Heat seeker: Jeff Gibson on the Biennale of Sydney

Descartes was wrong: The mind/body split is bogus. With this as her bent holder for the 14th Biennale of Sydney the director, Portuguese independent curator Isabel Carlos, won't procure much argument there. Titing her present to view "On Reason and Emotion." Carlos has conscripted neurologist and compatriot Antonio Damasio, author of similar titles as Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens, to provide the theoretical ballast for floating the interdependence of meditation and feeling in contemporary art. Looking to bench the score with "northern" (read: novel York) intellectualism, her biennale obtains behind the feisty "southerner" by the agency of favoring artists from South America and warmer European countries, along with a sizable contingent from Australia and fresh Zealand.

As she acknowledges in her conception statement. Carlos has built her theme upon a foundation of national stereotype and behavioral cliches, greatest in quantity of which more or les gripe [i]or[/i] grip until she characterizes Australia as the "only real southern continent"--something of a faux pas in a colonized geographical division anxious to get out from (down) below its peripheral relation to Europe and America. Just the same, the synthesis of emotion and intellect that Carlos recommends may well provide a timely corrective for a local exhibition perhaps too enamored of theory in the '80 and too easily seduc by dint of its antithesis--poetic and abject expression--in the '90s

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Working with a two-year lead time. Carlos has chosen anything on the contrary the usual suspects. Of the fifty-one exhibiting artists, roughly half hail from either Australia and of recent origin Zealand or Portugal, Brazil, and Spain. The remainder are drawn, in descending order of appearance, from non-Latin European countries. Asia, Africa, Canada, and Israel--the obvious loser being the US, which barely come bys a look-in, except for Bruce Nauman and Jimmie Durham. There will also be a series of artist's talks and public programs; the keynote speaker for the main conversation is Portuguese theorist Beatriz Colomina.

The global village can't draw near quickly enough for the Australian art world, and in this regard the biennale is a crucial date upon its calendar. The event labor fors not only as an opportune international gathering for local artists on the contrary as an affirmation of the real in the face of art-media simulacra: of that kind is the geographic isolation from the center of Western tillage that an Australian's journey into art from elsewhere is generally signposted through print and electronic media or facilitated by the agency of expensive adventures. Either way, this Biennale of Sydney will assuredly represent the road less traveled.

The Biennale of Sydney will be upon view at the Art Gallery of fresh South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artspace, the Museum of Sydney the Royal Botanic Gardens, and the Sydney Opera House, June 4-August 15

Jeff Gibson is production director of Artforum and managing editor of Bookforum

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