NGV Triennial: Yamagami Yukihiro, Jorge Mendez Blake and others
One of the few merits of the NGV Triennial is that audiences are led through rooms of the permanent collection on the way.
There is one really remarkable work downstairs at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of the first edition of the NGV Triennial. Shinjuku calling, by Yamagami Yukihiro, appears at first sight to be a video of the intersection outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, and it immediately attracts the viewer’s attention by its very quietness and subtlety. As I approached it, a vehicle driving past slowly faded away, evoking a poignant sense of passing time.
As always, aesthetic depth arises from the quality of the process. The work is based on a meticulously accurate pencil drawing of the scene, in this case of necessity precisely reproducing a photograph. Video material, shot from exactly the same viewpoint, is then projected on to the drawing, thus introducing colour and movement. But the projected imagery is highly selective, including the animated neon billboards, the train passing on an overhead bridge, and the crowds of people walking by and crossing the road.
The artist thus draws our attention effortlessly to the distinction between the things that move or change and those that remain unmoved and unchanged: on the one hand the structure of the city and on the other the figures of men and women, who are shadowy, diaphanous and fugitive, as though already ephemeral in their very nature, even as they pass in and out of our field of view. We do not even notice for a moment how few people there are, and indeed how few cars in this usually crowded intersection, for the artist can choose how many to let back into his artificial world. By night, the scene is even emptier, dark and colourless but for the light in the windows of the passing train and the suspended disc of the moon.
All the works in this room have a certain quiet intensity, and after Yamagami’s video the next most interesting is a series of 62 ink and wash drawings by Jorge Mendez Blake. The drawings represent views of ports and harbours, and they gradually appear to fade until the last pages are blank. The shape of the whole work is inspired by a rich and eccentric character in Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), who conceives the arcane project of painting 500 watercolours of ports around the world in the course of his travels, then having them turned into jigsaw puzzles, and finally into paintings that will then be left to dissolve into nothingness.
The artist’s paradoxical activity thus becomes a kind of discipline or meditative practice that sustains him and gives a purpose to his life, and yet will ultimately leave behind no material trace. In the novel, the character Bartleby dies after completing 438 of his projected 500 pictures, so the present series purports to supply the missing 62 images.
These works, as is clear from even the shortest description of them, require and — Yamagami’s especially — reward time and attention. But large collective exhibitions such as biennials and triennials are obviously not conducive to such patient looking. Here, for example, there are 100 works. A more effective exhibition would probably have had 10 or 20 at most.
But the crowds don’t come to see subtle and sophisticated things; they come for the circus, which is what one has to wade through to get to the room I have been discussing. And the curious thing about all this visual cacophony is that it so directly reproduces the environment of noise and distraction that surrounds us in daily life, both in the physical environment of the city and on the digital screens to which we are increasingly enslaved.
We naturally and unthinkingly spend much of our lives in states of preoccupation, agitation and anxiety. Aesthetic experience, however, as it has been pointed out at least since Kant, involves a freedom from all these forms of attachment. What he called disinterested interest is a kind of freedom, the precondition for imagination and perception. We might think of it as creating, like meditation, a space that allows for consciousness. Today, our natural tendency to attachment is amplified by various social and technological developments; stress and overload seem to be endemic. So it is all the more perverse when certain artists indulge in even greater overload, as in the case of Indonesia’s Uji (Hahan) Handoko Eko Saputro, whose work is not only grotesque and hyperactive but ultimately uninteresting. Typically for work of this kind, the painted images need to be supported by an elaborate and visually noisy environment, because the pictures on their own, though frenetically busy, are inherently insipid.
Adjacent to this room is a space full of photographic montages on huge ovals that somehow feel both random and obvious, evocations of First World neurosis grown, as in a Petri dish, in an environment designed by Ikea. But this is followed by a fun park room with mirrored walls, stripes on the floor and a forest of coloured strings. It is the same sort of pointless decorative space that I discussed recently in the Pipilotti Rist exhibition, and one wonders yet again why exactly this kind of thing is taken seriously, or at least tolerated, by the contemporary art world.
Perhaps it is akin to the reason that galleries today show exhibitions of fashion: it may have little to do with any recognised aspiration of art, but it draws a certain kind of audience, one that would not come for the serious art. And such vapidly colourful spaces appeal especially to girls and young women with their mobile phones who, as in the Rist show, see exhibitions such as this essentially as opportunities to add to the countless pictures of themselves that they or their friends have already taken in a short but dedicated career of narcissistic self-absorption.
At the Triennial, meanwhile, often in pairs or groups, the selfie-hunters prowled, camera in hand, barely looking at the work but sizing each space up as a photographic location. Plenty of pictures were attempted, in spite of the low light levels, in another fun-park installation, again with mirrored walls and this time with swirls of light moving around on the floor, once again inducing sensory overload and disorientation. Perhaps such disorientation even has a homeopathic or cathartic benefit for people whose own inner lives are sufficiently confused. But it was a bit depressing to see toddlers led into such an environment by well-meaning but not overly mindful parents.
This space was followed by another in which the audience was invited to lie down on a platform covered with a woven carpet or, more exactly, a tapestry, where they found themselves looking up at a mirrored ceiling. Ostensibly this work was intended to raise the audience’s awareness of the environment, and specifically of the fate of Argentina’s Santa Cruz River. The tapestry, in fact, represents an aerial view of the river and the sites where the authorities propose to build two hydroelectric dams which, it is said, will irreversibly damage a pristine environment.
All of this was, however, without the slightest doubt lost on most of the audience. The platform was covered in recumbent bodies, all staring raptly at their own images in the mirrored ceiling above them; when I was there, at least 10 visitors — mostly in couples — were taking pictures of their own reflections in the ceiling. It was a low point in the bathos of audience self-indulgence. Or perhaps there was even worse, when one girl actually took an upskirt photo of her friend standing on a mirrored floor.
Is this what these art binges are really for? It’s rather dispiriting to think that there are still two more to endure this year, the Adelaide Biennial and the Sydney Biennale. And at the end of the year there will also be the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which at least tends to be a bit more interesting than the others. Meanwhile the Melbourne event has the usual obligatory tome full of promotional copy disguised as theory that is meant to lend credibility to the event, but is in reality a purely symbolic, even fetishistic object that will adorn coffee tables but never be read. Unlike the others, the Triennial makes do without a portentous and vacuous title, although this does implicitly concede how gratuitous, and yet also predictable, the selection of work always is in such exhibitions.
One of the few merits of the NGV Triennial is that because some of the exhibits are dispersed upstairs, audiences are led through rooms of the permanent collection on the way, and some of them stop to look and discover things they might not otherwise have seen. And upstairs is also where we encounter the most impressive and, with Yamagami’s work described above, the most memorable thing in the whole exhibition, Richard Mosse’s three-screen film or video work devoted to the drama of irregular migration into Europe from the Middle East and Africa.
At the end of 2015 I reviewed The Enclave, Mosse’s study of the murderous hellhole that is the Congo, where about 5.5 million people have been killed in civil wars in the past 20 years alone. In this work, Mosse looks at the consequences of such violence and social breakdown, in the streams of displaced people willing to risk their lives to cross the sea to Europe.
The reason that Mosse’s work is so powerful is that it is not ideological, not trying to tug at our heartstrings or make us feel guilty or preach that we should open our borders and take in more migrants. He simply evokes the phenomenon of mass migration in its instinctive, irresistible, impersonal momentum, like the migrations of other creatures, yet without ever losing sight of the gravity of human suffering, or of a dignity epitomised in the scene of a black Muslim performing his ritual prayers even in the midst of chaos and dislocation.
But images of buses and boats laden with migrants, all shot in black-and-white with military grade infra-red cameras that turn everything into ghostly negative images, are undeniably frightening, poised between horror and tragedy, whether seen from the point of view of the migrants themselves or of those in whose countries they hope to arrive and settle.
NGV Triennial
National Gallery of Victoria. Until April 15.
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