A truly global show – shame about Britain’s bizarre effort
Exhibition Venice Biennale 2019 Various venues ★★★★★
The Olympics of Art, as this vast, city-filling sprawl of national exhibitions is often known, provides an opportunity for countries to make a statement about how they see themselves via the art that fills their national pavilions. With that in mind, it’s hard to know what anyone will glean about the state of British art – never mind the state of Britain itself – from this year’s official exhibition by the relatively little-known Cathy Wilkes. At first sight, the British pavilion appears almost empty, bar a sparse collection of domestic objects: a rusty Brillo pad and a dirty flannel, for example, wedged against a skirting board, rubber gloves that seem to stand up by themselves, and a few vaporous abstract paintings which – continuing the domestic theme – look as though they’ve been sponged on using old washing-up water. Strangest of all are balloon-headed stick figures with protruding cardboard stomachs – presumably suggesting pregnancy – that just seem to stand haplessly about throughout the space.
Wilkes, 53, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2008, has refused to make any statements or comments on the meaning of this enigmatic essay in female spirituality (at least, that’s what I take it to be). The choice of this eccentric and frankly befuddling work as a representation of Britain at this time of national anxiety and division has been much criticised. Yet perhaps the turning away from grand public themes towards private preoccupations is itself a kind of political statement. If that’s the case, the British pavilion is far from unique at this Biennale.
The French pavilion, hotly tipped to win the award for best national contribution, centres on an exuberant, brilliantly made and patently escapist road movie by the British-based French artist Laure Prouvost (winner of the 2013 Turner Prize), which climaxes with the suggestion that we should all turn into “creatures of the air” and simply fly away. America, meanwhile, has eschewed the opportunity to create
a new installation or body of work in favour of a collection of existing pieces – cleverly thought-out conceptual sculptures – by the veteran Africanamerican artist Martin Puryear. In other words, America has contented itself with presenting an array of good art. Now there’s a novel idea.
But, for a truly dizzying sense of where art could be going – and one that makes the travails of western Europe and America feel parochial – head to the official exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, which fills the large Central Pavilion on the official Biennale
The French pavilion, which features a brilliant road movie, is tipped to win the award for best contribution
site and large chunks of the huge warehouses in the neighbouring Arsenale. At each Biennale, a leading curator is invited to create a themed exhibition defining the current state of art. This year’s incumbent is Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery. He has taken the title May You Live in Interesting Times, that quaint, oft-quoted “ancient Chinese” curse, which was apparently made up relatively recently, as a metaphor for the fragility of truth in these “fake news” times, focusing on art that “challenges existing habits of thought and opens up our readings of objects and images, gestures and situations”.
If that sounds a bit woolly (surely all good art should do that), think again. The show is a genuinely exhilarating surprise, a truly global affair with the scale and ambition to credibly fill the dauntingly vast spaces at its disposal.
Art from Asia, Latin America and other further-flung areas dominates, with artists from China and India featuring particularly strongly. Indeed where non-western modern art tended until relatively recently to be a patronised, junior guest at the international art table, the work here has a ruthless scale and vitality that leaves the tepid fare annually served up at the Turner Prize far behind. Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s giant robotised brush swings terrifyingly around as it attempts to contain a mass of bloodlike fluid on the gallery floor. Indian artist Shilpa Gupta makes a brilliant play on the computerised security gates that protect the wealthy of what used to be called the Third World, with a swinging steel gate relentlessly smashing the plaster from the gallery wall.
Not everything here is great. I don’t know if I could live in a world where all art was like this. But there’s a formidable sense of energy, the feeling that art in our globalised, digitally emancipated times has gained a momentum that will power it forward whatever the fates of individuals or nations. For once, that tired epithet “cutting edge” actually applies.
Until Nov 24. Details: labiennale.org