The 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Contemporary
Photo-media
Art Gallery of SA



Murmurings of discontent and accusations of predictability and boredom have been aired ever since the names of the artists for this biennial were made public some months ago. Ninety-five percent of these artists are established safe bets and as such it is a pretty boring show - same old, same old...

Moreover, there is such an over-saturation of photo-media in today's contemporary art that you have to question the imagination of whoever decided on the theme. And the strength of some of this work - how much of it is simply riding the bandwagon of the hysterical popularity of video and photography?

There were some pleasant surprises in the show. David Haines' video of a forest falling down had a more pointed environmental implication than the other animated natural disasters he has produced. Patricia Piccinini's Plasmid Region - animated blobs of human skin tissue growing and extruding horrible, bloody cancerous globules - was surprisingly good. Way less sterile and contrived than the sculptures of bald genetically engineered hybrid creatures that she is better known for.

Yet much of this show's work was trite and formulaic. Darren Siwes repeats his formula of a ghostly figure of himself super-imposed in front of some icon of British Colonialism. He really hasn't managed to extend and deepen the conceptual or aesthetic implications of this 'one-liner' that he came up with some years ago. Bill Henson's dark prints are still aesthetically superb but not breaking any new ground. On the other hand, Bronwyn Wright has been spray painting and photographing old cars for the last fourteen years but she produces some truly idiosyncratic images.



While a video of Mike Parr's performance UnAustralian is confronting and powerful, the work of his sometimes collaborator Adam Geczy does nothing for me. Geczy appears to desperately attach himself to areas of political potency in a way that is all too affected. Two works by Geczy are included: one is a video of the same Mike Parr performance intended as an expressionist insinuation of what Parr was going through. All it does is turn upside down and the camera zooms in and out and goes out of focus. Another video Geczy edited to Peter Sculthorpe's despairing 1961 composition Irkanda IV is full of similarly weak expressionistic gestures.

The move to working with video betrayed the daft content of Deborah Paauwe's photographs. It seems that for years no one has quite been able believe that her photographs of young girls dressed in their respectable Sunday best, bows in their hair but perhaps with some slight imperfection, like a tiny graze, attempt to seduce us into some sort of fantasy about the erotic undercurrents of innocence. Her video features footage of her established motif of young girls brushing and tying pretty bows in each other's hair, which then intermittently cuts to a grown woman gyrating in a raunchy piece of red lingerie.

Speaking of dancing, it is now the most done to death gesture in video art. Those who know and love me will remember that I have pulled out the odd dance for some of my own video work, but that was before I knew about Gillian Wearing Dancing in Topham Mall, and Tracey Emin's Why I Am Not A Dancer. And aside from all the ads which feature spontaneous dancing, Spike Jonze's highly acclaimed and witty 2001 video clip for Fat Boy Slim, which features Christopher Walken as the dancer, has made the dancing gesture, with its implications of shedding self-consciousness, Spike Jonze's forever more. It is like trying to paint another Guernica.

A person committed to the field of video like David Rosetzky just shouldn't revert to something so exhausted of all its meaning in his video. It is obvious when watching Rosetzky's video that his narrative loop reaches a point in which he can't think of what to do so he goes to the dancing move.

Destiny Deacon's use of the dance may have few more social and political levels to it, but if you can get through seven and a half minutes of dancing in silence without yawning you are doing pretty well. The dance is interrupted at about seven minutes while someone pulls on a latex glove - the done-to-death motif from 'eighties 'art in the age of AIDS'. Then some flowers are left lonely/abandoned in a fireplace and you gotta think that video in its most basic form has really had its day.

Multi-channel installations such as Rosetzky's and animations such as Piccinini's perhaps indicate the degrees of formal experimentation that video artists are going have to pursue if they want their medium to remain at all exciting.

James Strickland

Photography:
top by Bronwyn Wright
bottom by Rosemary Laing