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Canadian Art International: 2002 Biennale of Sydney

“Brilliant,” the British expression, does not really mean brilliant—just good. Australians say “fantastic.” How’s the lemonade? Fantastic. We’ll meet at three? Fantastic. North Americans say “wow,” which encapsulates something of fantastic’s Latin root, relating to visionary worlds of the imagination. When 2002 Biennale of Sydney curator Richard Grayson chose the title “(The World May Be) Fantastic,” this is what he was after.

The Sydney exhibition is not a sprawling international collection of works requiring a vague, general theme to accommodate them: the criterion for inclusion was that each work engage an imaginary world. These parameters embraced a number of Canadians—Kim Adams’ playful machines for travelling, Rodney Graham’s masterful Vexation Island and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Muriel Lake Incident.

Overall, the 60 artists in the exhibition divided into two camps. In the first, artists followed an impulse to collect in order to create artistic processes that defined their own world: Veli Granö’s pseudo-library of documentary photography, Salon de Fleurus’s reconstructions of modernist art exhibitions, Peter Hill’s imaginary, humorous Museum of Contemporary Ideas, Cang Xin’s photographs showing him licking the ground in front of major world monuments, Susan Hiller’s UFO-sighting stories and Vito Acconci’s collection of his own architectural and public-art projects were some of the many.

The second and more compelling camp was less obsessive and more visionary. They looked to contemporary experience as inspiration to imagine the possible. Among them, Glenn Brown called on the floating crystal worlds of Wenzel Hablik to present Böcklin’s Tomb (after Chris Foss)—an exquisitely painted city in the air, retrofitted for human use. Do-Ho Suh’s New York apartments were sewn from pink and grey translucent nylon. They were netherworlds, barely touching down to earth. The rooms looked ready to drift elsewhere with the brush of a hand. Other works following this thread were Jeffrey Vallance’s paranoid Clowns of Turin, skewed maps of the world drawn from memory by Emma Kay and Katarzyna Józefowicz’s crowd of people collaged from magazine photos of the world’s glitterati.

Marseille artist Gilles Barbier combined both approaches in Manifestation des Super Heros, where action figures snaked across the floor of the gallery, placards in hand, marching in protest. A headless red-and-purple figure exhorted us to “Boycott this Exhibition.” An Uzi-toting creature warned: “Children Keep Out.” There was an entreaty to “Render Politics Unpredictable, Lie to the Public Opinion Polls.” It was a protest of the world as it is, a place where safety of the imagination is not assured. In this it was aligned with the ambition of “(The World May Be) Fantastic,” which was to ask what the world is now—to ask how it can be distorted, changed and, parentheses aside, recreated as a fantastic (good, better, best) world.

Fall 2002

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