On Biennale of Sydney @ Cockatoo Island

The Biennale of Sydney is confusing. A friend of mine recently described it as a "car crash mishmash" and she was right, sometimes the unexpected juxtapositions make for magical surprises, more often they leave you with a headache. The problem isn't the complexity of the pieces themselves, far from it, rather the way in which they've been bundled together with curatorial gaffer tape. The work on Cockatoo Island ought to benefit from its setting, the giant decayed sheds, the labyrinthine corridors and the evidence of past inhabitants and industries ought be able to render work strange and beautiful, more often than not it doesn't. The inherent ghostly palimpsest of the island's history, the shapes and textures of architecture and machinery speak so eloquently themselves that much of the work feels banal and tricksy.

I'm still unsure about the shouting. The Finnish 'Shouting Men's Choir', (Mieskuoru Huutajat) have produced a four channel video work where various of their members speak, then shout, their way through the text of Kevin Rudd's 'Sorry Speech' on aboriginal reconciliation to the Australian Federal Parliament. It's not profound but it is interesting. The textual meaning of the speech is lost quickly as the sound from the different channels overlaps and the tone of each speaker, or shouter, rises toward a crescendo. Rudd's speech, thoughtful and dignified, is reframed with anger, the righteous black anger of indigenous people demanding recognition of an historical wrong, the helpless anger we might in the face of their continuing appalling conditions and the venom of social and political conservatives who would still deny white culpability. The whole shouting choir thing is laced with the ludicrous but it still makes a powerful noise.

Yang Fudong's six channel video installation 'East of Que Village' is brutal and moving. It shows a township in China, it's residents and a pack of feral dogs that live amongst them. The 'dog's life' cliche might come to mind too obviously but the whole works makes a conscious parallel between the packs of dogs, wiry and threatening as they fight one another over carcasses and the peasant villagers as they eke out an existence. The six screen treatment makes the piece uncomfortable and relentless. It's difficult to watch, less because of the content itself more because the poverty on display jars so badly with some of the Chinese high-art lite on display elsewhere. It reminded me of the shock one can get even today from early Rossellini films, the camera's eye calm and dispassionate and all the more powerful for that.

There's some plain dull stuff too. I've seen too much of Dale Frank's high gloss canvasses with logorrhoea titles to be terribly interested in them. Ola Kolehmainen's 'South of Home - Journey of a Mind' is a set of projected photographs of Sydney Opera House and its surrounds. Each one has been over or multiply exposed, or shutter-speeds that are too slow have allowed camera shake or light seepage to happen. It's the sort of thing that most budding photographers have produced and considered as potentially arty and then discarded, it all just looks tedious and lazy.

The centre piece, or at least the much photographed biggest piece is Cai Guo-Qiang's car wreck fantasia 'Inopportune: Stage One'. The white saloon cars might be a three-dimensional Edward Muybridge rendering of a Hollywood car crash, although the fronds of optical fibre that emanate from each car make it look more like a video game. The work is impressive in scale but seems oddly pointless. One can look at it as a meditation on sensationalism and danger, but it's hardly JG Ballard. It could otherwise be the virtual made concrete, the tumbling car with all of its intimations of explosion arrives unbroken at the end and then the sequence begins again, a hyperreal disaster. It might have been more appropriate when Top Gear was in town and despite the pyrotechnics it's unmoving.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the most moving piece I saw was the most modest in scale and the most quietly understated. In 'Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement)' Daniel Crooks has created a video work of gorgeous fluidity and lingering lyricism. The piece is a widescreen video of an elderly Chinese man practicing tai chi in a park. It begins quiet normally then the video seems to slip, as if it were smudging itself on screen, the man becomes duplicated in a ribbon of slow movement. Gradually his movements dissolve, as does he and his surroundings leaving lines of pure colour, like DNA traces or atomic signatures humming across the screen. It succeeds as a purely visual poem, a chamber piece of colour and movement. More touchingly, as is so often the case with works that understand time and the decay of concrete images it makes us think of mortality, in this case of individuals and traditions. Crooks' work is so accomplished because it is also so intrinsically of it form. Hidden away in an easy to miss workshop it is a jewel worth seeking out.

I'm due another visit to Cockatoo Island, there is a lot of work I didn't see this time. My first feeling is that nothing inhabited the place in anything like the way William Kentridge had, of course that's a high bar to set for any work but not unfair for a Biennale that makes such significant claims. I haven't seen everything on Cockatoo Island, far from it, and I hope that the next ferry jostle will be deliver something amazing, even on the basis of what I've seen so far it's worth the trip.

On Biennale of Sydney: Video works @ The MCA

After my first visit to any of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney I'm relieved that it's hard to dismiss what I've seen so far as just another example of curatorial toss wrapped up in theory and radical chic. The signs weren't good though, the daft subtitle of the event "The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age" sounds like the worst sort of artwank, the taster show at the MCA 'We Call Them Pirates Out Here' is, for the most part, a collection of dismal pseudo-radical claptrap and 2008's Biennale 'Revolution: Forms That Turn' was so self regarding as to be parodic. So, it's fair to say that I hardly expected to be so excited by a number of works even before I'd finished with the Ground Floor. It's looking good.

Rather than take a venue by venue look at the work, or even a festival overview it strikes me that something more coherent might be said by looking at more or less natural groups of work. The MCA has a number of pieces I want to return to but on first view it was the range and quality of the video works in Circular Quay that impressed me.

In 'City Self Country Self' Rodney Graham has a made a strange circular narrative, set in what might be an early nineteenth century middle-European cathedral town, that isn't a million miles away in look or feel (it reminded me at least) to Herzog's 'Enigma of Kaspar Hauser'. In this costume piece two men in period costume one a bumpkin, the other a colourful dandy, walk around a town in a seemingly fixed orbit. The obvious surface message one can take as the climax arrives and the dandy's buckled show kicks the peasant's arse is one of the historical triumph of the bourgeoisie. That seems rather unsatisfying compared to What happens in the rest of the loop. This feels like a short film about time. Both characters bang out clockwork beat of footsteps on the cobbled streets, the dandy checks his watch, the yokel the clocktower and the circuit of the town's alleys might be a trip around the dial of a timepiece. Graham appears to be thinking about historical inevitability, about repetition and about the different relationship individuals and classes have historically had to time. It manages to funny, sweet and thought provoking, edited with a sure and metronomic hand.

Susan Hiller's black screen and subtitles are more poignant. 'The Last Silent Movie' is an installation across two rooms that is part elegy and part archaeology. In one room a black screen shows nothing but English subtitles whilst the soundtrack plays recordings of words and conversations in a range of indigenous languages and dialects from around the world, all at or close to extinction. In one sense this, if it alone composed the piece, would only be so effective. The loss of language is sad but the subtitles preserve meaning. For me the power of the piece is that it is composed with a second room in which are framed graphs of the sonic signatures of the spoken words. These look like death certificates for a language and remind us that something whole and integral to a people is being lost, rather than a quaint historical oddity. The loss of a voice is a terrible thing, and that innate knowledge helps make this work so poerful.

Of course it's not all good. Mark Wallinger's glib 'Hymn' serves to remind us of the inanity of so much BritArt (and if it doesn't go upstairs and look at the toss served up by the Chapman brothers) and in doing so at least gives us a sense of the high quality of some other works. If this is the artist as some kind of prankster it's lame stuff. Standing on a hill overlooking London, holding a ballon with (one assumes) his childhood image printed on it, the artist sucks in helium and recites a hymn. One can read into it a desire to return to youth, but that's it, no depth, no humanity. It's emblematic of nothing so much as the race for novelty and kitsch in a certain recent period in British art. It's long been my contention that art about art is pretty dull, art is interesting when it's about people, feelings, ideas and things. When it's about art it's not. Christian Jankowski goes to some lengths to prove this. His work is a mock documentary, or at least a montage of mock news footage, featuring pieces to camera where reporters pretend to cover the artist's psychic dilemma prior to the Biennale itself. It's wrapped in that self protecting suit of irony but that makes it no less dumb and self satisfied. A bad combination.

My admiration for Bill Viola remains undimmed and I smile inside when I know I'm going to see his work. Seeing 'Incarnation' this time I'm no less moved but feel a sense of over-familiarity with the tropes of falling water as a barrier between states of consciousness. This piece is typically slow and beautiful. Two naked figures gradually emerge behind a grey sheet of rain, perhaps a veil of tears or an amniotic fluid, they tentatively push at it, until a hand and then their bodies break through. They come out into light and colour and it is not a wholly happy incarnation. The trepidation, their vulnerability, their closeness reminds me of Masaccio's 'expulsion' but here uncertainty still reigns. Viola often captures something that is, literally, awful and sublime in our relation to life, here he does to, and I suppose if you do have a 'thing' it might as well be a great one.

Perhaps the most touching work from the videos here is by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. These simple video works show lareg reproduction of works by Manet, Millet and Van Gogh in Thai forests and rice fields. On the ground in front of each of them sit a group of Thai villagers, agricultural workers. Each projection simply records the villagers as they talk and laugh about the paintings. They laugh at nudity and the shape of Manet's sitters breasts, they assume Millet's gleaners must be searching for insects and they translate the images warmly and generously through the lens of their own experience. It would be an enormous mistake to think this was merely art about art, this is about much more, the dignity of real peasants in the face of romanticised historical agrarians and the tenuous nature of meaning. More interesting still is that despite the cross cultural and historical confusion they continue to be interested to seek to understand, as they talk they begin to empathise, to create sympathetic narratives. It really is a work worth sitting with.

This felt like a good start for me and the Biennale this year. I'm sure this won't be the first time I dwell on the overall 'Distance' theme imposed on all of the work here. It seems to me a fairly typical contemporary art strapline, it seems clever at first but collapses under any kind of consideration that doesn't come from deep within the belly of the art world. Firstly I would challenge the statement that underpins it, that somehow 'distance' is a maligned force in Australia. That might be true of artists and other cultural cringers but I would place money on the fact that for many Australians distance is an unalloyed good (the insight comes from my 'non-ArtKritique' life and social attitudes research I've conducted), it leaves them with a sense of autonomy and freedom. That doesn't make the work or the Biennale bad, it just inconveniently points out that what might be beautiful would be a greater distance between the art world and its own navel.

On William Kentridge @ Cockatoo Island

'I am not me, the horse is not mine', William Kentridge's complex and immersive installation of music and moving pictures was easily the most accomplished and memorable work in Sydney's 2008 Biennale. In that context it showed how humour and thoughtfulness can be infinitely more subsersive than leaden irony or confected shock. Installed once more in the peeling masonry of the skeleton of a toolshed on Sydney's Cockatoo Island it reminds us again how Kentridge is one of the major artists at work anywhere today.

Eight video projectors run separate and distinct animations in a derelict first floor room.

Light seeps in through cracks in floor boards and a soundtrack echoes about us, as though a kabaret band is trying to burst through the din of a workshop. Each projection moulds and presses itself onto the irregular surfaces of the building, here wrapping itself around a door frame, there taking on the colour and texture of crumbling brickwork. It is a work to wander within, there is much pleasure to be had working out how each projection is different, how each has its own internal logic and how those might interact with the adjacent piece. The whole work seems to possess the building, and fill it with ghosts.

Ostensibly Kentridge's subject is Soviet Russia of the 1930's. His animated collages shimmer in on top of the walls. In one the shadow of a commissar whirls like a cossack whilst on the adjacent screen a Malevich figure performs disjointed acrobatics. One of his sources is Nikolai Gogol's short story 'The Nose', a classic of absurdism. From Gogol one can draw a line to the magic realist response to the Soviet system that we find in writers like Milan Kundera. That line extends through Dimitri Shostakovich, who created an opera around the story and now to Kentridge himself. In the story a Tsarist official wakes to find his nose has not only taken on a life of its own, it has also reached a higher rank. We see the flight of an anthropomorphized nose on one of the screens, on another Eisenteinian collage and montage fleshes out the story. It is never quite narrative but the surrounding fragments have a cumulative effect whether you are familiar with the details of the source or not.

Many familiar Kentridge techniques and themes are here, the fluid charcoal animation that makes us feel the image is being drawn rather than projected, the processions of characters that might be in a parade or a 'dance of death' and the continual metamorphosis between people and objects. It is a rich visual spectacle that has more depth than usual, whilst sometimes the animations seems like shadowplays or cut-outs occasionally a flag might wave or a skirt swirl and the figures come off of the wall. That sense of the artist's hand is always there in Kentridge, his stop motion animation and draughtsman's hand give his work a expressive quality that prevent it from being mere polemic. The projection onto brickwork gives the constructivist geometries a rough vulnerability. It portends a future when their makers would find that the mechanical positivism of the revolution turn on them.

At one end of the room is a projection of extracts from the transcripts of the 1937 show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, a voice of humanist socialism within Stalin's regime. The extracts read like Ionesco but they are harder to laugh at, as we know that the trial ends, as it was always supposed to, in execution and the final silence of dissent. It is this that reminds us that the co-option of modernism by totalitarianism is a continual theme in the twentieth century and it makes Kentridge's work hover on the cusp between tragedy and farcical comedy.

There is something untidy and chaotic in Kentridge's work, this is more important than a stylistic glitch. Modernism was crushed under Stalin and it is in that context that we ought to remember how shameful the willing seduction of so many artists by totalitarian aesthetics is. The elimination of the human from art is every bit as sinister as it sounds. That's why there is something beautifully edifying in seeing that order stumble and smudged in Kentridge's projections.

'I am not me, the horse is not mine' might be the closest we come today to great history painting. Taking his cue from a particular moment in the past Kentridge speaks eloquently about the human condition and universal ideas, this might be 'The Raft of the Medusa' or 'The Oath of Claudius Civilis' in the way it brings illustrates the present with the past. Kentridge presents a case for humanism parcelled up in an history of the Russian avant garde, he persuades through presenting the beautiful messiness of mankind in the face of the sterile logic of ideology