Venice Biennale: It's the thought that counts

The invisible, the maudlin, the magic at the 51st Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte - AKA the Venice Biennale.

“Ohhh! This is so contempory [sic], contempory, contempory.” So mocked the fake gallery attendants in a singsong that greeted art lovers who wandered into the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festival.

Employed by 29-year-old Berliner Tino Sehgal, the attendants were the artwork. Their catchy refrain would prove difficult to shake, as some 15,000 critics, curators and collectors – and more than a few stray movie and pop stars – hummed their way across the sinking city, devouring the latest the art world has to offer.

In the 51st Biennale to inhabit the elegant Giardini di Castello and some 40 other splendid Venetian venues, that offering boiled down to reams of video art, stacks of installation, oodles of photography, a painting or two, and a sizeable dose of the proudly unclassifiable – works such as Sehgal’s, or works such as could be found (or rather not found) at the Romanian pavilion. Here Daniel Knorr decided that the exhibition space, left unkempt since the 2003 Biennale, looked fine just as he found it. It was the latest in a series of works he calls “invisible” art. It’s the thought that counts. And in the cerebral world of contemporary art, that’s often all there is.

In the elder statesperson category, the transatlantic alliance posed by professional iconoclasts Gilbert & George in the British pavilion and the magnificently maudlin works of American painter Ed Ruscha was more than matched for Old Europe by veteran French installation artist Annette Messager, whose gorgeous, if incomprehensible, telling of the tale of Pinocchio won her the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion.

No such ethereal mind games at the Australian Pavilion, where art ain’t art unless you can see it, smell it, pick it up and either buy it, or damage it and have to pay for it. New traditionalist woodworker Ricky Swallow presented his new selection of hand-made sculptures carved from jetulong to augment his 2003 masterpiece Killing Time, which took pride of place in the dimly lit pre-fab pavilion that could double as a demountable schoolroom or a stylish beach shack, circa 1988.

London resident Swallow scooped the pool on the opening day of the press preview, thanks to the hallowed presence of Cate Blanchett, who was convinced by Sydney art dealer Martin Browne to lend some Hollywood glamour for “Team Australia”. Blanchett quickly took it away with her again after a chaotic photo opportunity and a rousing, generous speech – “This is visceral stuff: blood and guts, death, the theatre of display, the pivot point between bloom and decay ...” – leaving only Swallow’s menacing works to fly the flag at these art olympics. Sadly the publicity coup generated by Our Cate only deflected attention from Swallow’s gruesome 1:1 dioramas of “freshly” killed animals, skeletons, skulls and vipers: “Blanchett supports artist in Venice” read a typical headline.

Elsewhere, reviews have been favourable. London’s Daily Telegraph listed Swallow as one of the Biennale’s “Ten Hot Artists”, lauding his “certain boyish cool”. More important for the artist’s career was the steady stream of art world heavyweights who popped in to ogle: Tate Modern director Vincente Todoli, Peggy Guggenheim director Philip Rylands, Biennale president Davide Croff, and curators from Britain’s National Gallery and New York’s MoMA. And über-curator Robert Storr, already appointed director of the 2007 Biennale, spent an hour with Swallow and his curator Charlotte Day, dissecting the work the day before the exhibition opened to the press.

Swallow, stoic son of a fisherman, remained above the hubbub even as he bathed in the limelight: “Having been cooped up in abstract isolation for the better part of a year producing these works, it’s been very rewarding to see them suddenly unleashed to this sort of reception,” he told The Bulletin. “But I really don’t think we’ll be able to assess what it means to show here until all this dies down a little.”

The Australia Council spent $1.4m on this year’s Venice adventure, more than half of it coming from private funds marshalled by Sydney arts patron John Kaldor, who was appointed official commissioner. The funding structure set up by Kaldor looked more like an Olympic bid, with its hierarchy of corporate and private donors. To be included in Kaldor’s inner sanctum cost $25,000. For $5000, you got listed in the official catalogue as a “Champion Donor”, plus a private tour of the Guggenheim and tickets to an ultra-exclusive Australian party at the Hotel Cipriani, an event that put plenty of noses out of joint among the large Australian contingent in Venice. While the event may have (briefly) “boasted” a celebrity in the form of Rolling Stone guitarist Ron Wood, the tenor was more that of the launch of a new managed fund than a celebration of a gifted Australian artist – or of Australian art for that matter.

The real tale of Australia at Venice was a repeat of 2003, when the only living Australian artist on show was the one we got to choose for our own pavilion. The Australia Council says they invited Biennale co-curator Rosa Martinez to visit Australia to assess artists for the curated shows outside the Giardini, “but she couldn’t find the time to come”. Beyond the national pavilions, Martinez and co-curator Maria de Corral have put together two spare but exhilarating shows of just 90 artists with stellar works by the great, such as Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas, and the very, very good, such as video artists, South African Candice Breitz and Korean Kimsooja. This is in stark contrast to 2003 director Francesco Bonami’s sprawling effort, when he enlisted 12 curators to mount a show of 350 artists.

It wouldn’t be a Biennale without controversy and this year another German, 2001 Golden Lion winner Gregor Schneider, obliged when his proposal for a huge black metal cube for Piazza San Marco was deemed too provocative. The work, a replica of the sacred Ka’ba in Mecca, caused consternation among organisers who were “concerned that it could hurt the religious emotions of the Muslim community”. Fears that the work would render the city a target for terrorist attack shows just how far freedom of expression has been wound back in the post-September 11 era.

The Venice Biennale runs until November.

---



First published in The Bulletin, Volume 123; Number 12

more...

Strictly modern

Intriguing connections surround the recent Australian visit of British art critic and author Matthew Collings, best known here for his British Academy Award-winning television series, This is Modern Art.

Collings, who has charted the rise of the so-called Young British Artists movement of the mid-1990s, wound up a sell-out speaking tour last week with a talk at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, where his subject was "The Solemn and the Trivial versus the Serious and the Playful". Collings' witty, plain-speaking accounts of the works of YBA stars such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst have done much to demystify art for the general public.

But now he believes that, while the popularity of modern art is on the rise (in Britain, at least), artists should have no obligation to be popular. Indeed, art is "neither democratic nor a form of entertainment but is a specialised endeavour for those willing to make the serious effort to engage with it".

While Collings' thesis is less applicable in Australia, where contemporary art more often attracts derision than praise in the popular press, the would-be painter is apparently planning regular sojourns down under.

Collings' visit was organised by Melbourne artist Mary Lou Pavlovic, who revealed to The Bulletin ambitious plans to open a gallery in Melbourne next year - working title: Pav Modern - with her first show being paintings and mosaics by none other than Collings and his artist wife, Emma Biggs.

Pavlovic met Collings at the height of the YBA ferment when she was studying at London's influential Goldsmiths College. The tour, she says, is just the beginning of her entrepreneurial forays onto the local art scene.

She says Pav Modern's backing is already secure and she will be joined in the venture by her brother, pop music promoter Steve Pav. He is a key figure in alternative music circles, being responsible for bringing bands such as the Beastie Boys and Nirvana to Australia long before both acts became household names.

Buoyed by crowds of several thousand for Collings, Pavlovic is thinking big and plans to stage art events that openly court controversy. She cites the landmark Sensation exhibition, where works such as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ were deemed an affront to public morals.

"I've just become sick of the apathy," she says. "Things have been too conservative for too long in the art scene in this country. We need an upbeat, broad-ranging art scene that connects more with what's happening internationally."

While factors such as the proverbial tyranny of distance may kick in before she gets going, either way Pavlovic seems determined to crash through or crash in a blaze of glory.
---

By Michael Hutak
457 words
22 October 2002
The Bulletin
Volume 120; Number 43




First published in The Bulletin

more...

Traffic (2000)

Dir: Stephen Soderbergh

...never fails to seduce.

It's beyond trite to say this is an landmark film, even though it is one of the most gripping and suspenseful thrillers I've ever sat through. This stylish and multi-faceted film sees Stephen Soderbergh display a command of the director’s craft that he only promised in earlier films like sex lies and videotape, King of the Hill or The Underneath. Latterly we have become accustomed to him bringing his independent smarts to the studio system in films like Out of Sight, or his crossover mainstream hit of last year, Erin Brockovich, a film which forced me to flip my view of Julia Roberts from appalling to appealing, such is the maestro's skill.

But Traffic is something else again - a film so accomplished it attracts critical clichés like moths to a flame. It is nothing less than the most authentic portrait of America’s drug trade yet committed to celluloid. With an all-star ensemble cast, filmed in 8 different cities and over 110 locations, it is a vast undertaking that takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride of intrigue, suspense and drama. Traffic’s tableaux is populated by characters which traverse all strata of the supply and consumption of illicit drugs, from the highest officials - both honest and corrupt - to the frontline victims of hard core addiction. Sparing us sermons on why people shouldn’t take drugs, the film ultimately demonstrates how America’s policy of waging an unwinnable supply-side "war against drugs” has only ended up entrenching organized crime, corrupting the public sector, and punishing the victims of addiction, while doing precisely nothing to stem the rising destructive tide of drug use at all levels of society.

Such a thesis is built quietly, subtly by a screenplay that intertwines three stories: an honest cop (Benicio Del Toro) trying to function within a “entrepreneurial” police force corrupted by the ruthless cartels that traffic drugs across the US/Mexico border; a conservative judge (Michael Douglas), whose appointment as the President's new national anti-drug czar coincides with his daughter's (Erika Christensen) slide into addiction; and a naïve society matron (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose bourgeois life is thrown into turmoil when her husband is arrested for drug trafficking. Hitherto, she thought he was an upstanding pillar of society.

Soderbergh mixes up the cinematic styles for each thread of the narrative, for instance the Mexican sequences are given a dreamy treatment, shot hand-held by Soderbergh himself in saturated colours on a stock so grainy it could be Super 8. The sequences where Douglas’s anti-drug czar goes on a fact-finding mission to “the frontline”, inspecting border crossings, or high tech anti-trafficking facilities have a semi-documentary feel, again shot hand held. Zeta-Jones sequences are shot like movie-of-the-week, as her lady-that-lunches, faced with losing everything, must swot up on the family business of engaging hit men, laundering money and dealing with the Tijuana cartels.

The detailed portrayal of police work rings true, in fact the whole films proffers a “no bullshit” authenticity, wrapped in the hip, contemporary apparel of independent filmmaking. This is intelligent cinema that assumes - and demands - an engaged and interested audience. That said, it flows freely and with ease and never fails to seduce. The cast is so good they render superlatives meaningless. Just go and see it. Then we can talk.

---

First published in Australian Style.

more...

2001: A Space Odyssey

Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Released at the height of psychedelic hysteria, Kubrick’s supra-philosophical mind fuck was billed as the ultimate trip, but was dismissed by critics as little more than a ponderous light-show with a few riddles thrown in for diversionm, and thus didn't rate even a nomination for Best Picture at the 1969 Oscars. Carol Reed’s musical, Oliver! won that year, with Kubrick nominated for Best Director but also losing out to Reed. Thirty three years later, if you haven’t seen 2001 on the big screen, then take the chance while it’s going. But if you’re all Kubricked out - and who isn’t after the orgy of hype surrounding the maestro’s death and the release of Eyes Wide Shut - rent Oliver! instead and see what all the fuss was about.
---
First published in Australian Style magazine, national. April 2000

more...

A Pure Formality (Una Pura formalità) 1994

Dir: Giuseppe Tornatore; Stars: Gerard Depardiue, Roman Polanski

professional and manipulative

Gifted Italian writer/director Tornatore admits he has been a little in limbo since his celebrated memoir Cinema Paradiso trumpeted his arrival on the international scene in 1988. But if such a creative hiatus can guarantee films as good as A Pure Formality, then writer's block should be added without delay to every film school syllabus.

Tornatore echoes these struggles in his main character of Onoff (Depardieu), a once-celebrated but now-defeated writer who has been living unproductively in rural isolation for some six years.

After a murder is committed near Onoff's farmhouse, police pick him up wandering the forest in the rain, deluded, and without ID. Dragged off to a suitably desolate police station, he is interrogated by a strange Inspector (Polanski), who, being the genius writer's greatest fan, brutally ridicules the suspect for impersonating his hero. The tables turn once it dawns on the Inspector that his hero and suspect are one and the same, and the film settles into a see-sawing psychological joust as the inspector tries to extract a confession from the uncooperative, unhinged poet.

The film isn't driven by suspense or an unravelling plot but by performances and dialogue which amount to extraordinary studies in character. Rendered in luscious, bleak cinematography, Depardieu cuts an unforgettable figure: a brooding, ranting beast of a poet, haunted by memories of the murder, unsure if he committed it or merely wrote it. Polanski's Inspector is his perfect dramatic foil: sycophantic yet cruel, professional and manipulative.

Indeed, Polanski's mere prescence recalls the claustrophobia of some his most memorable films as director, such as Repulsion (1964) or The Tenant (1976). And Tornatore's own masterful choreography of the elements of film only invites such comparisons - from the screenplay right through to his own astonishing work as editor. This is a melancholic but uplifting film, as rich in detail as it is in wisdom.

Add a shrieking, luminous score from Ennio Morricone and A Pure Formality becomes, without question, one of the most perfectly complete examples of film art to emerge this or any year.

Rated 'A plus'.

First published in Who Weekly, Australia, Time Inc.

more...

A Judgement in Stone (La Ceremonie) (1995)

Dir: Claude Chabrol

Refreshingly unsentimental

Now that it's 'eyes right' down in Canberra, those in the ruling class planning on whooping it up would be well advised to first take a sobering look at this truly subversive psychological thriller from veteran French director Claude Chabrol.

You simply can't get good help these days. Just ask the Lelievre family, a self-satisfied bourgeois nuclear unit who live in high-cultured good taste on their comfortable Brittany estate. The new housekeeper of their model home is the stoic Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire). A loner fond only of chocolate and tabloid TV, the near mute Sophie serves her new masters with skill but dispassion, fearing they will soon discover she is illiterate and sack her, as other employers have.

Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) thinks she's "a bit odd but a real pearl", but when Sophie forms a liberating bond with town rebel and local postie, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), she raises the suspicion of the Master of the House (Jean-Pierre Cassel), who believes Jeanne is secretly opening his mail. From here the narrative pivots around a series of increasingly odious revelations, unsettlingly delivered by Chabrol with an almost transparent touch. Suffice to say that the class war is alive and well, as those who are denied by life's lottery seek 'judgement' on those born to hold the winning tickets.

Chabrol, a former film critic who along with Godard and Truffaut was in the vanguard of the French New Wave in the late fifties, based his script on a 1963 Ruth Rendell novel (way before Inspector Wexford found fame). He weaves a quiet, austere tale which steadily builds its ironies and suspense to an unexpected climax, aided and abetted by some on-the-money acting. Bonnaire's surgical portrait of the sullen Sophie deservedly earned a Best Actress award at the French Oscars. As Jeanne, Huppert lays a rich psychological complexity beneath the character's sunny surface. Both realise dark yet unnervingly sympathetic portraits of feminist defiance and class solidarity.

Refreshingly unsentimental, A Judgement in Stone leaves its mark well beyond the cinema with a lingering sense that uncomfortable truths have been uncovered without fear of the consequences. Rich bastards will leave the cinema shaken. The rest of us will merely be stirred... perhaps into action. Only, a word of warning: don't try this at home.

Beat Magazine, Sydney. September, 1996

more...

Metal Skin (1994)

Stars Aden Young, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Morice, Nadine Garner

Australian writer/director Geoffrey Wright's new film has been a long-time-coming and judging by it's savagery, he's had plenty on his mind. Like his promising 1992 debut Romper Stomper, it takes place on society's frayed edges, but where Romper's forthright engagement with racism struck a nerve, Metal Skin's confused and ugly vision of the world risks alienating audiences with its jaundiced world view.


Motorheads expecting "Days of Thunder Down Under" will be disappointed. The hotted up Chargers and GTR-XU1's career impressively around desolate streets but are secondary in screen-time to the main game: broken lives, doomed love, social disintegration. The kids are bad, their parents are mad, and everyone's one push away from the edge.

Set in the inner-urban wastelands of a bleaker-than-usual contemporary Melbourne, Metal Skin follows four troubled twenty-somethings as they walk the tightrope of love and fall off, one by one. There's lots of snogging and lots of sex, but all four are either unloved, unlovable or degrees of both.

Revhead misfit 'Psycho' Joey (Young) is in love with Roslyn (Garner), but she's in an destructive relationship with drag-racing anti-hero Dazey (Mendelsohn). Sevina (Morice), a delusional black magic devotee, in turn loves Dazey, who uses, then rejects her.

After an impressive first half spent chiselling these characters, building their connections and their world, Wright literally loses the plot, lets the whole shebang off the leash and the film spins out into a series of gory, ugly and hysterical episodes.

This is a pity for the gifted Young, who continues to deliver outstanding performances in ordinary films. Morice, Mendelsohn and Garner also do extremely well to draw genuine pathos from their near comic-book characters.

On a technical level the film is equally impressive in design, cinematography, and editing, with action sequences that pack a punch not seen in local cinema since Mad Max 1. But all these noble efforts of cast and crew are wasted in a script which gives in to the decadence it seeks to portray, lamely opting to trundle out a bunch of downbeat melodramatic cliches - from an homage to the "tower scene" in Hitchcock's Vertigo down to the ultra-violent car chase finale.

Metal Skin is a glorious failure, an exiting disappointment. It's own newspaper ads admit as much when they scream that "everything is about to got totally out of control. "And so it does, but to what end remains a mystery.

Rating B-.

- MICHAEL HUTAK
---

First published in Beat Magazine

more...

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

As we have come to expect, Coppola has procured excellence from cast and crew to realise a work that is undeniable; in a word: BIG. Shot entirely on the Sony soundstage, this is a physical film, a juggernaut one endures rather than simply consumes: the sound design bodily assaults; the camera is forever dancing, trance-like and manic forcing the viewer to read the film; the use of colour is lurid, sensual, and oh so bloody red, as the costume design and art direction burn the idea of this Dracula deep into the memory.
Bar the appalling Keanu Reeves, the acting is exemplary with Gary Oldman again delving into his nether-regions to produce a genuinely enigmatic performance as the tragic, lusty Count Dracula. Playing opposite is winsome Winona Ryder who suffers from occasional
bouts of overactus hollywoodenae in amongst probably her most impressive role to date, while the supporting cast is led in cavalier fashion by the ever brilliant Anthony Hopkins, and impressive newcomer, English actress Sophie Frost.
Coppola's decision to tell this traditional screen romance by avoiding modern special FX technology (such as computer animation, morphing or blue-screen matteing, etc) in favour of old fashioned in-camera, "trick photography" (such as reversing footage and multiple exposure) works extremely well. The mood is like a Hammer film with production values raised to
the Nth degree but without the camp sensibilty in fact Dracula offers a lexicon of pre-cinema photographic illusionism. All FX were performed by second unit director, Roman Coppola, F.F.'s 27 year old son, continuing the rich tradition of creative nepotism that runs through his oeuvre.
On the level of performance Dracula bears no flaws, gaps, or gaffes: it's seamless, entertaining and engaging. Still all the brilliance doesn't seem to drag the resonance of the script above the archaic, perhaps because it keeps so true to Stoker's Victorian novel.
It IS a period piece and comes replete with Victorian social and moral baggage, but it begs the question: of what contemporary relevance is this?
Why do we need this movie now, today?
Just to clear Coppola's debts? Digging for clues, one interesting move is the backstage role christianity plays in the plot's denouement: the Count is a sort of underworld stand-in for Christ, forgoing immortality in the name of life rather than the other way round. It's a truly subversive moral manouvre: Dracula willfully brings about his own demise in the name of Love, not in the face of God's power. This is admirable but instead of being driven home it lays meekly buried 'neath all that silver screen "magic". Desperate for other sweeping metaphors, the AIDS epidemic is obvious: Blood + Sex = Death. But if it's Coppola's intention to draw his Dracula as a parable on the mythic, primeval link that humans make between sex and death then he's obscured it behind some extremely fancy footwork. Somehow a great film gets lost behind its dazzling archive of performance.

MICHAEL HUTAK
First published in Filmnews, 1989

more...

Mystic Pizza (1989)

(USA 1989;dist: Newvision Film; rt 104 mins)

Mystic Pizza has modest aspirations: it aims to draw the viewer's identification only, it seems, for the film's duration. Beyond that it enters the realm of the forgettable: that ever-growing catalogue of 'films-I-have-seen'. Rack up another one. Get ready for the next.
Not that this viewer's identification was ever held with gay abandon. Mystic Pizza plays out a string of Hollywood cliches all aimed at clinching the sale - ie.getting you to love the characters and be right in there gunning for the predictably happy outcome to their trials. This is a feel-good-again movie, where everyone's happy by film's end, leaving you with a feeling in your stomach like too much cheesecake.
Lip service has been paid to '80s shifts in mores - there's swearing, open talk of contraception, the central characters are all women, etc. But that's where contemporaneity ends - it's all 'seek and ye shall find', 'diligence will be rewarded', 'follow your feelings', like some scripted version of Snakes and Ladders. And, like a dutiful daughter, the film effaces it's technical performance directing the viewer to transparently concentrate on the story.
To be fair, the film isn't irredeemable: it is well paced, cinematography is of a high standard, all the actors try hard and are, indeed likeable, but, really, this film is made for Americans, who really go for this sort of thing. However, if life-decisions, blossoming adulthood, and sexual awakening among the post-pubescent of a fishing village in New England sounds like fun to you then Mystic Pizza is recommended. Others might find the pastry thiick with too much cheese buried under layers of overcooked ham.
-Michael Hutak

First published in Filmnews

more...