Showcase of the yin and yang

Energy and sensibility are on display in the NGV’s latest diverse exhibitions.

Nature-morte eggs 1 (1990–91) oil on canvas by Rossylnd Piggott. Picture: National Gallery of Victoria.

In a period when gender activists want to tamper with pronouns and zealots of the non-binary find themselves paradoxically encouraging gender reassignment surgery­, we can forget the more fundamental and per­ennial reality that all of us, regardless of biological sex, share in varying degrees, in the qualities known in Chinese­ as yang and yin.

Perhaps today this phenomenon may be partly explained by the variable levels of male and female hormones found in both men and women, although we should always beware of physiological determinism. But there is little doubt that anyone who wants to achieve anything in a field of any complexity needs a balance between the active yang and the receptive yin faculties.

If anyone doubted that these different characters exist and are fundamentally important in an artist’s makeup, they need only visit the upper level of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Federation Square building, where Darren Sylvester’s exhib­ition is ­installed on one side, Rosslynd Piggott’s on the other.

The contrast between them reveals the nature of these strengths and weaknesses: if yang is energy and yin sensibility, Sylvester’s exhibition is all energy and Piggott’s all sensibility.

There are attractive things about Sylvester’s work: he is responsiv­e to aspects of contemporary culture and alienation and he captures aspects of the world of media and marketing illusion­ within which young people are trapped. He does everything with tremendous thoroughness as well, like the photograph of the young man in the Concorde simulator, with an in-flight meal entirely served in original Concorde china, patiently sought out and purchased on eBay.

But overall his imagery is limited by a kind of loudness and brashness; a little more gentleness, sensibility and quietness might allow him to find his way to a deeper vein of inspiration. Even toning down the aggressive colour scheme would help, and moving on from the flashing lights and loud noises.

A still from Julian Rosefeldt’s In the Land of Drought (2015–17). National Gallery of Victoria. © Julian Rosefeldt Image courtesy of the artist and Konig Galerie

There are appealing things in Piggott’s work too, perhaps particularly the diary note reproduced on one label, when, decades­ ago, she stood on a scaffold inches from Piero della Francesca’s masterpieces in Arezzo and marvelled at them. But she seems to have lacked the yang qualities that would have helped make something from these experiences.

Instead, the works of this early part of her career are very minimal, almost fey things that distantly recall the colours and textures of the Quattrocento. The most distinctive and memorable pieces in the exhibition are the two still life paintings of eggs, which are not surprisingly reproduced in the publicity materi­al and on the website.

A display case of drawings suggests that part of the problem was she never learned to draw properly; presumably she was at art school at a time when that wasn’t considered important. There are notes, jottings and little sketches for compositional ideas, but they are painfully inarticulate as images.

Later works vary between the conceptual, always verging on the decorative if not decorator, and increasingly ineffectual abstractio­ns or patterns. We can see she is trying to evoke a meditative peace, and we can sympathise with the sensibility, but it is not enough for work to reflect the artist’s state of mind: it must be capable of conveying something to other minds. In the end, Piggott’s work simply evaporates for lack of substance.

Back at the NGV International, Julian Rosefeldt’s film installati­on In the Land of Drought is far more absorbing than eithe­r of these exhibitions.

It is, in fairness, easier to be absorbed when the viewers are invited to lie on the ground on large cushions, facing a film projectio­n that fills the whole facing wall from ceiling to ground.

Some members of the audience were even taking the opportunity to have a little nap, which is not as bad as it sounds, since the whole 43-minute long film, on a continuous loop, has the slow but relentless movement of a dream. The desert landscapes of Morocco, which occupy most of the film, are mesmerising, and because the whole thing is shot from a drone, virtually everything is seen from very far away.

A still from Rosefeldt’s In the Land of Drought. National Gallery of Victoria. © Julian Rosefeldt Image courtesy of the artist and Konig Galerie

in the middle of the desert, the drone discovers extraordinary structures which seem the remains of ancient empires: Roman perhaps in one case, medieval in another, or again Egyptian. We fly over fortifications, gates, vast courtyards surround­ed by colonnades, colossal statues of Egyptian deities, guardian beasts apparently carved of stone.

But then behind the colossal statues we see scaffolding; a tower is roofed with sheets of sun-bleached plywood; another section of a palace is covered in a roof of corrugated iron. For these are not real ruins but film sets built in the desert for costume­ epics, and sometimes reused on several occasions for different productions.

One of these sets was originally made for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), which is based on the story of Balian of Ibelin, a French nobleman who commanded the heroic defenc­e of Jerusalem against the Saracens in 1187; eventually, after he had assured Saladin that he was willing to destroy the whole city and all his men were willing to die fighting in its defenc­e, the Saracen king accepted his terms for surrender and allowed all the defenders to leave unharmed.

Darren Sylvester’s On holiday (2010). © Darren Sylvester, provided by National Gallery of Victoria.

Jerusalem had then been in Christian hands for almost a century, since the first Crusade and the founding of the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099. The loss of the city in 1187 provoked the Third Crusade, led by Richard the Lionheart and others, one of whose consequences was that the last effective King of Jerusalem­, Guy de Lusignan, was given the kingdom of Cyprus instead, which his family held until the 15th century.

To ponder the lives of such great figures — Balian, Saladin, Richard — among the ruins of the places in which they long ago confronted each other is inevitably to reflect on the ephemeral nature of human deeds; and here it is not even the real site of the events, but an illusion, like the images conjured up in our minds by a storyteller.

Today, as the drone passes over these artificial ruins, it is a mirage of memory that is revealed, floating among the sands. And yet the structures are so evocative they seem to beg to be brought to life again with new stories: and so the same set has been re-used to film an episode of Game of Thrones, and more recently a film version of the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries — Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, due to be released this year.

But Rosefeldt is concerned with more than the evanescence of human glories or the fragile illusions of the storyteller. He hints at a future world in which civilisation and even human life may have perished. In this sense the glimpses of antiquity, of the medieval world, and even of industrial modernity represented by another set of images of the Ruhr valley, are a survey of the ages of history, all of which have come to nothing in the spectacl­e of universal desolation.

And yet these landscapes with their abandoned remains are not entirely deserted. Instead, they are animated by figures in white protective costumes like biohazard suits, who seem to be exploring an extinct world. Seen from the height of the drone, they are all very small, and they move in slow processions across the landscape and around the ruined sites, sometimes appearing to examine things closely and to take notes.

Sometimes the film cuts to a scene which at first appears deserte­d, until we notice a single figure standing among the dunes or perched on a rock, who then begins to move. More often the figures are numerous, and their slow, choreographed movements — converging, for example, in two curving lines into the entrance of a ruined castle — add to the hypnotic effect of the film’s slow but constant unfolding.

The suggestion is these are either visitors from another world or human survivors who are inspecting the world ­formerly inhabited by human civilisation, but which is now abandoned and uninhabitable, presumably as a result of catastrophic climate change and desertification.

This work about endings had its origins in a commission about the beginning of all things. Rosefeldt was commissioned to produce a filmic accompaniment to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1797-98). As it happened, involvement in this project also led to support for his work Manifesto, a collection of filmic pieces starring Cate Blanchett and using the texts of various art manifestos of the 20th century, which was shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image three years ago.

Haydn’s work, of course, evokes the creation of the world by God as related in the first pages of the book of Genesis, and as visually represented in many Byzantine mosaics and in Michel­angelo’s Sistine ceiling. But Rosefeldt decided that rather than picturing the coming into being of all things, he would evoke their ending, perhaps suggesting the end of one cycle and the prelude to the beginning of a new one.

It would have been interesting to see the first incarnation of this work, accompanied by Haydn’s music: no doubt the counterpoint between the joyful singing and the images of inhuman but sublime desert landscapes would have produced a greater sense of potential for new life than we feel here.

In this new work, recut and shortened, the artist has chosen a different soundtrack, like the buffeting of violent winds, sometimes falling to a quieter and more meditative level and sometimes rising to an almost painfully thunderous volume.

The image of what Rosefeldt, himself, calls a post-anthropocene world is ultimately a profoundly disconcerting one, and yet the work is also, as already mentioned, aesthetically absorbing and almost hypnotic. One may wonder, and the artist himself is aware of the question, whether making an evocation of the possible effects of anthropogenic climate change into such an experience is not distracting us from its real dangers.

But as Rosefeldt says in an interview included on the gallery’s website, much work on these topics, in its attempts to be didactic, can end up being akin to reportage, and perhaps less effective.

The role of art, here as elsewhere, is not to express opinions, but to alter consciousness. And that is not achieved through propaganda or preaching, but through revelation. Thus Rosefeldt’s work does not tell us what to think or do, but invites us into a world of the imagination in which we, like the anonymous figure­s in white suits, explore a world that once was inhabited but now is silent, lonely and deserted.

Darren Sylvester: Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something, until June 30.

Rosslynd Piggott: I sense you but I cannot see you, until August 18.

Julian Rosefeldt: In the Land of Drought, until September 29.

All at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.