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The idea of a jumping castle that is also a war memorial is surely a perverse oxymoron. What is a memorial, after all, but a space of solemn contemplation, a testament to lives lost, a lasting monument. And what better signifies the trope of childhood high jinks than bouncing around on an inflatable fort, being king or queen of the castle for five minutes before the uncontrollable flood of exhaustion or tears strikes and playtime swiftly closes. At face value, then, these would appear to be antithetical interests: on the one hand we have the uprightness and adult reflection often associated with memorials, with their sombre concerns for the past, their rigid angularity and equally rigid stonework; and on the other hand, the bouncing castle that reverberates with the giggly squeals and spongy jumps of children locked in the throes of forgetting the world around them. Bringing these two objects and their rival significations together would thus seem to be inapt, in conflict, even insensitive to the gravitas that memorials and their burdensome histories ostensibly demand. And yet that is precisely what Melbourne-based artist Brook Andrew has chosen to do with his contribution to the 17th Biennale of Sydney (BoS) ...

What better way to propose an alternative agenda to those that dominate many societies globally - regardless of hemisphere, race or cultural background - than to use those tools of domination against themselves in order to open up other modes of thinking through the past or being in the present? Or to put it another way, can critical thinking be as genuinely pleasurable and efficacious as the thing under investigation? Or is such thinking doomed in an economy of the sensational, the immediate and the affective?

This may well be the key question underpinning much of Andrew's recent series of work, including his Jumping castle set atop Cockatoo Island. No matter how thrilling the backdrop or the ride it is hard not to find something discomforting or out of joint about the work, from its appearance - a European medieval-style fortress draped in Wiradjuri patterning installed in the middle of Sydney Harbour, a site of Australia's disputed 'founding' - to its purpose. Which wars might it commemorate (culture wars? colonial wars? international wars?), and can a children's fairground attraction provide the space and time for commemoration? Is it possible to think through the past while bouncing giddily in the here and now - or, for that matter, to think critically about that experience long after its sensations have dissipated? And can sensory politics still have bite or currency within a culture of biennialisation? ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.