Eyeline Publishing Limited Article Title: Enchantment and its Discontents. Magic Object: The 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Author: David Corbet Issue: 85 Pages: 36-41 Year: 2016 © Eyeline and contributing authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Eyeline Publishing Limited c/- QUT Visual Arts Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove Qld 4059 Australia Ph 61 7 3138 5521 Fax 61 7 3138 3974 Email info@eyelinepublishing.com Website www.eyelinepublishing.com Jacqui Stockdale, The Offering, 2015. From the series The Boho. Type C print, 139 x 105.5cm. Courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne. ENCHANTMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS MAGIC OBJECT: THE 2016 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART DAVID CORBET M agic Object was an exhibition of seductive materiality, with a lot to like in curator Lisa Slade’s selection of twentyfive Australian artists of admirable cultural, age and gender diversity. Kate Rohde’s vivid wallpaper installations (Ornament Crimes, 2015) set a high chromatic tone before one descended to the lower level galleries at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), where the largest component of the biennial was situated. Here Hiromi Tango’s vibrant mixed media installation, Lizard Tail (breaking cycle), 2015, provided the initial coup de theatre. 36 eyeline 85 The feeling of entering an otherworldly realm was very notably enhanced by subtle and subdued lighting design, which created dramatic foci for different works, opened up intriguing sightlines and engendered a sense of discovery. Adjacent to Tango’s work, a large and atmospheric space offered a vista of Danie Mellor’s photomedia-based installation (A universe of things, 2016) and Abdul Rahman Abdullah’s life-sized floor-work (Merantau, 2015)—a carved and painted figure in a canoe with a cockerel as sole passenger. These gave on to Heather B. Swann’s dimly-lit chamber of sinister totemic figures named, as it turns out, after May Gibbs’ Banksia men from the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie stories, but holding their own admirably without this subtext. Other standouts for both their artistic and installation values were Nell’s large floor work (The Wake, 2014-16), Glenn Barkley’s constellation of ceramic objects (Temple of the Worm, 2016), clustered jewel-like in their own tomato-red-walled gazebo, and Tom Moore’s whacky wonderland of glass objects (Bureau of Comical Ecologies, 2016). Garry Stewart and Thomas Pachoud, Proximity Interactive, 2014. Interactive multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists and Australian Dance Theatre, Adelaide. Photograph Chris Herzfeld, Camlight Productions. Fiona McMonagle showed a delicate, large-scale projected animation (The park at the end of my road, 2015-16), dreamily created from her figurative watercolours, some of which were also featured as framed images. Other spaces were configured somewhat more conventionally to accommodate smaller two-dimensional and sculptural works, with lighting adjusted to purpose, providing a sense of both separation and connection between interlinked rooms. Gareth Sansom’s arresting paintings enjoyed a room to themselves, the closest thing to an autonomous white cube (actually painted black) in the biennial. Over at Samstag, Juz Kitson’s potent ceramic/mixed media assemblages shared the large ground floor space with Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s ribald ceramic totems, and Chris Bond’s deadpan series of crafted and painted book simulacra. Upstairs Tarryn Gill created a theatrical, sonic world of spooky heads and other sewn and woven objects, arising from her research residency at London’s Freud museum (Guardians series, 2015-16). Nearby were Bluey Roberts’s (Ngarrindjeri/ Kokatha) emu egg creations, and a series of restrained photomedia works by Danie Mellor (On a noncorreolationist thought I–XIV, 2016). Garry Stewart & Australian Dance Theatre presented an extraordinary, interactive video projection (Proximity Interactive, 2014) in which the viewer, imagecaptured and mediated, could participate. Having set the visual scene, so to speak, I want to consider these and other works in the context of the biennial’s thematics. The curator’s fascination with the Wunderkammer is well known, and she foregrounds this in her catalogue introduction, reminding us that it is ‘neither a recent nor a novel phenomenon in contemporary art making and curating’. Slade alludes to it as a ‘means of colliding the historic and contemporary, art and non-art— and for investigating our antipodean position in the world, particularly the world that stands outside European knowledge and experience’.1 An important prior expression of this approach was the exhibition she curated in 2010 at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery, titled Curious Colony: a twenty eyeline 85 37 irst century Wunderkammer, in which early colonial works and artefacts were juxtaposed with those of contemporary artists. There the intention was clear—the Wunderkammer was both a framework for diverse temporal and genre collisions, and a means of interrogating colonial epistemologies, taxonomies and aesthetic regimes. This was less evident in Magic Object, indeed the curator emphasised that ‘this neo-Wunderkammer is neither a thematic approach nor a conceptual straitjacket’, and that the aim is ‘to enchant the viewer with its magic’. This was certainly achieved, at least on irst pass. It was only after returning the next day that I began to have misgivings—a nagging feeling that some essential ingredient was missing. I should stress that this is a highly subjective view, and is not intended to detract from the show’s undoubted success, much less the exhibited works themselves, all of which were of the highest quality. This is the kind of national survey show that AGSA does well, and much credit is due for bringing such an array of new work by leading artists—wellknown and not so well-known—to South Australian audiences. My reservations had more to do with my own expectations of the role and purpose of a national biennial, and this inevitably intersects with the host organisation’s methods, aims, resources and constraints. It may be useful to compare the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (ABAA) with Australia’s two other equivalent events. QAGOMA’s Asia Paciic Triennial (APT) works with an internal curatorial team across its two interlinked museum spaces, while the independent Biennale of Sydney (BoS) hires a new curator for each edition, and is staged across multiple museum and non-museum spaces. ABAA sits somewhere between these models, varying between guest and in-house curators, and using a variety of spaces, although irmly anchored by its host institution, AGSA. The last edition (Dark Heart, 2014) was curated by its director Nick Mitzevich, and Lisa Slade is a senior staff curator. ABAA’s implicit claim is to be the third among equals, with the status of a national survey—the oldest and most prestigious biennial of Australian art. It has, arguably, a duty to punch at the same conceptual weight as these international shows. With variable success, APT and BoS set out ambitious discursive programs and aim to expand audience expectations, sometimes to the point of discomfort, by giving artists and exhibition designers the opportunity to challenge the established rhetoric of display, by pushing against the conventions of the museum, and by questioning what art is, or is becoming. There are inherent risks in this approach, and occasional spectacular failures, but I suggest this the proper role of the biennial exhibition form. My question, then, is whether AGSA’s ABAA sets itself the same provocative goal, whether this is the demanding standard we should bring to it, and the context in which it is to be assessed? Or does it have other intentions? Does AGSA see its biennial as a 38 eyeline 85 from top: Installation view 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object featuring Tom Moore, Bureau of Comical Ecologies, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Robyn Stacey, Comfort Inn Riviera, SAMHRI, 2015. Type C print, 110 x 146.7cm. Courtesy the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney, and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane. crowd-pleaser rather than a crowd-challenger, for instance? If so, there is nothing wrong with that, but I think we need to know. Perhaps its state-funded status and Adelaide Festival calendar-slot imposes artistic constraints as well as the inevitable inancial ones. In my view Magic Object erred towards safe, known territory. Visual joy, yes. New art, yes, but nothing confounding; no challenge to the museum’s ‘docility’; no real dissensus; no speaking of the unspeakable. This was disappointing, given the enticing thematics and the curator’s interest in intersecting art, science and other forms of enquiry, an approach with a rich and growing history of exhibition-making worldwide. Its title, Magic Object, hints at an authoritative, even deinitive exploration of these terms through art and non-art, yet I was left with the impression that these from left: Tarryn Gill, Guardians (Siamese Twins), 2014. Mixed media (including foam, fabrics, synthetic hair and speakers), 45 x 41 x 25cm. Courtesy the artist. Photograph Kim Tran; Tiger Yaltangki, Pitjantjatjara people, Indulkana, APY Lands, South Australia, Self-portrait, 2014. Oil on canvas, 51 x 36cm. Courtesy the artist and Iwantja Arts, Indulkana, APY Lands, South Australia. beguiling works could have been just as easily grouped under some other rubric. It is not a negative, or even especially noteworthy, to observe that all the bodies of work at ABAA16 largely functioned autonomously, celebrating their own mediums, meanings and mythologies, independent of the biennial’s theme, or of each other. While the physical juxtaposition of works suggested connections and shared narrative threads, in fact there were few, and indeed the catalogue proposes ‘a space where free associations and insights are made possible by both artists and audiences’.2 The danger is that the thematic framework can end up looking like marketing rhetoric—a reading of magic at its most supericial. As with Dark Heart in 2014, which some suggested was not nearly dark enough, ABAA16 might better have been left untitled than suggest the complex historical, social and metaphysical practices that fall under the cultural realm of magic. To my eye only Nell’s installation, referencing Japanese haniwa (tomb ornaments), really delved into the mysteries of ritual and mimesis, and the artistic transformation of simple materials into objects of metaphysical power. To equate Michael Zavros’s witty photorealist paintings or Gareth Sansom’s works under the same premise arguably undermined the signiicance of all three bodies of work. Likewise senior Nyikina artist Loongkoonan’s commanding series of small canvasses (Bush Tucker in Nyikina Country series, 2006) and Pitjantjatjara painter Tiger Yaltangki’s self-portraits, are all highlights of the show, but not magic objects in any special sense, just superb paintings. Conversely, Bardi elder Roy Wiggan’s ilma or dancing rods are plainly objects of deep ritual signiicance, however despite atmospheric lighting their display stripped them of context and reduced them to decorative objects on a wall. Clare Milledge’s multi-layered works also seemed strangely denuded of their usual powerful presence and would have beneited from a more isolated and theatrical staging. Both Juz Kitson and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran make works of compelling presence and materiality, yet their cheek-by-jowl display oddly undermined rather than enhanced the power of each, suggesting a false equivalence between works with a supericial commonality (that is, ‘fetishised’ ceramic objects) but a very different genesis and cultural meaning. The earlier-mentioned juxtaposition of Mellor’s and Abdullah’s works likewise seemed to set up a false contextual promise. These remarks are gripes rather than major problems, an inevitable result of space constraints, and they may be a little harsh on the museum’s design team, which has nevertheless delivered a beautifully and thoughtfully mounted show. However I think it is legitimate to say that it is the interstices between works—spatial, thematic, narrative—which generate an exhibition’s higher resonances, and one might expect this to be especially so in an exhibition which posits juxtaposition and polysynchronicity as method, and evokes the Wunderkammer as a critical metaphor. The biennial’s catalogue introduction evokes French curator Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition Theatre of the World at MONA3 as a precedent, and one well might add the work of New South Wales curator Ace Bourke,4 and Parallel Collisions, the 12th ABAA in 2012, curated by Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor. Consider also Harald Szeemann’s exercises in ‘organized chaos’;5 the ‘contaminations’ of Brazilian curators Paulo Herkenhoff, Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz;6 Okwui Enwezor’s provocative decolonial strategies;7 the conceptual cores and multispeciesism of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev;8 and eyeline 85 39 clockwise from top left: Hiromi Tango, Lizard Tail (breaking cycle), 2015. Pigment print on paper, 81 x 170cm. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney; Danie Mellor, A universe of things, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Merantau, and Pepai Jangala Carroll, Walungurru, 2015; Nell, The Wake; Kate Rohde, Ornament Crimes. Installation views, 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace,9 to cite just a few examples. These deining exhibitions have generated provocative new models for curatorial and museum practice worldwide, in which the work of scientists and ‘pseudo-scientists’, botanists, explorers, physicists, philosophers, writers, psychoanalysts and mystics from many eras have been juxtaposed with the work of prominent and emerging contemporary artists. Far from deterring audiences, these approaches have encouraged and challenged them, and attracted new ones which might never have thought to step inside an art museum. Magic Object belongs, I think, to this tradition, and I would love to see what its curator might have done if afforded a wider canvas for her mission of ‘colliding the historic and contemporary, art and nonart’. Robyn Stacey’s camera obscura installations and still photographs hinted at this, and it would have been exciting to see more interactions with the social, natural and hard sciences, with AGSA’s own collection, and through technological experiment. Disappointingly I did not get to see Stacey’s camera obscura at Carrick Hill, nor the Santos Museum of Economic Botany, where Tom Moore had additional 40 eyeline 85 work. I did however get to the JamFactory, where a mini-Wunderkammer was situated in vitrines in a small side gallery. Titled Lovers of Neptune’s Cabinet (after an 18th century Dutch collecting group), selected ABAA artists exhibited small-scale works inspired by the world of the shell. This complemented JamFactory’s own show Lola Greeno: Cultural Jewels, featuring the revered Tasmanian artist’s astonishingly beautiful shell necklaces and other sculptural works. Magic objects, undoubtedly, but tastefully and conventionally displayed as precious jewellery, as beits a design/craft gallery. Other notable artists I have not yet mentioned are Pepai Jangala Carroll (Walungurru/Kintore), a senior painter who has recently turned to ceramics with considerable success; Adelaide-based Louise Haselton, who showed her restrained sculptural assemblages; and Melbourne-based Jacqui Stockdale. Stockdale’s impressive series of eight large photographs (The Boho, 2015) were prominent at AGSA, with their own implicit room, and my immediate reading of these stylised and powerful portraits was of the politics of representation and cultural othering. They are no doubt that as well, but their more literal content is focused on Ned Kelly mythology, and the models (among them singer Paul Kelly) all carry objects ‘sourced from various souvenir shops in Glenrowan’. The catalogue suggests that the series ‘enhances the artist’s love affair with the souvenir, an object trinket or image to jog the memory, to take one back to (hopefully) that happy point of existence’.10 Hmmm. In concluding, I will make one more observation. It is sometimes said that, as a response to global uncertainty, societies tend to turn inwards—towards autobiographical narratives, inner worlds, whimsical mashups of popular culture. If true, why should artists be any different, faced as they are by the precariousness of the creative life? In a world facing political upheaval, the largest refugee crisis since the European wars, catastrophic climactic change, and stumbling blindly into the Anthropocene, this exhibition struck me as a reassertion, or perhaps celebration, of art’s redemptive ability to create self-contained worlds, ‘to enchant the viewer with its magic’. Yet art serves many purposes, and artists are a sentinel species. As well as being transported to private worlds, I also want to see the art which speaks of unease and cultural contestation, which offers new ways of understanding the complex clockwise from left: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Kali, 2015. Earthenware, glaze, gold and platinum lustre, 103 x 34 x 20cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery 9, Sydney. Photograph Simon Hewson; Loongkoonan, Nyikina people, Western Australia, Bush Tucker in Nyikina Country, 2006. Acrylic on linen, 61 x 61cm. Courtesy the artist and Mossenson Galleries, Perth; Glenn Barkley, Iznik Ignatz Potz, 2015. Earthenware, 7 pieces, various sizes, installation, dimensions variable. Private collection, Sydney. Courtesy the artist and Utopia Art Sydney; Clare Milledge, Unresolved Pineapple, 2015. Oil on tempered glass, bronze, 90x 90 x 0.4cm. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney. world in which we live. Can these agonistic tendencies co-exist in one exhibition? I think they can, and I think they should. I also believe that the format of a national biennial is the right locus for such a synthesis. I wondered then, and I still wonder now, why Magic Object left me wanting more, but perhaps this is a symptom of intellectual gluttony, and to be charmed and delighted is enough to be getting on with.  Notes 1. Lisa Slade, ‘Every Artist is a Conjuror’, in Lisa Slade and Art Gallery of South Australia, Magic Object: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2016, pp.18-66. 2. Ibid. 3. French curator Jean-Hubert Martin curated Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande halle de la Villette, Paris,1989; co-curated Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice in 2007; Theatre of The World at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, and Maison Rouge-foundation Antoine de Galbert, Paris, 2013; and Carambolages, Grand Palais, Paris 2016. 4. Australian curator Ace Bourke curated the inluential exhibitions Flesh and Blood at the Museum of Sydney in 1998/99, and Lines in the Sand at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre in 2008. 5. This is how Hans Ulrich Obrist described the late Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s methods at the Kunsthalle Bern, in Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lionel Bovier, A Brief History of Curating, Documents Series, JRP / Ringier; Les Presses du réel, Zurich/Dijon, 2008. Szeemann is possibly best known for his groundbreaking 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern. He was also director of Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany,1972, and of the Venice Biennales in 1999 and 2001. 6. Paulo Herkenhoff was the curator of Cultural Anthropophagy: The 24th Bienal De São Paulo, 1998. Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz were the curators of the exhibition Histórias Mestiças at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2014. 7. Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor directed Documenta 11 in 2002 and the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, among many other projects. 8. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated the 16th Biennale of Sydney, 2008; Documenta 13, Kassel, 2012; the 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015. 9. The title of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Gioni’s exhibition concept was inspired by the sculptural model crafted over several years in rural Pennsylvania, USA, by the Italian-American ‘outsider’ Marino Auriti, now in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. 10. Craig Judd, ‘This Thing’, in Slade and Art Gallery of South Australia, Magic Object : 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, op. cit., p.126. David Corbet is a freelance writer and curator, currently engaged in PhD research at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. Magic Object: The 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art was held from 27 February to 15 May 2016 at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at UniSA, JamFactory, Carrick Hill and the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. It was curated by Lisa Slade and included artists: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Glenn Barkley, Chris Bond, Pepai Jangala Carroll, Tarryn Gill, Louise Haselton, Juz Kitson, Loongkoonan, Fiona McMonagle, Danie Mellor, Clare Milledge, Tom Moore, Nell, Ramesh Mario-Nithiyendran, Bluey Roberts, Kate Rohde, Gareth Sansom, Robyn Stacey, Garry Stewart and the Australian Dance Theatre, Jacqui Stockdale, Heather B. Swann, Hiromi Tango, Roy Wiggan, Tiger Yaltangki and Michael Zavros. eyeline 85 41