One of the signs that viewing "Modern Art" is still dangerous
I have suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.
Toddled around the Cockatoo Island part of the Biennale on Sunday and I have a few impressions to share with you.
Cockatoo Island is a terrifically interesting place in its own right. If you’ve never been there in the day time, there’s a lot of heavy industrial stuff for a boy to admire. If you’ve only been there at night, it probably means you were there at one of those rave/dance parties - and I can’t think of anywhere better. It’s massive and it’s got more dangerous nooks and crannies than you could shake your glow stick at. I can only imagine how brilliant a spectacle thousands of kids eccying off their tits and falling off, into, and over the various rusted, wet, high, sharp, toothed and uneven things there were around the place. There’s even dangerous wildlife, with the signs to prove it.
Scene. The island, two party goers leave the big dangerous warehouse to chill.
Raver 1: Oh dude, I love this song, I love this island, I love your… ahhhhhh, a seagull just took my eye!
Raver 2: Oh man I love your beautiful flying eye. It’s like that Hall and Oats song.
Raver 1: I love oats, and I love porridge… and halls, I mean how would you get between rooms without them?
Raver 2: …Step forth into any disguise, I still know you’re looking for your flying eye, it’s watching me, it sees your every move… aaahhhhhhhhh, dude, I fell down this huge hole.
Raver 1: Dude, how come there isn’t any water at the end of this jetty?
Raver 2: I think it’s a dry dock, dude, a dry dock on Cockatoo Island… what are the odds?
Modern art was placed around the island, and you walk around to look at it - just like in a gallery. Except that galleries are usually kept above four degrees centigrade and rarely have 25 knot gales blowing over them. This all adds to the adventurous feel though. I’m not actually complaining about that bit.
One complaint, one highlight, one happening, one beer (sing it to George Thorogood, it’s more fun that way). Here’s where I’ll start complaining.
Just say no to ‘Video Installations’. Or at least have a sign that says “The artist does get their kit off in the fourth minute, they don’t just blow spit bubbles for the entire piece.” Several things annoy me about the video installation. Half the time you don’t know where you’ve arrived in the piece. I don’t like standing there thinking that I would be able understand this, if I had just been here for the introduction where the artist stands there and says, “I am piercing my elbow flaps with lacquered vermicelli to demonstrate the futility of expressing ideas of materiality and ideology with charcoal and lime juice”. There should be a TV program, and it should also say whether this guy was a documentary maker who was crap at his job, or actually trying to make art.
A good one. Lara Favaretto rigs a room full of gas canisters on timers. They intermittently blow up party-blower-whistly-thingys, with the paper roll on the end. It’s funny. It’s like looking at the deadest party ever. The blurb craps on about a disillusioned army and the betrayal of defeat. I don’t think it needed to be quite that hysterical for it still to be good.
One ‘happening’. When we were having lunch down near the kiosk, a kid fell off an old canon onto his head. I was confused for a minute about this. I didn’t know if I was watching a Mike Parr installation, or a crap circus that couldn’t be bothered firing a midget out of the cannon. Turned out to be neither. Turned out to be a kid falling on his head. I don't know much about pratfalls, but I know what I like. I guess he was just 'bein' gnarley'. (Biennale... see it's like... sorry... won't happen again...)
Excellent description. I was there that windy Sunday afternoon. In an unused room near the video of the guy killing chickens was a big pile of bird shit with a bucket next to it. I'm still not sure if it was an unused room or an installation. It was my first Biennale, and my fist Art exhibition where they sold BEER.
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