The Guardian view on the Venice Biennale’s migrant boat: pushing the limits of art
There is no material so dark that art should not be able to confront it. Art can be beautiful, or serene, or ecstatic; but it can also be disturbing, harsh, or horrifying. Art should alchemise poetry from unexpected ingredients. It should shake our view of the world, and of ourselves. Bad art, by contrast, asks nothing of us.
This week, visitors to the newly opened Venice Biennale, which continues until 24 November, will have passed the wreck of a fishing boat in which between 700 and 1,100 people died on the night of 18 April 2015. These men, women and children, who were desperately attempting to reach Europe from Libya, were trapped in the hold as the boat capsized. Only 28 survived.
The boat was brought to Venice by a team including the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. Titled Barca Nostra – Italian for “our boat”– the vessel is intended to stand as “a relic of a human tragedy but also a monument to contemporary migration”. The boat’s presence has certainly provoked lively debate – and, in some, outrage. Few early visitors have failed to find its presence unsettling. Some have found it intensely challenging and powerful: the sheer brutal reality of that great, rusting hull where so many met their deaths. Others have found the idea of exhibiting what is effectively a mass grave as part of the spectacle of commodified contemporary art profoundly inappropriate.
Can something so raw and so touched with recent and undigested human catastrophe really have a role in an art exhibition? Surely, here, context is all. When the British artist Jeremy Deller took a real car – one that had been crushed by a bomb in Iraq – on a road trip around the US, the wreck was accompanied by a soldier and an Iraqi citizen. Its presence in the towns it passed through was about conversation and reflection, rather than brutal provocation.
It is precisely this kind of contextualisation that Barca Nostra lacks. Mr Büchel has objected even to the placing of information boards near the vessel. There is no programme of discussions or debates (for example), no immediate connection with those directly affected by the migrant crisis. Mr Büchel seems to intend Barca Nostra to stand as a nakedly distressing, disturbing intervention.
The boat may ultimately end up in Sicily as a peace garden. Handled sensitively and sensibly, this could mean a positive future for it. But, so far, the conversations sparked by the boat have largely been about its own status – as artwork, artefact, or intervention in an exhibition. It has not yet promised much in the way of serious debate about the migrant crisis or the EU’s failure to tackle it in a humane and coordinated manner, in the context of the Italian government’s increasingly xenophobic policies.
Barca Nostra is certainly provocative. What is less clear is whether it is stimulating much that is productive for those who have lost their lives on the Mediterranean – and for those who will attempt to follow them over the treacherous seas.