Fresh Sydney Biennale under Jose Roca a triumph: visual art review

Many of the works in this exhibition take us out of the neurotic introversion of contemporary academic art, especially the toxic Australian variety.

Rivus, The Cutaway at Barangaroo. Image: Document Photography.

Most of the exhibition sites for this year’s Biennale of Sydney are more or less in a diagonal line from the Art Gallery of NSW to the Museum of Contemporary Art and then Walsh Bay. It is at first sight surprising that the Biennale is not using Cockatoo Island this time, especially when a visit to the island is interesting in itself and has certainly been the high point of recent exhibitions. The natural site and the evocative remains of the convict era and of later industrial establishments have complemented, and frequently supplemented many works that were otherwise unremarkable.

The choice is more understandable, however, when we discover the appeal of the Walsh Bay and Barangaroo sites, with which many people may still be unfamiliar. The whole of the Walsh Bay area with its finger wharves along Hickson Rd, once inaccessible to the public, started to open up in the 1980s when the Sydney Theatre Company and later Sydney Dance Company moved into Pier 4/5.

Pier 2/3, as many will remember, also began to be used as a vast temporary exhibition space. In recent years, however, the renewal of the whole area has greatly accelerated. Pier 2/3 has been completely refurbished as a home for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Bell Shakespeare and the Australian Theatre for Young People. All around, the remaining wharves and storehouses have been converted into apartments, hotels and restaurants.

Immediately to the west of Walsh Bay, the Millers Point docklands were turned into Barangaroo Park, which opened about seven years ago. The landscaping of the park attempts to recreate the original shoreline of the late 18th century, although with its massive blocks of sandstone, quarried on the spot, the result is an explicitly artificial and architectural emulation, since exact reproduction would be impossible.

But it is not only the shoreline that is restored; the hill itself – presumably flattened by sandstone quarrying in the 19th century – has been reconstructed so that at the top it is on the same level as the Palisade Hotel and the adjacent streets. But it has not been built up, as one might expect, with landfill; on the contrary, it has been left hollow, and underneath is a vast and cavernous void, known as the Cutaway, probably the biggest exhibition space in Sydney, if not in Australia.

Undoubtedly the best place to start a visit to the Biennale is at Pier 2/3, from which it is a short and – if the weather is fine – pleasant walk to Barangaroo; from there one can stroll through the picturesque old streets of the Dawes Point area to reach the MCA and then, if one still has the time or energy, to the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Art School.

The Pier 2/3 space is also vast and surrounded by water, in keeping with the exhibition’s Latin title rivus – a word that has given rise to the English river, the French rivière, and the Italian and Spanish rio, although in Latin it means a stream or brook rather than a proper river, which is flumen.

We enter through a Dutch installation of underwater animated collages of the North Sea, accompanied by a watery soundscape; inside the main space we encounter a variety of displays, one of which is primarily an environmental innovation. Living Seawalls produces hexagonal modules with textures that emulate the natural surfaces of rocks and reefs, and which can be bolted on to seawalls to provide a hospitable environment for marine life to find a foothold and flourish.

In contrast to this practical intervention, there is a film installation by an English-born artist of Finnish origins, singing to seals on the coast of Scotland. The title Seals’kin suggests the animistic and almost shamanistic thinking that animates this work. At the end of the hall is a huge seascape which seems to evoke the dark swell of the open ocean; on closer inspection it turns out that the light on the water is gold leaf, while the shadows in the swell are composed of thousands of tiny fishhooks painted black, giving the whole piece another kind of menace and alluding implicitly to the fishing-out of the seas.

On either side of this are two works that are thoughtful and poetic, but rather like pieces of scientific bricolage. Each is concerned with the circulation of water in a closed system in which, as we know, the total volume of water in the world remains constant. Curiously, these two works that are so similar in their ultimate thinking are respectively by a Japanese and a pair of Americans. The main differences are that the American work evokes laboratory processes, while the Japanese suggests the endless play of randomness.

This sort of work is best seen in a large open space rather than in a conventional gallery, and indeed like much Biennale art it is inherently temporary, interesting to visit in such a setting, but not really suitable to collect or display permanently in a museum; arguably in fact most of the best work in this Biennale could be considered as post-museum art, occasional rather than perennial. It is always going to look more interesting in exhibition spaces like this than in oversized museum halls like the ones the AGNSW is spending so much to build.

This is even more obviously true of the works at the Cutaway. The space is almost breathtakingly vast, abutting the sandstone cliff that is all that remains of the original hill, and lit by equally enormous openings to the sky on the cliff side. The largest piece in this space is a swirling tangle of fluid forms made of bamboo, titled Flow and evoking the moving energy of water or wind. It is an extraordinary work, perhaps the single most striking thing in the Biennale, and yet it is essentially a momentary manifestation, like a performance, that cannot exist in the same way in any other place or form.

There is an intriguing digital work at the entrance of the Cutaway which alludes to the disaster of extinction and evokes the digital simulation of a rhinoceros, perhaps as a metaphor for its physical cloning. Up on the hill above is a sound installation based on recordings of the soundscapes of six different natural environments. Otherwise, however, almost all the best work here is notably low-tech, making use of natural materials and emphasising their organic qualities.

One of the most remarkable is what looks like a mattress made from turf, bound with a string netting, in the centre of a white marble disk. The disk turns out to be milk, with the addition of lime which forms a skin on the top and no doubt preserves it as well. The netting on the mattress is also made from milk, while what appeared to be turf is really rue, which fills the space all around with its fresh, hay-like aroma.

The olfactory, indeed, is an important part of these large-scale installations made of natural materials. Nearby is a piece that includes living grass, growing under lamps, as well as matted materials made of dried grass. And one of the largest works in the space, composed of suspended elements, constructions of wood and bamboo, and floor elements, evokes the ecosystem of an endangered wetland.

Walking across to the MCA, there are further works on the theme of rivers and wetlands, including large diagrammatic drawings evoking the ambivalent place of humanity within fluvial ecosystems downstairs, and upstairs many smaller works, including delicate watercolours about the lives of trees and forests, huge charcoal drawings of imaginary landscapes, and a couple of enigmatic oil paintings that evoke a peculiarly South American surreal or magical vision.

There are other sites too, although the work is not as engaging or memorable as those we have discussed at Walsh Bay and the Cutaway. At the Art Gallery of NSW, for example, there is an installation of Aboriginal bark canoes that is ethnologically interesting but has no atmosphere or poetry. This is at least the second Biennale in a row where the AGNSW component has been the least impressive.

At the National Art School gallery and in a nearby building are several interesting works, including large-scale works on paper. The most notable are in the Annexe: the massive cut-out prints by Teho Ropeyarn facing a huge monochrome painting of the goddess Ganga, personification of the Ganges, swimming through the river itself and surrounded by all the human life and activity that she supports.

Perpendicular to these two works is a digital print on fabric alluding to the damage caused by dams. In the main gallery too a video work upstairs evokes a village flooded by a dam. Most of the works in the NAS gallery, however, are not particularly memorable; several are slight although large in scale, and seem to be caught in an uncomfortable position: they are not substantial enough to be durable works of art in the normal sense, things that bear sustained attention on the walls of a gallery, but nor have they embraced the temporary and performance-like quality of the best installations at the Cutaway.

If this Biennale feels fresher and more interesting than usual, it is no doubt because the curator, José Roca, is from Colombia, a change from the usual suspects who have given us so many vacuous and pretentious Biennali in recent years. Thanks to Roca’s direction, the Biennale includes a large number of artists from Central and South America, who bring a direct, urgent and yet sophisticated apprehension of the natural environment.

Almost all of the interesting works this year, indeed, are by Latin Americans, who seem to come from somewhere beyond the boundaries of the ingrown world of anglosphere contemporary art, with its chronic indulgence in grievance themes, resentment and guilt, combined with stale academic cliches about “interrogating archives”.

The only requirement for a successful career in official contemporary art in Australia is to identify, however tenuously, as a member of an approved minority group and follow the appropriate script; the result is inevitably sterile, predictable and repetitive.

Artists in Latin America live with the reality of chronic violence of a level we can barely imagine, with terrifying rates of criminal homicide, with savage attacks on native peoples and with the regular murder of environmental activists.

Perhaps it is precisely because these conditions are so extreme that they seem to recognise that art is not a vehicle for complaining, but rather one for the expression of consciousness. At any rate, it is striking how many of the works in this exhibition take us out of the neurotic introversion of contemporary academic art, especially the toxic Australian variety, and invite us to open our imaginations and our hearts to the world of nature which surrounds us and ultimately supports our very existence.

23rd Biennale of Sydney

Rivus: A Glossary of Water

Various venues across Sydney, until June 13