to let us miss any opportunity to pat ourselves on the back. Of course no action is involved, and indeed works such as these are not going to do anything to improve the lot of oppressed Africans; they are simply going to be bought by rich Westerners for whom progressive art is like any other fashionable and prestigious form of consumption.

Politically tendentious labels are particularly inescapable in Islamic work, exacerbating their already destructive inclination to self-pity and finger-pointing. GoMA eagerly and predictably buys into the blame-the-West narrative, all but suggesting that the scourge of suicide bombing is a media beat-up. In Sharif Waked's video To Be Continued . . . (2009) a man is dressed as a suicide bomber, apparently recording his last message but turns out to be reading from The Arabian Nights, a wonderful work of literature whose deep feeling for the pleasures of human life is the contrary of the suicide bombers' nihilism. But the real lesson is not just a reminder to the West about the better side of Arab culture. It is an admonition to the Arabs that they must do more to denounce the religious fanaticism that is corroding their society and must seek renewed inspiration in earlier and more tolerant periods in their history.

You can be pretty sure that contemporary art institutions such as GoMA will go for politically correct mantras every time rather than risk thinking for themselves. There is safety in the pack when you repeat, as the labels do, all the right-thinking formulas about the evil West with its deplorable consumption and its wicked oil companies and the terrible things they do to downtrodden post-colonial countries.

It's too complicated to add into the picture the thuggish local dictators and brutal tribal massacres and systematic corruption and greed and the insanity of religious zealots; but of course unless you try to understand such problems in the round, you have no hope of finding a solution.

The lack of real thinking about political and social issues within the contemporary art establishment is matched by a lack of critical thinking about the art itself, which is why the exhibition is so strikingly inconsistent in quality. Although contemporary art is constantly presenting itself as critical and even subversive, in reality critical discrimination is implicitly prohibited.

All contemporary art is good, even as fashions bring one style or another into relative prominence; the job of the contemporary art curators is just to spruik this season's new hemline.

21st Century
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until April 26