Okay, but is it art?

Sydney's 18th Biennale has finished. This year it was at four venues: Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the NSW Art Gallery, and Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay. Children's Book Week has kept me on the hop but I did manage to see almost all the Biennale artworks. 

With over 100 artists represented from forty countries there was a lot to enjoy but of course not everything was for everyone. Okay so not everything was for me. Do bricks and leaves on a floor, or cloth hanging in a vast room, or some decrepit furniture on a platform qualify as works of art? I'm not hard to please. I just want works of art to make me feel something---other than exasperation---or works that make me think. It's also important that works of art pass the I-could-do-that test.

I'm afraid that these rocks scattered around a room didn't pass the I-could-do-that test. At first I didn't think that it was one of the entries but then I noticed the sign on the floor that said "Please do not touch the artwork".

How about this midden of oyster shells and tea cups? If you knew that it was the work of young Aboriginal artist, Jonathan Jones, who wanted us to think about the oyster middens of pre-European contact days with today's detritus---sort of a meeting of the middens---would that make a difference? Interesting but is it art?

How about a collection of tents in a vast warehouse. Inside the tents are television sets showing images of people in Cairo talking. This is Susan Hefuna's "Celebrate Life: I love Egypt." There is a lengthy explanation of the artist's intentions and a statement about the tents having been made in Cairo.

How about Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture, "Cloud"? The kids seemed to love running in and out of it. Are real clouds themselves or only artificial ones?

One of the problems for me was the written explanations of the artwork. One artist used "irony to create empathy" another "employs everyday objects and materials, de-constructing them to reveal their underlying codes". Another artist "overturns the relations between the work and its space". The artistic directors said that "the artworks gathered here engage with new models of reciprocity". New models of reciprocity? 

I gave up reading the explanatory material.

Things began to pick up for me with Canadian Artist, Cal Lane's "Domesticated Turf", a sculpted shipping container made to look like some kind of European gingerbread house. Clever and a lot of work sawing out all those bits of steel to liberate the cottage within. I was impressed.

And I loved New Zealand artist, Peter Robinson's, huge Styrofoam chains draped over some of the old rusting ship-building machinery. I didn't read the description of this installation but the internet tells me that Robinson "pursues multiple formal trajectories in his use of polystyrene, as if with its associations of disposability the possibility exists for any number of sculptural experiments to be tested, cast aside, reworked, reconsidered". Better to just look at it and enjoy it, I say.

For me the most impressive work at Cockatoo Island were Maria Fernanda Cardoso's Museum of Copulatory Organs, reproductions of reproductive organs. These much magnified---thanks to electron microscopy---models of male and female insect genitalia were not only wonderfully realised but quite beautiful simply as sculpture. Does an accurate reproduction from nature qualify as art? I think so. Certainly photos or paintings from nature can be art. Here science and art overlap. 

Back on dry land I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay in Sydney to see the both the new wing and the Biennale exhibits there. Yeesookyung's Translated Vase, the Moon and Park Young-Sook’s Moon Jars easily passed the I-could-do-that test. 

And, by the way, don't tell everyone but the MCA has a cafe with the best view in Sydney. (See heading photo above.)

Liu Zhuoquan, Two-Headed Snake was the stand-out for me at the MCA at least as a technical feat. Using an old Chinese technique of painting inside bottles the artist made the bottles appear to have snakes in them. There were a huge number of bottles and the detail was quite breathtaking. Art? Well I felt something.

Also at the MCA, Alwar Balasubramaniams Nothing From my Hands. For me these are unknown shapes pushing out from behind a wall. (Click on his name and it'll take you to a talk by this fascinating sculptor.) 

Most moving of all for me was Judith Wright's installation, A Journey. (For a better view of it click here.) This is a haunting work, displayed nearly in darkness. Whatever it's "about" (and here I did read the artist's explanation) I found it moving. It's not a great technical feat but, well, for me it works and that's all that should matter.

This Judith Wright, by the way, is not the late Australian poet but a former ballet dancer, now a a visual artist living in Queensland.

From the Museum of Contemporary Art I went to the Art Gallery of NSW. Those are paper bags from designer shops that you can see in Perspex cases on the wall. the top of each one has been intricately carved  in such a way that the carved bit, hanging down but still attached to the top, forms a tree.

These are the work of the Japanese-born New York artist, Yuken Teruya. These have both beauty and a definite wow-factor. They were hard to photograph. To see his work properly click here.

The Sydney Biennale is over but there's still so much on the internet, including videos of the artists, that it can still be enjoyed from a distance. But if you're in Sydney and want to see a small but wonderful collection of contemporary art from China, you might want to go to The White Rabbit Gallery. It's a private collection but, as with the MCA and the NSW Art Gallery, there's no entry charge. Here it's important to read the descriptions and to talk to the very helpful gallery attendants. This show is called Double Take for a reason.

The White Rabbit rotates its collections about every six months and the present show opened at the beginning of September so you have time to get there in you're in or around Sydney.

Here's a taste to get you in:

Above is Zhang Chun Hong powerful calligraphy-like drawing of a long braid on a scroll that stretches down the wall and across the floor.

Taiwanese artist Ah Leon’s Elementary School days. This deceptively simple wooden table and chair are not what they seem but I won't spoil it for you except to say that Ah Leon is a ceramicist. There, I just ruined it for you.

Above and below is/are Li Hongbo's Paper, two identical figures sculpted from honeycomb paper, one of them with it's head beginning to ravel and the other stretched all around the floor. Li Hongbo was one a a few artists represented at the White Rabbit who also had works in the Biennale.

My favourite of the trompe-l'oeil works was this one. I inspected it closely and was about to walk away when a museum attendant stopped me and explained that this wasn't two chunks of a log connected by chains. This is two chunks of wood with the connecting piece of wood carved to make the "chains". No matter how closely I looked, those chain links looked like metal, not wood. A definite wow factor but is it art? 

Absolutely. Well I think so anyway.

Kangaroo Carpet

The plan was simple: to visit a national park that we'd never seen before, to shake some city dust from our heels exchanging it for country dust, and to have a look at a particular Aboriginal rock art site. What we hadn't counted on was the amount of Australian wildlife we'd come across.

At the Visitors' Centre at Namadgi National Park south of Canberra the very helpful staff recommended The Yankee Hat Walk as an introduction to the park. I wondered if my Yankee accent had anything to do with this choice. In any event the promise of seeing the rock art and so many Eastern Grey Kangaroos that the fields would look like "a moving carpet of grey" sold us. We were told that the area had "the highest concentration of Eastern Grey Kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) anywhere in Australia". 

Eastern Greys are anything but rare here in Eastern Australia but we never tire of seeing them. Like deer in the Northern Hemisphere, they're always fun watch as long as they stay out of the headlights at dusk. And, speaking of deer, a male kangaroo is a "buck" and a female is a "doe". The young break the pattern by being "joeys" instead of "fauns".

We drove south to the beginning of the walk and found only one car in the carpark at the beginning of the track. A good sign. It was a family of three with bicycles---not a bad way to do this track because it's mostly flat, across fields that had once been a sheep station. The distance to the rock art site is only three kilometres, an easy two and a half hours on foot, there and back.

Not quite a kangaroo carpet but a sizeable mob.

Minutes went by and no kangaroos. Then there was one. And then another. Suddenly we passed a mob (no, the collective noun isn't a "court") of thirty-eight kangaroos. Within the first half hour we saw between one and two hundred. The next time we have friends visiting from overseas and they're not content to see kangaroos at Taronga Zoo, we'll bring them here. We had just happened upon kangaroo heaven.

This young male lost interest in me as I fiddled with my camera settlings.

These were more attentive.

This big male was more interested in his friends and family.

Jill is studiously ignored the encroaching grey carpet.

An echidna waddled across our path. It curled up like a hedgehog when I tried to take its picture but patience paid off and soon its eyes and ant-eating snout reappeared. (Click) Echidna's, along with platypuses, are egg-laying mammals.

Echidna

Another iconic bit of Australian fauna happened by but this one, a big goanna, was not for touching. They're not venomous and not aggressive but they can bite and, when they do, they hang on---forever.

Goanna.

The major species of kangaroo, including the Eastern Grey, are anything but endangered. Their principal predator was the Tasmanian Tiger (aka Tasmanian Wolf) which died out on the mainland about 2,000 years ago and in Tasmania sometime last century. Since then the main predator has been the dingo, the wild dogs introduced by Aboriginal Australians three to four thousand years ago. We didn't see any dingoes but we did see the remains of one of their meals.

When dingo meets kangaroo.

We also didn't see any wombats because they're mostly nocturnal. What we did see was wombat holes and plenty of what we think was wombat scat on top of rocks and logs. Wombats aren't ones to hide their lamps under bushels or their excreta in out of the way places. These animals are truly proud of their poo. Or maybe it wasn't wombat poo that we were seeing. Wombat poo usually comes out square. (Don't ask how.) If you recognise the poo in the picture below, please leave a comment. (We promise it's not ours.)

Essence of wombat?

Finally we came to Yankee Hat Rock Shelter, which we had all to ourselves. The "shelter" is a concave rock face with just enough overhang to protect its paintings from the weather.

Yankee Hat Rock Shelter

The art itself only occupies a small area of about two square metres. The photo below shows about two thirds of the artwork on the rock face so there's not a lot there.

These are the rock paintings.

Below I've attempted to label the figures according to what the National Park people think they represent. Nobody really knows. The images undoubtedly had ceremonial significance but their true meaning may only have been known to the initiated and, even then, their interpretation may have varied with the level of those initiated.

This sort of artwork is rare in this area. There is evidence that there were Aboriginal people in the Canberra region from about 21,000 years ago and there is further evidence that there were people camping near these paintings a long ago as 3,700 years but when these were painted is unknown. They may have been painted and re-painted over many years. The white pigment is clay and the red is ochre, perhaps coming from trade with other Aboriginal people nearer to the coast.

There's a fascination with this sort of artwork that's hard to explain. We can't look at them the way we might with a Western modernist painting such as the works of Pablo Picasso*, Joan Miró or Jean-Michel Basquiat. In other words, they can't have been acts of individual self-expression because there are cultural similarities with other Aboriginal art in Eastern Australia. And their painting is not nearly as polished as much earlier Neolithic cave art from Europe, for example, the bison and deer of the Altamira Cave in Spain. Maybe it's the mystery that moves us: who were these people and why did they paint these images? In any case, we were much moved by what we saw and, after a picnic lunch at the shelter, we picked our way back through the kangaroo carpet and drove to Canberra.

* While putting in the link to Picasso I learned that he was born Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. I just thought I'd mention that.

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Still on the subject of bushwalking: a couple of weeks ago I did The Grand Canyon Walk walk in the Blue Mountains with my walking mate, Richard Tulloch. It's one of my favourite walks in the Blue Mountains. As usual he beat me to a blog about our walk. All the better because his photos are invariably better than mine. Because I've had some feedback from his blog I'd like to state---partly for legal reasons---that I strenuously deny being the "Shifty" in Richard's (highly amusing) write-up.