Every day, 11th Biennale of Sydney
If many artists in the 1970s mistook desperation for reality, the artists of this Biennale mistake triviality for the quotidian and solipsism for nothingness. The promise of Every Day was an art that triggers thinking, in which a simple work of art and its casual, quasi-phenomenological experience would set the mind rolling away from its usual moorings. This was a gentle aspiration, and the artistic director of the Biennale, Jonathan Watkins, was looking back to Courbet's realist interest in the ordinary. His stated aim, according to press -releases, was to avoid a 'sublime and prescriptive world-view of contemporary art', definitely steering clear of both Catherine David 's text-driven Documenta politics and the transcendental, nostalgic humanism of curators of the 1980s like Bonito Oliva.
Although the 11th Biennale of Sydney will almost certainly be judged a success, there will be little recollection of urgency, of immediacy or even that most coveted of modem spiritual aspirations of having been there. This is because the llth Biennale was an index of a series of little deaths – most notably, the death of installation art as a vital art form (despite the presence of so much 'site-specific' work by artists from so many centres far away from New York) and the death of big statements (despite the presence of many major artists such as Carl Andre and Rasheed Araeen). It's hardly news, but it's bad news all the same: installations have become academic, much like ab-ex in the mid- 1950s, in an empty set of rhetorical gestures undercut by a set of assumptions about affect. Politically committed, socially-aware art has also been relegated, by many of these artists, to the been-there, done that, dust-heap... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline