There is no denying that the Eighth Biennale of Sydney was an immensely engaging and intriguing exhibition, tracing the idea of the readymade. in Twentieth Century art. Despite Rene Block's budgetary, spatial and logistical restrictions he still managed to present an exhibition which was impressively large in scope: some three hundred works by one hundred and twenty artists from well over thirty countries. The Biennale's theoretical and curatorial architecture was inspired by the innovative contributions of three seminal artists of this century: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray (particularly Duchamp). These three Dada iconoclasts were responsible for influencing the second post-war generation of European and American avant-garde artists, including such Fluxus exemplars as John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and others like Henri Manzoni, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman. They also impacted on a subsequent third generation of artists who came to critical prominence in the 1980s. Artists like Ange Leccia, Rosemary Trockel, Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer are a few of the more representative figures of this generation.
Above all else this Biennale was full of irreverent humour, wit and poetry (what else can one expect of an exhibition based on Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray?). If we agree, however, with Block's view of thef Biennale as an exhibition which "tells a true story of art in the tradition of opera comique" and with his general notion of the Biennale as resembling a "workshop"- something akin to Foucault's definition of discursive knowledge as a "toolbox" of speculative lines of playful enquiry-then we are also obliged, I think, to agree with Ian Burn's recent incisive critique of the Biennale. Burn posits the thesis that the exhibition... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline