NZArtMonthly

Slow Down / Breathe Quietly / Look (and keep looking)
by Sue Gardiner

The Sydney Biennale 2004 at MCA/AGNSW/Museum of Sydney/Royal Botanic Gardens/Artspace until 15 August 2004

One might normally anticipate large Biennale exhibitions to be flashy, punchy, extravagant and dynamic affairs. Not so the Sydney Biennale for 2004. Experiencing the exhibition, across a number of different venues, involves a totally different physical and psychological stance - to view it you NEED to slow down, breathe, talk quietly, relax, and take the time to look and keep looking ... and looking.

In some cases, the looking becomes a marathon of visual fitness such as in Bruce Naumann's work, Office Edit II with color shift, flip, flop, and flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage), Mapping the Studio (2001), at the MCA. The work depicts Bruce Naumann's New Mexico studio at night and was filmed using an infrared video camera over a period of several months in 2000. Colours change gradually from red to green to blue and back to red. Nauman flips the image left to right or right to left and upside-down. These "events" occur approximately every 15 minutes. Almost hanging in space, the studio as object/subject becomes a place for inaction and emptiness. All that happens is that the odd mouse runs over the floor, a cat moves ... nothing else.

Accompanying exhibition notes add that "Combined with the noises of trains, horses, coyotes, wind and rain Naumman creates a heightened awareness of space, sound and time. This is also is an example of an artwork that deals with sophisticated concepts rather than sophisticated technology." It also takes time to see, it lasts for about an hour and chairs thankfully are provided.

The slow moving, meditative atmosphere continues in James Coleman's work, La Tache Aveugle, 1978 - 90, at the MCA. A large projection in a huge room, nothing seems to be happening, as we watch a large image that looks like a film still from an old black and white movie. The work invites the viewer to reflect on how one perceives images, words, narratives and structures of time in storytelling and documentary. Notes tell us that "projecting a small sequence of still frames from the 1933 James Whale film "The Invisible Man" (based on the original novella by H.G. Wells), La Tache Aveugle uses a slow computerized dissolve program to create an almost imperceptible movement between images, blurring the boundary between what one perceives as "moving" (cinema) and "still" imagery (photography). It is impossible to detect the changes as they occur."

Out in the peaceful surroundings of the Royal Botanic Gardens, several works interact with the beautiful harbour setting but one is linked to the seating instead. On the lawn, there is a bench with headphones. It invites you to sit down, relax, chill out and take a moment to listen. "In a calm, soft voice the tape begins - You cannot draw. You say you cannot draw. You wish you could draw. You see. You see things. You see people. You see people moving things. You see moving people ... You come back and they are changed. And you come back later. You then see they are not there anymore. And you say: "They have disappeared." Grass. You can draw grass. As the tape continues the viewer/listener is taken on a journey." Cunha asks the viewer to question how we see and what might fall outside of the given clues of language and habit.

Following this theme of works that demand slow, considered digesting, Jeroen De Rijke and Willem De Rooij ask viewers to consider images and sensual experiences they might otherwise process in a glance. In a specially designed space at the Museum of Contemporary Art de Rijke/de Rooij show their most recent 35mm-film The point of Departure (2002). In this film the artists visually investigate the structure and the patterns of an Oriental rug. Scenes slowly unfold to become recognised. It is the passing of time that provides the narrative in de Rijke/de Rooij's work. In a single slow moving shot painterly, photographic and cinematographic elements are consciously combined and played off against one another. The film is shown at set times in regular intervals approximately twice every hour.

The process of watching this film is one of conscious commitment. You have to spend the time for the film to unravel itself - and then after some time you will feel the colours bleed into your retina, the texture of the rug fibres become ingrained in your mind, the patterns painstakingly become familiar and slowly you make the connections as the camera moves over the rug. A fulfilling experience if you can endure it.

Melik Ohanian presents a video titled White Wall Travelling from 1997. Filmed on a super 16 camera, it relates the process of slowly driving through the empty streets of a now desolate area of Liverpool's docks. It has a mind-altering effect as you find your brain is trying to find patterning, repetitions and recognitions in the journey. You start to will the slow moving car to turn right, turn left, go straight towards the wall as you slowly start to recognise and map in your own mind the territory covered. It is a fascinating process to go through and one that creeps up on you without you really realising it - and one thing is for sure, you cannot hurry the process.

Being lulled into a totally false state of safety and childhood fantasy is the outcome of the outstanding video by Susan Norrie. Made for this Biennale, Enola, titled after "Enola Gay" the name of the aeroplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, continues the artist's fascination with the causes and effects of disaster. Inspired by a children's library designed by Kenzo Tange that was built after the bombings in 1945, the new project uses images from a built to scale theme park based in the mountains near Nikko where there are perfect replicas of world icons such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Twin Towers of New York (pre 9/11). The accompanying sound track is shopping mall musack designed to lull us further into a feeling of 'take-it-easy' 'everything will be alright' numbness. Enola is a work that is full of hope for a perfect dream world but the impossibility of the dream is calmly made apparent throughout the film.

Playing with your mind seems to be a recurring theme throughout the Biennale and none more clearly demonstrated than the video work by Cecilia Costa, Pli 2003, at the MCA. Here non English speakers are asked to read the words of colours such as red, brown and pink but they are presented to them in a mixed up fashion so that the words for pink is coloured brown, the word for blue is coloured red etc. It is fascinating to watch as the speakers battle with their own internal dominant brain functions to combat the confusion and the deeply ingrained brain recognition patterns we all learn right from infants. In this work Costa asks audiences to consider the relationships between image and text and to question the biological cultural force of language and tradition. She reflects on how easily these relationships can be threatened and destabilised.

I was scared to death/I could have died for joy (2000) is an installation by Catherine Richards, at the MCA, that features two large glass tubes placed on stainless steel tables at opposite ends of the gallery. Each tube encloses a glass model of the right and left lobes of a brain with a trailing 'spinal column' that tapers to an ambiguous, reptilian tail. Representing the differing functions of each side of the brain, each tube represented the patterns of brain activity that some neuroscientists claim will produce a feeling of benign enlightenment or trigger the abject fear of being haunted by a demonic presence. As you slowly enter the gallery space, you tend to move cautiously to the left, then move to the right as your eyes adjust to the dark and you begin to grasp what it is you are seeing.

Matias Faldbakken's huge wall painting, Turn Off, at the AGNSW even seems to be actively encouraging us to slow down, shut down and TURN OFF - portrayed in computerised lettering, it implores us to switch off the computer. Faced with the faster speeds we demand on the internet and the immediacy of world wide information access, this work seems to be saying we should just take the time out to disengage - maybe even to read a book instead.

The work by Singaporean artist Lim Tzay Chuen, at Artspace, was so subtle and conceptual that it literally did not exist. The artist decided to manipulate the curatorial process of being invited into a Biennale by offering his space at ArtSpace to anyone who could fulfill a certain mundane task successfully - in this case the collection of the most pages from the Biennale catalogue as nominated by the artist. They needed to deliver their pages by a certain deadline and the space was theirs to do what ever they wanted. The artist also offered part of his Biennale fee and his hotel room bookings which he vacated early to return home. The winners, who collected over 120 of the nominated catalogue pages, returned the gesture in a similarly conceptual way and engineered a reply project to match the original - the space, meanwhile, remained empty.

Lie down, chill out, relax is most certainly the message in another of the Artspace projects by Frederic Post, titled La Temple de l'Extase, 2003. The installation is described as looking like a cross between a mosque, a Protestant church and the chill-out room of a club as mattresses, posters, subdued lighting, mirrors, oriental carpeting and incense remind us of quiet places for contemplation. But the objects around the room refer to the contemporary drug culture - there are 30 kilograms of placebo pills displayed for example. And the wall posters, likened to pop psychedelic album covers from the 1970s, refer to the ecstasy pill and its many variations. Overriding the whole installation are performances of experimental music. Drug taking becomes the new religion, the nightclub becomes the new church. An ecstasy pill replaces religious ecstasy in a rush of chemical substances. The most rewarding visual treat of the whole show was Daniel von Sturmer's The Truth Effect at the AGNSW. Born in Auckland but largely making work in Melbourne for several years, von Sturmer's work presents sophisticated technology and presentation ( there are five DVD screen projections) combined with sparse, divinely simple and magical visual content to captivate the audience - the work draws them in and slows them down.

Frederic Post La Temple de l'Extase, 2003 Photograph courtesy of the author

Von Sturmer starts with the idea of the white cube and experiments with it- and with us. The videos show his spatial experiments within a white cube - gravity, weight, movement and perception are all toyed with as he films his experiments with objects such as polystyrene cups, sponges, rubber bands, spinning coloured disks and paper balls, then presents them upside down to us - or sideways or back to front. The delight felt is in the beauty of the results. The installation again uses the white cube model. The large white platform that the videos are displayed on (projected both back and front onto small, slim, table top screens) dominates the white gallery space perfectly so physically we need to move around to see each video in its entirety.

The faces and body language of the people viewing the work begin to change as they look further - it's all about pure visual pleasure, perceptual delight and puzzlement, fascination and intrigue. And boy, do the young kids love it too - we watched two delightful little lads aged around 4 and 6 years who were drawn like magnets to these wonderful images - they just could not stop looking and guess what? They were moving slowly, looking, talking quietly and smiling at each other.

For further information on what the Bienniale of Sydney has to offer, and to view further works, visit www.biennaleofsydney.com.au