Earlier this week I visited the National Gallery of Victoria's
NGV Triennial exhibition. This is free to enter and is a very large
show, claiming over 100 artists from 32 countries. I only saw a
fraction of the works, so I will be back. But here are some first
impressions.
Firstly, there were a
lot of people here. Secondly, the
works that I saw are very diverse. The NGV has made a point of
including design, fashion and craft alongside art, and information
about the show states that there was initially no set theme, but
that five themes or "prevalent ideas" emerged: Movement, Time,
Change, Body and Virtual. It is hard to think of anything not
covered by at least one of these.
And thirdly, the show is certainly tuned into modern media. Apart from
actual multimedia artworks there are screens around the place
showing words and images related to the five themes, and on the third
level there is a bar with tablets for people to use, linked to all sorts of vaguely connected discussions, and more screens
around the walls. And visitors are encouraged to get on social media
and say what they think.
There were, as expected, a number of works dealing with refugees and
with climate change. Some of these turned out to be political in a
way that the NGV perhaps didn't expect, turning into protests
against the employment by the NGV of Wilson Security, who have been involved in
brutal treatment of detainees on Manus island. Two artists, Candice
Breitz and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, retitled their works to include the
words "Wilson must go", and a third, Richard Mosse, edited his work
to include statements from Behrouz Bouchani, a refugee detained on
Manus Island who had been mistreated by Wilson Security. The changes
came too late to be included in the catalogue, but they are included
in the NGV's online material.
On this visit I saw two of the works just mentioned. Richard Mosse's
Incoming is a large installation showing videos and still images of refugee
camps and the like, obtained by using a military-grade infrared
telephoto camera. The images are crisp, black and white, and with an
eerie quality that reminds us that this camera does not see the same
way that we do. Candice Breitz's
Wilson Must Go consisted of
six in-depth interviews with people driven out of their countries,
and also a news-bite version consisting of brief extracts from the
interviews read by two Hollywood actors, Alec Baldwin and Julianne
Moore. There was a point here about the way that celebrities acting
a part are more real to us than the actual people who have lived
through the events.
 |
| A detail from Richard Mosse's Incoming |
A number of the works in the Triennial were placed in among the
NGV's permanent collection. This applied in particular to Ron
Mueck's
Mass, a massive collection of oversize skulls, in
with 18th-century European paintings. The wall text referred to the
tradition of
vanitas painting, but the surrounding paintings
didn't reflect this. For more, and more varied, skulls, come to
Ballarat and see the exhibition
Romancing the Skull, on
until 28th January
(
http://artgalleryofballarat.com.au/gallery_exhibitions/romancing-the-skull/).
 |
| Ron Mueck's Mass in among the 17th-18th century European painting |
Another work from the Triennial placed in among the permanent
collection is
Ore Streams, from the Dutch Formafantasia
design studio. This complex installation is about mining of metals;
the group consider that by about 2080 most of the available ores
will have been mined, so the source of metals will have to be
recycling: "the era of above-ground mining is upon us".
Ore
Streams was placed among the 19th-century paintings, and there
was no discernible connection. But the placing did lead to some of
the 19th-century works getting more attention than usual, even if of
the selfie-taking kind.
 |
| Ore Streams, installation view (one side) |
 |
| In front of John Rogers Herbert, Moses Bringing down the Tables of the Law (1870s) |
Some other works I saw, across art, design and fashion: Sean
O'Connell made images made by placing jewellery (rings made out of
different materials) in the path of electric discharges that then
struck photographic plates. The design studio Joris Laarman Lab had
a large table in the form of a bridge, made by advanced
manufacturing techniques. Timo Nasseri had a modern take on
muqarnas,
a technique used in Islamic architecture of covering the inside of a
dome or vault with repeating three-dimensional shapes. Nasseri made
a small version covered in mirrors and placed in a wall; it showed
kaleidoscopic fragmentary reflections of the people passing by. Iris
van Herpen had a remarkable
dress cut somehow out of leather.
 |
| One of Sean O'Connell's Spark Ring works. |
 |
| Joris Laarman Lab, Bridge Table (prototype) |
 |
| Timo Nasseri, Epistrophy |
 |
| Leather dress by Iris van Herpen |
What I took away from this first visit was a feeling of
incoherence. There are a lot of interesting things here (and I know
I haven't seen some of the most interesting ones yet), but there
didn't seem to be any reason for selecting these particular works
and bringing them together. There wasn't even a
post-modern line like "the theme is that there is no theme". What I
saw reads as though the curators took a bunch of interesting works
and threw them at the wall to see what would stick, always with one
and a half eyes on mass audience appeal. The catalogue gives the
same impression of incoherence, being a heterogeneous collection of
essays, statements, interviews and images; the amount of space given
to individual artists represented in the Triennial varies wildly.
After I had visited the Triennial I came across two contrasting reviews, an enthusiastic one by the
Guardian
at
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/18/ngv-triennial-astounding-blockbuster-grips-the-heart-and-repels-the-nostrils,
and a remarkably jaundiced one by Giles Fielke at
http://memoreview.net/blog/triennial-at-ngv-international-by-giles-fielke. I haven't made up my mind about the exhibition yet, and I need to see more of it. I will definitely be back.
