July/August 09
Ancient Alchemy Faces the Future > NSW
Alchemists have been out of a job for centuries. It’s a dead profession alongside dragon slayer and wizard. Read More
Give it up for the rich guy: Off track with Andrew Mackenzie
Question: What did all the successful Young British Artists of the early 90’s share, besides their three-letter acronym YBA? Read More
Lost to Worlds > NSW
For more than two decades Anne Ferran has been one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists. Read More
Printed Matter > VIC
The boy has been all cut up and then – mercifully – put back together again but the fix-it job is far from seamless. Read More
The Act of Theatre > VIC
"I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged." Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present
By Tracey Clement
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. In 1979, he presented European Dialogue, still considered a landmark moment in the Biennale’s 35 year history. He was also artistic director in 1986 and 1988. In 2000, Waterlow chaired the international selection committee.
Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev is the artistic director of the upcoming Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions – Forms That Turn. When she leaves Sydney she will return to Turin, Italy and resume her post as Chief
Curator of Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art.
Tracey Clement got them together, sat back and let them talk. What follows is an edited excerpt from an intense, illuminating and inspirational conversation.
TC So, what is the role of the Biennale in general?
NW Well it began in 1973, when Australia was still very isolated in terms of sharing artistic practice between Australian artists and the rest of the world; that was its aim. And it was also at a time when, obviously there’d been the Venice Biennale, the first one, Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Sao Paulo, Documenta and at that time there was the Paris Biennale, they were the only ones. So it wasn’t a competitive market then at all.
CCB Today we are in a world where the art fairs are taking over the so called international exhibition platform. So I think the role of the biennale today, and Sydney being one of the oldest ones has the prestige to do it, is to maintain a space of freedom from the market; freedom for experimentation and for dialogue.
And it is true that now there are a lot of biennales, 104 last time I counted. But not all of them are curated, a lot of artists are not interested in the ‘just list of artists’ shows. They are more interested in having a curatorial and conceptual framework that the art fair doesn’t give them. Which is interesting, because at the time maybe when you were working it was all about freeing the exhibition and the artist from strong concepts. Harald Szeeman and all of you were very much about a network of artists without needing to define too strongly a conceptual articulation of the exhibition, that was felt as older, something of the fifties? So it’s strange how things shift!
NW I think it’s true, Harry Szeeman (et al), their belief was in the individual artist making a statement that had never been possible before. In the 1979 Biennale, I remember Mario Merz for example, coming to Australia and blazing a trail that nobody has forgotten! He was a man who accepted no boundaries at all: personally or artistically.
Mike Parr, College of Cardinals, 2005,
digital print, 186.5 x 126 cm. Courtesy of the artist
and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.
CCB Drinking and dancing on tables…
NW He did that at my house! But he produced astonishing work. He was the sort of cipher for that moment; he was totally iconoclastic in a way and believed that his artistic practice could move whatever needed to be moved and I think it did.
CCB I believe in that.
NW So do I. I’m forged in that belief and stupidly I still believe it. (Laughs)
CCB Well as Emily Dickinson says, I’m alone, are you alone too? That makes two of us! So that’s interesting. We share something through this different historical relevance.
NW We do. But I wonder if a younger, emerging generation of curators would feel that?
CCB I think they do. I’ll be bringing over a certain number of people, curators that I call comrades, like Raimundas Malasauskas from Lithuania. He is like a Fluxus person, radically disrupting the conventionality of the art world. So I think there are very young
curators who are breaking rules and who are interested in the freedom of an earlier generation.
NW Which is so vital. I remember well in European Dialogue, a group of local people paraded through the exhibition, on several occasions, in Ku Klux clan outfits with placards saying, ‘Decadent European shit!’
TC Carolyn, are you expecting anything like that?
CCB I don’t know. There’s such a self imposed repression in society now, so I think people have developed more subtle forms of resistance that are very, very strong. It’s not as confrontational, it’s more post feminist; because between Mario Merz and now there’s been feminism.
NW Oh absolutely. That made huge alternations.
CCB So it’s a different kind of radicality, and this is expressed in subtle ways in the show. With artist Lia Perjovschi I am writing (deceptive) wall texts. I mean it might seem like a small thing to you, opposed to
climbing on tables, but I don’t think so. In a society that is so controlled, to actually tell lies in a wall label is not a small thing. It potentially creates a certain number of consequences.
NW Do you see Australia as being less subversive than where you live? I mean it always strikes me that in Italy it doesn’t matter too much who is in government because people live the life they choose.
CCB I know Australia so little, but my instinct tells me that it’s a culture that has interiorised repression and being proper and correct. There’s a kind of self flagellation that I see: rules and regulations that contradict other rules and regulations, so that suddenly you are in this Kafka-ian universe where it’s really hard to do something that is out of the norm. So I do feel that there is no chaos here at all. (Laughs) No anarchy, no chaos! So it is very different from where I am and there is no tradition of anarchy here.
NW There is a tradition here. The Eureka Stockade for example, the Rum Rebellion. But, Australia has become truly over governed. On the other hand there are freedoms here that perhaps don’t exist in Europe, in the sense of possibilities, because there are no precedents. And I think extraordinary things can happen here, seemingly from nowhere.
CCB It’s true and I was actually going to add that. If you look at certain cultural tendencies, they start very early in Australia, for example post colonial studies or post modernist thinking or practice. But Nick, tell me about the fact that you were the first curator to bring traditional Aboriginal work, made today, into a contemporary art exhibition, because you did that.
NW I did. In 1979, and everybody followed since.
CCB That was pretty revolutionary at the time.
NW It was. When I was appointed to do the 1979 Biennale it seemed to me an absurdity not to include Aboriginal artists in this contemporary exhibition. The interesting thing, of course, was that the exhibition had a great deal of performance work within it, but the Aboriginal work was quite traditional.
CCB An interesting reversal.
TC And a perfect segue back to this year’s Biennale which will explore themes of reversal, revolution and inversion in unexpected ways at seven venues including the AGNSW, MCA, Pier 2/3 and Cockatoo Island.
The 16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions - Forms That Turn
18 June to 7 September 2008
Tracey Clement is an artist and writer
