THE 2006 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART
How and why do contemporary artists engage with earlier avant-gardes? And what differences do time and place make to modernism? The exhibition ‘21st Century Modern’, the 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art curated by Linda Michael, poses fascinating responses to these perennial questions. In fact Michael appears to have uncovered a common obsession among contemporary Australian artists of different generations and various orientations, such that we might want to call it a zeitgeist or at the very least a common desire.
Of the twenty-eight artists (plus a collaboration of seven) in the exhibition, many invoke certain quirky or interdisciplinary aspects of the mid-20th century avant-garde, like Robert Rooney’s Balletomania paintings of 2004 based on early modernist choreography, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s Barbara Hepworth Table, 2005 and A.D.S. Donaldson’s Untitled (for Mary Webb) carpets. Some artists have constructed miniature museums or perform key moderns, like the Malevich paper-bag puppets in Shane Haseman’s Zero for Conduct (8 masks), 2004, Gareth Donnelly’s miniature Art of the Twentieth Century, 2004 or Domenico de Clario’s seven times thank you series of 2004. As Michael underlines in her catalogue essay, all these dialogues suggest quite a different relation to earlier modernisms than that of the appropriation strategies of the 1980s. She writes that this contemporary art enacts ‘a shift away from the melancholic collapse of certainty that underpinned post-modern art and reveals many life-lines from the past to the future: artists respond to the collaborative, experimental or utopian spirit of modern art movements, give a digital twist to modern forms, pay homage to modern artists, and revive childhood encounters with modern design across its multidisciplinary forms’.1
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