Sensory pleasantries in the NGV Triennial

Managing to attract even those who do no regularly attend galleries, one of the NGV’s largest affairs, may have turned out to be one of its most disappointing. Pleasing to the visual senses, so aesthetically stunning that it warrants being immortalised on Instagram, and just captivating enough that you battle it out to the end, the Triennial was a curatorial hotpot made by a chef full of ambition.

With good intentions to work “from the art up”, the Triennial spans across all three levels of the NGV, and although viewers have the option to acquire a map on their way in, the through-line is clunky and messily articulated. It becomes a treasure hunt to find certain works, disrupting the flow of the entire narrative the Triennial hoped to focus on: a conversation around movement, body, virtual, change and time. Bringing together 100 artists and already working with a wide scope to begin with, it was only inevitable that a single exhibition could only hope to be able to shallowly penetrate these ideas. Working with the notion of the exhibition as a mixture of concepts, the curatorial choice fails in its intention to allow for the ebb of movement and the modulation of different energies throughout the gallery. The changes in pace instead interrupts immersion with frustration, and the conversation between artworks falls on deaf ears. Although not a suggestion to return to the tired form of curating in thematic, working in slightly tighter clusters could have perhaps served Simon Maidment and his team well. 

The idea of movement between NENDO’s Manga Chairs (2015) against Team Lab’s wonderfully mesmerizing Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement (2017) could have melded together beautifully, before funnelling out into the works of Yamagami Yukihiro and Richard Giblett. The elegant yet harrowing installation of Rob Mueck risked being hidden away a little too well, and although given space to breathe, it breathes a little too far away from anything else in the Triennial.

Clumsy curatorial enunciations aside, the works themselves are visually captivating, and perhaps if not so cumbersome to move through, one could take the time to unravel the gentle layers of meaning beneath each artwork. You know your eyes are in for a treat when you are greeted by Xu Zhen’s gargantuan Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana (2016-17), adorned with Aphrodite, Narcissus, other Greek gods, and even tales. Taken at face value as a commentary on East meets West, the work is also a visual representation of religious tolerance and a contemplation on harmony in our world today. Guo Pei’s intersection of fashion and art in her new Legend (2017) Collection are arresting in their beauty, the details in her designs inviting both intimacy and reverence from viewers. But within this, the works are gentle and intricate interweaves of material, history and technology as she explores new textile avenues for the future. Yayoi Kusama never fails to garner a line to enter her beautiful installations, but after the pleasure of placing your flower somewhere in the room you wrestle through crowds of viewers crouching in the bathtub, sitting on a seat or god forbid, posing in a doorway. But following through with her consistent theme of the internal and personal, Flower Obsession also touches on spatial and environmental awareness. 

What is clear is that art galleries have now found themselves at the threshold of transformation. Formerly vanguards of culture and travel attractions, technological and sociological transformations declares our receptivity to entertainment and information as a challenge to the institution to transcend its original place in the world. NGV’s Triennial was a precarious balancing act between shallow visual pleasantry and being provocative enough to question itself within itself. The dissolution of the boundaries between art, entertainment, design, craft and technology was a bold, yet admirable play, in the integration of the new Triennial pieces with the NGV’s old collection. Beneath the mess and frustration, what also remains indisputable is the crowning of the journey we are now taking in the realm of “instagrammable art”. The age of the aesthetic here to please the senses without necessarily seeking to challenge intellect. A new manifestation of art for entertainment. The new era of beautiful installations which double as photobooths. The generation of going to a gallery to be seen but not to see.