When my boat comes in (detail), by Fiona Hall, 2002-ongoing.
Art
Heavy weather
by Tessa Laird
Impressive and affecting, the third Auckland Triennial shows that you can’t keep the world – in all its violence, hope and despair – out of contemporary art.
It’s a given in the art world that triennials and biennales exist to be complained about. You’d think that copious numbers of inter-national artists exhibiting at once would be a cause for celebration.
More often it’s an excuse to vent about who’s in and who’s out; curators cop flak for titles and themes, while artists are chastised for not fulfilling the brief.
Be warned: I’m not going to lambast Australian curator Victoria Lynn for Auckland’s third Triennial. Hardly a seasoned mega-show hopper, I confess to being impressed by the multi-venue Turbulence.
Lynn doesn’t deliver the frothy frisson that’s characteristic of “usual global suspects” expositions; there’s a lot to see, hear and feel in her show. There’s tangible pain that’s far from frothy: an emotive video talks about the Aboriginal Australian experience, viewers interact with images of women who have survived abuse, and a gutsy Guatemalan artist walks through the streets with her feet dipped in human blood, a memorial to massacre.
Turbulence does feel a little didactic at times, like the famously reviled 1993 Whitney Biennale in New York, which detractors proclaimed overly political and even downright ugly. One memorably offensive review compared the watershed exhibition to a waiting-room in the Department of Immigration. That show galvanised a backlash among US critics who felt that art was losing its aura in a bid to be politically correct. A return to formalism and beauty was touted, and still holds sway in some circles. But trying to keep the world out of art, the world in all its violence, hope and despair, is, I think, fundamentally futile.
Turbulence isn’t lacking its moments of beauty, but they are more affecting for the stories they tell. One of my favourites is Australian Fiona Hall’s When my boat comes in – an exquisite herbarium painted on vintage banknotes. Each delicate gouache leaf graces a note from the country of its origin; a simple conceit that provides endless visual pleasure, while underlining flows of capital and exploitation of natural resources. Ethiopian currency is painted with a leaf from the coffee tree; Chinese notes feature tea. Movements of people and crops are traced: the sweet potato, our kumara, originates in Guatemala, while the yam finds its home in Vietnam.
Even those staples we take for granted are contested by Alerta Roja (Red Alert) by the Costa Rican artist Lucia Madriz – rice, beans, corn and salt make up a skull, crossbones and stars on the floor. Reminiscent of Tibetan sand mandalas or Indian rangoli – both floor-based, temporary, devotional art forms – Alerta Roja is a warning rather than a talisman. All these basic peasant foods are being genetically modified; terminator seeds destroy seed-saving traditions that have lasted for thousands of years, and Third-World farmers bear the brunt of western scientific experimentation.
Exploitation of the Earth’s riches is further explored by Michal Rovner with her gleaming miniature LCD screens. The Israeli-American artist at first appears to be making tiny abstractions – but closer inspection reveals computer-animated vistas of oil pumps bobbing up and down, streams of oil flowing from them like ribbons, imagery that segues perfectly into new works by local artists John Pule and Yuk King Tan.
Tan revisits her firecracker wall drawings with Boomtown, a portrait of oil refineries in reference to the booming Chinese economy that she, now, based in Hong Kong, is a part of. Pule has always managed to straddle the worlds of commodifiable beauty and raw emotion.
A sure pick for Turbulence, Pule’s hiapo-inspired paintings have begun to feature lianas which, like Rovner’s rivulets of oil, are both flows of capital and ties that bind. Ragged clouds allude to violent weather as well as the violence of air travel: bringing people to new and indifferent lands, not to mention military interventions and terrorist attacks.
Kehe Tau Hauga Foou (To All New Arrivals) features an American Air Force jet dropping bombs on a mosque, which appears as a hallucination or a dream – something happening a world away but infecting our consciousness nonetheless.
Issues of peace or otherwise in the Middle East recur throughout the exhibition – even one of the most upbeat pieces, a seven-hour video of a dance marathon, turns out to be populated by young Palestinians. Their goofy boogie, their joviality despite exhaustion, is all the more poignant when you consider these people’s usual portrayal in the media as potential terrorists. Called They Shoot Horses, by the English artist Phil Collins, it’s utterly humanising in a way that dry documentary never could be.
There’s a huge amount of work from South and Central America, generous showings from Australasia, but less work from Asia than is usual for our region, minus of course the large and sprawling contribution of the Long March project along with local artists Daniel Malone and Kah Bee Chow (previewed by Tze Ming Mok in the Listener, March 17).
There is, however, a luscious serving of Orientalism at Artspace, with an elegant new work from local Sriwhana Spong, and the charmingly personal mail art relics of travels through South and South-east Asia by Greek artist Alexandros Georgiou.
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