Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys is presented as a relational geography of encounters Kouoh had with artists over her lifetime. Her aim was to create a musical metaphor which asks the public to look and listen. That requires a different criterion, a shift in the way we think about Art.
Venice has become one of the most important venues for Art if not the most important with eight months in alternative years devoted to either Art or Architecture. More Foundations and galleries spring up daily in Venice. Art has always been a central inspiration for the creative arts and the design world. Its natural role in society has always been emotional, visual, sensory, affective, and subjective. The great artist and theorist Yves Klein said, “Art is not sensory, but extrasensory. True art contains an invisible, indefinable substance, which transmutes into eternality. It’s experienced as a vibration in a space that can be picked up by others if their sensibility is sufficiently developed.” Political protest, historical reflection, and even the desire to shock are all legitimate subjects for artistic exploration. They succeed only when the work itself is strong enough to carry that “invisible, indefinable substance” of which Klein spoke. Too often, the work on display does not.
The 61st Biennale is marked by loss, pain, and disappearance more than any other in its recent history. The events and narratives of those who helped create it, curate it, protest it are a commentary on the present tumultuous world crisis. ritically that may be more interesting than the Biennale itself. People protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s actions in Gaza, even if it was disruptive to this art event have a value. Protests against America—or more specifically against Trump and the recent war with Iran—took the form of a boycott of Alma Allen’s exhibition with few people visiting the American Pavilion. Perhaps that is just as well, since the exhibition itself is disappointing: chintzy forms cast in gold that seem to mirror what many regard as the vulgarity of Trump’s America and its present policies.
Art for Art’s Sake expresses the idea that art has an inherent value independent of its subject matter, or of any social, political, or ethical significance. Many pavilions left me wondering what was going on. The German Pavilion addressed the treatment of Vietnamese communities after reunification, choosing Sung Tieu and Henrike Naumann examination of their racist, inhuman past.
It is, however, an encouraging development that the Biennale seeks to challenge Western artistic dominance and broaden its geographical horizons. Yet the result was an exhibition closer to a craft fair, with political demonstration, or an exercise in provocation than an Art exhibition. The Austrian pavilion with nude women swimming in urine was an all-out desire to cause a sensation and shock people. It prompted the inevitable question: so what? Where is the Art?
Many pavilions left me wondering what exactly I was meant to take away from the experience. Lubaina Himid’s awkward installation of monumental paintings in the British pavilion was an uncomfortable presentation of a damp nation of working-class people shaping the country by keeping it fed, clothed and sheltered. The Japanese pavilion left me struggling to reconcile adults wandering about laughing with baby dolls in their arms while images of atrocities committed against real children in Gaza continue to circulate globally.
The Danish Pavilion with Maja Malou Lyse exploring different images and value systems through the paradoxical entanglement of fertility science and erotic imagery of giant bouncing breasts and waxed crotches \supposedly addressed fertility, sexuality, power, and pornography in the digital age. More off-putting than illuminating. Low fertility and a less populated world suddenly seem unexpectedly attractive. Especially in the small city of Venice full of lost tourists.
Ukraine, in the mdst of its war with Russia, offered delightful replicas of Murano glass chandeliers made from sweets which seemed a touching a ray of hope. At the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, a film by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Wishful Thinking featuring Ukrainian actors portraying elderly Russian soldiers confounding the line of separation between staging and testimony, confession and propaganda, forgiveness and responsibility captured exactly the contradictory spirit that runs through much of the Biennale.
One of the highlights was the magnificent Palazzo Pisani Moretta, where Dries Van Noten’s exhibition, poised somewhere between art and decoration, introduced a welcome note of beauty and diversion.
The Central Pavilion in the Giardini certainly provided much food for thought. I ran out of time so I will have to come back to see the Egyptian and Serbian pavilions which I heard were well worth the effort. Among the vast displays of the Arsenal there were several genuinely excellent works. Khaled Sabsabi, and Kennedy Yanko among others. The Biennale’s reflection on our fractured world may be what this year’s Art is about in these troubling days. Art has a way of telling us about ourselves. This Biennale and many of the exhibitions reminds us of our cruel imperial past and how our political leaders today are still causing senseless death and destruction. The politics remain memorable, but the Art didn’t give us much hope for the future.
