The world is a mass of intractable ills on which art must shed light. With oceans rising, climates warming, the income gap widening and human rights abuses of every imaginable kind occurring, the very future of the planet — its many futures — hangs in the balance. This is not the time for art as an object of contemplation or delight, much less a market commodity — certainly not in a public exhibition whose chief responsibility is to stimulate debate.
That basically is the provocative but also confining message behind All the World’s Futures, the lopsided central exhibition at the sprawling 56th Venice Biennale, which runs through Nov. 22. Organized by Okwui Enwezor, a veteran curator of international undertakings like this, All the World’s Futures brings out into the open a central preoccupation of the moment, namely the limiting belief that art is not doing its job unless it has loud and clear social concerns, a position whose popularity has made “social practice” the latest new thing to be taught in art schools.
In its single-mindedness All the World’s Futures echoes its 2013 predecessor, Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace, but from the opposite direction. More uplifting, Gioni’s effort opened modernist art history to all kinds of self-taught and outsider artists, expanding its origins to urgent expressions from around the world, somewhat at the cost of contemporary art. Enwezor is less interested in artistic urgency than in the urgent state of the world itself.
Photo: EPA, Maciej Kulczynski
But like Gioni’s show, Enwezor’s effort is shifting the center of gravity away from the West and the art market. It proves once more that art — or something like it — is everywhere, widespread beyond imagining.
Regardless of whether you agree with his viewpoint or prefer considering art case by case, this position provides Enwezor’s show with clarity and purpose. There is something admirable and even heroic about its morality-based approach. In addition, it includes a fair amount of good, even great art, along with too much that is only well-intentioned. If it is not perfect, it goes off-message in redemptive ways, including artists whose work is not overtly political.
The entire project swirls around Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s critique of the effects of the Industrial Revolution and its reliance on exploitation of workers. Daily readings are featured in the arena designed by David Adjaye at the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, the public park that contains the art-filled national pavilions. Labor and work of all kinds is a recurring theme, whether we watch a gravestone of cast-concrete being made in Steve McQueen’s excellent video Ashes; enter into the strange world of Mika Rottenberg’s video installation NoNoseKnows, a mordant meditation on the rituals of cultured pearl production and utilitarian sneezing, or whiz past a big banner by Gulf Labor, a human rights collective organized to protect migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates. (I’m not sure the banner is art or even quasi-art, but I hope Gulf Labor’s labors succeed.)
Photo: EPA, Andrea Merola
Colonialism, perhaps the most extreme instance of the exploitation of labor, is a visible subtext, as is the show’s intent to reflect more completely than usual the diversity of the world’s population. It is full of women and of artists from outside the West, most prominently in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
At times it feels as if Enwezor has included everything that interested him, with no thought to what the viewer can actually absorb. His show presents works in nearly every conceivable medium — including music, performance art and lengthy films and videos — by nearly 140 artists from 53 countries and several generations. Their efforts are crammed into the Giardini and the seemingly endless string of galleries that fill much of the medieval Arsenale, Venice’s former navy yard, a short distance away.
As with his 2002 Documenta XI exhibition, Enwezor’s proclivity for camera-based work bordering on documentary is apparent, evidenced here by McQueen’s work as well as Sonia Boyce’s Exquisite Cacophony, which records the brilliant improvisations of three vocal artists who mix the idioms of rap, jazz scat, Dadaist noise and gospel, and Fara Fara, a split-screen documentary by Carsten Hoeller and Mans Mansson about the vibrant music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And especially impressive are new hybrids of documentary, activism and expressive artistic power as seen in the disorienting films of Rosa Barba and Raha Raissnia and the multimedia installation of Lili Reynaud Dewar, a brilliant French artist and dancer who tackles issues of sexual orientation while paying tribute to Josephine Baker. Precedents for this kind of work include the word-and-music installations of American artist-composer Charles Gaines.
Enwezor’s extravaganza is an argument embedded in the curatorial equivalent of a food fight. Unlike other international biennials, Venice’s is surrounded by the random crossfire of the art selected by the individual countries for the national pavilions of which there are 89 arrayed in the Giardini, at the Arsenale and throughout the Venice itself.
A few pavilions stress formal purity, like the immense and stunning pool of pink-tinged water that Pamela Rosenkranz has inserted in the Swiss Pavilion — a fluid, girly version of Walter de Maria’s Earth Room. At the Austrian Pavilion, Heimo Zobernig has leveled the floor and lowered the ceiling with planes of black, added a few white benches and planted an array of new trees in its small courtyard. It becomes a stark existential chapel in which thoughts of human folly contrast with the logic of nature.
Some artists have outdone themselves, like the performance/video eminence grise, Joan Jonas, who has filled the US Pavilion with the mysterious installation They Come to Us Without a Word, weaving a shifting tapestry of video, objects, music and ghost stories. Others, like Sarah Lucas, one of the few great artists of her notorious YBA (Young British Artist) generation, didn’t quite rise to the occasion, scattering the British Pavilion with intermittently pervy sculpture against dazzling marigold yellow walls.
The one artist who really engaged the world was Christoph Buechel representing Iceland. He orchestrated the conversion of a disused Roman Catholic church in Venice’s Canareggio neighborhood into what became the only mosque in the historic part of the city, aimed at serving the many Muslims who commute to Venice each day to work.
Buechel outfitted the interior with a convincing arrangement of prayer carpets, plaques and Korans, and after weeks of touch-and-go negotiations with city officials he was allowed to stage the opening ceremony, complete with a sermon by an imam. But no sooner had this taken place than rumblings resumed, with the city threatening to forbid services being held there. It could function only as art, not for religion. Even so, the effort succeeded in shedding a harsh light on a failure of civic tolerance and understanding.
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