THE THIRD AUCKLAND TRIENNIAL
It’s a biennale world. So many shows, so many artists, so many new ideas. 2007 is a vintage year for contemporary art: ‘Documenta’ in Kassel, Venice and Münster, APT 5 in Brisbane, Istanbul, Lyon and now Athens. The promotional catch-phrase for the last three is cute: Les Trois Biens, the three good things. While the upbeat promotional spin for these massive shows suggests that one cannot have too much of a good thing, ‘Turbulence’, the title of the third Auckland Triennial, seemed altogether more ominous.
‘Turbulence’ was mounted for Auckland Art Gallery by Melbourne-based independent curator Victoria Lynn. The title gives the impression of a traditional theme show, with each work the bearer of a carefully-selected aspect of the core concept. Many biennales/triennials do profess a thematic core, as a way of revivifying the conventional necessity of producing new rabbits out of old hats on a regular basis. On further inspection this thematic pretension usually turns out to be a mere conjuring trick, but it is an important posture, nevertheless, for somewhere in the tensions between the striving intellectual framework of a thematic exhibition and the biennale-type exhibition’s recurring production of industrial quantities of new, spectacular or just plain exceptional art, lies the potential for these events to make new kinds of magic.
What kinds of ‘turbulence’ did Victoria Lynn convene in Auckland? In most theme shows the array of works suggests the adroitness of the curatorial conceit: the richer the idea, the wider the array of works. This was not exactly how Lynn’s exhibition worked. The ‘turbulence’ of Lynn’s title was indeed a sort of shorthand for a rich cluster of ideas, with many varieties of change, unpredictability... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline