Indigenous artist Tony Albert’s take on Sorry. Source: The Australian

A SPECTACULAR display of art from the first 10 years of the 21st century tells us, on the surface, that anything goes, and everyone is welcome.

21st Century: Art in the First Decade, opening in Brisbane on Saturday, includes Carston Holler’s giant slides in the Gallery of Modern Art’s towering central atrium. Viewers will be invited to become players, as they spiral down inside it, contemplating what it means to get this close to contemporary art.

Damien Hirst will be represented by a screenprint based on his 2007 skull embedded with diamonds, an example, curator David Burnett says, of the way many contemporary artists now “merge the distant and recent past with the present in revealing the condition and complexities of our age”.

A room half-full of purple balloons, a giant triumphal arch made of cardboard boxes, and a carefully constructed, temperature controlled room full of live finches that make music as they go about their daily tasks, are among 180 works by 110 artists from 40 countries in an ambitious show that, once again, puts out a statement from Queensland Art Gallery about its “commitment to be truly international”, as director Tony Ellwood says.

Significantly, alongside some of the top names in world contemporary art including Martin Creed, Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama and Ai Weiwei, some of the artists in 21st Century represent parts of the world only recently entering into global art.

Romuald Hazoume from Benin in West Africa, Armando Andrade Tudela from Peru and Pascale Marthine Tayou from Cameroon are some of the artists taking part in an ambitious attempt to bring audiences up to date with the dizzying variety of art now being made, not just in the traditional centres for collecting and exhibiting, but in every region of the world.

“We haven’t sought a cohesive, unified experience,” Ellwood says, “but rather a reflection on the polymorphous nature of the world.”

The big, bright, welcoming GoMA opened in late 2006 with the 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. While the momentum of the opening exhausted former director Doug Hall, the challenge of keeping up the pace was as daunting for Ellwood, who has been at the helm since 2007.

As independent curator Nancy Adajania says in one of the essays commissioned for this survey show, Brisbane’s QAG/GoMA was one of the museums which set up biennials or triennials at the right time, representing a “soft power articulation through which its proponents staked their claim to remap the world afresh”.

Once QAG had staked its claim with APT, it may have been prudent for the gallery to spend a decade consolidating, particularly as APT and other survey shows have made the art of the Asia Pacific region so visible and important worldwide.

Instead, Ellwood scheduled a summer blockbuster show of Australian contemporary art that he called Optimism, then proceeded to up the ante with 21st Century.

An opportunity to take stock of a decade of collecting, it also provides QAG with an opportunity to remind local, national and international audiences that it is more than a regional gallery. Indeed, one of the ideas behind 21st Century is the way local and global have become so much more than geographic descriptors.

GoMA film curator Kathryn Weir says that “one of the defining characteristics of the art of the 21st century is its drive for absolute inclusiveness: the aesthetic equality of all media and all geographies”.

If the “anything goes” quality of contemporary art worries some people, who complain to art museums that visitors are only there to have a good time rather than appreciate the art, the very serious discussion QAG has created around the exhibition aims to dispel some of that anxiety.

Curators write about particular themes that can be seen in the exhibition: the “aesthetics of inclusion”; why so much contemporary art recycles junk; what it means when a viewer is immersed into a work of art, physically engaging with it and sometimes even being asked to help create it; how indigenous art sits within the now almost limitless boundaries of what constitutes contemporary art.

Nicholas Chambers explains why stuff in contemporary shows has tended towards the gigantic, even while paradoxically using junk as the source material. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s enormous cloud of plastic bags will be on show in 21st Century, as will Latifa Echakhch’s wall of carbon paper which bleeds on to the floor.

These, Chambers says, are “anti-masterpieces”, “works with fragmented, precarious forms”, using the detritus of contemporary life.

The gallery will display for the first time its new acquisition from Hazoume’s masks series, in which plastic jerry cans are recycled into what seem to be traditional African masks. In this context, Weir answers a question that comes up constantly with each new contemporary art show: why does so much work seem political?

“Contemporary art has become increasingly visible to a broad public over the past decade,” she says, “and, in parallel, artists have assumed the agency and autonomy necessary to make visible nodes of conflict, not only within art practice, but also more broadly in society.”

Artists, Weir suggests, can be “weathervanes or harbingers of change, showing current directions of broader social thought, and indicating sites of transformation where intervention may make inequities and blind spots tangible.”

Curator Miranda Wallace says the gallery wants to bring what happens in art museums into contact with the theoretical work being done by scholars, and so she has also commissioned more general essays, not confined to this show.

In his essay, academic Terry Smith (author of the recent book, What is Contemporary Art?) starts out with a cross-sounding criticism of the kinds of generalisations he says are usually made by those wishing to talk about contemporary art. He says they sound either excessively adulatory or they pillory art “as evidence of profound cultural vacuity”.

On the one hand, this is a “particularism” which only scrutinises the successful and expensive examples of contemporary practice; on the other, its “reductive simplification”.

What Smith and the other essayists seem to be saying is that the “anything goes” nature of what we meet in contemporary art galleries is actually evidence of a “distinctive aesthetic” taking shape in the 21st century.

It’s an aesthetic that “mixes tastes, imagery and textures from many times and places, creating unexpected conjunctures that override cultural borders, geographic boundaries and semiotic stereotypes, and melts categorical distinctions such as those usually drawn between the human and the animal”.

There is a little finger-wagging warning at the end of Smith’s essay, suggesting that, in fact, anything does not go, not when artists, seduced by the spectacular large spaces of the contemporary gallery, and encouraged by large budgets and avid audiences to compete with the entertainment industry, “slip into a new kind of distracted exoticism”. Art, Smith says, should still oblige us to “undergo genuine encounters with its intractable difference”.

Adajania, who is interested in the ways art can tell us something about — and how to deal with — globalism, says “framing devices” such as the APT and 21st Century can help us make sense of the new world order. Such shows provide, she says, an “everyday anthropology of the familiarly strange”.

21st Century: Art in the First Decade opens at QAG’s Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, on Saturday and runs until April 25, 2011.
For more information on 21st Century: Art in the First Decade visit www.qag.qld.gov.au/21stcentury

Rosemary Sorensen, The Australian, December 13, 2010 12:00AM