I'm, still mulling over the Biennale bits that I saw at cockatoo Island. I think Susan Phillipsz piece epitomised my ambiguous feelings about the place, the work, and whatever was in my head that day... the last time I'd been to cockatoo Island was during the dockyard workers protests of 1989 - Most of my memories are heavily filtered by the haze of alcohol that I lived under at the time.... but I remember drukenly screeching "The Internationale" while on a harbour cruise filled with drunken shipping workers, and drunk and dazed ratbags like moi... the sun, VB, sweat, and a bizarre trostkyite zeal that the falling walls of the eastern Bloc would be a good thing for the revolution. Linking tianmen square and the closing of the shipyards in sydney harbour, through drunken word slurring boozy renditions of "Arise ye workers from your hunger" seems now to be completely bizarre, and testament to my complete mental absence from where I was, or... something.....
Cockatoo Island is a compellingly mournful type of venue, even on a sun-saturated day in June. Impossibly huge rusting bits of machinery, brutally modernist edifices, where the patina of peeling paint graffitti in the late winter sun, lead me stupidly towards a Rosalie Gasgoine style reification of the detritus of industrialisation.... but unlike her assemblages, the paint peeling, foreign shapes, rusted out bolts, old concrete, infinite patinas of labour, salt and seagull shit loom around us - intensely immersive and alienating. Walking through th huge halls, my body felt disconnected from itself, disarticulated... and so Phillipse's mournful strains ehcoing through the various chilly chambers added to this.
the cockatoo Island insallations all seem eerily incomplete - and perversely enough I like the fact that the curators have left the spaces empty enough to haunt the works. the rabbitwarren of Mike Parrs creepy Gruesome Silly Stuff seemed to be the best way to present the works... with just the right level of claustrophobia and mystery, to evoke a building likea body, or a collection of bodies.
I wanted to be taken out of this space, to dive into artworks as another magical sphere of utopian immersian. Part of me wrung my hands remembering a similar setting for the Lyon biennale in 2000 - where cavernous industrial spaces were transformed by installations of netted birds, remade kitchens, an immense dining room made from sheets of woven hair.... at the end of the day, I was frustrated at the plethora of screens - that the main way to use the spaces seems to have instaled little portals out of them......
Cockatoo Island is still a "liminal" space - somewhere between industrial refuse and remade recreational fantasia that actually operates as a "nice" (ok - effectively icky) corollary to the Biennale theme of "revolution". for me revolution, always implies not only a kind of endless return, but a strange spatiotemporal disjncture from the present..... our minds leave the present, fetishize history, projecting into a redemptive future that disconnects us from the present time, the present space and propells into far more enticing imperatives....
Despite such natty critiques, I'm afraid I've hardly changed. this week I found myself sitting on a bench in Parramatta Arcade, discussing Heidegger with my boss, in order to stop my face from freezing into a stony faced scowl at a random bunch Catholic Pilgrims singing loudly. Parramatta itself seems to have morphed into a bastardized version of Spencer Street station, and La defense, and I wodner where the hell I actually am.
I got a bit more gloomy when I read the weekend herald and found my views of the biennale concurred with John Mcdonald's. Mike Parr works well in the space, and WIlliam Kentridge is incredible...... I really like Lene Berg's installation too, though it was too late in the day for me to see the Pinhole reflection... TV Moore's instalation int ehd go tunnel felt like an allegory of heterosexuality itself, and I wish the space could ahve been given over to the Brown Council - but maybe that's just me...... I also think Shaun LGadwell is overrated.
I need to stop my grumpy grumblings now, so want to remid people of the delights of stuff around sydney. I staggered out to firstdraft on wednesday night - for - what looked like the tunnel of love - a flatscreen phallanx of top of the pops videos filled with crowds on non pilgrims, huddling and shuddering from the papal phillistines outside..... I was pretty feverish - so was just BEWILDERED by the guy pumping up the back chair in the back room. I loved the front room installation - complete with retro 1980's computer hardwear of the live not live, subtitle duo... Performing for the Camera was lots of fun.
the other fun thing this week was the launch of Midnight Morning by the incredible animation collective Popperbox. these guys take virtuality and space into completely new realms of fabulousness - and have used digital media as a nexus for collaborating about projects that get fed back into the real world..... My favourite project consists of the projections they did on the windows of Canley Vale Recreation Club (I kid u not).
If I miss mirroring space tonight - then I thought I'd go into the powerhouse in a fortnight for fabbo theory head funstuff at Jack Halberstam's talk on "Queer Animation". Part of me sustpects this is going to be another girly gush fest almost as silly as Judth Butler's talk at angel PLace 3 years ago, but part of me reckons What the hell, I'm officially part of the cognoscetti of queer, visual culutral critique, so one must be seen at such things.
