ART FOR ART’S SAKE: POLITICS TAKES A BACK SEAT AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
Christine Macel, the curator of this year’s edition, is putting artists and artistic practice at the centre of the event
In 2015, the Venice Biennale with Okwui Enwezor as curator sometimes felt more like a political manifesto, with readings from Marx’s Das Kapital and work that touched on climate change, colonialism and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The curator of this year’s Biennale, Christine Macel, had a different vision: to put artists and artistic practice at the centre.
For Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the 57th Biennale, which opens this week, is “an exclamation, a passionate outcry for art and the state of the artist”. She added that it is “a Biennale designed with artists, by artists and for artists”.
But in times like these — after Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump, with the rise of populism and return of nationalism and with intense political fervour and uncertainty in Europe and beyond — can a Biennale curator turn away from politics and focus on art for art’s sake?
When I asked her that last week, Macel effectively said yes because of the way she believes art operates. “I’m very interested in politics,” she said, walking through the Biennale gardens. “But not all art should be about politics. It’s only one dimension.”
Workers were installing art nearby. A bird trilled and Macel paused to listen, then pointed in its direction. “To me, art is linked with all dimensions of life,” she said. We strolled towards the water, where hulking cranes rose in the background. “People think art will save the world,” she continued. “I don’t think art will save the world, but it’s saved a lot of lives.”
Macel, 48, is probably the most important woman you have never heard of in the European art world. Since 2000, she has helped oversee contemporary art acquisitions for the Pompidou. She is the fourth woman in the Biennale’s 122-year history to be curator of the international exhibition. One of the most prestigious shows in the world, the event drew 500,000 visitors in 2015.
Macel calls her show Viva Arte Viva and it extends from the former Italian pavilion through the Arsenale, a cavernous space where ships were once built, and into the surrounding gardens. (She does not oversee the work in the national pavilions, of which there are 86 this year; curators are chosen by each country.)
Viva Arte Viva begins with a methodological question: What does it mean to be an artist today? It showcases 120 artists, 103 of whom are participating in the Biennale for the first time.
Macel chose to give the Biennale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement to the pioneering feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann, whose work — including her bacchanalian 1964 video Meat Joy — pushes the boundary between dance and visual art. “I wanted to honour someone who’s changed the definition of artist,” Macel said.
“There’s a lot of people there I don’t know; it’s a good thing,” said Robert Storr, a curator and former director of the Yale School of Art who was curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale. One of the challenges of the job, he said, was to “set a tone without necessarily having a theme”.
Macel’s Biennale comes in an intense year for the art world after the Whitney Biennial, caught up in debates around race, and Documenta, which this year is divided for the first time between Athens, Greece, and its native Kassel, Germany.
The Biennale’s national pavilions are expected to generate debate about the very idea of national pavilions. (Mark Bradford is featured in the US pavilion with an installation that questions how to represent a country he feels no longer represents him.)
Like all Venice Biennale curators, Macel has had to work with limited time and funds. The budget for her international exhibition is €13 million (about US$14.2 million), of which she had to help raise 10%.
Macel, who was raised in and around Paris by an architect father and history-teacher mother, said a formative experience came at age eight. That’s when her parents took her to the inauguration of the institution where she would later come to work, the Pompidou Centre, with its once-radical, inside-out, high-tech architecture by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini.
In the often insular French art world, she is known for travelling — especially to Eastern Europe and the Middle East — to find artists to introduce to French audiences. She has also helped rediscover older artists and championed some of France’s best-known ones, such as Philippe Parreno and Fabrice Hyber.
When Macel was curator of the French pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale, she chose a non-French artist: Albanian-born, Berlin-based Anri Sala, and his Ravel Ravel Unravel video work in which two pianists play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which the composer composed for a musician who had lost a hand in World War I.
Ravel Ravel Unravel is a telling window into Macel’s taste and thinking — philosophical, poetic, aesthetically accomplished, but with a subtle undertone of politics, in a work that addresses the wartime enmity between France and Germany. (Sala also has a work in Viva Arte Viva.)
That year’s French pavilion caught the attention of Paolo Baratta, president of the Venice Biennale, as did some of Macel’s other exhibits, including Danser Sa Vie, her 2011 show at the Pompidou about dance and visual art. “It showed that even in a state institution like the Pompidou, a fresh creature may develop,” Baratta said.
In choosing Enwezor for 2015, Baratta had wanted a curator for what he called an “age of anxiety”. This year, he said the pendulum had swung a bit, and he wanted a curator with a different point of view.
Macel has organised Viva Arte Viva into nine sections, which she calls pavilions. “The Pavilion of Joys and Fears explores new feelings of alienation due to forced migrations or mass surveillance,” she writes in her introduction.
Her Biennale may touch on timely themes, but in a more oblique way. “At a time of global disorder,” she writes, “the role, the voice and the responsibility of the artist are more crucial than ever before within the framework of contemporary debates.”