Heaven and Earth

Before and After Science: 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Until May 2.

IT is significant that the Adelaide Biennial coincides with the Art Gallery of South Australia's purchase of an enormous work by Patricia Piccinini, because most of the works in the biennial implicitly reject the kind of international investment-grade contemporary art - promoted by collectors such as Charles Saatchi - bought by the conspicuously rich and collected by museums to fill their new trophy buildings.

Piccinini's Big Mother, a hyper-realist fantasy model of an ape-like humanoid holding an infant, is commercial schlock of the vilest kind, managing to exploit both grotesque ugliness and kitsch sentimentality at the same time, which is no mean feat. It is a terrible error of judgment to have spent $200,000 on this horrible object, when those funds could have been employed to build the collection in any number of areas.

A purchase of this scale should have been exhibited as a proposed acquisition, to allow those with a reasonable interest to comment. Instead, it was revealed - with much effort to beat up press interest - as a fait accompli.

The works in the biennial mostly espouse poverty of materials while seeking to evoke mystery and even a kind of enchantment verging on the mystical. The exhibition's premise is that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy - the catalogue also quotes copiously from literature - and especially in our modern rationalist, managerial and economic philosophy of life.

Many of the artists involved have gone well past vague ideas of the spiritual and have launched out into the territory of magic, alchemy and shamanism. Mikala Dwyer, for example, apparently consulted a clairvoyant before making her piece, which is a strange collection of objects arranged in a circle. You have to stand in the middle to experience it properly, and then it is like a cross between a necromantic circle - like the one Dr Faustus uses to protect himself from the spirits he calls up - and a cabinet of curiosities. There are everyday objects arbitrarily altered, shapes we cannot decipher, even a huge conical copper object that vaguely recalls an alembic, and so evokes alchemy.

Several works are whimsical, such as Michelle Nikou's darkened room hung with shapes made of glow-in-the-dark plastic, or Peter Yates's puppet of Isaac Newton, suspended by helium balloons, and every now and then walking hesitantly around, legs activated by some internal machine.

More portentous, but still fundamentally whimsical rather than serious, are the large papier-mache figures by James Morrison, one of a naked and bald man with a worried expression, the other a flying devil who seems to have escaped from a medieval Last Judgment.

Some participants are disappointing, such as Callum Morton, whose cardboard box wrapped in a tarpaulin, though meant to suggest the improvised street shelters of the homeless, hardly lives up to the interest of the installation he showed at the Melbourne Festival last year, where you entered the ruined shell of a house to find yourself in a gleaming but sterile office lift lobby.

On the other hand, the Mangano sisters, who had a rather annoying video in last year's Anne Landa Award show in Sydney, this time present an evocative triptych in which one of them swings from a tree in slow motion in the centre, while on either side each walks or scrambles again, in dreamlike slow motion, through barren countryside.

Nature and the environment are common themes, and the destruction brought about by human exploitation is suggested by showing, not telling: thus Nicholas Mangan has an installation of images of the Pacific island of Nauru, where he lives and works. Extremely wealthy for a time because of its phosphate mines, the island is destitute as well as environmentally damaged now that the mines are exhausted.

Mangan projects a series of still images of sometimes hauntingly beautiful, though arid and rocky, landscapes, interspersed with shots of collapsed and ruined bulk oar loaders or abandoned bulldozers. The slides alternate with short video clips of, for example, skeletal telecommunication dishes with waving palms behind; because we have been watching still images, and because the foreground motifs are motionless, the sudden appearance of movement in the background is surprising and almost magical.

An even more sobering image of a wasteland, though one that has nothing to do with human intervention, is at the heart of Matthew Bradley's installation, inspired by his passion for astronomy. The shell of an old car serves as a makeshift observatory, with a battery of telescopes mounted on a tripod cut through the roof and a webcam feed of the image to a laptop installed inside. Another laptop mounted in the boot plays footage of Bradley's recorded observations of the moon's surface: moving images, trembling presumably because seen through the earth's atmosphere, alternate with stills that come into closer focus.

Astronomy is also the subject, or the occasion, of the most poetic and memorable work in the exhibition. Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig have taken pages from an old book on astronomy, each with photographs of scientists and their instruments as well as explanatory text; and then they have carefully cut out all but a few of the words, creating unintended sequences that yet seem to have lain hidden in the original.

Each small page is protected between sheets of acrylic; there are headphones with soundtracks for each, so that the effect is a cumulative one of image, reconfigured words, and music. Thus "in the sky ... uncertainties ... coincide" is accompanied by organ music and voices and "special mechanism ... for ... universal ... uncertainty" by electronic music, while for "in the star ... which is so near ... I ... measure ... time ... with circles" the words are sung.

Anyone familiar with Jean Cocteau's film Orphee (1949) will be reminded of the oracular phrases broadcast from the underworld, which Orpheus listens to avidly on the Princess's car radio.

The sheer economy and precise attunement of this piece contrasts with several that are more ungainly in form and vague in meaning, a prime case being the installation by Hany Armanious which is enormous, portentous and leaves you in that rather too familiar territory between the obscure and the obvious. Armanious, like John Barbour, is an overestimated artist, which is to say that a great deal of the meaning perceived in his work is helpfully supplied by the authors of catalogue essays and exegeses. This is where we realise that for all the apparent poverty of means, artists such as this do not escape the commercial world more blatantly inhabited by the Piccininis.

The impression we so often have in reading about these individuals is that the engine of language is running, generating words and what should be meaning, and yet the phrases ring hollow: we experience emptiness, because in the end the elaborate production of language is not matched by corresponding meaning in the work itself.

Yet again, we see how hard it is for culture not to mirror the social and economic realities of its time, especially when it operates outside formal languages that have their own tradition and momentum; and the reality they mirror in this case is one in which the value attached to consumer goods is largely an effect of the marketing process. Relentless marketing in the art press endows many a vacuous work with the aura of genius. With examples such as Duchamp (whose shadow play is twice quoted in the show) and Joseph Beuys, no bow is too long; the scrappier and more apparently arbitrary the work, the more likely it is to be celebrated as possessing an occult power invisible to the profane.

Empty work packaged in abundant commentary is, perhaps inevitably, the official art of our time. Intuitively, though, almost everyone is drawn to the opposite: work inherently resonant with meaning and which refuses to yield to analysis. And this is what is striking about the two Aboriginal works in the show.

One is an enormous and impressive composition painted by a group of elderly women from Martumili and depicting the salt lake where they live, its vast white crystalline centre fringed with pools, marshes and vegetation.

The other is a canvas by Doreen Reid Nakamarra, who died shortly before the opening of the biennial and to whom the exhibition is dedicated. Nakamarra's work, shown on the ground and close in this respect to the original sand-paintings, evokes in almost hallucinatory fashion a living movement in what we see as desert country.

Both Aboriginal paintings are eloquently discussed in an essay by Elizabeth Grosz; she is tempted into hyperbole, and ultimately an overestimation of the importance of her subject, but one can understand that this is provoked by frustration at the nullity of official contemporary art. Yet the substance of what Grosz says is perceptive and applicable to all art with the pulse of real life.

What her essay, as well as that of Ian North, confirm is that the age of postmodernism ended some time ago, and only persists in a ghostly afterlife in the academy. It died of its own sterility, introversion and cynicism, but what has revealed that death to the world - as the biennial suggests - is the resurgence of traditional Aboriginal art.

For some years, as I have observed before, contemporary art writers have tried to juggle two incompatible sets of ideals: everything they claim to value in Aboriginal culture - authenticity, spontaneity, tradition, memory, durability - they simultaneously want to question or subvert in our own. Postcolonial theory provided the means of papering over this double standard for a time.

But contradiction can only be denied for so long. In the end, Aboriginal art has corroded the academic ideology of postmodernism. If the Adelaide exhibition celebrates intuition, sympathy and mystery, the accompanying essays speak of ideas proscribed by postmodernist orthodoxy: nature, including human nature; feeling and affect; even the idea of beauty.

These are profound changes, and of urgent relevance to the discussion about a national art curriculum for secondary schools. The NSW curriculum is stale; an ideological mishmash called postmodernism is taught as an official frame through which works of art of any period can be evaluated; anachronism is no obstacle, since there is no conception of history.

Works included in the HSC examination for comment are mainly drawn from the last few decades of art. Would this be tolerated in English or music? As a result there is an absurd bias in teaching, and as young art teachers are trained for this curriculum, they are not taught either fundamental art skills or the history of art.

This whole moribund system needs radical renewal. A new curriculum must be developed, based on a fundamental reappraisal both of what can and should be taught in the area of studio skills and what should be understood in art history and aesthetics.