It's big and yellow but is it art?

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/jan/15/big-and-yellow-but-is-it-art

Version 0 of 1.

That giant yellow duck is back: after its Australian debut in Darling Harbour in January 2013 it has taken up temporary residence on the Parramatta river where the council estimates 20,000 people will flock to see the inflated rubber mallard. It’s a part of this year’s Sydney festival, and it’s an artwork too. Allegedly.

The Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman has toured Rubber Duck around the world and claims tens of millions of people have experienced its special magic. Hofman even claims that the duck “doesn't discriminate [against] people and doesn't have a political connotation” and has healing properties since it “can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them”.

Hofman’s claims are as grand as the size of his duck, reflecting a trend that has seen the scale and size of art works that turn up in festivals grow ever larger. This year’s Sydney festival has three massive art works: alongside Hofman’s Rubber Duck there’s Leanrdo Erlich’s Merchants Store, a faux building front sited under a giant mirror at Darling Harbour that allows for some dazzling photo trickery, and Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, an inflatable, full-scale replica of Stonehenge on which visitors can bounce around for 10 minutes.

It would take a special kind of curmudgeon to begrudge visitors the fun of these works, and they prove to be fantastically popular with the punters, but the question has to be asked: how do they measure up as art works? Hofman, Erlich and Deller have had long careers making interactive pieces, with varying degrees of critical success. 

Deller won the Turner prize in 2004 for works that chart the space between public memory and history, and his giant jumping-castle version of Stonehenge, cleverly sited across the road from St Mary’s Cathedral, makes sense in that context, despite seemingly meaning not much on first encounter.

Erlich too has made some extraordinary pieces using architecture and mirrors and although the Darling Harbour work is simple, it too has some degree of meaning beyond the funpark context. But Hofman’s CV is littered with similarly gargantuan and politics-free projects that look good but mean nothing.

The Sydney festival has always struggled with how to incorporate visual art into its program. Past years have been little more than branding exercises, with a logo slapped onto an exhibition at one of the big galleries. This year’s decision to feature installation art makes sense, as crowd pullers for outdoor works, but also as a logical way to connect them to gallery projects such as Christian Boltanski’s Chance at Carriageworks, Alex Davies’ The Very Near Future at Artspace, Karen Therese’s Funpark at Bidwell Shopping Plaza, and Kaldor Project 28: Roman Ondak at Parramatta Town Hall.

One might be tempted to say that the outdoor setting of big art works is evidence that they have to be dumbed down to work with the general public, but that’s not the case. While Boltanski’s Chance, a massive gallery installation that creates a mechanical metaphor for life and death, is as clever and as inscrutable as its maker, Ondak’s three works at Parramatta are conceptually thin and inconsequential. The success or failure of an artwork is judged by how, and where, it was intended to be seen and experienced, and whether the actual experience matches that intention.

Hofman’s claim that Rubber Duck is politics free is patently ridiculous. It was politics that put it there and it’s politics that fund the Sydney festival. A giant and very conspicuous artwork lets everyone know that the organisers and state government support the arts and they do it in an egalitarian, feel-good way. I have no problem with that. The real challenge is to make the visual art offering a little more ambitious. The inclusion of Davies' and Therese’s works – the only two Australians in the group – is a step in the right direction but that’s all it is – one step.

As with many things, Melbourne has shown the way. The National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Now, a survey show of the work of Melbourne’s artists, designers and architects, is just the kind of thing that would put the Sydney Festival at the forefront of visual arts exhibition in Australia. It would take vision, money and leadership to make it happen – but if we can copy small bars and laneways, how hard is an exhibition?

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.