Water, water everywhere

By GRAHAM REID

The most appropriate way to get to Sydney's Liquid Sea exhibition is to go by ferry around the harbour to Circular Quay where the Museum of Contemporary Art is on the foreshore.

Rain or shine - and rain would be better in this case - it allows the opportunity to contemplate the "big blue wobbly thing", as Baldrick memorably described the sea for Blackadder's dictionary.

Given the world's disproportionate ratio of wet to dry - 70 per cent of the Earth's surface is wet - it's peculiar we have so little understanding of what goes on down there, much less that we spend any time thinking about it.

But that boat trip can give you time. And water, specifically the sea, is nominally the theme of Liquid Sea, one of the MCA's major exhibitions for this year.

Perhaps the subject is too amorphous, but the exhibition feels unfocused with works from 12 contemporary and four historical artists ranging from entrancing photography to leadenly dull films.

Among the standouts are the seven evocative, beautifully monochromatic photographs of seascapes by Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose Portraits were on show at the Auckland Art Gallery last year. These silver gelatin prints have the horizon bisect the image, sometimes as a crisp line between the dark sea and pale sky; in others the two elements merge through the imperceptible tonal changes of light.

Equally powerful but on a much larger scale appropriate to their subject are the lightboxes of Elisa Sighicelli whose photographs of Iceland capture an eerie stillness or a poetic, brooding menace of icebergs, and a rugged coastline of black rock.

Elsewhere in the gallery are the delicate sculptures of sea spiders, slugs and jelly fish by the 19th-century Dresden glassmakers Leopold and Rudolpf Blaschka, and remarkable underwater films by Jean Painleve, an early 20th-century film-maker, which are as witty and wry as they are whimsical.

Tacita Dean's two-and-a-half minute film of a tropical sunset into an ocean may be best explained by the fact she lives in London and Berlin. Her 14-minute Disappearance at Sea is a close-up of a revolving bulb in a lighthouse and the ocean beyond, and is paired with Teignmouth Electron, a lengthy exploration of the abandoned and beached vessel of the round-the-world sailor Donald Crowhurst, who tragically went delusional at sea and reported himself making great progress before suicidally abandoning his boat.

These two films are earnest, yet uninteresting in execution despite their fascinating subject. An acquired taste.

Joan Brassil's installation will also depend on how much you like sonic, poetic and static installations. Kids will like Auckland artist Ani O'Neill's crocheted eke (octopus) and Doug Aitken offers a deep immersion surround-a-vision installation where you can lie on the floor and watch the images of ice and water to the sound of ambient music. The teenage school students seemed to like it, even to the point of hushing someone whose cellphone rang.

There is also a mesmerising loop-film of water pouring in torrents through the windows of the ground floor of a two storey home in Pennsylvania, by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. It is engrossing and speaks litres about the relentless and unforgiving power of water.

Aside from the photography, the most enchanting contemporary work comes from Mariele Neudecker whose liquid-filled dioramas with a sailing ship and rocks like ice evoke the German romantic tradition of Caspar David Friedrich and take on tonal changes in the gallery windows' light. They are quiet but, as with the photography of Sighicelli and Sugimoto, gain great strength from that.

Peter Hill, a lecturer at the University of NSW College of Fine Arts writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, perhaps overstated the case - unless recent MCA exhibitions have been dire - when he said Liquid Sea was a stunner and, "after looking at all the international museum websites and scanning press releases from London to New York" he couldn't find a more exciting exhibition than this one. Maybe reading press releases and visiting websites isn't the optimum way of considering exhibitions.

Liquid Sea certainly offers some provocative and beautiful work alongside the mundane, but those photographs are not to be missed.

Photography is also the attraction at the Gallery of New South Wales where the Archibald Prize finalists have drawn huge crowds. The A$35,000 ($39,000) Archibald portraiture prize is, like most art competitions, seldom without controversy although it bills itself as accessible by virtue of it being portraiture which most people understand. It was won by Tasmanian artist Geoffrey Dyer with his painting friend and author Richard Flanagan.

Painting portraits of the well-known - other artists, dealers, actors, writers - is the meat of this year's showing. It's a slightly incestuous activity (Flanagan based an artist character in his prize-winning novel Gould's Book of Fish on Dyer who returns the compliment and similarly picks up an award), but one which has delivered some fine portraits. And some squiggles.

But of greater interest and of a more consistently high standard is the inaugural photographic portraiture prize which features some exceptional work, notably Anne Zahalka's Guangan Wu, market gardens which juxtaposes a traditional Chinese market garden and its immigrant gardener in the foreground with a looming Qantas jet overhead (the garden is near the airport) and the towers of Sydney in the far distance. Rendered in hard-edged vibrant colour these studied and conflicting elements create a captivating image, as does Stuart Humphrey's digitally enhanced portrait of Professor Michael Archer apparently taking an extinct Thylacine for a walk on a straining leash.

The variety of photographic reproduction - digital prints on canvas, digitally enhanced images, grainy black and white to vivid artificial colour - make for an exhibition of great visual diversity, but also one of an astonishing range of subject matter.

There are works which owe something to the classic styles of Bill Brandt, Imogen Cunningham or Dorothea Lange, but also the more surreal and disconcerting styles which technology allow.

Installations, traditional painting and Australian landscapes - from neo-primitives to dabstracts and those heavy with Aboriginal references in the entrants for the Wynne prize - are also displayed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

So if Sydney is on your travel agenda in the next few months there's a rewarding, provocative and, yes, sometimes tedious day of gallery-going available. And if you can, take the ferry to the MCA and contemplate the big blue wobbly bit.

* Liquid Sea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until June 8; Archibald and other exhibitions, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until May 25