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The theme of this year's Biennale of Sydney looked promising. The foregrounding of the relationship between reason and emotion in our engagement with art raised the exciting prospect that a major exhibition of contemporary art hosted in Australia might respond to certain shifts in practice away from a strictly post-conceptual mode, and address some recent art critical debates emerging from a reconsideration of aesthetics. In proposing the theme, I hoped that the curator might already have moved beyond the need to address the Cartesian mind/body split- given that it has been so roundly problematised by poststructuralist, in particular feminist, scholarship in the last two to three decades. I hoped that the starting point might be rooted in more current debates, so as to enable the exhibition to consider the interaction of reason and emotion in the aesthetic experience from a contemporary perspective. For beyond the dualistic strictures of mind/body and reason/emotion, in a reconsideration of aesthetics, lies fertile territory. Here, artists and critics alike, dismayed at the desiccation of art by what American art critic Dave Hickey called 'the monitoring of desire' that expunged aesthetics from 'serious' critical art, have been exploring alternatives: how might contemporary art reengage with audiences outside the institutional limits of the art world? How might contemporary art speak in a critical language that neither reiterates the strategies of shock and horror of the 20th century avant-gardes, nor repudiates art's broad range of aesthetic effects in deference to conceptual 'criticality'?
Disappointingly, however, independent Portuguese curator Isabel Carlos did not take the opportunity to engage with this rich body of thought and practice. Rather, the exhibition's rationale, as outlined in the brief and sketchy catalogue essay, rested... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline