6th September - Sydney

Following yesterday's 'Tour Day', we decided to have an 'Art Day' and, after watching the lady at the hostel reception desk labour at the computer and being permitted another night in the 6-bed dorm (yay!), we made our way to the docks to catch the free ferry to Cockatoo Island.

Cockatoo Island was a secondary penal colony and one of Australia's biggest ship-yards and, as part of the Biennale celebrations of the city, an exhibition was being held in the vast expanse of the corrugated iron ship-building sheds. Most of the cavernous rooms contained installations of contemporary visual arts, from the impressive to the pretentiously obscure. Our favourites were a detailed filigree cage cut from a shipping container and a massive array of giant polystyrene chains which draped over a collection of gigantic industrial machines.

The dog-leg tunnel and the old prison building about the island also housed installations, some of which were perfectly suited to their surroundings while others were overpowered by the beauty and decay of the buildings themselves. Unfortunately, it was one of those exhibitions where the 'explanatory plaques' didn't bother to illuminate the work but instead gave verbose, existential descriptions  that served only to confuse people, rather than give them insight into the motivations and messages of the work.

One of the most interesting areas was the Museum of Copulatory organs, which contained magnified images and models of the penises of tiny little insects; some of which could only be described as beautiful.

Less enthralling for us personally were the 'sculptures' of beeswax which mostly just looked like melted beeswax and a collection of stones and little glass bottles. Asking the staff on hand about them did elicit interesting background stories but they started Matt on his usual questioning spiral (to me of course, not them) of what art actually is.

We took the ferry back and went back to Subway because we were starving and we knew where it was, it was predictable, and Matt wanted to claim his free cookie for completing an online survey for them yesterday!

The evening was spent in the Museum of Contemporary Art where there was more of the Biennale, some indigineous cultures installations and a cool glass lift with views over the harbour. I particularly liked the work of a Thai guy called Kamin Lertchaiprasert who had used Thai Baht to make papier mache sculptures representing his insight into himself and his family and friends for every single day of the year. Not only were they interesting, moving and comical themselves, the sight of them stretching off down the wall museum made me feel a lot better about struggling with the mammoth task that I have set myself in writing this blog. And a lot more determined to complete it.

We were about to do a last scoot round of the things we hadn't seen (I do hate to leave things incomplete) when there was an announcement about a free tour of the Biennale work. We'd looked at those floors already but I couldn't resist so we went round them all again with the tour group. Although I was very tired and my feet were hurting I was really glad we did and I enjoyed the additional insight we got into the installations. 

The end of the night was spent watching crappy TV  in the common room and struggling to hear the 'dialogue' of 'Operation Repo' while tuning out the banging music and partying of drunken groups of hostelers at the other side of the kitchen. The contrast to our day led to an inevitable feeling of being old.