Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The NGV Triennial

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.3.1.0137

2380-7687

Andrew Treloar,

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened the St. Kilda Road building in 1968 showing The Field, an exhibition of works by emerging Australian artists.1 Previously, Australia’s cultural sphere had consistently seen Australian works deprioritized in exhibitions and collections, so many aspiring artists of earlier generations left for Paris, London, or New York City to develop their practice amid greater opportunities for innovation and recognition. For them, Australia’s parochialism and conservatism, generated by its colonial origins and profound isolation from major Western cultural centers, were insurmountable barriers. This was one result of processes associated with Australia’s cultural cringe.2This deliberate orientation of The Field’s rationale toward a positive and experimental exhibiting future for Australian artists demonstrated a clear intention to escape the NGV’s reputation for conservative strategies in both exhibiting and collecting artworks. The Field showed significant artistic departures from the New York influences shown in Melbourne and Sydney the previous year in Two Decades of American Painting.3 Both of these popular exhibitions also generated a large cultural shift in Melbourne audiences’ understanding of art4 and can be seen to bear a relationship with a gradual easing of the cringe.Fifty years later, it might be a similarly bold gesture to attempt a triennial for Melbourne in 2017. The city’s history of experimentation with landmark exhibitions has yet to generate the impetus for an event comparable with the ever-spreading tradition of Venice’s Biennale. For example, Signs of Life in 1999 was promoted as the Melbourne Biennial.5 Encompassing many Melbourne venues (although not the NGV), it generated high attendance numbers with a strong program of mostly Northern Hemisphere artists.6,7 This biennial was not repeated.In 2014, the NGV’s Melbourne Now took a different approach. In a similar manner to The Field, it confidently and successfully presented a survey of Melbourne artists into both the NGV’s Australian and international buildings.8 The gallery’s director, Tony Ellwood, describes the exemplary quality of works in Melbourne Now as a “mandate” from which the NGV Triennial “expands” globally.9 This is difficult to reconcile, as the NGV Triennial can be easily perceived as a reversion to the gallery’s long-standing practice of largely importing the content of most of its major exhibitions, bringing “the world” to a remote cultural center. The positive example of Melbourne Now might better have been built into a series of more integrated collaborations, commissions, dialogues, and community practices to more reciprocally “reflect Melbourne’s unique perspective on the world.”10 Instead, the NGV Triennial largely replicates NGV’s habit—importing blockbusters—and repeats the curatorial mix of 1999’s Signs of Life, without that exhibition’s citywide, expansive engagement.11Although it is trite to note intercity rivalries, nonetheless it seems discernible from Ellwood’s catalog foreword that an impulse not to build the success of Melbourne Now into a repeating event was based on a more ambitious imperative. The need to differentiate the NGV Triennial from “the many other recurring large-scale contemporary exhibitions” suggests a consciousness of Melbourne’s lack of such an exhibition and a strategic need to be competitive in that arena.12 Has Melbourne been suffering under a marketing-led brand crisis now that audience engagement is king? A triennial cringe?In Australia alone, Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth have held their biennales, biennials, and triennials consistently since 1973, 1990, and 1993, respectively. Ellwood’s “concerted effort to showcase work from countries that have not been strongly represented in our region”13 is possibly inevitable, considering that these other events have already demonstrated such clear rationales for their own representations, especially the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). David Walsh’s MONA14 in Hobart further exemplifies a competitive drawcard, with a clear brand showing uniquely focused content.Meanwhile, the NGV itself already has a very strong track record of successful large-scale exhibitions to its credit. So, apart from an assertive branding impetus, the specific need for yet another triennial—let alone one branded as NGV instead of Melbourne—needs to be examined. Are there really no other similar events focusing on “artists and designers working at the intersections between architecture, fashion, art, design and performance”?15 Senior curators Ewan McEoin and Simon Maidment claim that the NGV Triennial is “breaking with contemporary tradition of presenting fields separately,” framed here as art, design, and technology.16 Although other biennials and triennials do not necessarily claim this as a specific focus, the methodology of “integrated, multidisciplinary display”17 is well established, even within the NGV. Melbourne Now promoted a cross-field presentation of “art, architecture, design, performance and cultural practice.”18 Rather than needing to claim a fresh break, the gallery’s own exhibiting strategy could naturally be seen to have expanded methodologically from Melbourne Now.The standard biennial and triennial model in which an international curator is invited to structure an exhibition around a theme or set of concerns has been avoided by the curatorial team of the NGV Triennial. The viability and legitimacy of in-house curation are not under question, but the selection criteria for the artists and designers are not made clear. The statement that “five framing themes emerged”19 indicates that curatorial criteria were limited to a geographic strategy (as already mentioned), which seems to have generated a real-time process of sourcing that operated alongside project management timelines and the schedules of prospective invitees. Did the requirement to deliver an instance of “a” triennial allow the mechanics of that process to dominate and determine its curatorial rationale? This is perceptible in the show itself. “A” triennial needs “some” artworks. It almost does not matter which ones or how they are arranged. Attending the exhibition, this context often palpably engenders a contingent or incidental quality to the relationships between the artworks.At first glance, the five themes are almost so generalized as to allow artworks to be interchangeably classified: movement, change, virtual, body, and time. These were only loosely or obliquely discernible while encountering the works, unless one happened across the specific room that contained some explanatory information. Meanwhile, the organization of the catalog and cross-platform content did help to approach a semblance of overall logic a posteriori. The “internationally renowned thinkers”20 have delivered some rich, reflexive writing despite the initial risk of a curatorial premise that does not invite deep theoretical reflection.The sheer onslaught of artworks meant that many were positioned unfavorably in corridors or singularly marooned among the less visited halls of the permanent collection. Artworks in the main hubs of the triennial were compressed, making the gallery’s largest spaces seem much smaller, even without the added component of massive crowds. Despite being a free-entry exhibition and not directly bolstering revenue through ticket sales, the NGV Triennial has reproduced the experience of a blockbuster. Art installations were tacitly transformed into sets for visitors to stage their social media content. If postings on Instagram are a measure of audience engagement, then the gallery’s success was replicated incessantly throughout social media platforms in a mutually reinforcing narcissistic loop with its audience. As a result, those artworks that seriously addressed urgent contemporary crises were recontextualized as a different kind of self-validating moment for audiences to purse their lips thoughtfully in a moment of virtue signaling before seeking out the next fun room.Yet a small group of artworks almost escaped this general phenomenon through a series of circumstances. On August 11, 2017, a group of Australian artists delivered a letter of demand to the director. The letter alleged a series of human rights abuses perpetrated by employees of Wilson Security, a security provider that was simultaneously entering into contracts with the Australian federal government for its internationally condemned refugee detention centers at Manus Island and Nauru.21 The letter demanded that the NGV, as a leading cultural institution, break its security contract with Wilson. A statement from the gallery described how Wilson Security had been appointed as an interim service provider by a separate state government department, with a permanent appointment yet to be made. Soon after, a core group of artists began series of interventions and quiet public protests, culminating in a peaceful blockade of the VIP preview night of the NGV Triennial.22 In the lead-up to the opening of the triennial, Ben Frost, Trevor Tweeten, and Richard Mosse had altered their work to register their own protest. Others changed their work titles to Wilson Must Go (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Candice Breitz).23 The artists’ gestures lent an aura of activism to the works, which mildly affected their reception among the general conditions of the NGV Triennial.Throughout these events, the NGV remained impassive while tacitly allowing these actions to proceed (imagine if the gallery had ejected the peacefully protesting artists utilizing the services of Wilson Security staff). Aside from the legalities of breaking a security contract, perhaps the NGV’s downplaying related to an earlier situation in which a group of artists boycotted the 2014 Biennale of Sydney24 due to sponsorship by Transfield, another service provider with a commercial contract for Australia’s offshore detention facilities. In that case, the biennale quickly severed associations with Transfield and the exhibition continued with less disruption. However, that situation drew national attention. Although both major Australian political parties continue to support mandatory detention of seaborne refugees and their offshore processing, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull implied that corporate patronage should buy compliance from artists, whose boycott demonstrated “vicious ingratitude.”25 This set up the conditions for a reprisal from the then–Minister for the Arts and Sport, George Brandis, who instructed the Australia Council for the Arts26 to not provide government funding to artists who refuse corporate funding (despite the governing liberal party exercising its own moral liberty to refuse donations from the tobacco industry).27 Such a politically attuned background might also have precluded the NGV from exacerbating the situation and immediately capitulating to the artists’ demands, which could have risked the institution’s own funding position through also showing “vicious ingratitude.” By late February 2018, after presumably enduring the full interim term of Wilson’s engagement and enjoying mild notoriety and initial public interest concentrated around the issue, the NGV was able to announce the ongoing appointment of a different security provider, earning the respectful gratitude of the protesting artists.Alexandra Kehayoglou’s Santa Cruz River28 is arguably the most emblematic of the NGV Triennial. A long-running critical research project centered around environmental impact is materialized through a rigorous design and material process into a meticulously detailed floor covering. This facsimile of a section of the Santa Cruz River is rendered using painstaking carpet-making techniques. The local environment in Argentina would be completely inundated if two hydroelectric dams were constructed by an agglomeration of Chinese and Argentinian interests. Within its installation, the carpet is instead inundated by throngs of gallery visitors, sans shoes, who enjoy a moment of rest on the soft fibers and giggle while shooting self-portraits with their cell phones using the mirrors installed on the ceiling. Clearly, so much of the reception of the work is dominated by its installation context that it only invites one kind of self-reflection.Few artworks were able to cut through this festival of self-satisfaction, which cauterized the potential for personally challenging or visceral experiences. Performance was mostly limited to a 10-day period, Triennial Extra,29 when live DJs performed to passing crowds at the gallery’s entrance while old pop and disco tunes were played reassuringly inside. The dance “takeover” did not actually take over the spaces it was programmed into. Choreographers were instructed to make a very short work in response to an installation that would be engaging for a wide public audience. The works were performed only a few times each evening to extremely restricted audiences. These conditions undermined the potential for dance and performance works to function as something other than “extra” works. If artworks implicate the viewer sometimes, then this show self-implicates the institution in its relationship to the artworks it houses.Unfortunately, the drive toward large-scale audience engagement through surfeit of mostly internationally sourced works in a series of content-oriented installations does not raise many questions that are not already endemic to similar events globally. Although visually stunning and clearly successful, the NGV Triennial leaves major ontological questions open for its second iteration. In a recent interview, James Bradburne, the new director of Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera, described a cannibalizing effect on art museums, where visitor numbers to temporary blockbuster exhibitions mask dwindling interest (business) for permanent collections.30 The NGV’s tentative attempts to bleed the exhibition footprint of its triennial into the vast permanent collection seem cognizant of this circumstance but are already compromised by the unavoidability of the timid collecting policies of earlier administrations. Perhaps the NGV Triennial 2 could clear the halls and emphatically establish multiple dialogues between the collection and newer works. It will be very interesting to see which of the current triennial’s specially commissioned and collected works maintain re-exhibitability after being so heavily branded. How might some of these works be recontextualized within a second triennial?During the NGV Triennial, many interesting, critically engaged, and strong exhibitions and public programs operated elsewhere in Melbourne. Perhaps a second triennial could interact more fully beyond the NGV International compound on St. Kilda Road. Partnering with other arts organizations would resemble the citywide reach of Signs of Life. But further forays into Melbourne’s urban and suburban communities could relate more intimately with Melbourne’s unique perspective on the world rather than simply reflecting it from within an edifice. These forays could attempt to exploit the conditions of blockbuster consumption and initiate relationships between the collaborative, the commissioned, the permanent, and the transient communities and artworks generated around such events. But these are all strategies that have been used in other global biennial and triennial formats in the last twenty years.Even with this first triennial, is there another format or framing that might still provide a more dynamic impetus than only the promise of an inevitable three-year repeat? Melbourne has already abandoned one biennial. It would be a bold gesture and entirely in keeping with the city’s expectations that a second triennial need not happen at all.Andrew Treloar is an artist and designer working in Melbourne. He is a sessional lecturer in critical and theoretical studies at Victorian College of the Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne. He was commissioned by Chunky Move to design performance apparel for Prue Lang’s choreography in Triennial Extra.