By Ruth Skilbeck
It may to some seem ironic that the main point that has emerged from a Biennale ostensibly on promoting libidinal desire, in accord with the desire that propels "upmarket" advertising to represent and glamorise objects with the allure of mediated sensations, that evoke pleasure and/or (in the "right way") pain; is very far from this, is its converse and counter-balance in a world out of control: Ethics.
A word far from the postmodern euphorias that Baudrillard recognised as "obscene" yet which have propelled the world of illusion and deception, the false images of promotion, and advertising, into university departments to replace the former courses in Literature which gave a grounding in critical thinking.
This is a libidinal state, where the catalogue essays reveal, desire may not even be for the pleasurable, but in the text by Edward Colless, for the pain of torture, and hideous defilements. Colless illustrates his imaginings with the image of the "corpse bride" a figure from myth and literature where a living young woman was forced into an embrace with a rotting corpse, until she too, tied to the corpse, was consumed and killed by its literal embrace of death, as she could not escape, tied to the corpse, by her torturers. It seems like an odd image to use as a motif in a catalogue essay on a Biennale with the theme You Imagine What You Desire (a quotation from Bernard Shaw apparently), yet this is the motif that Colless plays with and works up - and which even more oddly acquired a very real and unintended resonance in this Biennale, when the artists participating in it refused to let their works be used to, figuratively speaking,
illustrate this foul sick play of words.
For a long time in the art world and postmodern critical theory there was an idea that the Real was illusory, inaccessible, that we live in a world where emotion and real affect is not only impossible to convey, as impossible to transmit through writing or art to others, as our intentions, in words. Also deeply uncool, although that in itself is a contradiction.
What this leads to logically and illogically, is the efflorescence of decadence that emerges in ideas of Flowers of Evil, and the corpse bride, though I still don't get the associations that Colless was trying to convey with his foul images. He also slanders facebook as a means of communication and likens those who use it to communicate as zombies, the living dead, their "communication" a form of contagion and sickness. Ironically or otherwise, what he criticises in others, is evident and manifest in his own words and writing, the image of the young woman tied to a rotting corpse that he cannot leave alone, it seems, throughout his essay is a rather disturbing reflection of the author's mind, and yet he is using this to project onto the artists and art in the Biennale. Or is there something more to it, that the reader does not know??
Perhaps this is part of what caused the deep abreaction from the international artists in the Biennale. Not only do they find that they are in an environment where they are subliminally being married to corpses, they are also then to find out that their works are being used to endorse a sponsor who is running offshore mandatory detention camps where - as the media reveals during the month prior to the Biennale opening- inmates are held in conditions which amount to forms of torture, and are even murdered in the supposed care given to them, as happened in the last month prior to the Biennale, when 23 year old architecture student, Reza Barati had his "head stamped on" and died as a result in attacks on inmates by locals and service providers at the camps run by the now-ex Biennale sponsor (due to the boycott).
Given this it is not surprising perhaps that the young artist whose work, Garden of Bad Flowers, was made in reference to Baudelaire's book of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of evil) that she should suddenly wish to withdraw her work, when she found out about these shockingly real links and connections, ties to funding which is analogously as appalling as finding you are tied to a rotten corpse. Gabrielle de Vietri, aged 31, who led the artists group who boycotted the Biennale for this very reason, is one of the two artists who did not return when the Board subsequently acted on the artists' boycott and the looming boycott of the international governments who were about to withdraw their funds, in support of their artist representatives.
Her "site-specific work", The Garden of Bad Flowers, was a literally ecological work, of flowers and grasses filling many planters, which had already been situated on Cockatoo Island (a former convict prison island in Sydney Harbour and as of 2008 a Biennale site), the Biennale catalogue still includes her work, as if she is still a part of the Biennale. Yet she is not. The catalogues were printed three months ago, curator Engberg said in the media preview, apparently they could not be altered and reprinted, and failing this neither could a slip of paper be inserted into the catalogues- one of which I bought at the MCA shop yesterday- with the change of artist representation, as the artists themselves wished and requested that their withdrawal be marked with a statement that they had withdrawn. This was ignored in Gabrielle's case.
Most of the artists boycotting the Biennale went back, and installed their works, after the Board severed ties with the detention camps sponsor. But not Gabrielle de Vietri.
She had made a garden, and an installation of floriography,
the language of flowers.
What her statement says, unwritten though it may be on paper, or in the Biennale exhibition guide, is that her flowers are now saying something very different.
This week, Gabrielle de Vietri has moved her garden of flowers, with the help of "burly women and men" off Cockatoo Island and she has relocated her garden of flowers. With many helpers she moved the garden to a community Farm in Sydney's outskirts.
She wrote on her website of her work last year:
[For] the 2014 Biennale of Sydney I am creating a Garden of Bad Flowers - plants that have been given negative symbolic meanings according to the 19th century publication "The Language of Flowers". Lavender means distrust, lobelia represents malevolence, cypress symbolises mourning, basil, hatred and mandrake, horror, etc.
It will be...
As it turned out the 'horror' of mandrake became real, with the detention camps
link becoming apparent, and Gabrielle de Vietri withdrew her work.
She should be commended for her ethical
leadership and her work in changing the language of flowers, which has achieved an important cultural change, in the real world, where symbolic art meets politics, and makes a social difference.
Ruth Skilbeck, 19.3.2014
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