30th March - Triennial

We went to the triennial this week which explored the idea of art being more risky and adventurous. I didn't fully understand what this meant because the artworks I saw at the gallery didn't seem very risky or adventurous but more explored the idea of reality and imagination like Bundith Phunsombatlert's The Room with a Bird, where you walk through a passageway of bird perches triggering motion detectors which start the sounds of a bird flying around and chirping. It is an odd experience, hearing something so clear and real but not being able to see it to know it is real. Then there is Alicia Frankovich's Revolution (Martini Fountain) which could be risky if you think of it as representing a frail, sickly state of a human body, as an object or tool, and therefore offensive to someone who is actually sick but that seems very far fetched. This work focused so much on representing the human body, with the forever circulating fluids and almost skeletal body it didn't seem to create the theme of risk or adventure. So in my opinion, probably because of my not understanding, this triennial didn't fulfill it's own brief. If one artwork worked, more than others at least, it was Shilpa Gupta's Singing Cloud partnered with the airport-style flap board because the dark, disturbing mass of 4000 microphones emitting several different strange sounds looks very similar to a bomb or a mushroom cloud and the flap board continuously displays numbers representing casualties in different countries and words like death. This work strongly reflects terrorism, particularly like 711, and therefore is risky because it explores the psychology of fear and prejudice (prejudice being a very delicate subject). Terrorism is of coarse today's society's greatest fear, whereas in the past it might have been media moguls having too much power and influence or secrecy in foreign organisations so time was also a big part of the work, in another time in order to be risky the work would be completely different.