An alternative world

By PAUL PANCKHURST

A Japanese artist sends two giant foam dice lurching down the steps of Sydney's Opera House. A Chinese artist licks the pavement at Circular Quay, declaring it cleaner than some he's tasted, if somewhat salty. Cue predictable newspaper headline: "Artist with a taste for the bizarre."

A clunky metal submarine created by a Belgian artist is put on display outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales after a late discovery that it's too big to get through the doors.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, a line of plastic toy figures is on a protest march. "We are not fictions," says a tiny placard.

This is the Biennale of Sydney, where work from 56 artists or groups from 21 countries stretches across eight venues in a communique on developments in contemporary art.

Just over halfway through the show's run, artistic director Richard Grayson's verdict on how things are going is: "So far, so very good".

Grayson is the first practising artist to run the 29-year-old show. He claims the event is heading towards being the most popular yet, which would mean an attendance of more than 200,000, despite the absence of any drawcard as big as one of the past participants, Yoko Ono.

Grayson's spin: the crowds are an unexpected bonus. He says putting the show together was like making a tape for a party. He just chose what he liked and hoped other people would like it as well.

The tiny placard held by a marching toy ties in cutely with a major strand of the show: works where artists create elaborately realised alter-ego characters, supported by mock authenticating documents and artefacts. One example is the Australian artist Suzanne Treister's creation of a character called Rosalind Brodsky, described as "a delusional time traveller". Another is the American Eleanor Antin's prima ballerina character, Eleanora Antinova.

Calling the show (The World May Be) Fantastic, Grayson describes the focus as "artists who use fictions, fakes, invented methodologies, hypotheses, subjective belief systems, modellings, and experiments as a basis for their work".

In a written introduction, he says the construction of alternative worlds or alternative readings of this world "suggests that our everyday belief systems may also be changeable, constructed, hallucinatory, slippery and various".

The better-known art names represented include Panamarenko, the man who made the 7m-long submarine and, elsewhere in the show, displays a fascination with flying contraptions and walking machines.

There is also the American Chris Burden, the artist who famously once had himself nailed to a Volkswagen (the "nail me to my car" reference in the 1970s Bowie song Joe the Lion). Here, his works are model bridges created from real or copied Meccano and Erector Set pieces.

The countries most represented are Australia, Britain and the United States, while some parts of the globe - such as Africa, South America and the Middle East - seem entirely absent.

Two New Zealanders are here, the stuffed critters and silk flowers of Michael Parekowhai are on the same floor of the NSW gallery as Mike Stevenson's Can Dialects Break Bricks?, an installation that examines art politics, drawing on the period in the 1970s when the art world, or part of it, sucked up to the Shah of Iran.

A Japanese-born artist living in Vietnam and a Korean living in the US contribute two of the show's stand-outs. A video by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba shifts the pedal taxi, the cyclo, from Vietnam's teeming streets to the sea floor. Called Memorial Project Nha Trang, the work shows a group of young men pedalling and dragging the vehicles across sand and rock, breaking off to surface for air, and then diving down to return to their struggle.

It is mesmerising, a matching up of an eccentric, dreamy setting, a hard physical task, and the connotations of poverty.

In one of the most talked-about works, Korean Do-Ho Suh recreates his New York apartment in pink and turquoise translucent nylon at MOCA. This soft home is a masterpiece of detail, from the door hinges and light switches to the saggy stove and the bathroom plumbing, all in fabric. You can walk through. Breathe on the walls and doors and they ripple.

UFOs, aliens and alien-style images seem to pop up everywhere. Just past Suh's apartment, in a curtained-off, night-lit room, is the US-born, Britain-based Susan Hiller's work Witness (2000), where hundreds of speakers broadcast witnesses' accounts of UFO sightings.

This is where gallery-goers linger the longest, walking through the cloud of speakers, enveloped by the multilingual babble, or taking hold of a single speaker to listen to an individual story.

It is a visual spectacle as well as an aural experience - the hanging speakers cast shadows like inverted poppies and in the half-light the listeners are like the story-tellers' co-conspirators.

Critics have given the biennale a thumbs-up as refreshing and endearing - "jaunty", "a palpable hit" - but have damned some works. Cang Xin is the Chinese artist who licks famous places and miscellaneous objects. Photographs of some of his licks - like the Colosseum in Rome - are part of the biennale.

Xin is a natural for media coverage - "a good 'wacky art' story" as Richard Grayson puts it - and one Australian critic, Benjamin Genocchio, described the inclusion of his work as little more than a publicity stunt.

An intriguing set of works that seemed to attract little attention is Les Trotteuses, the walking and story-telling devices created by Belgian artist Patrick Corillon.

Lying around the NSW Gallery waiting to be picked up, these aluminium devices are on rubber rollers and display fictional stories on sets of flip cards. The cards flip when viewers walk the devices around.

This means that in The Hotel, a story set in a fictional hotel, the viewer is walking the same distance from room to room as the character telling the story.

You pace, a card flips, and you get something like: "The woman in room 102 wears a beautiful dress buttoned up at the back. She is 53 years old and there are 53 buttons. She expects her lovers as they roughly strip it off to pull off as many buttons as possible and so take years off her age. She spends the next day sewing them back on." You start pacing again.

Back at Moca, a photograph by French artist Gilles Barbier makes a different sort of demand on the viewer. It is entitled Mon salon est une base martienne (My living room is a martian base) and features notes called "Reality Correctors". Attached to everyday objects, the notes explain what the viewer should see.

Attached to an umbrella: "It would be really great if you could transform this object into an anti-meteorite magnetic shield. (Congratulations if you get it right)."

It's also worth mentioning Miwa Yanagi's photographs, depicting young Japanese people's imagined lives in 50 years' time and the manga character Annlee, rescued from life as a second-rate piece of animation by the artists who bought her copyright.

Then there's Polish artist Katarzyna Jozefowicz's cardboard and paper carpet of tens of thousands of people cut from magazines, and Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells.

So much to see at the biennale - but this story has to stop somewhere.

* The Biennale of Sydney is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Opera House, Artspace and 24 Orwell St, Kings Cross, until July 14, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Object Galleries, City Exhibition Space and the Customs House until July 28.