European Masters @ NGV

I normally try to avoid comment on how exhibitions are branded or what they're called. In the case of 'European Masters' the NGV's show of works from Frankfurt's Stådel Museum. The problem might be that the catch all title doesn't quite capture what's going on here. The lead image of a Renoir lunch suggests an impressionist blockbuster awaits inside. Instead the NGV houses a path through the neurotic spasms of a national identity seeking a form. That nation is Germany through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. There's some great and compelling works hung inside here but there's also a lot of painting that is, frankly, kitsch and odd. Edited and pulled together it creates an interesting narrative, made sinister as we know the tragic point where it ends. So whilst there are great examples of Degas and Bonnard here they're not the real story, instead the odd procession from Romanticism through Symbolism to Expressionism captures something much stranger, if less immediately pleasurable.

German Romanticism is a complex set of impulses. Here it encompasses the neo-classicism, pagan fantasies and historical mythmaking. The pictures here show less of the primal urge toward the sublime that we might find in Casper David Freidrich and a far more twee version. Medieval and classical figures find themselves in the dark German forests, forging a link between the geography and culture. The images are polite, bloodless and a highly mediated version of nature making this very different fare to Romantics such as Goya or Turner operating elsewhere. Lighting is often theatrical and compositions tend to signpost the meaningful relation between the landscape and those inserted into it leaving each work looking like a restrained polemic. What becomes clear here, and never leaves through the rest of the rooms, is a penchant for fairly heavy handed symbolism without a corresponding stylistic tension. The approach feels all or nothing. Certain works look like academic exercises whilst others are full of bombast, all too often what they fail to provide is depth or ambiguity.

It seems fitting that in amongst the German work, and a respectable room of impressionism, there are smatterings of artists like James Ensor and Henri Rousseau, who are almost sui generis and and yet seem to add to the feverish searching of German artists. Amongst these figures is Odilon Redon. The work 'Christ and the Samaritan Woman' is of such hallucinatory beauty and mystical strangeness that one can hardly bear to walk away from it. There is a biblical story in there somewhere but it hardly matters. A Christ figure, manifests out of a layers of ochre at once a mirage and the memory of someone real. In the foreground the profile of a woman who is almost sculptural but who, with the greatest economy of paint, appears to be in a state of transcendent serenity. There's an abstract splash of purple in the middle of the frame and a scarlet wound of paint, like the sacred heart and something like a cloud or a splash below Christ, describing them is hard but together they feel like something necessary and essential that happens between these two figures. The tenderly minimal expressions (both have eyes downcast or closed) convey a sense of grace and surrender and allow us to identify the human core of something deeply spiritual. It's a wonderful quiet painting.

There are surprises. Wilhelm Trübner's 'Moor Reading a Newspaper' is beautiful and a real shock. This small portrait takes on the drab black blues and greens of workman's serge and imparts an oily quality to the air. The composition cuts the frame in a diagonal as the seated figures rest his feet, the light of a nineteenth century room hardly picking out black skin. It's the light that makes this so brilliant though. The only objects that stick out form a line across the middle of the painting, a pair of gloves on the empty portion of the chaise, the snow white newspaper and a hat and cane. This isn't a work that attempts o make exotic, rather one that defiantly normalises with symbols of bourgeois life. The newspaper, holding its form in a black hand is genuinely shocking, it's the last way you'd expect a black man in 1870's Germany (a mere ten years after American emancipation) to be presented.

There's a point in the exhibition where we see things start to lose their serene myth building. Where the subject and implicitly the viewer violently shifts. This is best seen in the way women become vampires and harpies having been the maidens and nymphs of a mythical bucolic past. Hindsight makes it tempting, and all too easy, to draw sociological and political conclusions but even if we avoid them it's clear that colour and form begin to change. There is a line of sinister, grotesque women that begins to appear with the symbolists. We see Lovis Corinth's slutty daubs and palate knived flesh and the bone pale temptress of Max Liebermann's 'Samson and Delilah' and, in both, women's skin itself seems toxic and dangerous, evidence of something hateful inside. This is where Max Slevogt's 'Frau Aventiture' is so revealing both thematically and the way paint restlessly clings to the canvass. The areas of pink and grey, flesh and steel, hard and soft just reinforces the idea of a conflict between male and female. What appears to be happening is unsure, a knight either lifting or strangling a naked woman, you can't help feeling it's the latter as it all takes place on a queasy green darkness. Without delving into the sexual politics it is both bravura and unpleasant.

It's probably not the done thing to express a pretty much blanket dislike for the many strands of German Expressionism. I've often thought that if anything were going to make an art movement impervious to criticism it was its censure by Adolf Hitler. This might be the root of my problem with the German strand of Expressionism. I understand the context and significance of Max Beckmann but more often than not his paintings descend into a caricature of neuroses on canvas. The twisted geometry and ugly decapitated proportions feel like a potent political cri de couer but are all angular aggression. It's hard to love these pictures even when, as in 'The Circus Carriage' Beckmann is creating and exposing his own personal mythology. Context can define the value of a political act, and Beckmann's defiance of Naziism through paint is inspirational, it can't determine aesthetic response.

My lack of sympathy for much expressionism comes from its inability to give a human access point to the work. The dark and light all comes in a flash in expressionism, and then another flash and a series of fireworks on top of one another until we're blinded. It's a sensational conceit but it suffers from a law of diminishing returns as the volume is constantly turned up to eleven. The work from the painters of 'Die Brücke' and the Expressionists here is often violently ugly. It often uses the clash of colour, and also of expectation of shape and colour, to to create a sensory disruption that has a psychological analogue. The effectiveness is undeniable but the sheer boldness make the works one dimensional. Whether these are the response to a violent world or the expression of an assaulted psyche or otherwise doesn't really matter, they seem to take a single emotional dimension at the expense of subtlety or ambiguity. That heavy handedness can be seen here in work by Emil Nolde and Franz Marc and it's as alienating as any Brechtian technique. This is in sharp contrast to works by artists such as Egon Schiele who captured no less angst and shock but retain their effectiveness because they're shown in concert with the brittle frailty of people.

There are two different stories at play in 'European Masters'. In one there is the battle for the visual identity of a nation, the discovery and rejection of a mythology. The second only just begins in the final room. It shows how the early Twentieth Century was less a crossroads for art and more a spawning ground. Multiple avant gardes and modernisms spring from it, the battle becoming one for self-expression rather than a single path or movement. All through this show there are works of power and beauty: August Macke's 'Naked girl with Headscarf', Kirchner's 'Reclining Woman in White Chemise' or Ferdinand Hodler's 'Childhood' all have the power to move. As an exhibition this challenges and enlightens which is in itself a fine thing, that much of the work might not be to my taste doesn't really matter and I'm simply glad the NGV have tried to tell an important story.

On Runa Islam @ MCA

There's something comforting throughout the MCA's small but stunning Runa Islam retrospective, the analogue flicker of 16mm film, the gentle hum of spindle and the clatter of sprockets creates a welcoming soundtrack. The retro technology has a qualitative effect on all of the film pieces on show, there's a warmth and an intimacy in the medium that reflects much of the subject matter. The first couple of works one comes across borrow heavily from the past. One might be an Andy Warhol screentest, another takes the cold light of Fassbinder and the slow deliberate pans of Antonioni, together this seems like a visit to the past. However as you watch and spend time in and with these works you feel something very different. The icy nihilism of Warhol is nowhere to be found nor is the dispassionate dialectic of the modernist filmmakers, this work feels much more tangible and sympathetic but no less intellectually rigorous. In fact 'Assault', Islam's version of the Warhol 'Screen Tests' breaks down the cold modernist stare by involving and implicating the viewer. Here a young androgyne man is filmed having light shone through coloured gels directly into his eyes. To see the piece properly we have to stand in front of the translucent screen it's projected on, this when the light is at its strongest and the subject squints so does the viewer. It's tricksy and not entirely successful but it shows something that makes Islam interesting, she privileges the senses over the intellectual. This makes her far more affecting than any number media theorists and it gives the work depth and intrigue.

The most ambitious work here 'Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot' hints at narrative as it focusses on reality and representation. In it a concrete multi-storey car park sits above a non-descript town like a spaceship landed. The film explores the car park and issues arising. The mildewed concrete of a Sixties municipal edifice are contrasted with the brilliant orange of chairs in a restaurant, and immediately a space is created between the idea of town planner's utopia and urban decay. The camera takes on a dispassionate and clinical role as it surveys the building, it is geometrically gorgeous but sits oddly amongst Victorian terraces and whilst this isn't a rant against brutalist architecture it is nonetheless unsettling. The name of the film can be pinned down to format and subject, Two interlinked reels are projected, on on to a small screen hanging in front of a much larger one. At times the images interact, most obviously when one screen has the camera moving around the exterior of the car-park and on the other the same movement is played out on an architect's scale model. The whole film gives a sense of dislocation, between people and their environment, between intention and result and between aesthetics and lived reality. It rewards viewing and is much more satisfying than its tricksy conceit might suggest.

'The House Belongs To Those Who Inhabit It' simply explores a derelict warehouse. A projection onto a suspended screen hangs in front of a dark wall but also seems to cut through it. A camera with a narrow field of vision, giving no sense of anything peripheral simply scans its surroundings, up and down and panning along. The movement and the blinkered field is unsettling, the whole picture refuses to reveal itself and as the camera moves around it takes on an urgent personality. we can imagine our surroundings but we will only believe our eyes. The screen becomes our aperture into another world from which we have been separated and in doing so it makes us much more conscious and appreciative of its details. In fact this is a familiar theme across the works here, Islam is concerned with the particularity of the senses, of their capacity to comfort or confuse us.

The heightened sensory property of film is again explored in 'Be the first to see what you see as you see it'. It looks like Fassbinder but feels like Hitchcock. In its almost narrative a girl in a china showroom lifts, rocks and spins pieces of porcelain. Watching her as coffee pots wobble is like waiting for a bomb to explode in a thriller. Islam doesn't just rely on the implicit fragility of china as symbol but layers on a brittle naturalistic soundtrack and has the protagonist touch the fragile crockery in extreme close up. What Islam manages to do is contrast experience with imagination, the whole film is a tease, we expect something to smash soon but it is always simply concentrating on the physicality of the object. The effect is at once hypnotic and thought provoking.

Runa Islam is a film buff's delight. She takes on Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', almost everything by Antonioni and the saturated directness of Fassbinder. This magpie borrowing makes it easy to see the works here as small essays on film history and the properties of a medium. It seems to me this is a lazy and narrow reading of what she does as despite these elements the films are far more emotional and visceral than conceptual. What Islam does is use the properties of film, when stripped of the demands of narrative, to explore how we experience our surroundings whether mediated by film or not. This makes the films curious and ruminative, they challenge us through our senses rather than through contrived visual oxymorons. The fact that these films have such a physical presence and effect is testimony that this is much more than 'art as lecture'. Runa Islam is asking us to consider how we see the world rather than how we see film, that's a far more righteous challenge.

On 'Exit Through The Gift Shop'

I just can't help myself. The more I think about 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' a film by stencil artist Banksy the more I get the whiff of bad faith and it's not a smell I like. That's not to say it isn't smart, at times thoughtful and always entertaining - it's just that it looks and sounds like someone who's done really well out of a fairly modest situationist-lite pop-art derivative complaining about all the factors that have allowed him to be successful. That's not terribly edifying.

The story is fairly simple. An amiable French caricature, Thierry Guetta, obsessively films a new and growing generation of street artists. Eventually the camera turns on him and the film becomes a document of his bombastic and derivative entry into the art world. It's very funny. Guetta, or 'Mr BrainWash' as he styles himself once he becomes an artist, is a classic comic creation. He has the lack of self awareness that makes for great mockumentary characters, the film becomes "Inspector Clouseau meets Spinal Tap with a spray can". Of course the 'is he, isn't he?' question is the viral heart of the film. Mister Brainwash looks very much like a comic creation, his history seems to coincide with that of the production of the film. He is both its subject an its creation and the ambiguity around whether this is a real documentary of not can only be good for box-office.

A lot of things ring just wrong enough to make you smell le rat. The main one for me, perhaps with an English ear, is the sound of Banksy's diction. His observations sound well scripted and badly acted, even with his voice going through a distorting filter it's clear that this isn't spontaneous speech. Some of the wrongness is probably imaginary, like the uncanny resemblance between Thierry and Rob Schnieder, but still distracting. It feels like a big in-joke. The fact that Mr Brainwash provided the cover for Madonna's album 'Celebration' makes you think like it might be. Throughout you can almost hear the smug laughter of celebrities imagining they're being transgressive.

There's plenty to like about Banksy. He's not just a smug post-pop arsehole he's genuinely witty (visually and verbally) and he uses absurd juxtapositions for the right reasons. His kissing coppers and Ramallah wall stencils are clever and righteous, they undermine power through wicked humour. He quotes from art history relentlessly but you sense that he's only doing it to create a shared objective base for the twist of satire he brings to his subject. That said it's undeniable that Banksy is a bit of a one line joke, the images are conceptual jokes that feel both right and wrong, you smile, maybe laugh and then they're gone. This film's a bit like that. Banksy can't be held responsible for the imitators who have followed in his wake but he can't pretend not to have benefitted from the street art boom. 'Wall and Piece', the book he published in 2005 is a bestseller reaching out to the alternative middlebrow coffee table market.

I don't have anything against anti-establishment artists making money, far from it. However I do have a natural inclination for intellectual rigour. Creating a crass talentless version of yourself and watching him succeed in just the same cultural and commercial milieu you thrive in doesn't seem all that smart. Thierry puts on a massive post-modern mess of a pop art spectacle. Of course people come to it, but that doesn't make them stupid.

Ostensibly the joke is on the art market. Prices for street art rise and rise and the implicit message in the film is "you idiots will buy ANYTHING". That might be a fair critique but it's one made fairly gently, it would have been interesting to see the kind of collectors who will pay millions of dollars to see what started on a wall put into a frame. Instead, particularly in the shots of the concert sized crowds waiting to get into MBW's show, the joke is on the great unwashed who've been lured by the bait of free art. It's a cheap shot but one supposes more comfortable than potentially upsetting the real money who buy the real Banksy.

So the film comes with a giant set of inverted commas. The ironies are trowelled on, but the one never explored is that we seem to be watching a rogue and anti-establishment art form complaining about how it has been commoditized even when many of the artists concerned, from Banksy himself through to Shepard Fairey have thriving industries based around them. It's a fairly conservative moan and even if the whole movie is an elaborate spoof it isn't a terribly radical one. I quite like the Banksy who picks big targets, who takes on power with pisstaking and releases a dangerous idea with a spraycan. Given the context of some of the fights he's picked 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' all seems a bit too smug and whingey.

On Alfred Stieglitz @ AGNSW

Perhaps nothing is so hard to look at and value as photography. The ubiquity of the photographic reproduction, the infinite possibilities of photoshop and the blur between art and advertising has meant that art photography is less and less compelling. That makes an exhibition such as Alfred Stieglitz: The Lake George Years (worth a click for the excellent video introduction) at Sydney's AGNSW all the more shocking. A show that might have been of interest for its historical content, exploring the work of genuine pioneer, eschews trickery, celebrity and massive scale and delivers something quietly breathtaking.

I didn't expect to have my prejudices about size and art reinforced here but they were. It's refreshing to see images so small and so perfect. Some of my nervousness about photography is in its easy default to massive prints that bludgeon the viewer. This monumental urge undermines an art form that has an enormous potential for intimacy. Intimacy is precisely what we see here. Fittingly the Stieglitz exhibition is situated a couple of floors above the AGNSW's abstraction show. Stieglitz uses the camera and film as neutral tools for expression, much of the work here is virtually abstract, tiny essays on light and dark and the music of nature. It's difficult to imagine how strange these images must have looked. Roughly contemporaneous with cubism and expressionism the earliest works here cut up urban America and arrange it in grids of silver grey and black.

The studies of light and weather might be Stieglitz's most radical contribution to art. In painting they would be both impressionist and expressionist, in the context of photography they show how the camera could compose in light and form rather than simply record, that it could capture some of the sublime effect nature has upon us without simply describing it. These series, the 'Equivalents', 'Songs of the Sky' and 'Music' get close to the central paradox of photography: How does a technology that chemically records the fall and reflection of light on objects allow an artist to express their own vision? Stieglitz uses the light bouncing off and passing through clouds to turn them into abstract expressions, we don't see clouds as much as we see the shine and depth of greys that seems to capture the sublimity of nature. The cloud images are more romantic than they are meteorological.

Stripping the images of earthbound reference Stieglitz relies instead on the way that the natural light interplays with the structural formation of the clouds. He isn't a child seeking familiar or anthropomorphic shapes in the skies rather he's exploring the possibilities of dark and light and how they might provide analogues for emotion and experience. This isn't stage set chiaroscuro but a sensitive play with pattern and contrast and how they might evoke something deep within the viewer.

Photographic portraits have had a profound and disruptive effect on the painted portrait, what has been for centuries the core of art and patronage. Stieglitz's portraits of friends and fellow artists show a restraint that's touching and rare today but, at the same time, betray the stylistic signatures of an auteur. These understated image often include a compositional element of a framing device, as shape or object, within the rectangle of the image and behind the sitters head. It's a simple device that borrows from the painted technique. The sitters head is isolated, we focus on the essentials. The effect also creates a perspectival link somewhere behind the sitter, so we can't help but feel Stieglitz has taken us into their space. But perhaps most touchingly Stieglitz has created a fragile halo, a remnant from an ancient tradition, behind these naked faces conferring on them some kind of modernist beatification.

The series of studies by Stieglitz of his lover and later wife Georgia O'Keefe are stunning in the tender proximity between subject and artist. Taken over a period of thirty years they are a clear a melding of obsessive love and pictorial technique as any set of pictures, perhaps even those Bonnard painted of his wife Marthe over almost fifty years. These photographs might be unique as the added frisson of O'Keeffe as artist/muse adds layers of possible meaning.

O'Keeffe has suffered as have other female modernists, Frida Kahlo and Camille Claudel come to mind, from a feminist tendency toward hagiography that privileges biography over work. It's understandable but it lessens the impact of the artworks themselves and that's a shame. What makes the portraits of O'Keeffe so remarkable is that they feel so unmediated by culture, history or interpretation. It's a raw vision of an artist that is a meditation in flesh and geometry and light. When seen as a series these pictures are achingly beautiful, they paint a portrait of love and trust but their repetition also reminds us that Stieglitz, who can't of been short of sitters, was simply endlessly fascinated by his lover and wife.

The portrait, from 1931, when they had been married for seven years, reduces the artist to her hands cradling a sun bleached cow's skull. Of course that skull is a familiar and powerful motif from O'Keeffe's paintings but here it looks chalkier, like unglazed porcelain, as she cradles it in tanned hands. The skull serves as reference to both art and nature but most powerfully to the omnipresence of mortality, the way the hands hold it is almost an embrace, one doesn't need to understand the relationship between artist and sitter here to get a whiff of the complex and profound feelings at play.

Stieglitz's intention is clearly to capture the essence of someone. This makes his use of hands fascinating, they appear as body parts, almost abstracted, but they are always more than objects and retain the essential personality of their owner almost like ones voice. Hands and gestures are fascinating because we never perceive them as still, so even in a hundred year old photograph they seem to be captured at a point between movements. Similarly whatever this human essence is it has infinite manifestations, people are too complex despite what we might believe of an artist's powers and a single image will never suffice. Stieglitz is like someone chasing light around the facets of a diamond, he seems to know the best he can do is capture moments and angles in light. He uses O'Keefe's hands, her human geometry but never tries to reduce her, just to capture something fleeting. Many of these photographs, and in a sense all of them in their totality, are like haiku in gelatin silver.

Stieglitz is too easily bundled in amongst a rush to the reductions of modernism and cubism, the time he inhabits and the new technology he is stretching make that almost inevitable. On looking at the images here it feels like a mistake to label him that simply. We can see hints of the abstract, the grids of Mondrian or the blocks of Braque, but his work is as human and as smudged as a fingerprint. It is this sense of flaw and serendipity is what makes him so different to photographers like Man Ray for Stieglitz seems to embrace the beauty of imperfection. The memorable works here inhabit a world of infinite shining gradations between black and white, they are expansive and open rather than reductive and finished, in doing this Stieglitz's greatest innovation might be to take a static form and make it so intensely moving.

On The Path To Abstraction @ AGNSW

Currently 'creativity' is a word rarely uttered in art word circles. The importance of the concept, the contradiction and the hones paradox is king, clothed or not, and the idea of an individual impulse to seek form and shape for an interior impulse is smiled at as being hopelessly romantic. In that post-modern art school context one might shy away from a portmanteau show about the phenomenon of abstraction, expecting it to be full of dogma and theory. Happily that's not the case. 'Paths To Abstraction' at Sydney's AGNSW feels a little like exhibition as lecture, but that shouldn't sound like faint praise. Throughout the rooms there hangs such an intricate gossamer web of influence and impulse that rather than an harangue this lecture feels like the best sort, a gentle and persuasive nudge toward connection and insight.

A modest selection of Whistler begins the show. Straightaway it's an interesting hang (curatorially that is, the staging is pretty modest given the sensory possibilities and later a single red room feels like it's been left over from something else) the two Whistler pieces show his astonishing dive into a musical palette of smudged impressions. 'Nocturne: Black and Gold' from 1875 is striking for its gentle introspective depiction of an explosive shower of fireworks and for the way that a black wash, the fingerprints of vertical drips and a sneeze of gold can capture something so perfectly. The smear of a Victorian night gives away little but captures all. The paint is less redolent of smoke and meteorological effects than it is the blur between perception and memory. Like so much in this exhibition a small canvass feels like the epicenter of something seismic. That's reinforced when he's hung next to impersonators, one of whom appears to be a young Picasso.

What strikes one as impressive throughout is not so much the paths taken as the impulses that have driven artists toward the abstract. The number of groups and movements represented through Impressioninsts, Fauvists, Constructivists, Cubists, Expressionists, Nabis and Futurists begin to demonstrate that abstraction is less a formal style than a communicative necessity. It's certainly possible to see tracks that link artists and images, intentional or not Cezanne to Analytical Cubism looks the groove of a well trodden short cut, but these aren't as interesting as seeing (or sometimes just feeling) the shared impulse between visually dissimilar works. The breadth of colour and shape and construction serve a question to the modernist notion of abstraction as being a purely painterly approach that separated paint from subject or object. Braque's analysis of shape is a response to an accelerating and mechanizing world just as the Futurists try to mould a new kind of speed and change in pigment. Again and again artists appear to be wrestling at the edge of their practice, forcing something more onto the canvass than they've seen before. It's like watching the transition between thought and expression again and again, each time with fewer boundaries.

The sheer eroticism of so much of the work here shouldn't be understated. Before the Ab-Ex model of artist as priapic savant had been established the sheer lubricity of form and colour that writhes from these pictures can only have been shocking. As figurative subjects begin to melt then artists are left with form, shape and materials, the physicality of a lot of the paintings is sensuous and sexy but the visual interplay, the rhymes and responses takes you to the most intimate relationships. Where sex is most literally apparent, the nudes of Bonnard and Delaunay, they take on a delirious character. It's almost as though El Greco's holy spirit has become the vibration filled air of desire (Maurice Denis' more devout Calvary might remind us of that master of Spain too). There are three versions of Robert Delaunay's 'Nude Woman Reading' and as the voyeuristic scene becomes less representative, the connections looser, the shapes more fetishized and symbolic of a thigh or a buttock it becomes more lubricous and affecting. The book and table retain their physical image and the woman fades, making Delaunay's subject nothing less than sex itself.

This is the great discovery of abstraction. That one can capture essence. Matisse's 'Nude in the Woods' is both essential and conceptual. You're immediately struck by the pinks and just enough hint of a posture to make the title redundant. The fuschia seems to expand and populate the painting, echoed by lilac blocks of sky. Pink is the brilliant tonal analog of flesh, the image is overtaken by it fleshiness, its nudeness, just as dropping a nude into a landscape possesses the rest of the image. Matisse goes further, the nude itself is not the pinkest area of the picture, it's the scratchiest lumpiest. Even as he pushed himself into the abstract Matisse uses colour to show something perfectly flawed and human. It's a small painting but it contains so much it's dizzying.

One of the brilliant and refreshing elements here is the equal weight given to lithographs. woodcuts and other print-making techniques. The relatively easy dissemination of editioned works on paper is another thread that winds around and across this path to abstraction. So too does the demand of media where limitations of means inspire the most direct and economical expression. Kandinsky's 'Blue Rider' might be as influential as any work here, and it shares a lineage with Gaugin's tribal woodcuts and Munch's interior projections. The woodcut might have been as important in the spread of a more abstract essentialist art as the printing press had been the ideas and techniques of linear perspective in that earlier seismic shift. Some of the works on paper are sublimely beautiful and they highlight masters of different media, like Gaugin and especially Bonnard. It's good not to see them relegated to the margins.

The show is not perfect, the final room entitled 'the limits of abstraction' feels like a stumble on the path. It is neither a resolution or the posing of a question to take out into the world. And, to be honest, Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel has probably spun round enough shows about enough things for it not to shed much light on where this particular path leads to. The best themed shows reveal something about ourselves far more than they shine a light on particular artists. As an exercise in topography 'Paths to Abstraction' is interesting, however as a demonstration of the human mind and its desperate and essential need to communicate the unspeakable and ineffable it throws up echoes, shadows and harmonies that will stay with viewers every time they encounter the boring formalist and theoretical explanations for the modern and conceptual. That ability to make us look at fare more recent work differently an better makes this show a success.

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.