Humanism, writ large at the Adelaide Biennial

THIS year’s Adelaide Biennial has the theme Dark Heart, alluding to Australia’s history and unhealed wounds in the national psyche.

A still from Richard Lewer’s video Worse Luck … I am Still Here (2013). Courtesy Hugo Mic

THE trouble with big regular exhibitions such as the Sydney Biennale or the Adelaide Biennial is that they are driven more by the need to find content for an already committed spot on the calendar than by any inherent necessity, anything that urgently needs to be said. The date comes around, a curator is chosen from among a tiny self-reproducing tribe, and they in turn have to come up with a theme that sounds plausible and preferably in some sense new, since contemporary art is still committed to a myth of innovation.

In reality, these exhibitions are so constrained by conventions and expectations that they all tend to look rather the same, and that is why unless you are a member of the curatorium hoping that your own turn will one day come to add one of these headline events to your CV, they tend to be rather dispiriting and one is grateful if, as in the present Adelaide Biennial, there are a few pleasant surprises.

This year’s Biennial is curated by Nick Mitzevich, director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, which also hosts the exhibition, and the theme he has chosen is Dark Heart. This is not an allusion to the culture of his city but to the history of Australia and the sense that there are still, within the national psyche, unhealed wounds that go back to the days of the convicts and early interaction with the Aborigines.

One of the contributing artists observes that Australians don’t like to confront difficult questions. This is perhaps true in a general way but, like so many things in contemporary Australian culture, it is strikingly polarised along class and educational lines. The less educated don’t want to entertain any doubts, while the educated classes enjoy masochistically rehearsing their sense of guilt — which reaffirms their moral superiority — before proceeding to enjoy all the material benefits of their privileged lives.

Clearly the historical treatment of the Aboriginal people, and more significantly their present condition, is a matter of grave national concern, but truly frank and open discussion is still hampered by entrenched prejudices and ideological positions. One day, perhaps, it will be possible to recognise the injustices done to Aborigines in the process of white settlement without minimising or rhetorically inflating them; and at the same time to acknowledge the damage done to them more recently by misguided well-wishers, and finally to consider the multiple reasons they are still so poorly integrated into modern Australia.

Given the limitations of this kind of event, Mitzevich has put together a show that is reasonably coherent and, especially in the basement area, works well as a series of spaces in which each artist generally has a room to themselves, minimising jarring juxtapositions. He has also managed to include Aboriginal work without producing the impression of patronising tokenism that is so common when traditional indigenous work is set beside contemporary art.

One of the most striking things in the exhibition, indeed, is a forest of wooden spears, made as part of a cultural heritage project, suspended from the ceiling in a sword-of-Damocles forest of potential menace above our heads. Another successful work is Warwick Thornton’s huge charcoal drawing of a tree, apparently executed over a photographic print in which the remainder of the view of inland plains and stark mountains forms a fainter, dreamlike background.

This work is preceded by a room in which we find ourselves surrounded by enormous murals by Brook Andrew. They are in fact based on prints of Aboriginal life by Gustav Mutzel, inspired by William Blandowski’s natural history expedition through Victoria and NSW in 1856-57. In Andrew’s version, these images are scaled up and digitally printed on to canvas, but darkened and distressed so that they remind one of images scanned from old photographs, charged with the sense of memory recovered from sources in which it only just survives.

Occupying a whole room with its dark and silvery surfaces and mysterious glimpses of a long-vanished way of life, Andrew’s work makes a strong first impression; on longer inspection, however, it appears increasingly contrived, too much like high production-value work ultimately designed for the art market with a carefully calibrated combination of solemn resonance and decorator elegance.

Another favourite of the contemporary art market is Ben Quilty, whose immense painting of an island occupies the wall of an adjacent room. I can’t help feeling that Quilty could be a much better artist, but he has to give up the ridiculous gimmick of pull-apart painting. The picture in the Biennial is enormous and its asking price would undoubtedly be more than $250,000, but as an attempt at a landscape it is little but an absurd expression of arrogance. Quilty’s problem, however, is that the position he has gained in the market makes it hard for him to afford the humility it would take to learn to paint the landscape in a meaningful way.

In front of this is an installation of life vests carved in marble, which is meant to commemorate the drowning of a group of asylum-seekers. One formal objection is that the artist has attached nylon straps to the stone life vests, but the deeper problem is that there is no good reason to carve them in marble in the first place. A pile of real-life vests could have been more poignant. The work also suffers from not being clear about what exactly it is trying to say. If the emphasis is meant to be on the sadness of the loss, it seems skewed by the need to point the finger of blame.

Similarly suffering from a lack of focus is eX de Medici’s installation based on a period spent in Iran. The back wall is covered with a floral pattern interwoven with the logos of multinational corporations, while a low tabletop is covered in a design that seems to conflate the Australian flag with stripes from the American one, the pattern made out of bullet casings. Iran has seen a great deal of violence, but fortunately Australia has not yet been involved in any significant armed conflict in that country.

Or perhaps this just shows once again how lamentably low the level of intellectual coherence can be in contemporary art, where you always seem to get more brownie points for being on the right side and indulging in ostentatious displays of narcissistic guilt than for sobriety and clarity of perception. How can you go wrong making our flag out of bullets? Surely capitalism and the modern state are always associated with violence? Perhaps, but unfortunately so are most other forms of social and economic organisation.

The best part of this installation is the inclusion of portraits of the great poets Sadi and Hafiz , who remind us Iran was not always the place it is today. It long represented the main bastion of humanism in the Islamic world and made the most important contributions to Islamic scientific thought in the medieval period.

Other things include a room full of faces of people photographed at random by Trent Parke in the streets of Adelaide, which recall the early work of Bill Henson, who took pictures of crowds from a distance and unbeknown to his subjects, revealing the tired apathy and disconnection of urban commuters at the end of a day. There is a brilliantly painted canvas by a group of Aboriginal women from Martu, particularly remarkable for the fact that it was made collectively, as we can see from Lynette Wallworth’s video in the adjacent room.

Another room is devoted to the work of Fiona Lowry, who has a potentially interesting subject, the story of a runaway convict, a black American who, among other adventures, had an affair with a white convict girl. But the story is presented in a way that exploits both its sentimental and erotic aspects — the figures are naked and the convict girl is unlikely to have been as young and pretty as she is in the photos — while the artist’s device of washed-out pastel photographic images shows that little thought has gone into the making of these works beyond the concern to produce a polished, decorative and recognisably branded commodity.

The baneful effect of biennial exhibitions in encouraging artists to work on a larger scale and fill more space is apparent in a number of cases. Sally Smart’s combination of drawing and paper cutouts evoking dance are quite engaging, but in filling a whole room she has been led to repeat herself — even frequently in the annotations — and the installation would probably be more effective occupying a single wall.

Upstairs, Ian Burns has an enormously elaborate low-tech contraption built of ladders and other non-artistic materials, but it is disappointing and lumbering compared with the smaller machines he has built before, in which much more limited means produced surprising and delightful effects.

By far the most moving work in the exhibition — in fact the only one to which that epithet can rightly be applied — is by Richard Lewer. I mentioned his work recently because three short animations were included in the Sea of Dreams exhibition at Mornington Peninsula. Lewer’s style is deliberately minimal and ostensibly almost naive, yet it is underpinned by the skill needed to evoke the settings of his stories and, above all, the expression of his characters.

The style is designed to allude to its own artifice, and Lewer takes what Brecht called the “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) a step further on this occasion, by including shots of himself arranging transparencies on a light box. It is perhaps only because we have become so accustomed to the slick hyper-realism of the mass media that we may be surprised to find that such acknowledgment of artifice can heighten the poignancy of the work.

Lewer tells the simple story of a man whose wife suffers a stroke and who is finally driven by their common misery to end her life and to attempt to take his own. It is a credit to Mitzevich to have included this artist, although his unrelenting focus on a dreadfully real subject casts a pitiless light on many of the others, scrambling to balance credibility in the subculture of the contemporary with rich rewards in an overheated market of art speculators.

Adelaide Biennial

Art Gallery of South Australia, to May 11