At the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), the theme of interconnectedness was insightfully embodied in African artist El Anatsui’s flowing wall sculpture Anonymous Creature, made from found aluminum cans woven together to create an abstract wall relief. It sat surprisingly well in the company of the late Australian David Aspden’s colourfield paintings from the early 1970s, which, in this new context, recalled the colours of North American indigenous culture and the compositions of textile design. These are the two key areas of interest shared by the co-curators: Gerald McMaster, an indigenous Canadian curator based in Toronto, and Belgian-trained Catherine de Zegher, who previously ran The Drawing Center in New York.

Extending, perhaps too literally, the themes of colour and interweaving, the usually more poetic Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei invited visitors to have their clothes mended while they talked with the artist-mender (later a volunteer tailor) against wall-mounted spools of thread in every colour of the rainbow. In its revelation of intersections between high and low art, between traditional crafts and modern Minimalism, this first room at the MCA served the exhibition premise well.

At Cockatoo Island, the largest of the Biennale venues, the weaving motif continued through many installations, its rhetoric wearing a little thin the higher it continued up the island. Ironically, the three standout works here were almost devoid of colour and the result not of lo-tech sewing and patching, but of hi-tech, computer-aided visualisation processes. The show’s obligatory moment of spectacle and fun was provided by British-Canadian artist Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Series: Sibyl.It comprised hundreds of digitally fabricated, plant-like components that respond to human presence – an ingenious proposal that the architectural fabric of our built environment not only mimics but merges with that of the natural environment. Attention to the miraculous and quirky workings of nature continued in Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Ross Rudesch Harley’s intriguing Museum of Copulatory Organs, where visitors could ponder scaled-up models of insect penises.

Incongruously installed deep within the Byron Bay cultural aesthetic that prevailed at the top of the island, Iraqi-British artist Jananne Al-Ani’s Aerial IV video, inspired by the military’s aerial footage of Iraq, was compelling. Accompanied by an unsettling soundtrack that merged the sounds of war machines and fearful animal (or human?) screams of terror, this work best illustrated Bruno Latour’s cogent catalogue essay on the relation, or lack thereof, between cultural and environmental micro and macrocosm. Like Al-Ani’s work in the exhibition, Latour’s essay in the catalogue clearly articulates a need to reassess how we see and respond to the world. Alhough labelled by the author as a ‘draft manifesto’, its fluent discourse on the failure of the Western world’s prioritisation of politics over nature is a welcome relief from the turgid, sermonising tone of other texts in the book.

A biennale exhibition should not attempt to be definitive but should offer a snapshot of the cultural Zeitgeist that will inevitably be updated, reassessed, and individualised under the direction of another curator in the next iteration just two years away. The exhibition catalogue, by contrast, is the sole component of the project with a presence beyond the exhibition. The challenge for the publisher is to capture the transitory spirit of the exhibition while producing a serious art book that will have continued value in art and scholarly research environments. In a somewhat conservative response to this conundrum, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney catalogue, Revolutions: Forms that Turn, was the first to be graced with a hardcover, although this came at the expense of colour, an undesirable aesthetic for an art book, no matter how sturdy its structure. A more pioneering approach was taken with the 2010 catalogue publication, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, with catalogue designer Jonathan Barnbrook’s ‘graphic identity’ conceived of, and presented as, a work of art of equal standing to others in the Biennale. As a prelude to mentioning the shortcomings of the 2012 catalogue, it is important to acknowledge that the Biennale of Sydney is Australia’s most important visual arts exhibition. It is the third oldest biennale in an international field of around 100, having begun in 1973 after São Paulo (1952) and Venice (1895). Together with Venice and the quinquennial dOCUMENTA in Germany, it is rated as one of the world’s most prestigious recurrent exhibitions.

The 2012 catalogue undermines the institution’s standing as a serious world player. In a very superficial response to the curatorial imperative for connection between individuals and cultures, pages of the central section are split horizontally, adopting a format favoured in, and best reserved for, children’s picture books. The intention is that readers will play with the book, mixing and matching images, quotes and biographies of participating artists. The result is an over-complicated design that defies the reader to use it as a catalogue should be used: to source information about artists and their work.

The curatorial premise for the exhibition is closely related to the notion of care. Summing up the curatorial rationale more succinctly than anywhere else in the exhibition or catalogue, Latour argues in his essay: ‘It is time to compose – in all the meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution.’ Indeed, the word curator comes from the Latin ‘to care for’. In the catalogue, however, the artists are not adequately cared for. It seems hypocritical, given the exhibition’s themes of equality and sharing, that texts by the curators and theorists are privileged over the artists’ statements, the former appearing in their entirety on full, uncut pages and the latter all but impossible to piece together.

Unlike the open-ended idealism of the curatorial strategy, the catalogue design does not simply propose, but forcibly imposes, a new model of engagement between art and its audience. In this kind of ‘slow art’ taken to an illogical end point, the reader’s patience is tested to the point of frustration and the art lost, quite literally, between the severed pages. While the exhibition provided enough sustenance to satisfy curious minds, the catalogue left readers starving for more.