There are lots of contemporary artworks exhibited in the 4th Auckland Triennial exhibits fulfilled it's terms "adventure & risk" in a extraordinary way. The theme of this exhibition: Last Ride In A Hot Air Balloon, tells people that nowadays, we are facing more and more risk and contradiction in our society, like the recent economic recession, higher unemployment rate, gap between wealthy and poor and so on. And now it's the time to change the situation and face the risk bravely. In this Triennial, we can find most of the artists trying to describe their desire of having adventure and break something new. one if those artworks which can totally represents the terms is the short films made by Marine Hugonnier, her films almost completely contain all kinds of risk and adventure, especially the third one has a image of a hot balloon image, this one has the function of emphasis the theme of this exhibition and let me think of the last year American 3D animation UP, the old man attaches thousands of hot balloons to the house and use the flying house to go to the south American waterfall to finish the dream of him and his wife who had die. For a person, a life without adventure and risk isn't a worth life, for our society, environment, and our world, if we don't try to transform or try to explore the world, we will never develop our society. And the artists are try to telling us, it's time to risk. In addition to the idea those artworks represent, I'm also attracted by the wild range of materials they use, you can see color painting or hand-made drawing in this exhibition, all these new materials and art forms seem like telling person this is something new, some new style, not tradition.I think this is also one part of the risk and adventure.
There are two artworks interest me most, first one is the "Singing Cloud", by Shilpa Gupta. I was amazed by the 4000 microphones, and the sound of singing songs, bird, surfing, etc. This one is really close to the adventure than others because this one can give viewer not only visual impact but also the natural sound which lead listener to the adventure, making people feel they are walking in the forest.
Another one is Robert Hood's Making Useful Useless, this one is quite a performance art. I'm really appreciate the tension of this artwork and I was surprised by the scrap from his white car. It's really a wonderful idea to destroy a useful thing useless to represent his idea. Actually, it's not destroy, it's a non-traditional way to give one thing a new life. Through looking at those car materials can you feel Hood's insinuative attitude to the lack of productivity in both economy and art area. He trying to tell us well should create something new, something more contemporary, don't be outmoded.
Thanks Chris, this was a much better entry! I really like the way you summed up the themes from the exhibition as a whole. I thought you could have given a little more detail on the two individual artworks. Two things to consider: I think the Shilpa Gupta work was situated too close to the Thai artist's birds on perches - so the bird sound in Gupta's cloud was actually from another artwork, and not supposed to be part of it. The sounds the cloud was making were more women singing and whispering, but it was too quiet to be effective, I thought.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, about Rob Hood's car, when he makes the useful useless, I don't think he's suggesting we should all shred our cars, I think he's trying to talk about the problem of waste and how can we be environmentally friendly when we all want new cars? What will we do with the waste that creates? So it is quite political, I think...
TX