Big questions unanswered
Venice Biennale 2017 Venice
Peering down through the plate-glass floor in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, you see figures moving in the cavity between this specially installed surface and the actual floor a metre or so beneath: wasted-looking youths in hoodies performing a kind of tortuous, writhing ballet to a hypnotic, electronically treated vocal score. Entitled Faust and devised by artist Anne Imhof, this is Germany’s official contribution to the Biennale, and while it appears to take place almost entirely under the floor, the spectators provide another choreographed dimension to the work as they follow the movements of the performers and a couple of dangerous-looking dogs lurking down there.
Faust has an extensive rationale about the flow of capital and the “world as a kennel”, expounded in a waffly supporting statement. If this made little difference to my appreciation of the piece, it’s typical of an event where the art is frequently in danger of being overwhelmed by its attendant rhetoric.
The hits at this year’s festival include an observation tower in the form of an upended truck at the Austrian pavilion, a Japanese pavilion in which you mount a staircase and put your head through a hole to find yourself effectively an exhibit in the gallery above, and a New Zealand pavilion where a piece of Maori-themed 18th-century wallpaper has been transformed into a vast cinematic panorama.
But the longest queues are at the American pavilion, where Mark Bradford, seen as one of the key artists of the moment, revisits a familiar trope of modern art, the accidental patterns created by the layering of torn flyposters but on an almost cosmic scale. While you might infer some political comment in the contrast between the elegant White House-style neo-classical building and Bradford’s magnificently ravaged surfaces, there’s no question of being allowed to come to your own conclusions. Bradford’s concern with the “collapse of the centre” – under the depredation of guess-who (though he isn’t named) – is spelled out in an accompanying booklet that you inevitably read while queuing. That you’ve been told what to think before you’ve even seen it diminishes the impact of this powerful work.
The sense that we’re living in the best and worst of times – beset by war, populism and a vast migration crisis – crops up endlessly at the biennale, and is particularly explicit in the official exhibition, curated this year by the Pompidou Centre’s Christine Macel under the title Viva Arte Viva (Long Live Art). It aims to celebrate art itself, which, we are told, “bears witness to the most precious part of what makes us human, at a time when humanism is precisely jeopardised”.
As you enter the first section, to find a practical workshop taking place, there’s a heartening sense that art is something that involves us all. However, those making the art here are refugees, assiduously fashioning green-painted, geodesic lights, under the aegis of voguish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, for sale at €250 in aid of migrant-supporting NGOS. While there is no sense of exploitation, the event feels like an uncomfortable updating of the kind of colonial-era exhibition in which Westerners watched life in transplanted “primitive” villages.
The wall texts, meanwhile, bend over backwards to conform to a liberal view to which, they appear to assume, the visitor also adheres. “Subjective emotions” appear suspect because they are played on by “populism and anti-elitism”. Yet the show offers little in the way of intense personal feeling. Among the rooms of conceptually based work that is detached in tone the tortured self-portraits of Syrian painter Marwan stand out, because they’re almost the only work here that is rooted in emotional self-expression.
In the second part of the exhibition, in the ancient shipyards of the Arsenale, the focus is on artists evolving new ways of living and working. But after an initial impression of wacky, sometimes genuinely idealistic utopianism, you form the view that art today doesn’t address the big questions directly. Rather, artists extract tiny elements from the bigger conversations and work on them in rarefied isolation.
A group of Japanese artists make an arrow-shaped raft out of polystyrene, travel down a river on it, then throw it away: artwork, journey and performance in one. French-algerian artist Kader Attia creates kinetic sculptures out of couscous grains that move in response to sound waves from records of great Arab singers.
Cranky though these sound, they are some of the more magical moments in an emotionally straitjacketed show that aims to be political but isn’t at all. If we are in new times and are to see new art that responds to that, it can’t come soon enough.