The spectacular harbor of Sydney served as a backdrop to the city's 11th Biennale, a sprawling show of works by 101 artists displayed in 10 far-flung venues. Undaunted by the intense heat of an Australian summer, a pair of intrepid American critics encounter art of the "Every Day."

Imagine it is a very hot, humid morning in Sydney, Australia, on the second full day of our first visit to the antipodes. From the plane, the initial approaching and descending view of the brute headlands that define the mouth of Sydney's huge harbor has thrilled and lastingly perturbed us, and we have yet to recover from an essentially sleepless 50-odd-hour day, within which an entire Monday completely disappeared, forever unlived, at least by us. It was during the final stretch of that kaleidoscopic day that we met quite literally everyone we were destined to meet in our new host city. Only now we am having trouble remembering who they all were, and our one friend in town--the one who gave the hallucinatory party in our honor on the evening of the day we arrived--has already flown off to familiar old Europe. Unfamiliar new Sydney is teeming with unleashed children, the harbor with small craft: it's October, and spring break.

We had come, of course, to see an exhibition of contemporary art: the 11th Biennale of Sydney, for which works by 101 artists from 28 countries were installed at 10 scattered venues, including two major museum buildings, two noncommercial galleries, an alternative space, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the adjacent Government House, the grounds of the Sydney Opera House, a pier and an island in the harbor. A quick first tour of the most august and central of these venues, the Beaux-Arts-style Art Gallery of New South Wales, had been less than galvanizing. Au equally cursory walkabout in the Art Deco building that houses the Museum of Contemporary Art, located between the Rocks (formerly Sydney's raunchiest district, now a high-end touristic zone) and the Circular Quay (the city's main ferry hub), had seemed only a bit brighter. We elected to make Pier 2/3, in nearby Walsh Bay, our next port of call.

There--dazed, daunted and schvitzing--we immediately found ourselves amidst Hammocks, a magnanimous installation by the American artist Patrick Killoran, of approximately 20 modified but perfectly functional string beds attached to pillars, in the shade of the pier's lovely old industrial arcade. Lisa immediately caught the spirit of the piece and hurled herself into one of them for a late-morning siesta. Brooks removed his shoes (for the first of many times that day) and in his own hammock began taking notes. This, dear readers, was our first wholly positive diurnal experience of a Biennale titled "Every Day."

It turns out that Killoran's mercifully lackadaisical Hammocks in many ways encapsulated the virtues and shortcomings of the 11th Sydney Biennale as a whole--a low-key, mildly hedonistic affair that did a solid job of filling a number of big gaping spaces and made deft use of some of this spectacular city's most atmospheric and scenic locales. Like Killoran's Hammocks, the show in general had a neo-Conceptualist, process-oriented bent within which artistic strategies and systems were emphasized, along with viewer-interactivity. The deconstruction and/or recycling of ordinary objects--used clothing, for example, unraveled and reknit by the Canadian artist Germaine Koh, at the alternative Artspace-formed one major leitmotif. Various physical impositions and temporal demands on viewers, including darkened projection rooms, obstacle-filled spaces and mechanized sculptures morphing slowly over time, constituted another.

At the small, laid-back Artspace, an old industrial building on Woolloomooloo Bay, the Biennale component provided a veritable hotbed of artistic egos in states of flux, subversion or denial. Lisa found the varied production of the Toronto-based Koh to be among the standouts in the show. Koh's Self-Portrait, in progress since 1994, consists of a single, constantly reworked painting, with documentation of each phase of likeness along the way. Also on view were: a rack of the sort of postcards she's been making since 1992, using other people's lost or discarded Fotomat prints; a stack of miscellaneous business cards acquired while on the road; and a pile of classified sections from the Sydney Morning Herald, wherein she had placed terse, daily, diaristic ads.

At Artspace, Brooks felt as if he were discovering something new and nearly invisible in the string and wood installation by the Brazilian Fernanda Gomez, which was quite accurately evoked in the Biennale catalogue as a "three-dimensional drawing" and "poetic whisper." We both interacted with the installation of Chumpon Apisuk, a performance artist and AIDS activist from Thailand, who provided a chair, a desk, a lamp, a diary in which to note impressions, and a casette recording of the artist's voice. A daily fax arrived from Apisuk in Bangkok, and we were invited to respond, via the notebook or fax. At different times we each sat down and listened to the voice of Apisuk along with that of a simultaneous translator, talking about HIV saturation in Thailand. The effect was both chilling and banal, far-off and close-at-hand. (Thai artists were a big presence in this Biennale, and there was an essay on the Bangkok art scene by Thai writer and editor Phatarawadee Phataranawik in the catalogue.)

It seemed to Lisa that even the relatively few well-known artists represented in this show, for instance the Swiss team of David Fischli and Peter Weiss, are in part recognizable for their formal mutability--for the very absence from their body of work of a "signature" style. Then too, a lot of things on view looked like the work of other, better-known artists not in the exhibition: "Every Day" might indeed have been subtitled the "School of" show.

Take the case of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Although he was nominally included in the exhibition, and reportedly present during its opening days with a nomadic puptent-and-projector piece, neither the artist nor his work was anywhere to be found by the time we arrived, some two weeks into the show's two-month run. His spirit, however, seemed to have been channeled by the Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong, whose Free for All Project (Sydney), a true-to-life, flat-on-the-floor installation, inside Pier 2/3, of street-bazaar bric-a-brac (made-in-Asia goodies such as paper fans, painted wood birdcages, bright plastic cooking utensils and the like) served as a perfect analogue for Tiravanija's most characteristic works: makeshift street-stall installations-cum-cooking-demonstrations.

With varying degrees of impact and originality, "Every Day" capitalized on a broad theme that has colored, or all but defined, a significant number of major contemporary-art exhibitions, both American and international, over the last few years. Even an off-the-top-of-one's-head list of recent shows involving some notion of everydayness, or kitchen-sink-redux ordinariness, or post-grange as-is-ness, must by now include the last Carnegie International (1995-96) [see A.i.A., Feb. '96]; "The Art of the Everyday: France in the '90s," at NYU's Grey Art Gallery (1997); the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1997 Biennial [see A.i.A., June '97]; large swathes of Documenta X [see A.i.A., Sept. '97]; the more recessive elements (i.e., not Damien Hirst) of any number of YBA jamborees, ranging from the Walker Art Center's "`Brilliant!': New Art from London" [see A.i.A., Apr. '96] to the Royal Academy's "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" [see A.i.A., Apr. '98]; the nontraditionalist aspects of "Inside/Out: Contemporary Art from China" [see A.i.A., Mar. '99] as well as the entirety of "Cities on the Move," both at P.S. 1 last fall; and also last fall, the first Biennial of Montreal [see A.i.A., Feb. '99].

So, though not exactly news, the eponymous aspect of "Every Day" reflected a certain generational quiddity on the part of Jonathan Watkins, its British curator. Watkins, who is 41, spent his childhood in England and his university years in Australia, where he eventually assisted on the 1986 Sydney Biennale, curated by Nick Waterlow. Upon returning to London, he run the alternative Chisenhale Gallery in the East End, then worked as a curator at the not-for-profit Serpentine Gallery. Watkins was at the Serpentine planning a retrospective of paintings by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan when he was hired as director of this Biennale. (The Nolan show was postponed, and Watkins temporarily relocated to Sydney with his Australian wife and family.)

A number of Watkins's Biennale inclusions represent a direct segue from his London-based activities and relationships to artists. During his five years at Chisenhale, for instance, he presented work by Perry Roberts, Gereon Lepper, Richard Venlet, Ceal Hoyer, Bernard Frize, Absalon, Ann Veronica Janssens and Lisa Milroy--all included in this Biennale. While at the Serpentine, between 1995 and 1997, he worked on projects with Fischli & Weiss, Rasheed Araeen, Tadashi Kawamata, Beat Streuli and Julian Opie--each, likewise, a prominent player in Sydney.

Rasheed Araeen, born in 1935 in Karachi and based in London, who created an outdoor sculpture at the Serpentine in 1996, is another member of this small subspecies of artists who make use of everyday materials but seem otherwise to be engaged primarily with formal or architectonic issues [see A.i.A., Feb. '98]. In Sydney, Araeen was represented by a single quite spectacular work: Where There's a Will There's a Way, a 39-foot-high, open pyramidal structure made of used scaffolding parts, installed outdoors on the grounds of Government House. It was, we both thought, one of the strongest pieces on view.

Watkins's zeitgeist-friendly theme efficiently served any global aspirations he might harbor. But firstly, the show functioned as an easygoing index of mostly rather amiable British art. This was an exhibition, for example, in which Julian Opie's freestanding, shaped, sign-simple paintings--emblematic pictures of people and building facades in their own gallery at the MCA, and, grazing on the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens like creatures in a prelapsarian theme park, a large flock of baa-lamb effigies painted on both sides--could look positively sensational. And it was an exhibition in which Martin Creed, a member of owada, the alternative art-rock band from London that performed during opening week, could lay claim to the Biennale's showstopping number with his Work No. 200--half the air in a given space, an unforgettably challenging installation that only one of us managed fully to cope with in the unseasonable heat of the day.

Creed filled half the interior volume of the two-story former Harbour Master's Cottage on Goat Island with 43,000 inflated and terribly insistent white balloons. Only barely contained by the vigilant efforts of Biennale workers posted on the veranda--they let us in by cracking the front door open a few inches and shoving us inside before slamming it shut again (still there were some buoyant escapees)--these balloons gave new meaning to both critical mass and claustrophobia. They hovered and huddled together, pressing ever forward, clinging to every square inch of skin and clothing as they exuded their rubbery smell--a smell synonymous, it soon seemed, with the smell of sticky children. Lisa made it inside for a few disoriented, gasping, flailing moments, and then panicked completely, which did not make it any easier once again to find the front door. Brooks, being very tall and quite nearsighted, sailed onward and up a flight of stairs to the second floor, where he insists the balloons were better behaved. To this day he speaks of the dazzling, all-enveloping, balloon-amplified daylight; of being followed into empty rooms by balloons that would multiply as if by magic and flood the floor like visible gas; of the sporadic sight of a human face popping out amidst blank orbs; of the sublimity of sweat and warm rubber.

With this in mind during the immediate aftermath of her white-balloon freak-out, Lisa wondered whether the rest of the art works on Goat Island might not constitute a sort of intensely site-specific "everyday theater of cruelty" subtheme. Our next stop on this garden-club-maudit tour of the island lent credence to her theory-in-formation. A video projection piece titled Related to Environment, by the Chinese artist Zhu Jia, was situated in a darkened enclosure within a nondescript brick outbuilding and consisted of the sustained trompe l'oeil image, accompanied by loud tinny drumbeats, of a fish on the floor gasping and flailing until death.

The theory, however, like the dying carp, petered out. A clanking, thudding sound piece in the convict-built Queen's Powder Magazine (a munitions warehouse, dear readers, not a glossy) by the Irish-born, London-based David Cunningham was evocative within its context, but only mildly unpleasant. And a nearby pair of videos by Mike Marshall, also from London, including the self-explanatory Landing at Gatwick Airport, would have been upsetting only to those who live near runways or who hate going home.

It was nevertheless with some relief that we made the last call of the day to board the antique ferry--specially mustered for the occasion and steered by one Adam Huey, its old-ferry buff owner--and headed back to shore. As we plowed across the harbor, with only a few other late-afternoon stragglers on board to distract us, we were able to concentrate on a mixed-media narrative installation by the Japanese artist Shimabuku, titled I Am Travelling with a 165m Mermaid--a made-up mariner's yarn, featuring drawings, photographs and one painting on panel of the mythic undine--that charmed us both with its fabulist arcana and most site-suitable funkiness. Soon, however, we caught a glimpse of old Pier 2/3, whose presence was made visible from afar by the sight of an enormous, scaffolded, neo-Minimalist vinyl tarp sporting a grid of off-key, computer-generated colors, by the British-born, Antwerp-based Perry Roberts--another member of Watkins's non-"Sensational" elect.

In its own darkened space, Thomas Struth's Video Portraits 1 Hour--a characteristic piece by this German artist consisting of four simultaneous, much larger-than-life-size wall projections of his subjects' faces stiffening, relaxing, zoning out or twitching over the course of their protracted sittings--exerted its usual hypnotic spell. Likewise, the similarly confined Bondi Beach/Parramatta Road 97-98, a multiple screen, 30-minute slide-projection sequence of dissolving images, by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli, of people photographed unawares in those two well-known Sydney locations. Streuli's close-up of an Asian girl surfer disaffectedly tugging at her wetsuit on Bondi Beach provided the 11th Sydney Biennale with its haunting signal image, reproduced on both the exhibition's poster and its catalogue cover.

As yet another example, in yet another chambre separee, of the documentarian zeitgeist--a chilled-out humanism, if you will, like Cartier-Bresson on ice--that seems at present to be criss-crossing the globe, the Korean artist Kim Soo-Ja's Sewing into Walking--Istiklal Street invited viewers to lounge on a bright, striped, crudely woven, room-size carpet while watching big-screen video footage of traffic on a bustling Istanbul street.

For the rest, however, installations inside the cavernous pier building tended to be so crowded as to suggest a giant's stocking stuffed with miscellaneous aural, visual and structural gifts, including an actual Christmas tree by Joseph Grigely trimmed with bits of paper bearing messages to the hearing-impaired American artist. The pier looked like a single, rambling and disheveled mega-installation. Here and there the jumble effect sort of worked.

The Brazilian Ernesto Neto's Nave Noiva, Blop ... Bride Shuttle, Blop ... is a stretched polyamide environmental structure, counterbalanced with hanging bags of rice, through which you could walk. (A variant was later shown at Bonakdar Jancou in New York.) Brooks dutifully took off his shoes again and winced at the splintery old floorboards that could be felt through the gauzy white fabric as he trod through this cocoon-like, School-of-Oiticica space. Nearby, the Italian Giuseppe Gabellone's stretched white fabric tunnel (seen previously at Barbara Gladstone in New York) provided another space--a collapsible, portable tunnel structure through which to proceed.

More to Brooks's liking was the caustic juncture of Untitled (Cricket Stumps), a jaunty array of dented garbage cans on yellow plinths by the Australian artist Paul Saint, and Not Untitled, by Pascale Marthine Tayou from Cameroon. Tayou's freeform junk assortment--a tattered tennis net, a battered road sign, and a pile of broken racquets and smashed Coke cans leading to walls with graffiti (with tags such as "My Sweet Mother") in a trashed adjacent annex--clinched this duet on the theme of postcolonialism gone adrift. (It turns out that these two artists were consensually "jamming.") Lisa took a shine to a lone, orphaned video monitor playing Edited (Spectrum) by the British artist Ceal Floyer, a looped street vignette that suggested Pipilotti Rist, but whose nifty intermix of black-and-white and color was reminiscent of Albert Lamorisse's classic 1955 film, The Red Balloon.

Watkins had his work cut out for him. Although the 11th Sydney Biennale secured a budget of around Australian $3.8 million or U.S. $2.2 million, according to the curator who had to raise some of it himself, the show was put together in just over a year because of a late-breaking restructuring of its entire board and bureaucracy. This was clearly not a situation that allowed for much deliberation over the esthetics and finer points of installation. Still, it was a shame that works situated in the Art Gallery of New South Wales suffered most in this respect.

One of Brooks's Biennale linchpins, however, was right in the lobby. The Irresistible State of Calm (1st Version), by the Dusseldorf-based Gereon Lepper, survived the clash by dint of sheer physical brawn, a rare characteristic in this show. Lepper's three standing machines, with rotating pairs of steel triangular wing shapes on vertical supports, looked like obsolete aircraft parts: the "wings" were loaded with oil visible through glass sidings. As the horizon line of oil shifted with their movement, one's perspective on an adjacent gallery full of 19th-century Australian landscape paintings, in plain view from this vantage, seemed to go topsy-turvy as well--an inadvertent moment of antipodean symbolism that Brooks especially enjoyed. (Lisa preferred Lepper's mechanized, slowly submerging-and-emerging, inflatable plastic pods in a pond in the Botanic Gardens.)

By contrast, Fischli & Weiss's grand Sichtbare Welt (Visible World), comprising eight hours of exquisitely dissolving videotaped images--views of nature, industry, villages, slums, suburbs and cities from all continents, ranging from the ordinary to the sublime--was shown on three smallish TV monitors positioned next to the d's station at the museum's cafe. This piece may have been the ultimate in armchair travel--and in Lisa's opinion the defining ode to everydayness--but where, figuratively speaking, was that armchair? American Holiday, a nearby suite of small scenic paintings by the British artist Lisa Milroy (indebted, it seemed, to the epochal road photos of Robert Frank), would have made an effective coda to Visible World, had it not been hung along a wall that was partly off limits: a busing zone, accessible only to cafe staff.

Among other memorable--or at least discernible--works downstairs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Lisa liked a mildly perverse group of domestic-drama videos by Joel Bartolomeo, including The Sleeping Cat, in which the French artist's young daughter harasses her inexplicably drowsy and forbearing pet. Brooks picked out two funny, airbrushed paintings by Howard Arkley of Melbourne, of banal suburban ranch houses seen inside and out, that suggested a cross between the figurative style of Chicago's Hairy Who and Roy Lichtenstein's late "Interiors." (Arkley, it turns out, will represent Australia in the Venice Biennale, opening this month.) Brooks also admired a wall installation of fluorescent light boxes, some with words such as "Khmer" on them, by the New Zealand artist Jim Speers, that looked like restaurant signage run amok. At the end of a labyrinth of small alcove galleries, he was momentarily transfixed by Sleep, a video installation in a white-papered room by Colin Duncan, also from Melbourne, involving rapid footage of old television broadcast countdown numbers. Lisa, on the other hand, tarried over a romantic (if indifferently installed) suite of heraldic tarp paintings with Australian river names by Robert MacPherson, a venerable figure Down Under, titled Dry River: 20 Frog Poems, in Memory of Alex Wilson, Master Horseman. We both liked the Swedish artist Maria Hedlund's set of six large color photographs, Rymanesque in their chromatically nuanced pallor, of humble household junctures--where the refrigerator meets the floor, where a hinge meets a door, etc.

Except for an installation in the Opera House Forecourt--upended shipping containers by the Brazilian scuiptor Jose Resende--that was removed before our arrival, the rest of this Biennale was easy to find as well as to see. Prefabricated wooden garden sheds by the ever-brilliant Tadashi Kawamata of Japan, for instance, were liberally strewn over a whole huge lawn in the Botanic Gardens; and the American Roni Horn's Pi (later to be seen in LA. and New York), a suite of Iris-printed photographs--of taxidermic subjects ranging from empty interiors and landscapes as well as stoic-seeming inhabitants of her beloved Iceland--looked limpid and vigorous, hung above eye Level, at the Australian Centre for Photography, in Darlinghurst, one of the most fun, fashionably hip parts of town.

At the MCA, a midsize institution also hosting other exhibitions, only one upper floor was in play. On second viewing it looked pretty good. The one obvious blooper there seemed to have been deliberate--a moment of Monty Python humor, or so we decided, on the curator's part: two adjacent installations by Scandinavian artists, named Henriette Heise and Henrietta Lehtonen, from Denmark and Finland, respectively, each involving very plainspoken furniture and a highly introverted theoretical point of view. Heise's featured a cardboard screen and a wooden bench for ascetic video viewing of a tape about unscrewing the back of a TV. Lehtonen's was a reconstruction of a childish shelter (made when she was five) composed of couches and blankets shoved together, which, the artist claims, foreshadowed her later study of architecture.

In the next room, symbolism and conceptualism seemed to have reached a shnilar accord in pointillistic dreamscapes by the late Rover Thomas (Indigenous Australian); abstract collaged paintings with real noodles by Udomsak Krisanamis (Thailand and the U.S.); a suave group of black-and-white still-life photographs by Franco V'unercati (Italy); a vitrine full of little ballpoint-and-colored-pencil drawings on cards by Frederic Bruly Bouabre (Ivory Coast), a veteran of the previous Sydney Biennale curated by Lynne Cooke [see A.i.A., June '97]; and Did they have sex?, part of a photo-documentation project on the streets of Beijing by Zhu Jla, chronicler of Goat Island's expiring fish.

The remainder of the MCA display was scattershot. We both enjoyed the Finnish photographer Pekka Tumnen's lineup of color portraits (school of Esko M'annikko) of small-town people with big personalities at home with their decidedly global kitsch. Brooks was slid out a window, strapped down and on his back as he partook of Observation Deck (Sydney), Patrick Killoran's second, not-so-relaxing Biennale piece--an experience that Lisa had already endured once, at P.S. 1 in New York. Only she, however, managed to go the distance with the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssen's closed room full of daylight, sound and fog: indeed she waxed eloquent, but Brooks couldn't breathe.

There was actually one Biennale art work that almost nobody could see. Although the conceptualist On Kawara was represented in the Art Gallery of New South Wales with a couple of pieces from the late 1960s, archivally displayed, the only recent work of his on view, Pure Consciousness (Kindergarten Project), was installed in a good-looking old building in Darlinghurst, where Watkins's older child went to school. We were trying (unsuccessfully) to sneak into this closed facility when the scary thought occurred: who, more or less precisely, was this Biennale for? Judging from our conversations with several local artists, curators and dealers--not to mention our rather blissful state of near-solitude in most venues of the show--very few people in Sydney would even be tempted to pry open such doors.

All in all, we liked this exhibition, despite its surfeit of weak tea. But the 11th Biennale of Sydney seemed to be aimed at points outward, elsewhere, across vast oceans, to faraway people such as us.

Those wishing to pursue an Australian avant-garde might find it at "Signs of Life," the very first Melbourne Biennial [currently on view, May 11-June 27[--curated by Juliana Engberg; or at the first Liverpool Biennial [Sept. 23-Nov. 7], curated by Anthony Bond of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The 11th Biennale of Sydney was on view Sept. 18-Nov. 8, 1998.

Authors: Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams are critics based in New York.