For someone on the social periphery of the Sydney art world, the carnival of character assassination and professional intrigue associated with major exhibitions like Perspecta or the Biennale induces a perverse delight, almost like that of watching American wrestling: there is something wonderfully unbelievable about it, as the agonistic rituals of 'cultural politics' plunge into burlesque.
If Perspecta '89 seemed less controversial than the preceding ones it was not for lack of effort on the part of its critics. Whether in print or in conversation the complaints vigorously arched between pre-emptive strikes at the show's possible exclusions or secretive biases and smug post-mortem demonstrations of its predictable failures (amounting to equally predictable expressions in the form, "I told you so!")
Since the late 1970s the so-called critical community which musters in the spotlight around major public exhibitions has refined its leftist pontifical decrees with a mercurial rhetoric extracted from the more esoteric convolutions of philosophical 'deconstruction', to the point where symposia sponsored by these exhibitions can take on the appearance of academic lectures on the 'closures' of Kantian epistemology or the aporiae in Eco's semiotic theory as a way of proving the unwitting culpability of a beleaguered artist or curator in some global tide of neo-conservatism. Interesting as these conceits may be, one rarely manages to escape from these sessions without the suspicion that a much simpler (dare one say 'base') motivation has been finding all sorts of displaced indulgences through the glamorous and at times intimidating accusations of the 'marginalisation', the 'closure', or the 'privileging' of certain 'cultural practices'. Nothing really to do with professional ambition (that would be too exciting, too scandalous) but rather with a sheer, constitutional... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline