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| Installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu |
The Venice Bienniale reminded me of a shopping mall experience I recently had. Artist Anna Björklund of the VICCA Production Seminar at Aalto University led us through the maze of the huge mall Redi in Kalasatama, Helsinki, stretching over three floors. There were endless new shops with one or two sales persons but rarely a customer. I was told this new shopping mall had promised great revenue but was a failure: the customers didn’t come and if they came they got lost and couldn’t find the shop they were looking for. It was a sad capitalist experience. On the roof a Japanese garden had been created for some zen with too many fake buddha sculptures and plastic grass.
Walking through the main venue of the Venice Bienniale felt equally depressing and fake. When arriving, two pavilions were spreading fog in the Giardini: the central pavilion and the French one of Laure Provost. One of them should have cancelled their fog. To see it twice made it even more into a gimmick. Fog might make you think of Baudelaire: “Les rêves et les féeries sont enfants de la brume.” ("Dreams and fairy tales are children of the mist."). But this fog didn’t: it’s just fake and it shows. Best thing you can do with it, is to photograph it for Instagram and get likes. Even the title of the Bienniale is based on a fake: May You Live in Interesting Times.
The central pavilion curated by Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery in London, has other gimmicky art that is supposed to tickle your senses. After the fog, first thing you see are the panels of Antoine Catala that have air pumped in and out of them so that messages are revealed. Very cheesy. And Ryoji Ikeda then leads you through a corridor of bright fluorescent light that is supposed, so the wall text, to “open the door to an experience of the sublime.” I thought it was super annoying and didn't feel anything close to the sublime. I rather prefer what artist Matteo Cremonesi told me about the sublime in the 21st century: “It’s on leave.”
Talking about text, the curatorial text of Ralph Rugoff is bland: “Among their many outstanding qualities, the contributors to this exhibition are seriously adventurous; they each produce diverse bodies of work that articulate distinct modes of thinking and engage far-ranging concerns.” Nice empty art speak that could be talking about any art work. To highlight the “multi-dimensional approach to making art”, Rogoff shows his artists twice - both in the central pavilion and in the Arsenale. Again a gimmick that leads to nothing much. Two examples: the beautiful photography of Zanele Muholi, shown in small size in the pavilion turn into advertisement size, plastered on the walls, in the Arsenale. Or Nicole Eisenman shows (ugly) paintings in the pavilion and sculptures in the Arsenale. Yuh yuh, multidimensional, ooookay.
Talking about multidimensional, I saw a lot of art that was 1/1: Teresa Margolles shows Muro Ciuda Juárez, a concrete wall with bullet holes and barbed wire that was standing in front of school in Juárez, Mexico. And you probably heard already enough about the refugee boat of Christoph Büchel. In the middle of the central pavilion there is the horrible installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, with a huge industrial robot causing havoc in a glass cage. Watching it feels like disaster tourism. Standing next to it is Margolles’ wall and behind the wall peeks out the collaged photography sculptures of Frida Orupabo. I’ve seen the work by Orupabo before and thought it to have beauty, poetry and strength. But the curating made sure that it lost all these qualities. Ralph Rogoff seems to know how to slick everything down so that hardly a spark of energy survives, sensuality comes about, and let's not even talk about poetry. Only some art works survive: the paintings of Henry Taylor or the video The White Album of Arthur Jafa, for instance, are hard to destroy even by the worst curator.
Of course, as to be expected, there is a lot of digital art, a lot of immersive art, and a lot of art on ecology and identity. And I guess that’s fine because that’s what is at the forefront in our society. But often it goes along with borrowed importance and the importance of Being Important. As it is, the wall texts accompanying the art works try hard to put as much (literal) importance into the exhibited art works as possible. In a Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf suggested not to try to influence people but to "think of things in themselves". But in art, influencing often seems all it's about. It’s interesting to know that this Bienniale apparently didn’t even bother to work together with existing local environmental initiatives in Venice. “It’s just acting,” a curatorial student at the Venice University of Design told me.
Now we could of course talk in detail about all the national pavilions but for me, after seeing the main exhibitions, it all looked like a bad Eurovision Song Contest for contemporary art. About my own home country: I saw that the Belgian pavilion got a special mention for Jos de Gruyter's and Harald Thys' animatronic figures, which I thought were awful. My conclusion: the nationstate concept is not working anymore in the 21st century and the Venice Bienniale is losing more and more of its relevance by holding on to it.