11th Biennale of Sydney
The concept of the "everyday" versus art theory
Walking around Pier 2 on Sydney Harbour, on brilliant spring day, its hard not to like the 11th Biennale of Sydney. Beat Streuli has a whole room dedicated to huge projections of colour photographs, taken at Bondi beach. Surfers, teenagers, mums and dads, everyone looks as heroic as a classical Greek statue. The bright light of the photographs contrasts eloquently with the cool shade and woody aroma of the pier.
Entering the space set aside for Ariane Epars work, I find myself looking at a perfectly ordinary corner of the pier building. There seems to be no art in it at all. I back up and read the title of the work.
"Emerald Green: Gritty dirt flicked from the floorboard cracks searching for the sea".
On closer inspection, I see the water lapping beneath the pier, greener than a lime soft drink. The attendant tells me the artist got down on her hands and knees to get the dirt out of the cracks between the boards, and on such a brilliant day this insane act seems like a wonderful gift, a labour of love.
Art critics think they review art shows. The truth is that art shows review their critics. The mainstream newspaper critics completely failed the test of this Biennale. Bruce James, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, was the only exception. The others just cranked out their prejudices.
If the 11th Biennale exposed the illiteracy of the mainstream critics when it comes to contemporary art, it also exposed the limits of the hyper-literacy of the art theory academy. In the superb catalogue for the show, Every Day, curator Jonathan Watkins explains how the impetus behind his Biennale is the growing rejection of the "operatic tendencies" of art theory.
Hence the anxiety among art theorists about this Biennale. Watkins has chosen the one concept from cultural theory that most consistently points to a way of escaping from its totalising clutches. The concept of the "everyday", borrowed from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, is expressly designed to lead theory out of its desires account entirely for the world in its own terms, and lead thinking back into the world and the things people do there, day to day, in their lives.
In his essay for the catalogue, Nikos Papastergiadis acknowledges the force of the desire in contemporary art for "overthrowing the tyranny of theory", but feels obliged to counsel caution. "It can lead to the idiocies and banalities of life being reproduced under the name of art". What he doesn't say is that the reverse is true also. This art arose as a reaction to the banalities of theory being reproduced under the name of art.
Papastergiadis can't resist restating the central dogma of cultural theory:
"There is never any direct access to life -- language, culture and the psyche are always inextricably interwoven in our every effort."
Which is most likely quite true. But it all too often gets used as a licence to see in art nothing but the trace of language and culture. Theory abstracts any residues of the everyday out of art in order to say how art is actually just a symptom of some hidden social or political cause. The more subtle, unthinkable, everyday side of art is then no longer available as a resource, and art is trapped within theory.
But is theory the only way to arrive at an understanding of what Papastergiadis calls "the good life"? Maybe not. Maybe art still has a few tricks up its sleeve for outwitting the ever vigilant and always ferocious rhetorical energies of theory.
Given the banality of the newspaper criticism of contemporary art, Artspace, one of the host venues for the Biennale, put out its own little booklet of critical writing. Called 'In the Everyday: critical and Theoretical Speculations on the 11th Biennale of Sydney', its well worth the five bucks.
In the Artspace book, Jill Bennett points out that art doesn't have to be about representation and signs and all of the things art theory specialises in at all. Art is also a kind of creative productivity with things, in the world. Returning to working with the materials of everyday life has been a strategy for artists who are "jaded by postmodernism". By "playing dumb" they come up with a smarter, if less articulate, kind of practice for art.
Far from being a renunciation of what is now the modern tradition of art, everyday art returns to one of its key moments -- minimalism. The 11th Biennale includes work by Carl Andre and On Kawara, two of the giants of postwar modern art. On Kawara is represented by two simple books that record people he met and places he went. Its a puzzling work, in which the distance between art and everyday work is completely collapsed -- except for the documentation of that collapse, lovingly preserved under glass.
As David Carter once suggested, there were two kinds of postmodernism, the wild and the cool. While Watkins reproduces the currently fashionable antipathy for postmodernism, he is more at odds with its cool than its wild expressions. Wild postmodernism was deeply interested in the everyday. Cool postmodernism turned its back on anything so messy, and refined a purely formal way of thinking about art.
Rex Butler is a fine example of what came of cool postmodernism. Not surprisingly, he is unimpressed with the 11th Biennale. What he finds lacking is "aesthetics, taste, judgement", which he claims are "unspeakable words in today's art world."
"It is through its encounter with the other that art tests itself and discovers what it is made of", Butler asserts. This idea of how understanding arises is a core dogma of European critical thought. Watkins has quite clearly proposed a more 'English" and indeed 'empirical' way of thinking about art. Art need not confront anything as an other. It can do just as nicely by making itself up as it goes along out of whatever is lying around.
Butler asserts that the everyday "arises as an effect within art". Watkins would have it more the other way around. Art arises as an effect within everyday life. Its not about looking out from the gallery into the world, its about making any and every experience over into something different. Art is different from everyday life, but it is not other to it.
Charles Green offers the more telling criticism that Watkins' show is an "evasion of popular culture and, even worse, the cinema". This I think would be a more productive way of thinking about the limits of how Watkins would have us think about the everyday.
The everyday in the 11th Biennale is a world of knitting wool and dirt and wood veneer shelves and dented garbage bins, but it isn't the world saturated in the images of the mass media that so fascinated wild postmodernism. Watkins has an answer to cool postmodernism, but he has simply ignored its walk on the wildside, which was very much about the media as an integral part of the everyday.
The anxiety that I think Watkins is wrestling with is that if the everyday is about media images as much as things, then there is no separate world called Contemporary Art anymore. Art, media and the everyday would be blended together in a way that challenges the institutional foundations of the art world as much as the haughty pretensions of art theory. The more radical side of postmodernism is evaded rather than answered.
The everyday is about mute actions that may leave traces, but somehow escape any attempt to account for what they mean. The art of the everyday is about perception, experience, feeling. The art theory of the everyday is about making distinct and different ideas out of each and every distinct and different encounter with art.
McKenzie Wark has contributed to numerous publications (21*C, nettime) and is Lecturer in Media Studies School of English, Macquarie University, Australia. Homepage