Divided Worlds: 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

After a triennial in Melbourne and the Sydney Biennale, the Adelaide Biennial turned out to be a rather different experience.

Detail from Tamara Dean’s Elephant ear (Alocasia odora) in Autumn.

After the NGV Triennial in Melbourne and the Sydney Biennale, the prospect of another exhibition of this kind was hardly an appealing one, yet the Adelaide Biennial turned out to be a rather different experience.

In the first place it is a lot smaller and more focused. Sydney had 70 artists and more than 300 works; Adelaide has 30 artists, which is probably as many as one can focus on properly. In fact for years I have argued that blockbuster exhibitions in general, which so often insist on the magic number of 100 works, would be better with 30 or so well-chosen pieces of real quality.

Another advantage, curious as it may sound, is that the 30 artists are all Australian. To some extent institutions such as the Biennale of ­Sydney perpetuate a cultural cringe in which we feel we have to compare ourselves with artists overseas, desperately seeking validation of our own relevance or loudly asserting our own importance in the alternation of self-doubt and ­arrogance that is characteristic of narcissism.

These international shows are most dispiriting when they hoover up second and third-rate representatives of the international contemporary art world. Contemporary art is a big business, crowded not only with well-known figures but also with minor individuals trying to put ­together a product that will attract corporate sponsorship, institutional support and ultim­ately membership of the approved shopping list from which all international exhibitions are put together, much as online customers click on a product to put it into their basket.

In this market, naturally enough, there are highly priced items and economy or budget ­options. An artist’s valuation is determined by an obscure interplay of commercial and institutional interests, tacit agreements between ­investors pursuing capital gains, curators building careers and influence, and the media looking for good stories. And of course when exhibitions of this sort include artists from minor or Third World countries, this is only after they have been duly processed through the system and underwritten by one of the approved international contemporary art brokerages, the gatekeepers of the system.

Christian Thompson's Purified by Fire (2017)

On the whole, the artists in Adelaide were better chosen and of a higher quality than those in Sydney, and this is ultimately the result of having a better curator. Erica Green, who is also director of the Samstag Museum, has made a more thoughtful and coherent selection of works, and her catalogue observations about the rationale of her Biennial are incomparably more intelligent than the nonsense I quoted a few weeks ago in reviewing the Sydney ­­Bien­nale. Instead of asserting that we are living in a state of equilibrium, then presenting a spectacle of randomness, Green expressly acknowledges division and conflict but suggests ways that art can restore connection, love and meaning.

The presentation of the exhibition in several venues is also helpful because works of different natures are better experienced in small groups than in the usual indiscriminate and heterogeneous crowding of such collective shows. Thus I began the day by visiting the Jam ­Factory, with only a handful of displays.

There we enter a darkened room to discover a remarkable set of white ceramic vessels, ­exhibited at about chest height so that we are looking more or less straight at them. The vessels seem to glow in a darkness so profound that we don’t at first realise that we can walk around behind them, too.

The vessels, which are exhibited in a long row but broken into groups recalling the work of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, are beautiful and ­refined examples of the potter’s art, ostensibly vernacular yet constantly echoing the myriad forms of the great Chinese tradition of ceramics. But these forms have even longer histories and sometimes other origins: there are shapes that emulate those of plants, such as gourds, and others that originated in the Tang dynasty as imitations of the central Asian art of metallic vessels. One vessel, standing incongruously in the middle, is a conspicuous reminder of the graceless forms of industrial production.

Next to this is a fascinating series of enlarged photographs of the stamens and pistils of flowers. A botanical table reproduced from an 18th-century English translation of the fundamental work of Carl Linnaeus, who established the modern system for the classification of plant types, reminds us that his taxonomy was based on the sexual organs of flowers. Even if we ­already knew this, the work invites us to meditate on the boundless morphological variety and the sensual luxuriance of these flowers — with forms that uncannily can echo those of human sexual organs — and above all the ­irresistible energy of life and the momentum of reproduction.

The same overwhelming instinct is embodied by horses in Amos Gebhardt’s video work at the nearby Samstag Museum. The film is projected on two adjacent walls and the creatures are seen relatively close up, crowding the frame so the viewer is absorbed in a restless ­visual drama, never allowed the objectifying relief of a long shot. This intensity of absorption reflects the tense and powerful drama of the subject, which is the mating behaviour of horses.

Mutual desire, with passion on one side and receptiveness on the other, is complicated by the reluctance of the mare to yield to her ­impulses. The drama of mutual approaches, ­contact and moments of apparent mutual understanding that alternate with separation and disconnection becomes a metaphor of the intermittence of human sympathy; and the ­animals seem to take on a disconcertingly anthropomorphic appearance, merely because we are looking at them so intently, gazing into their eyes, feeling the rippling of their flesh, ­recognising the anatomical structures they share with us.

Patricia Piccinini's The Avian Trilogy (Eagle in flight with helmets) (2017).

Human communication is evoked in a much quieter mode by Angelica Mesiti in a new video work at the other end of the gallery. All of ­Mesiti’s work has been inspired by her interest in the way people communicate or establish connection and even communion: from the ­whistling languages used in remote parts of the Mediterranean to singing, dancing and even the transmission of choreography through physical prompts, she is above all drawn to the complex ways that we make contact with our fellow creatures.

Here she is drawn to the Danish people’s use of singing not as a way of communicating a message but, rather, of forming a communal bond between the members of a group. Thus we see choirs of schoolchildren, but also town councillors singing together before a meeting.

The ambiguous relation of an outsider to such a close-knot community, however, is ­suggested by the figure of an Arab acrobat who performs handstands on the council desks: a feat that is admirable in its stillness and balance but essentially solitary.

Also at Samstag are the small but poignant works of Khaled Sabsabi, in which colour photographs of war-shattered parts of Beirut have been painted over in acrylic. Lebanon and Syria have become tragic places in the contemporary world, not only victims of rivalries ­between regional and global powers but also lands in which good and bad intentions alike have equally brought about catastrophic ­consequences for their populations.

Particularly notable are two short films by Douglas Watkin, both of which make subtle and imaginative use of stop-motion animation as well as the resources of new technology.

The Queen & I, for example, poignantly evokes many aspects of Aboriginal experience while completely avoiding the themes of ­victimhood and resentment that too often are present in contemporary Aboriginal art. Here the viewer is not accused or blamed but is invited to share a human story in a generous and sympathetic spirit.

Detail from Lisa Adams’s Inquisition (2016).

At the Art Gallery of South Australia, the selection is a little more mixed. Among the more striking works upstairs is the series of subtly surreal paintings by Lisa Adams: a girl whispers her secret into a hollow in a tree and the trunk above bursts into flames — reminding us of Jean Cocteau’s observation, at the opening of La Belle et la bete (1946), that children naturally will believe that the hands of a murderer can smoke.

Elsewhere, a swan becomes an icebreaker, and a sparrow is disguised as a hunting falcon. Surgeons operate on a winged figure who could be Icarus or an angel. A ghost train emits smoke but remains invisible. Two beekeepers, in their protective uniforms, kiss. And a pair of lovers lie hugging in a park, the grass around them scorched by their passion.

Julie Gough, once again, deals with Aboriginal themes in an interesting way: old textbooks with simplistically triumphalist accounts of ­colonialism alternate with footage of Tasmanian landscapes, rightly without further comment. The most memorable section, however, is where a colonial painting by John Glover dissolves into an image of what is apparently the same view today — since it was a part of his estate — but now without the Aborigines. The sense of absence is all the more poignant for being allowed to speak for itself.

Elsewhere downstairs, the installation that crowds the space around the stairs is like an image of constructivism gone feral: a symbol of rationality and dialectic turned into a triffid-like proliferation of entropic forms.

Turning a corner, we are confronted by Tamara Dean’s image of a man falling into a well of darkness, in reality reflected in a mirror from an image floating above.

Hayden Fowler has a 3-D video work of an eel climbing up an underground waterway to experience some kind of ecstatic union, ­perhaps mating, before dying. The work is ­hypnotic and suspenseful in a low-key way, yet ultimately somewhat overlong and inconclusive. But what really struck me was that during the time I sat and watched the whole thing — almost 17 minutes in all — about three or four other people came in and none of them stayed for a whole minute.

Sixty seconds is an eternity for the average viewer of contemporary art, so there is little chance of gaining more than the most cursory impression of time-based works; most leave with the superficial impression of having seen something cool but incomprehensible.

The most intriguing work of all was Patrick Pound’s large and at first sight completely arbitrary selection of old and new objects from the gallery’s collection. There are paintings, prints, objects, photographs, books, even items of furniture. And then you realise that the title is a pun: The Point of Everything. For every one of these things has something to do with points or pointing: and you begin to discover figures pointing in a painting, or realise that an object is pointed in shape; different editions of Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point (1928) are at each ­corner of the installation. And as we scrutinise each seemingly disparate item we realise Pound has made us rediscover individually familiar ­objects and images as though we had never seen them before.

Divided Worlds: 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

Art Gallery of South Australia and other Adelaide venues, until June 3