By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Biennale has been a buzzword for some years now. Venice is the granddaddy of a recent big bang explosion that has grown a constellation of enormous two-yearly international exhibitions dotted around the planet. Exploring big themes and cultural exchange, with jet-setting curators networking to identify the latest thing, the biennale is a global art village's moveable feast. Yet as the gap between biennale and art fairs grows slimmer, and contemporary art practice gets more socially attuned, this model could be on the wane.

Sydney's Biennale is Australasia's big contemporary art gesture - the public expecting to be challenged by new ideas presented on a spectacular scale. This year there are works by 180 artists from over 42 countries, with 50 works created especially for the Biennale.Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's programme reacts against the international art market buzz by being unruly, historical and highlighting artists who overturn art as a commercial currency and who become agents of change.

This biennale is at once incredibly coherent and consciously all over the place. The beauty of Christov-Bakargie's curation is that it creates clear access to powerful ideas for a broad audience, while also creating spaces below for deeper strands of thought. This is summed up by the directness and poetry of the Biennale's title: 'Revolutions - Forms that Turn'. Exploring the "impulse to revolt", alongside contemporary artists it features avant-garde artists from the early 20th century on. The idea of things being turned and overturned is represented by works that do this physically as well as conceptually: such as Marcel Duchamp's readymade of a bicycle wheel upturned on a stool.

This isn't an exhibition of work that just talks of revolution, but of forms that actually revolt. As Len Lye's inclusion attests (Storm King and a reconstruction of a fantastic 1965 work Ribbon Snake (Convolution)) this is about artists who put art in motion outside of its traditional frames. In a recent interview Christov-Bakargie suggests that the video black box has put art "back in that crazy gilded frame from the 1400s." The Biennale is full of video, but with constant interesting challenges to its limited use.

This is all painfully relevant, and one of the smartest things this Biennale ends up doing is offer up an alternate art history of more relevance to now than the modernist journey. By intermingling the contemporary and the historical in exhibition it creates communities of ideas, rather than the usual shaky chronologies.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds the greatest repository of historical work, but it's beautifully intercut by the likes of Renata Lucas's walls (that the audience can move on tracks) and Francis Alys's filming of an incident from nine different points of view, shown on nine monitors around the space.

There are some picture-perfect Biennale icons: James Angus reconstructs the Bugatti that revolutionised racing in the age of the Futurists, turns it upside down and (having used digital modeling) warps its geometry 30 degrees to the right - a symbol of an era that spun out of shape. Rejected by the gallery, but represented in maquette form is Gordon Bennett's proposal to hang the old gilded frame historical works in the gallery's collection upside down and insert in between them the contemporary Aboriginal collection work that is exhibited in the gallery's basement. It's a masterstroke of making a point through pushing boundaries to the point of failure, evoking the similar big dreaming acts of Lye, Tatlin and Tinguely.

Spanning public galleries, the Botanic Gardens and a wharf, a free ferry then takes you on to the Biennale's extraordinary jewel, Cockatoo Island. The largest island in the harbour, it's a former prison and shipyard, where the great ships of the last century were built. Just opened to the public last year, it's an awesome rusty memorial to industrial progress, and a perfect fit for Christov-Bakargie's concerns. It has allowed 35 artists to have their own spaces around the island in disused buildings and tunnels. City Gallery might do well to look to our equivalent, Somes Island.

The only trouble on Cockatoo is that it's a powerful site in its own right that sometimes overwhelms the works (such as the disappointing Jannis Kounellis' work in the great Turbine Hall). Ultimately the strongest works for me were to be found in the prison buildings on the top of the island where the sense of captivity meets video artists working to break out of the imposed confines of their media. They interrogate the revolutionary impulse as much as evoke it.

New Zealand's represented in Sydney by Simon Denny, who re-presents critic Wystan Curnow's record of a Peter Roche '70s performance work, in which Roche set out to test his audience's patience. Denny reflects and refracts Roche and Curnow's ideas in a deadpan installation that plays on ideas around presentation and demonstration. It may well be the Biennale's most demanding work, but its one that in its suggestion of a few new interesting turns I found myself wanting to return to.

Revolutions - Forms that Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney, until 7 September

Image: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Courtesy Biennale of Sydney
Photo: Ben Symons

16/07/08