Reaching for the emotions

By JOSIE McNAUGHT

Sydney was looking picture-postcard perfect for the first week of the Biennale.

With balmy temperatures in the early 20s, soft midwinter sunlight and that glorious harbour twinkling invitingly, it was hard to steer indoors and take in the work of 51 invited artists from 32 countries.

Staged in six venues - principally the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with smaller shows at Artspace, the Museum of Sydney, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Sydney Opera House forecourt - the whole exhibition, which is free, can be seen in a day, as you stroll from one place to another.

The route bypasses streets seething with shopping-mad tourists, who invade Sydney and measure the success of a weekend there by the size of their credit-card bill and the number of shopping bags they take back to their hotel.

They probably don't give two hoots about an exhibition of contemporary art that involves such stunts as dropping a 3-tonne rock with a face painted on it on to a car in the Sydney Opera House forecourt.

Native American artist Jimmie Durham really gave sightseers something to talk about, and photograph, when he did just that at the Biennale's opening weekend. To put it in context, his goal was to make a non-monumental sculpture using the most traditional of monumental materials, marble.

Tell that to the tourists staring quizzically at the result a week later, as it sat, fenced off like all good art, on the forecourt. The phrase "waste of a good car" was uttered more than once by passers-by.

I guess it's proof you have to be there to appreciate performance art sculpture.

It also may or may not help to know that Sydney differs from the Venice Biennale in that the artists exhibiting here have been invited by a single curator, who assembles the show driven by personal vision.

For Sydney, this role fell to Portuguese-born Isabel Carlos, who has worked at the Venice, London and Sao Paulo biennales. She heroically sought to bring all the art together under the title Reason and Emotion.

Carlos wants us to move on from the traditional "I think therefore I am" via the works in the exhibition, which she hopes will create a bridge between reason and emotion, so that one can also say, "I feel, therefore I am."

Before you scoff, it's worth noting that around half the works were being seen for the first time, so some of the artists followed her vision.

But once you get down and dirty with the stuff on display, the curatorial direction becomes fairly meaningless - especially when you have works at the MCA as diverse as school desks displaying bandaged cheese, by Pravdoliub Ivanov of Bulgaria, and Luisa Cunha's eerie voices in the toilets calling, "Hello, are you there? Can you hear me?"

She has also papered over the mirrors and it's so off-putting that she's probably ensured that the MCA's level 4 toilets get little use during the Biennale.

Video is everywhere in this show, and there is a limit to the number of dark spaces you want to dwell in while the machinery does its stuff and you try and grasp the meaning.

One exception is Javier Tellez' La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc made for the Biennale while she was in residence at Sydney College of Arts. She appropriates Dreyer's classic black and white film about Joan of Arc and - using patients from Rozelle Hospital - contrasts Dreyer's depiction of martyrdom in the 15th century with mental illness and institutions today.

The films play on two screens opposite each other, and the audience is forced to shift between the silent film and the poignant stories of sufferers of mental illness. It is powerful and compelling, evidenced by the number of viewers who came, and stayed, for the whole performance.

There was humour too in Cecilia Costa's Pli, which features people of different races, reading aloud the names of colours on the wall in front of them - only red is written in the colour blue, while yellow is written in grey, and so on.

Some of them really struggle with the concept, and despite being asked to say the colour they see, out comes the word.

It is simple, but effective and fun.

Asta Groting's (Germany) videoed ventriloquist performances aren't meant to be funny, but there's something about the whole set-up that makes you smile. The work uses performers and a female dummy; the usual gags and jokes are dropped in favour of the dummy becoming the performer's inner voice. So there are discussions about life, love and death.

As a nice contrast, outside on Circular Quay, a real ventriloquist was entertaining the crowds with a traditional boy dummy and crude jokes.

Then it was off for a quick walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens, which were harbouring six pieces of art. I know this event is all about looking, but did they have to make it so hard? Or were there secret cameras filming baffled Biennale geeks, catalogues in hand, staring earnestly at the piece of pvc pipe poking out of the creek and wondering if it was indeed a piece of art by Jimmie Durham?

MP and MP Rosado's sculptures of two boys up a tree were easier to find, but once I came across the bats, it was all over. They aren't in the Biennale, but they hang precariously above the parks' pathways, and occasionally soar above with a terrible screech.

It was time to retire to the relative safety of the AGNSW.

They haven't gone overboard with Biennale projects, but there is a satisfying clutch of material, including new work by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, whose fabric cities sprouting out of suitcases featured at Wellington's Adam Art Gallery during this year's international arts festival. She lovingly recreated Wellington out of op-shop clothing for Portable Cities, and she has added Paris, Lisbon and (of course) Sydney to the collection. (I did want to place a little sign on the Welly suitcase - the grey flannel windmill and brown felt Beehive are hardly instantly recognisable icons in the international art world.)

Xiuzhen has also covered two jumbo jets in discarded clothes to refer to the effects of travel on memory and the imagination.

Photography gets a look in here, too, with work by Emiko Kasahara (cervixes), Helena Almeida (abstract self portraits) and Frank Thiel's beautiful recordings of post-reunification building projects in Berlin.

It's all getting a bit "too, too much darling", so thank goodness, over at Artspace one can slump into Frederic Post's Le Temple de l'Extase (Temple of Ecstasy), a cross between a mosque, a church and the chill-out room at a club. There are mattresses, pills, posters and experimental music, and it seems to be about the similarity between religious and chemical highs, but I've had the equivalent of a visual OD, so I can't be sure.

Suddenly, fighting my way through the zealous shoppers at the winter sales looks like a bit of light relief and, funnily enough, the perfect combination of reason and emotion.

Exhibition

* What: Sydney Biennale

* Where and when: various venues, Sydney, to August 15


* Josie McNaught's travel to Sydney was sponsored by Tourism New South Wales and Air New Zealand.