A View of World Art c. 1940-1988
The sounds became extravagant only when it was clear that the Art Gallery of New South Wales was their source. These were the "natural" city noises of water, rail and road traffic, discordant but familiar, a live sound portrait of Sydney Harbour and surrounding environments. Amplification of Bill Fontana's Accoustical Views (between 17 May and 29 May) from the incongruously monolithic, tightly conservative facade of the AGNSW, heralded the beginning of the Australian Biennale 1988 - A View Of World Art c.1940-1988. Biennale-goers streamed through the Domain, drawn by the noise, like sinners queuing for an irresistible, albeit very post-modernist, last trump. It was a spectacle rich with potential metaphors for the Biennale itself, metaphors of subversion and/or absorption, of inspired but contesting juxtapositions. Sadly, on the inside, the show didn't measure up to the jarring promise of the fanfare.
The "Australian Biennale" turned out to be the Biennale you have when you are also having a Bicentenary. Of course no-one would deny the logic of attempting to shackle this first "travelling" Biennale (Sydney May 17 - July 3, and Melbourne, August 4 - September 18) to the reflective structure of the larger national celebration. However the deliberate hybridity of the exhibition's organisation this year, an amalgamation of historical survey and contemporary festival, has further confused what was already tentative and elusive - a role for the Biennale as a developing but manageable contemporary forum. It is an identity crisis that had Nick Waterlow pleading in 1982 for us to "avoid the word Biennale, for the time being."1 In an odd way the schismic format, at least, seems appropriate, both to the Biennale's fundamental and longstanding preoccupation with peripheries... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline