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Sweet success
Event Venice Biennale 2009
A review of ceramic installation artist Ken Yonetani's installation Sweet Barrier Reef at the 2009 Venice Biennale, 7 June - 22 November.
Fatigued and footsore, on my fourth consecutive day in Venice previewing the wide spectrum of contemporary art on offer at the 53rd International Art Exhibition, I visited the Australian group exhibition Once Removed at the Ludoteca. Housed in an outbuilding at the rear of the former convent, the Australian-based Japanese artist Ken Yonetani's installation Sweet Barrier Reef provided a welcome respite from the clamour at the Arsenale and Giardini. Ignorant of the artist's routine exploration of environmental concerns in his work, my initial thought was that his tableaux of luminous white coral forms made from sugar, arranged on the sugar-strewn gallery floor, was his light-hearted comment on the growing fashion for couples to marry at picturesque beaches. Knife-ravaged remnants of four gaudily iced cakes, discarded on a side table, hinted at wedding rituals. But they could simply have been launch party leftovers. It was a puzzling mise en scene, involving more than met the eye.
Later, in the courtyard, four glamorous young Italian models, identically dressed in pristine- white, attenuated bridal gowns and notional head-dresses, appeared simultaneously. Soon, the increasingly curious onlookers were invited to re-enter the gallery where, to the saccharine strains of Johann Strauss"s Blue Danube Waltz, the 'brides' performed a captivatingly choreographed routine, in paired symmetry, during which they carried and displayed four intact cakes for onlookers' inspection. The performance culminated in their cutting the cakes into hefty wedges, which they offered to bemused onlookers with elegant gestures and dazzlingly perfect smiles. While tentatively tasting the sugary confection, our recognition of its 'sweetness' as a basic physiological taste was overwhelmed by the emotional sentimentality of the luxuriant Viennese music as it swelled to its climax, before its post-coital collapse.
"For the artist, sugar represents human desire and consumerism," Felicity Fenner, curator of Once Removed, wrote earlier about Yonetani's work. "The demand for sugar-based products is wreaking havoc, causing obesity and environmental damage and is a direct result of the modern demand for instant gratification." 1 His intention with Sweet Barrier Reef is therefore to highlight the damage that sugar refinery waste wreaks on coral off the coast of North Queensland, and many other coastlines throughout the world. The Venice Biennale installation is the third manifestation of this work, which was shown first at Artspace in Sydney in 2005 and then at the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. His innovations for the Venetian installation included adding underwater wave effect lights, which washed the bleached coral forms with pastel shades; and new performers. "I chose "brides" as participants because I wanted to have more sexuality and beauty," he says. 2
Their dance was choreographed by Annalice Creighton, a student at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. "I tried to teach the models their movements, but it was terrible," adds Yonetani. Their costumes were the work of Zephyr Huang of the Melbourne-based design brand Zephyr Graham. "I asked the designer to make the dress with pure white that is the same colour as bleached corals and purity." He also requested that she incorporate some marine imagery into the bridal outfits, which included their upswept, sea shell-shaped bodices and hats in tulle which Huang used to evoke the shape of coiled, Nautilus shells.
The performances, in which the four models masquerading as brides interacted directly with the audience, drawing them into the performance via the shared, communal ritual of cutting and eating the wedding cakes, were held only during the hectic days of the vernissage, so documenting this ephemeral aspect of the work for posterity was very important to the artist and his partner Julia Yonetani. They have created a new work for Three Degrees of Change, an exhibition of work by three artists at the La Trobe University art Museum (12 August - 2 September). Entitled Sweet Barrier Reef for the 21st Century - Play Strauss's waltz grandly their work documents the Biennale installation with photographs and footage from Venice, as well as a newly created installation in which performance is also important.
"Documentation is always important for me because my previous work 'fumie-tiles' and these edible sculptures were eaten and destroyed," says Yonetani. "Monitoring our changing environment is very important in recognising how dramatically and quickly we have changed it", as Al Gore"s film Inconvenient Truth shows.
Yonetani equates consumers' desire for sugar with sexuality. His view is that the people who eat his edible sculptures, which he colours brightly to represent living corals, become participants in the symbolic destruction of the environment. "I am interested in human desires such as one of eros and destruction," he says, quoting Morris Berman. "Real knowledge is not merely discursive or literal; it is also, if not first and foremost, sensuous. In fact, it is very nearly erotic, derived from bodily participation in the learning act. De gustibus non est disputandum, goes a scholastic saying; about things eaten, there can be no argument. Or as the Sufit put it, those who taste, know." 3 The formal beauty of Sweet Barrier Reef and their participation seduce viewers, priming them to accept the subtle environmental messages that Yonetani develops through his work. He educates us by whispering not shouting.
"A coral reef is the canary in the cage as far as the oceans are concerned," said David Attenborough on 6 July, following a meeting of marine biologists at the Royal Society in London. "They are the places where the damage [caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere] is most easily and quickly seen. It is more difficult for us to see what is happening in, for example, the deep ocean or the central expanses of ocean." 4 Artists' investigations of environmental problems, although more tangential than those of scientists, provide a potent means to engage with the public, subjectively via their senses rather than with more rigorous scientific objectivity. "I have some ideas and plans for new work, which will focus of environmental issues as long as I am anxious about them" concludes Yonetani.
Colin Martin is a London-based Australian writer with a particular interest in the work of artists who engage with science and medicine.
Footnotes
- Fenner, F., 2007. The nature of art. Art & Australia 44(3).
- Yonetani, K., 2009. Edited responses to questions [Email] (Personal Communication, 30 July 2009 ).
- Berman, M., 1981. The Re-enchantment of the World. New York: Cornell University Press.
- Jha, A., 2009. Scientists warn coral reefs may soon be extinct.The Guardian, 7 July.
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