This weekend, my wife and I visited the Biennale of Sydney exhibits on Cockatoo Island. The Biennale is so large with about 180 artists participating, that its venues are all over town.

Cockatoo Island is an old shipyard that started off as a prison during the convict days of early European settlement in Australia. 

It’s a fascinating place that is a mixture of convict made sandstone buildings and heavy industry which used to be out of bounds to the public up until very recently. The fact that the shipyard was on an island meant that it became no longer economically viable due to the high cost of bringing in materials. The shipyard was closed down over a decade ago and has been allowed to fall into disrepair. 

The neglect of the buildings on the island has led to the creation of what can only be described as a bonanza of textures.

 Peeling paint, rusted iron, decaying cement and manually chipped sandstone relics of brutal utilitarianism.

Luckily Cockatoo Island has been recognized as being culturally important, and there has been an effort to preserve and restore many of the machines and buildings. Interestingly, one of the really amazing things about Cockatoo Island (which is in Sydney Harbour) is that you can camp there. At $45 a night, it is not cheap, but the facilities are amazing, with hot showers, clean coin operated stainless steel barbecue areas, a communal refrigerator, even a microwave oven. The icing on the cake is that it all comes complete with views of Sydney Harbour that people pay millions of dollars to own houses near.

Prime real estate open to the masses to enjoy rather than being sold off to the rich so they can wall it off and exclude the hoi polloi.

Our friend Peter had invited us to come and camp on the island with him and his friends, several months ago and we had said yes.  By the time Friday came around, and it was time for us to go, I was having second thoughts because it is the middle of winter here and it had been raining. As luck would have it, the weather was unseasonably warm, and we had the most perfect conditions. Two beautifully clear and warm days divided by a perfectly still and calm evening.

Because it is winter, there was hardly anyone else in the campground and we more or less had it to ourselves. At dusk, a campground employee came around and lit a large fire in a brazier, for all of us to sit around. It was all so civilised and comfortable. The really incredible thing about staying overnight was that we were able to roam around the deserted island at night and go just about go anywhere we liked to take photographs.

Another advantage of camping on the island was that we could take our time to look at the exhibits.  Most of the exhibits were video installations, and while I’m not really a fan of such things, there were several pieces that were quite powerful.

I think that the piece that both my wife and I enjoyed the most was a projected video installation on two large screens by the American artist Mark Boulos which deals with the plight of the disenfranchised Nigerians living in the Niger River delta area that is currently being plundered by international oil companies.

On one screen we see young Nigerian men with machetes and guns, wearing balaclavas declaring how they are prepared to fight the Nigerian government, which they see as robbing them of resources and giving them nothing but poverty and oppression in return. On the other screen is video of traders in the Chicago commodities market yelling and screaming to make deals as they frantically make their arcane hand signals to other traders across the room. As the videos progress, the Nigerians become more vehement in their declarations of animosity towards a government that they feel has betrayed them and white people, who they see as robbing them. Meanwhile on the trading floor, tempers start to flare and the hub-bub from the trading increases in intensity until it becomes an almost deafening crescendo.

Boulos has made a very powerful statement about what a large disconnect there is between the exploited and the exploiters.

Another interesting video installation was by Chen Xiaoyun from China, which had an enraged man in the middle of a large muddy field with a whip at night. The man cracked his whip as several trucks circled him. The man seemed full of all of this pointless to rage and the trucks were going around under his direction in the mud not really achieving anything other than making a total mess of the place. To my mind, it seemed to be a metaphor about the Chinese leadership. A lot of misdirected rage and the pointless exercise of power that was not achieving anything of worth. It was almost funny, whilst being ultimately very tragic.

Probably the most confronting work that we saw was that of Mike Parr and his work “MIRROR/ARSE”.  One of the videos was of Parr, sticking his little finger into a candle to see how long he could hold there, while it was being burnt. It was absolutely horrific to watch his finger as it turned black and shook violently as he screamed. Parr also videotaped himself as he had his lips sewn together in solidarity with the illegal immigrants and refugees held in detention here in Australia. It was excruciating to watch.

I felt very conflicted as I watched such painful things. 

On one hand, I can understand Parr wants us to think about the nature of brutality being committed all around the world.  On the other hand, I wonder about the nature of people’s desire to see such things. I found myself thinking of Fellini’s Satyricon and the scene where an actor, cuts off one of his fingers for the entertainment of a bored audience, who toss him a couple of small coins for his pains. I was also reminded about when I saw a Chinese acrobatic troupe which came to Australia in the early 1970s.  It was quite interesting that in the program for the show, the Chinese government had made a point of stating that they weren’t going to risk any of their performance lives in any death-defying feats without some form of safety harness or net, because they thought that the desire to risk people’s lives for entertainment was a bourgeois concept.

As we headed back home by ferry the good weather came to an end and the rain came. During a lull in the storm a rainbow formed over the city.