June 18 - September 7, 2008
The Impulse to revolt. Revolving, rotating, mirroring, repeating, reversing, turning upside down or inside out, changing perspeclives. I imagine the 16th Biennale of Sydney as a constellation of historical and contemporary works of art that celebrate and explore these dynamics, both in art and life. Through installations, performances, films, texts, an evolving online venue, conversations and other events, Revolutions - Forms That Turn articulates the agency embedded in forms that express our desire for change. Such literal and formal devices are charted for their broader aesthetic, psychological, radical and political perspectives.
In polltlcs, 'revolution' is a term often considered obsolete, ominous and associated with violence - abrupt and sudden change is seen as impossible or dangerous. Revolution is defined as the collapse of revolt into institutionalised new orders. We are told that change can only occur as a senes of micro-changes or through evolution, not revolution. The idea or revolution has become a lifestyle choice, co-opted into the latest software upgrade.
The etymology of the word revolution, however, reveals its ambivalent and paradoxical nature. To revolve means to turn twice (re-volvere), to follow a curvature around and return to where one began - an ecological movement. In its most common original usage, revolution defined the rotation of the planets. Later, as a political term in the seventeenth century, it referred to the restoration of an earlier form of rule. With the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the word came to mean a sudden rupture and the birth of a new and better society - a utopian world come true - with a strong projection onto the future. The Australian context suggests further reversals. In European consciousness, the Continente Australis was imagined since antiquity as the 'upside-down' continent. Subsequently, through the utopic/dystopic tragedy of the Enligl1tenmenl and Transportation, another dimension accrued to the 'upside-down' contlnent; from Indigenous perspectives, the narrative was one of invasion, the reversal of discovery. Ironically, the First Fleet ( 1788) landed in Australia one year before the liberating rush of the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
More than a century later, in 1913, in order to articulate the suspension and liberation of subjectivity from the emerging flow of consumer goods, Marcel Duchamp interrupted the wheels of modernity by turnlng a bicycle wheel upside down and placing it on a stool. It was a revolutionary gesture by repetition, not by any forward movement. Shortly after, in 1917, Vladimir Tatlin imagined a 400-metre-high twin helix tower as a rotating platform for revolutionary events, congresses and broadcasts. On a very dlfferent note, Alexander Calder fragmented and turned the sculptural object, allowing for chance and the pleasure of childhood play with mobiles and movement. In the mid -1960s, Helio Oiticia celebrated the self in the revolution by creating colourful Parangolés to wear and dance with in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, at a tlme when an entire generation of artists world-wide (from Arte Povera to performance, feminist and conceptual practices) was also exploring the rupture with Renaissance perspective by moving towards a 360- degree circular and 'self-turning' universe.
Since then, postmodern cultural practices have rarely advocated radical change and revolution in the forms and language of art, instead promoting notions of pastiche, repetition and inter-textuality that, in retrospect, have encouraged the loss of agency and singularity.
Some artists are exploring mental, physical and aesthetic border zones - folly, madness, illness, pain and confusion - as a way of articulating the depression caused by this loss. Some artists trust that the dlgital revolution of globalisation wlll reinvigorate community-building, collaboration and social action, while other artists see the world as spinning excessively fast and are currently exploring ways of 'slowing down' the rotation or expanding the poetics of silence, metaphysics and 'bare life', Still, others are reacting to the glamour and current rise of the art market by inhabiting areas beyond vlsuallty and creating non-saleable cultural practices through performance, ephemeral or freeware online works.
The 'space' explored by this exhibition is the gap between the first part of the title - revolutions - which suggests a directly political and content-based exhibition, and the subsequent phrase - forms that turn - which alternatively suggests the autonomy and isolation of the art object, spinning on its own and detached from daily life, or the energy and potential latent in forms themselves (turns that form). The first term collapses (is over-turned) into the second and within that gap perspective suddenly shifts, as when a joke is understood - causing unexpected laughter, a release of tension and a collapse into the comic dimension of radical and absolute presence. It is a space of rotation, confusion, revolt, insubordination, anarchy and disruption of order, a space of 'revolution'.