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If one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of biennials concerns the format's complicity with global spectacle culture and local political agendas alike, another is that at the apparently straightforward level of visitor experience, the vast majority of biennials have not been particularly engaging. The practice of biennial curatorship is, after all, a relatively young one, still finding its political and methodological feet. But so too are biennial criticism and spectatorship, practices that continue to struggle with the vastness of the biennial enterprise, both in terms of the scale of individual exhibitions and the apparent limitlessness of their much-discussed proliferation. The attendant phenomenon of 'biennale fatigue', an energy-sapping combination of jetlag, over-stimulation and critical inertia, has created a demonstrable jadedness toward the format - one that anticipates, and treats as inevitable, viewer disappointment.

Perhaps this is why the mood around Sydney was so buoyant after the opening of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's 2008 Biennale of Sydney, 'Revolutions - Forms that Turn'. Let's face it: despite numerous high points, no Biennale of Sydney in the past decade has been declared a resounding success by the critical community. Whether resigned to disappointment or suspicious of grand claims, it seems that this time around, the Sydney art world and visitors from around the region have been pleasantly surprised. If initial responses are anything to go by, Christov-Bakargiev's attempt has at the very least reinvigorated the institution in the local mindset...

Crucial to this is her employment of a strategy, last explored in Rene Block's 1990 Biennale of Sydney, 'The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art', of juxtaposing new and recent efforts by contemporary artists with historical works from certain 'revolutionary' periods in the twentieth century. While Block's biennale constructed a non-linear history based around the iconic figure of the readymade, 'Revolutions - Forms that Turn' seems more directed toward the performative. While it is tempting to view the inclusion of work with kinetic or revolving elements, such as a 1960s Tinguely Bascule, Michael Snow's De la, 1969-71, or a rotating canvas by Atsuko Tanaka, as overly literal, they retain an allegorical aspect that is more productive in consideration of the real revolutionary impact of avant-garde art, and by extension the social role of art in general, functioning less in terms of tangible social change and more as a performative gesture, a rhetorical rupture in a prevailing symbolic order...

Importantly, though, the biennale does not disrupt the spectacle of the major exhibition, as some advance publicity had boldly claimed. If exploring an island filled with compelling works of Australian and international art on a clear Sydney winter day seems all too perfect, it's because it is too perfect. The 2008 Biennale of Sydney's great innovation is that it does not attempt to elude the spectacle of intellectual and cultural tourism endemic to its format. Rather, it embraces the sense of adventure and the pleasure of knowledge central to tourism's economy of desire and uses them as a platform to present an engaging but critical exhibition. And it is an exhibition after all, a show, a spectacle with many, many standout experiences on offer - and a quick roll call would include, but not be limited to, works by Gerard Byrne, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Sam Durant, Harun Farocki and Adrei Ujica, Dan Perjovschi, and Susan Philipsz - but a spectacle all the same. It is from this platform, the process of its creation and its reception, that any revolutionary experience associated with it will be had. Whatever that might mean, of course.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.