Zones of Contact
2006 Sydney Biennale June-August
SPEECH talks with Rebecca Belmore about the Sydney Biennale:
'… It was almost like I was never there. It was the second time. I had been at Pier 2/3 in Sydney in 1998. It’s strange to go such a distance to almost exactly the same spot and never have any sense of Australia.
There was funding for us to go to Australia and New Zealand from Canada, to connect with Australian Aboriginals and Maoris, in the 1990’s but I didn’t go then.
The Biennale puts a lot of pressure on you to be clever in an intense and simple way. Trying to fit into someone else’s ideas of what they want you to say. It’s a game trying to figure out the curators desires and your own. Many voices, many places, about political issues, but it wasn’t clear what the message was. Was it that the world is a terrible place and we’re all fucked? When you are in this company of voices is it for people to come to the Biennale, as tourists, to see how horrible it is in all these places?'
Rebecca BelmoreUntitled I 2004 inkjet print on paper 150 x 104cm
courtesy of the artist, photo Donna H. Hagerman
The Party's Over
see Lowe's comment
SPEECH talks with Rebecca Belmore about the Sydney Biennale:
'… It was almost like I was never there. It was the second time. I had been at Pier 2/3 in Sydney in 1998. It’s strange to go such a distance to almost exactly the same spot and never have any sense of Australia.
There was funding for us to go to Australia and New Zealand from Canada, to connect with Australian Aboriginals and Maoris, in the 1990’s but I didn’t go then.
The Biennale puts a lot of pressure on you to be clever in an intense and simple way. Trying to fit into someone else’s ideas of what they want you to say. It’s a game trying to figure out the curators desires and your own. Many voices, many places, about political issues, but it wasn’t clear what the message was. Was it that the world is a terrible place and we’re all fucked? When you are in this company of voices is it for people to come to the Biennale, as tourists, to see how horrible it is in all these places?'
Rebecca BelmoreUntitled I 2004 inkjet print on paper 150 x 104cm
courtesy of the artist, photo Donna H. Hagerman
The Party's Over
see Lowe's comment
posted by speech at
5:07 AM
3 Comments:
Why a stupid rumination? Why would you hyphenate "meant to be together"?
To Geoff:
Elegant explanation, though I was just joshing about the hyphens.
We could write
other things on a whiteboard, like the economy, (stupid) that don't make sense .. a list of stupid things to go over in the mind. Stupid rumination. But that's not what you mean.
These days I only explore works that I haven't seen. But it's a "flat world" not a "level world", which would imply equality.
Thinking about that Gormley work after I came back from Sydney, I wished I had time and money enough to produce a bunch of those terracotta figures and take them back to the biennale, arrange them around the biennale venues in small clusters as though they are socialising, being in communities, being like humans rather than mere components of a spectacle which I agree was a depressingly Western vision.
A significant problem I found with the biennale was that for all its dealings with 'zones of contact', it contained almost no reference or acknowledgement of its own location in Sydney. As though it was floating nebulously rather than being in Sydney. And to me this betrayed a grounding too much in theory and too little in practice.
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