Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 1998
The 1998 Adelaide Biennial, curated by Juliana Engberg and Ewen McDonald, appears to fall between two stools: a little too comfortable for the die-hard conceptual purists yet still too linguistically introverted for the visual pleasure principle enthusiasts. To my mind these operational modes are interdependent—textual rigour really lives when presented with aesthetic panache. In this instance, however, neither camp seems very happy.
As a whole, the show, somewhat overcrowded, wears a slightly retrospective air. Mehmet Adil's backward video gaze at empty wet Glasgow streets—domestic by-ways viewed through the letters THOUGHT—might seem to be a metaphor for the show's quiet convolutions within a familiar context. This intimacy of view may result, however, from a nineties' cocooning against a disjunctive future, seen for instance in the couchy uncertainty of Christopher Langton's unnameable forms, or Ricky Swallow's cuddlesome blanket-sharks acting out de-fanged nursery danger like media euphemisms.
The Adelaide Festival 's theme of sacred/profane appears as the exhibition's rationale—the sacred immanence of daily life as replacement for a theologically framed heaven, as is indirectly referenced, for example, in Robert Ambrose Cole's refined spirit paintings. With Modernism's agenda progressing us only to a Utopia of 'the everyday', the show posits internal spiritual questing through the pervasively profane. Everyone, however, seems to be just getting on with the usual—redemptive values or not. Linda Syddick Napaltjarri's exuberant incorporation of ET into her own arcana deftly affirms the impact of our involvement with twentieth century icons, but Joy Hardman's sunbeams-for-Jesus songs seem to have more to do with identity.
I seem not to have engaged with some work (in the catalogue's terms) including Peter Tyndall's imagery or the reductio ad minimum of Margaret Morgan's plumbing. My architecturally