‘Ultimate blandness’: Nothing funky about this Gibbon
A giant inflatable gibbon sculpture has been installed on top of the Carriageworks rooftop. But as Christopher Allen observes, ‘a work of art is not good just because it is well-intentioned’.
Are you still mourning the departure of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental Maman spider from the forecourt of the Art Gallery of NSW? Searching for the next herculean animal sculpture to fill the void?
Look no further than Skywalker, a colossal inflatable gibbon that, as of this morning, calls Australia home.
Created by Melbourne-based artist Lisa Roet, this metallic sculpture is made from solar-sensitive inflatable material and modelled after the endangered Skywalker hoolock gibbon, discovered in 2017 in China’s Yunnan Province. The piece aims to raise awareness about sustainability and environmental issues.
The gibbon species was named in honour of the scientists who discovered it, devout fans of the Star Wars series.
Standing an imposing 20m wide and 9m high, Skywalker debuted in Beijing in 2018 atop The Opposite House, one of the city’s first environmentally conscious buildings, during Earth Hour. The installation was paired with a recording of a male gibbon’s full-throated mating call, captured by Roet in Borneo and powered by 50 volunteer cyclists on energy-generating bicycles. In 2023, Skywalker journeyed to Edinburgh, Scotland, where it perched on a community church to mark the opening of the Fringe Festival.
Now, it has swung into The Emerald City, greeting visitors at the entrance of the Sydney Contemporary art fair at Carriageworks. The sculpture is part of the Installation Contemporary program, curated by Talia Linz, Senior Curator at Artspace.
Sydney Contemporary Fair Director Zoe Paulsen remarked, “As Australia’s premier art fair, we’re always trying to push the envelope and offer our visitors a truly unique and unforgettable experience … As well as deliver an incredibly important environmental message.”
The artwork will be on display from 5-8 September.
Here is what The Australian’s art critic Christopher Allen had to say about it:
If you read this in time you may still be able to get over to Carriageworks by 10am to witness the installation of a giant 9m high inflatable gibbon – no doubt an irresistible prospect for lovers of the various other big objects that Australians are fond of, from big bananas to the big merino or the big prawn. It also seems a suitably gratuitous object to promote a celebration of the commodification of art like the contemporary art fair.
It is pointless to ask whether something like this is art or not. It’s certainly the kind of thing that is embraced by institutions of all kinds, because of its spectacular size, its ostentatious good intentions and its ultimate blandness. Several other large inflatable primates made by the artist, Lisa Roet, have been installed on the outside of buildings around the world, including in China.
The trouble with works of this nature is that it’s easy to confuse the aesthetic interest of the work with the importance of the underlying cause. A work of art is not good just because it is well-intentioned, or because it deals with an important issue. Nor is it necessarily effective even in advancing its cause: there is no doubt of the urgency to protect the world’s primates; but making large inflatable models of them at artfairs probably does more to promote the notoriety of the artist than the cause of conservation.
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