THE 15TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
The long march across sixteen venues of Zones of Contact was slowed by an elegiac sensibility. Spectral silhouettes flickered in darkened rooms. Slow, cinematic sweeps across ruins, desolate landscapes, wall washes and witnesses signposted a lucid journey through a fallen world. By the time we reached ultima thule, the satellite show at Campbelltown’s Art Centre, we empathised with Dimitry Gutov’s hapless artist-intellectual who endlessly struggles to his feet in a pool of icy Tundra sludge, puts on his glasses and takes a lurching step forward (Thaw, 2006). A resonant bass-baritone sings to Shostakovich over Gutov’s short video loop, while the inter-title reads: ‘Even though that hooligan Fedulov beat me up I didn’t complain to the Organs of our outstanding Militia. I decided to confine myself to the beating I had already received’. Buffoonery is a reflexive strategy open to artists and audiences alike. We have decided to complain to the Organs of outstanding International Art on behalf of Gutov’s bruised conscript.
Almost incidentally (and certainly unwittingly), Gutov’s sonorous address to the failed Socialist Utopia prompted mildly hysterical laughter at our own expense. It seemed to re-enact the historical adventure of post-war critical theory and artistic praxis—as a poignant farce. If this falling man at the Museum of Contemporary Art was miming the story of post-war cultural politics, then this certainly included our successive aspirations for the Sydney Biennale. As he rose from the black mud of Mother Russia, again and again, we had to admit that this show was the materialist yet non-mechanical, historically reflexive Biennale we had all longed for, damn it. It was crammed to the rafters with non-canonical and non-metropolitan artworks and ‘best practice’... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline