At the entrance of Carrriageworks, Sam Cranstoun’s ironic Utopia sign is a visual quotation of Ken Done’s triumphalist Australia sign, which welcomed visitors to Brisbane’s World Expo 1988. Rather than seeing exhibitions of contemporary art as an ever recording black box, it’s probably more appropriate to see them as a time capsule – where the contents are laid out for inspection to show the future what we were.Īll three venues have works that explore the nature of history and recovering memories that were either willingly or unwillingly repressed. She sees our present time as being “a moment steeped in uncertainty and precariousness”. In her catalogue essay, AGNSW curator Isobel Parker Philip likens The National to a black box flight recorder that captures the moment even as the plane falls to its doom. Mark Shorter, Song for von Guerard, at Carriageworks. At the MCA, curators Anna Davis and Clothilde Bullen explored what they call the “third space”, an overlapping between cultures and gender to produce a greater visual diversity. The old industrial space of Carriageworks is the place for the over the top performance by Pope Alice (aka Luke Roberts and entourage) as well as Mark Shorter’s (literally) dark performance piece, Song for von Guérard. The National casually stretches between three reasonably large locations – Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales, but in its scope it draws the whole country into its extended embrace.Įach venue has a slightly different flavour.
Courtesy the artist and Tangentyere Artists, Mparntwe (Alice Springs) © the artist and Tangentyere Artists Photo: AGNSW, Mim Stirling Nangala Mulda, Town Camp Anywhere 2018–19 Acrylic on canvas, acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Adelaide’s Biennial has always been constrained by the relatively small size of the Art Gallery of SA. Despite spreading over two generously sized venues, Melbourne Now has always projected a decidedly local focus – it may include artists from other locations and even other countries – but the city is the hero. In both size and subtext, this differs from the two other regular surveys of contemporary Australian art – the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Now and the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Adelaide Biennial. It is the result of a very conscious curatorial decision to show what is new, and what concerns artists at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. Their biographies reveal a broad range of age, geographic and cultural backgrounds showing modern, multicultural Australia at work. The bald statistics of the media release note that over 60% of the 70 artists are women, and over one third are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. In this case it is justified by the inclusion of artists from every state and territory. The National is an ambitious name for any exhibition of contemporary Australian art.
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