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 The 2010 Archibald Prize @ AGNSW

I tend to take a ‘death and taxes’ view of the Archibald Prize, currently on at Sydney’s AGNSW. Complaining about it seems futile, it’s as inevitable as the tides. As with those other two unfortunate afflictions far better to simply offer advice and succour in an attempt to ameliorate the pain it causes.This time it feels pretty grim, the trends toward giganticism, historical pastiche (although there is ONE good pun to be enjoyed) and splashy sanitized street art are all present an incorrect. Perhaps the fact that they’re so predictable only makes them more depressing, if nothing else the whole exercise makes you question the aesthetic judgement of our present generation of commissioning Medici.

It’s curious to see a portrait show in the age of digital reproduction. The rise of photography did not see the demise of painting but, instead, a move away from the illusionistic realism as such a key criteria of quality. The Impressionists were at work as the first plates of silver oxide were being exposed and they are the first group of artists who we recognise from photographic portraits rather than paintings, yet we accept their work as showing a perceived reality. Thus in the age of chemical and digital reproduction our criteria has changed, we ask for images to reveal rather than show. Photographs must capture a moment, and by moment we mean a frozen frame of time that represents so much more, the same must go for painted portraits where we hope that medium and representation offer something that could never otherwise be produced. That's the criterion used here.

We ought to start on a positive, with the winner, Sam Leach’s portrait of 'Tim Minchin'. Leach paints in the intimate cabinet style of the old Dutch Masters but it is his handling of light, both as subject and in the mirror like surfaces of his paintings that makes him extraordinary rather than the, still significant, precision of his painting. Photo-realism damns Leach with faint praise. That is not to denigrate his desegno and brushwork, his compositions are stunning, he makes the shining void a character in his work and he demonstrates how six hundred years of western art tradition is still relevant. Leach shows us that his miniaturist’s skill offers revelation rather than reproduction. His subjects often look uneasy, perhaps Leach’s method reminds them of the old Dutch vanitas, and brings intimations of mortality and posterity. He seems to capture living people resistant at being caught in his varnished surfaces and in doing so creates something more soulful than clever.

The piece that has stayed with me most persistently is James Money’s portrait of 'The Lord Mayor of Melbourne'. It’s not huge, it’s not flashy but it is beautiful and creates very human spectacle. The slight flattening and the geometric rigidity of the collar and tie give a hint of John Brack, but they also show give a basis for contrast, their formality, both sartorially and aesthetically, opens us the possibility of the big head atop them to appear ever so subtly alive. Money’s technique, where he has scraped away at the surface so it almost appears to be tattooed into the red earth ground, is impeccably matched to the subject. Like Melbourne’s architecture there is a sombre nineteenth century alderman quality to the surface, but you also become aware how smart and stylized it is (again you might remind yourself of John Brack). In every way Money has captured the balance between office holder and human being perfectly.

I would contrast this to some of the other ‘great and good’ portraits here. They range from the merely prosaic like Yang Li’s ‘Bishop Elliot’ or Peter Smeeth’s ‘Peter Fitzsimons’ to, a popular Archibald genre, the comic symbolic. The best representation of the latter here is Alexander McKenzie’s ‘Andrew Upton’ which is as cartoonish and heavy handed as Upton’s translations are cloth eared. If one painting symbolizes that Archibald tendency to wear references heavily but smugly it’s Giles Alexander’s ‘The Alternative Ambassadors (Professors Ross Garnaut and Martin Gree)'. I don’t mind a spot of historical appropriation but this is so witless that it steps into the realms of those pastiche Wild West photos you can dress up for. In picking Holbein’s masterpiece Alexander has taken on a painting full of mystery and replaced it with a series of glib references. It’s a classic ‘secret stupid’ painting, not seeming to understand that there is a difference between using a symbolic system to denote an object or a quality and using a small image of that object itself. I find it difficult to describe just how irritating I found this smug middlebrow mess.

There is always a thread of artists painting one another in the show and at least there are two interesting examples here. Rodney Pople, always refreshingly off kilter, is fairly traditional but darkly seductive in his triptych of Stelarc, the body modifier-cum artist. Pople’s blurring of photography and painting echoes Stelarc’s blurring of the body as organism and art medium and he gives the artist a kind of film noir intensity. I like the dramatic vitality of Pople’s work and here he raises the question of the difference between man and performance and personae through the different panels. That the question is never resolved actually makes it more interesting than Stelarc’s work. Another case of a portraitist outdoing his subject is Nigel Milsom’s portrait of Adam Cullen. The full length work picks out a figure in tones of black and gives him hints of Picasso, German Expressionism and even a hint of mystery play. Milsom creates a theatrical image that might have come from the salon of an early Twentieth Century actor, it captures the idea of artist as celebrity and plays at a knowingly symbolic level. It’s much more interesting than Cullen’s own entry, a typically drippy cartoon.

There are some more bravura stylistic experiments here that appear to sneak in by way of apology from the judges. The high shine abstraction of 'I wake up with TODAY!' by Shane Bowden and Dean Reilly, looks calculated to shock, whilst it is striking, a massive mirror varnished black panel is broken by multi-coloured lines that hint at human chins. It's hard to say what, if anything, it's trying to do with the idea of the portrait, it isn't that daring just opaque and seems to be a triumph of style over subject. While that's confusing Marc De Jong's 'Janice Petersen' just looks confused. There's a convergence of ideas here that never quite works out, the paintings surface is either pointillist or pixellated, depending on your bent, makes one remember television when of an older, lower resolution, past. The subject, a newsreader at work, is painted as if the lights and cameras were between us and her. The painting has a hugely self conscious composition that's dominated by a big black clump of TV camera, one imagines that it is supposed to say something about being behind the scenes, or surface and reality. All of these odd alienating effects add up to far less than the sum of their parts.

There are sometimes small treasures to be found in these shows, tucked away in a corner one of these is Khue Nguyen's 'Unleashed'. So modest in size and palette this watercolour self-portrait undoes much of the clumsiness elsewhere. An obvious precursor is Arcimboldo whose puzzle portraits of men created from fruits, fish and flesh were commissioned for renaissance monarchs. Nguyen bleeds a symbolic octopus into his face, and almost camouflages himself. That puzzle set within a side-on portrait also reminds us of Titian's 'Allegory of Prudence' but here none of these references are highlighted or screamed. The overall of feel of the piece is that of a faded document, as though Nguyen were unearthing his own history and using the form of the portrait to understand who he is.

The fact of the Archibald being a portrait prize concerned with prominent Australians (as opposed to all those other Australians who commission painters to do portraits of them) is problematic where it ought to be enlightening. At present the galleries are filled with ‘ooh’s and ‘aaah’s as people recognise subjects and consider the veracity of the representation. Imagine though (and this would take imagination, first of all, amongst the judging panel) an annual review of the art of the portrait, of its conventions, discontents and possibilities. That would be worth queuing up for.

On Fiona Tan @ Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Art School Gallery

I'm still thinking about 'Coming Home', Fiona Tan's show of two video works spread between Paddington's admirable Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the charming gallery of the National Art School (where you can also take in a spot of Norman McLaren if you fancy). I imagine I'll feel like this for some time these twin meditations on Orientalism, history and our subconscious take such a profound and subtle look at a cultural and psychological condition that they already feel like that rare thing, a parallel critique of feelings and thoughts.

The two works, 'A Lapse of Memory' and 'Disorient' are big, almost cinematic, affairs with high production values, most notably a poetic sense of editing and a sound design that is integral to meaning. They are connected thematically, both deal with memory and place and are to greater or lesser extent concerned with orientalism and the psyche of the traveller.

'Disorient', the work at Sherman, is composed of projections onto two large screens facing one an other running out of synch in a continuous loop. At one end of the room is what looks like a travelogue through Asia with handheld video and newsreel footage. Over this is a calm measured English voice reads from Marco Polo's journals, a flat factual narrative where he describes the social characteristics, trade, religion and character of each of the people's he encounters. For the most part this avoids the picturesque clichés of the Orient. So whilst geishas and temples are eschewed the camera might shakily pan around an empty factory or through street traffic giving an equal weight to each. The more familiar images that break through are Chinese troops charging Tibetan demonstrators or the inevitable and timeless armed convoys in Afghanistan.

This is done in a less heavy handed way than it might sound from that description even though the images always provide a light counterpoint to the Venetian explorer's text. It serves to remind us of the mutability of our pre-conceptions about distant cultures, the inevitably selective imagery we encounter can replace one myth with another as easily as it can reinforce the ancient. As Polo, and the viewer, moves from place to place we see the anonymous cloud banks outside every airliner's window. Marco Polo was a merchant before he ever became a chronicler of the East and we ought to remember this as we see him characterise each country by its industry and trading habits, the news footage shows that now we are as likely to be conditioned by a foreign correspondent and their cameras, thus the world changes with the lens through which it is seen. Tan creates or presents some gorgeous individual images, a blue dyed dog skulking thorugh an indigo factory, a young man with a bicycle kneeling on a broken concrete slab as he prays in the Iraqui twilight and the sight of a whole car body carried atop a camel on a mountain pass might be forever memorable.

The travelogue screen might be the visible, the external version of our engagement with Asia, but facing it is a slow luscious film that can only represent the recesses of our minds. In deep reds and blacks this projection is a slow close up tour of the shelves and corridors of what at first seems an oriental junk shop. Everything is here, Buddhas, birdcages, masks, dragons, elephants, clouds of silk and spice. The confusion of culture and category in this cabinet of wonders feels intentional, it presents an Orient of otherness, of familiar versions of the exotic. Each of the objects and artefacts here represent something bigger, a broader looser vision of the inscrutable strangeness of the East. This is made all the stranger by an unexplained man who appears in what might be the saffron robes of a monk, he seems like a keeper, of a shop or of memories but you suspect that we have only seen a little of his domain and that the shelves are a tiny part of some Borgesian labyrinth. Tan is accomplished in her medium and much more than a creator of tableaux, the pacing of the smooth camera moves and the subtlety of the edit creates an ethereal feel. There is the layered shimmer of lacquer here, the light of consciousness is being reflected and captured constantly so that you can almost see our own assumptions and beliefs about the Orient in each object.

When one looks between the two screens it is clear how much more vivid and detailed the inner imaginary world of symbols and signs is than the messy, shaky reality of the travelogue. On its own this would be a glib observation (but plenty of works have been created on single insights far less profound than this) but the density of the veneered layers of image and idea make 'Disorient' a beautifully puzzling work.

No less beautiful, but perhaps less complex, is the second work, 'A Lapse of Memory'. This is an almost narrative piece that follows a curious old man around a rococo oriental place (which turns out to be the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, England). We learn the man's name is Henry and that he once travelled and may or may not be Asian. The film mostly observes the ritual;s of his day as he scuttles through the extravagantly colourful, but peeling and shabby, Chinoiserie of the building. He too might be a keeper, but this time of something lost, of an absence. We are told that "Henry is waiting for a story he can make his home" and what we hear about are fragments of arrivals, departures and voyages. Henry's memory palace is made to feel afloat and adrift by the sound of ocean borne gulls on the soundtrack and that sense of dislocation is pervasive.

Again Tan combines a beautiful technique, notably here the sound design, with individual images of pervasive beauty. A sequence where Henry lays and gathers lengths of inspection lamps in a long corridor is breathtaking and the frames where he lays himself to sleep beneath an umbrella feels unexplainably poignant. My sole reservation is with the voice over. The knowing self referentiality of reading the shooting script is irritating and the only occasionally poetic non-sequitirs of the script tend toward the pretentious. It's a difficult line to follow, the images Tan creates are pregnant with possibility, light of touch and confident. Prose is oddly far more concrete, it exists to describe the specific and negates some of that wonder Henry's story, or stories, or the story which he seeks, is held in his rituals and his traverses of the rooms not in the narration but it also comes from what we might imagine that story could be, after all it not only Henry who is searching for a narrative.

These works are far more interesting than their PR descriptions. All too often the press releases and verbiage that surround shows don't do them justice, they obfuscate or attempt to connect with art touchstones rather than describe an experience. I think that this is the case with Tan's work here. It doesn't matter that one work was made for Venice and that subsequently it can be seen as an essay on that serene republic's pivotal role in east/west trade, nor does the identity of Henry's home, the Regency chinoise Brighton Pavillion. It's not uninteresting but it presents the viewer with a terribly limited lens and to come at works such as these with a pre-conceived idea of meaning is a great shame, they hold so much more than these locational puns. Tan's work is a gorgeous, serious and thoughtful meditation on memory and identity. It is powerful because as it deals with those subjects it doesn't reduce them to badges and positions or a précis of Edward Said, but instead captures the fragility of consciousness and the shifting sands of identity through time. These two pieces are small wonders and we are lucky that they are on show until June.

Wilderness @ AGNSW

For all of the galleries that cluster in particular Sydney neighbourhoods, amidst posh terraces or polished concrete warehouse conversions, there is precious little evidence of contemporary artists, in particular painters, at work in our few public galleries. It's a great shame. No matter what their best intentions the showrooms, and that is what they are, of commercial galleries are scary places and it would be disingenuous to believe that a casual engagement with art is likely to flourish into something more serious under the gaze of hawkish gallerinas. As a result the public conversation around art is limited to travelling blockbusters and celebrity portraits.

It's good to see 'Wilderness' a show of contemporary painting supported by The Balnaves Foundation at Sydney's AGNSW. The show's title is a little misleading, the common thread between these fourteen Australian artists is not the landscape per se but figurative painting. That might sound like a pretty loose thread, but it's unusual and refreshing enough.

Ground is overlapped between the various works, both in terms of theme and pictorial style. One tendency is a certain airbrushed sfumato used to render naturalist images flat and graphic. This is a technique shared here by both Andrew Browne and Mary Scott. Browne is represented by three large monochrome images of dead branches and detritus. Each is picked out in a chalky bone palette on a deep black ground. The images are suggestive of other things, animal skulls, faces, contorted limbs. However they are more reminiscent of a gothic Howard Arkley, their closest relation being the sinister enchanted forests of the Grimm's tales. Mary Scott's hummingbirds are similarly less interesting than their backstory. The large flat surfaces look like they could be rendered on a giant LCD screen as over sized birds come out of ghostly camouflage. It's somehow unsatisfactory and reminded me of giant canvas prints of frangipane flowers that you see in homeware shops. Of this fuzzy tendency the strongest showing by far is that of Fiona Lowry. Her forests are rendered dreamlike by one or two colours on a white ground in a feather light paint. One piece in particular "They come to me days and nights and go from me again" is compelling in its otherworldly directness. A full length image of a bearded naked man seems to hover in an hallucinatory forest. His head thrown back in a kind of ecstatic surrender he might be related to the saints of Zurbaran or Rinera or he may simply be an old man liberated from the world. It's an arresting and memorable work.

The show also contains a lot of pop-art psychedelia which is more eye-catching than it is interesting. Alex Pittendrigh's big swirly canvasses look less like inner distorted visions and more like an hommage to hippy album covers and tie-dye posters and, as such, pretty pointless. More worthy of consideration, but no less ugly, are Stephen Bush's day-glo fantasia's of melting ecology. "Shout on the Hills of Glory" presents a children's book log cabin amidst dripped and dragged masses of glossy paint. It's heavy handed and not accomplished enough to convey much more meaning than 'look at me'. It's not a huge surprise that work like this should be included, it's a distorted view of landscape painting. However that oppositional stance doesn't really ring true. Landscape painting, whether the chocolate box variety or something more academic is fairly peripheral to the established canon of contemporary art, so it's a pretty soft target. The size of the works too betrays an exhibitionism that has overcome any real insight or sensibility.

On artist, well represented here, who has taken on a range of pictorial conventions and created something genuinely moving and stimulating is Julie Fragar. A series of works here show a man, the same in each, posing with the carcasses of animals he has killed whilst hunting. The images range in size and colour, each is painted in a loose impressionistic way, catching a sense of immediacy and drama. Each too may well simply be copies of trophy photographs, for the pose in each is familiar from those magazines such as 'Bacon Busters' or 'Boars and Babes' that are so often the object of internet mirth. Some images are then painted over with cryptic slogans, that never quite obscure the scene beneath. What makes these interesting is the blank expression of the hunter, his face a little bewildered, slightly suspicious. It's not a patronising rendering, it manages to be sympathetic, but it seems to represent an existential emptiness, perhaps even a suppressed dread. These are very good, very thoughtful and intellectually subtle works.

Less easily explained but fascinating and charming, is James Morrison's polyptych 'Freeman Dyson' A man who might be clad in moss has fallen to earth, perhaps from space, maybe from another time. The piece has the same obsessive detail and illustrative quality one sometimes finds in outsider art. It shows a hyper-real world where details are so clearly rendered they seem to be demanding our attention. It's a strange and charming experience this imaginary portrait of a quantum physicist and futurist who is now in his nineties. Its real achievement is not the narrative and interpretative possibilities it opens up but how strange and magical it makes a mundane landscape seem through its almost molecular detail.

It shouldn't be a surprise that so much of the most interesting work here is that which casts strange new light on people and their experience and perception of the world around them. Louise Hearman's beautiful and disturbing little canvasses might remind us of the dreams of Magritte or the nightmares of Goya but they work very specifically in their own way. She isolates faces, objects and animals in fields of darkness or oddly lit landscapes. The work has a surreal sensibility but is suggestive rather than explicit, it begs questions but it's never quite clear what those questions might be. Her use of nature is effective because the subtle naturalism helps achieve that disjointed dream like association. The work is beautiful and uncomfortable, which seems appropriate for a show called 'Wilderness' as our relationship to nature hasn't been and isn't always easy. Hearman shows how we internalise nature in order to articulate things for which we have no other vocabulary, how our interiors are every bit as strange and picturesque as the world around us.

On Sylvie Blocher @ MCA

Sydney's MCA is a having a good 2010. Almost overlooked on the fourth floor, a detour away from the excellent Olafur Eliason show, is Sylvie Blocher's 'Living Pictures' a group of simple large scale video works that you must see if you care about art and people. The show has, in the late summer cacophony of festivals and events, been very quietly promoted, which made its discovery all the more pleasurable, for this is assertive and essential contemporary art that proves to be acute and intimate.

'Living Pictures' is a series of something like speaking video portraits where, predominantly, a single person occupies the screen at any given time. They are encouraged to speak, sing or write about a particular subject that might be 'slavery', 'money' or 'beauty'. Blocher records the results, shooting the people against highly artificial high colour backdrops, and intercuts them, some pieces are close to an hour in length.It's perhaps because that conceit sounds so mundane that the results are so extraordinary. The idea that is the genesis of each of the works in this series (some of which have been commissioned with the patron choosing a theme) is an idea that is essentially human, 'What does ecstasy look like?', 'What does slavery mean?' or 'What is it like to feel a lack?' What ensues are 'conceptual' works in the sense they explore certain abstract concepts rather than being concerned with art as a concept in itself. The germinal idea in each, and the human tendency to gravitate to the felt and experienced, means that even within each film there can be a massive range of response, which in itself presents us with human depth and variety.

The first piece we see doesn't bode well, a half naked French guitarist, who has been painted partially brown, singing the words to a Barack Obama speech in an ecstatic falsetto. It's one of those works that requires you to be in on a certain part of the joke to get it, Thus when the next piece, entitled 'What Belongs To Them', is introduced as an exploration of the idea of slavery made in New York some time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq we have every right to shudder. Instead we find a room with something tender and raw as men and women recount their stories or act out their obsessions in front of a vast American flag. A man recounts the story (in high storytelling mode) of shooting his first deer, another struggles to tell the story of murder on a relations plantation in pre-emancipation Louisiana and one woman simply dances with joy to what sounds like The Last Poets. What you get here is America through the lens of its original sin, the twists and evasions and confrontations it pushes people to. There are tales of every day slavery here but even in the hurt and confused or the needy and paranoid there is clear sense of bondage to the need to tell. It's easy, and I don't doubt popular, to see this as work about big abstractions like race and gender. However you don't feel the didacticism of identity politics art here instead there's something far more direct and tangible that's far less comfortable than theory.

Sylvie Blocher expo l'Inde dans tous les sens
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That sense of the messy blur of reality of even borne out by the way sound bleeds from room to room and piece to piece. Initially irritating it gives the sense of being in an endless urgent global conversation. Blocher's outlook is global, truly and sincerely, she seems drawn to the sense of displacement felt by migrants, the search for identity and dignity and the immediacy of experience that is lost in either touristic or theoretical snapshots of globalisation. Her filming of the private ecstasy of Indian men, whose faces loom large on the screens, tightly cut to give us a complete sense of separation from stimulus, is warm and close in a way that feels almost intrusive.

Another painfully honest piece is 'Nanling' a piece in which Blocher appears with an elderly Chinese lady who has never met a white woman before. Even now I'm unsure of the totality of my response. The pair sit on a sofa and touch one another: childlike, apelike, sexual, innocent, disturbing, comforting. There is clearly much unspoken, perhaps even unthought and only just felt but that unknown and unknowable subtext makes the work trembingly good. This may be an old refrain on this blog but works that capture our need for contact will always shine whatever the medium or context.

There appears to be nothing that Blocher isn't interested in, nothing that her cool eyed camera is not willing to explore at face value. Her work with the residents of French Housing project, "Je & Nous" at first reminded me of Gillian Wearing's "Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say", but the gentleness of the transitions, the faces given to faceless people as they appear in T-Shirts with statements they had written about self and beauty moves it somewhere else. This is less about the irony that can be pulled from between our inner and outer lives as voiceless invisible immigrants and working class people give access to words and an audience. It is gently moving in the best possible way.

Her work with the residents of Penrith in Sydney's outer Western suburbs, 'What's Missing' is no less extraordinary, and on reflection may be just as exotic as China or India for many viewers. The piece is formally different as each interviewee is duplicated on screen, next to their own image, listening, singing or simply trying to put their best face forward. Each person stands in front of a camouflage backdrop, odd because the last thing these people do is hide, they are in plain view and plainly vulnerable. One woman asks "Why does this country have this big hole in its heart?" and whilst she might be talking about the red desert we can't help think that the piece is about people negotiating their way around that hole, living on the edge of a city. There is damage here and battler optimism, the gap between words and expressions is often poignant. This may look like a social commentary but in tone and mood it has a strangely spiritual dimension, the 'lack' that is spoken of in a card on the wall might be something far more universal than that of the residents of Penrith.

I've rarely spent time in an exhibition and been so determined to go back even before I left. Sylvie Blocher has an incredible lightness of touch and heaviness of purpose that make these works so powerful. Inevitably they transcend any of the bumf and explanation that surrounds them, they feel private and breathtaking, so personal that one feels it is a privilege to share time with their protagonists.

On Dale Frank @ Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Dale Frank's show 'Ice Age' at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery pushes my buttons and tries my patience. There's no doubt that his luminously varnished canvasses are often beautiful, their sumptuous whirls and maws of paint preserved in suspended animation, are beautiful. However he also manages to invoke my innate suspicion about works with titles that read like protracted statements or bad situationist slogans. Try this for starters, "He pushed himself into his car. Breakneck speed was chocolate and coconut covered as he gradually urged the car from the garage in R watching not to scrape the sides. Apart from the first few minutes after the end of the driveway were he had to reach 120 to clean out the air filters the rest of the trip was sedate", that's not a title it's undergraduate poetry. If it weren't for the beauty of the canvass it would make this project risible.

Frank works in a kind of material abstraction. The paintings tease with meaning and echo but are always about the paint itself. The varnish appears to preserve not the marks that paint leaves but the movement of the paint itself, in a sense that's a literal truth as the varnish is saturated with pigment, its drying and mixing creates the work. That reliance on an unmediated physical process does make you wonder where intention and serendipity collide. In a piece called 'The Chinese Military Machine' there are hints of calligraphy and scared patterns. Whether these effects are desired or not these works are powerful because of their reminder of paint's ability to capture that which is fleeting and the mind's necessity to seek pattern and meaning.

The tendency to project onto these painting helps explain the appeal of the more affecting works. In one work the seeping flesh tones remind us of painters from Rubens to Lucian Freud. Its accreted layers and still remain messy under the shining varnish, without a hint of the object it's a terribly human mirror. It is naive to pretend that the works here are pristine abstractions. The aesthetic is fairly consistent and like John Olsen or James Gleason reminds us of the fluid world between the spirit and the organic. At times that can descend into the lava lamp picturesque but more often than not the compositions overcome kitsch, presenting colour and form in a kind of restless search for equilibrium. This art is never static.

These are big often beautiful paintings undone by the taint of smugness. The catalogue states "Twenty nine paintings were supposed to say something through their titles if not through their reason for being; twenty nine went onto the truck. Out of how many, seventy, well, forty six. Others could not be counted. But one was an actor, so there were really only twenty eight". Together with the titles it makes one feel the subject in an elaborate piss take. They're too redolent of dumb conceptualism for my liking. It's a shame, I like these paintings (varnishings?) very much, but Dale, do give the titles a rest.

On Edge of Elsewhere @ Campbelltown Arts Centre

To enter 'The Edge of Elsewhere' you need to walk through Khaled Sabsabi's hypnotic video installation '99', it sets the bar very high for what will be (unless we're incredibly lucky) one of the best shows in Sydney this year. Three weeks in that's a big claim but the immediacy, depth and moral fibre of some of the work here at the Campbelltown Arts Centre make it an extraordinarily powerful achievement.

'99' is an installation of 99 televisions, on racks four high, on either side of the 'L'-shaped entrance to the exhibition. Each television has a dual image, in the background is news footage of Middle East (what could be Palestine or Iraq), familiar and depressing, rubble, explosions, distress. Over this are various grainy repeated images of a whirling dervish. The super-8 graininess makes them look like photographs from the nineteenth century, the dervish's white garments filling the screen, each clip short and repeated. The soundtrack seems to come from each screen, a crashing chat that has strobed into a rhythm. It's an incredible effect. The dervish seeks enlightenment and rapture from his repetition, the footage gives us only darkness and confusion. The ghostly pairing of antique and modern asks questions of Western views of Islam too, about the supposed inevitability of a clash of cultures. This is much more than a tricky juxtaposition. '99' is powerful because it has so much of the characteristics of great religious art, it searches for peace through the ecstatic and is thus highly affecting.

Richard Bell's acid satire manages to be more than just TV in a gallery. There's something giddy, almost hallucinogenic, about the imagery as if the documentary form alone cannot contain his righteous ire. 'Broken English' the video piece here is centred round a chess game between Bell and a mate, the conversation, who wants to play black and who white also challenges Bell to confront the privileged white art world more. Bell critiques the present through the vehicle of the past, he demonstrates a picture of race in Australia where white people know they ought to say the 'right thing' but the obvious discomfort of interviewees suggests rhetoric and reality are far apart (and black interviewees tell you exactly how they see white people feel about them). Bell is angry when he visits the unintentionally hilarious Australia Day re-enactment of Captain Cook's landing where he's greeted by an aboriginal handshake (Bell's mate points out that the real story was that Cook really had a spear pointed at him and was told to 'fuck off'). The scenes of Bell at an opening in his Brisbane Gallery are excruciating as he scares off the liberal luvvies who are happy to condescend to a black artist but notably skittish when the subject of land and rights comes up. Bell's work is messy and open ended, it's an urgent demand rather than a glib solution. In effect he asks "Why should I give a fuck that you say you respect my culture when you don't recognise that I own this land?" Bell doesn't do identity politics, he does flesh and bones and socio-economics wrapped in a black black humour, he knows laughter might not be the best medicine but it can be a bloody good weapon.

The sheer physical centrepiece of the show is Wang Jianwei's multimedia, multi room, multi-ideaed installation 'Hostage'. It's hard to describe and seems more like the culmination of a project to demonstrate the deadening effects of ideology rather than a single artwork. The first elements you encounter are massive sculptures, Heath Robinson machines made of pipes and cogs and taps. From them emanate vast gloopy solid clouds. It's like a machine to produce nothing, conformity, sameness and it manages to be both cute and sinister. The arrangement of the three sculptural pieces is important, at one end of the long machine pumping out its clouds of conformist thought is a red curtain, less theatrical than reminding us of the 'Wizard of Oz' it might be the barrier between the rhetoric and the intent of a communist regime. On its other side a boiler or perhaps even a space ship compartment sits, encased in that familiar white, this time with two drivers, reproducing themselves in a shapeless mass. The works support more than a single interpretation (although I was struck so powerfully by my own at the time) but the accompanying film and stills do lead us down a particular path.

The video piece places us firmly in Communist China, possibly in the cultural revolution. It's a wordless highly theatrical (in that it takes place on a soundstage in three walls) tableau of brutalisation and the rituals of totalitarianism. The film is beautifully almost mournfully lit and has a tone of regret and reverie. There are strong echoes of socialist realist art, as the dispassionate, almost banal, nature of the crimes committed on the main group (initiated by figures who remind us of Mao the shepherd, the peasantry and the Red Guard) unfold. Sitting alongside the fanciful machine installations the film makes a powerful work, there is always a human aspect to ideological imperatives, a lesson we should never forget.

There are other jewels here, Lisa Reihana's 'Digital Marae', attempting to project a version of Maori identity into the future or Indonesian artist Arahmaini meditation on the compartmentalisation of aspects of Indonesian femininity. For all this quality I don't know what the title 'Edge of Elsewhere' is supposed to mean. It's one of those non-sequitirs that art folk love. Like the accompanying catalogue, almost parodically filled with academic unspeak, it fails to convey the real power of the work here. It doesn't matter. So many of these pieces need no explanation but promise to infiltrate our selves and ask us again and again how we should live our lives, how we should make our worlds. This is socially and politically engaged art at its most human.