VENICE
— The world is a mass of intractable ills on which art must shed light.
With oceans rising, climates warming, the income gap widening and human
rights abuses of every imaginable kind occurring, the very future of
the planet — its many futures — hangs in the balance. This is not the
time for art as an object of contemplation or delight, much less a
market commodity — certainly not in a public exhibition whose chief
responsibility is to stimulate debate.
That
basically is the provocative but also confining message behind “All the
World’s Futures,” the lopsided central exhibition at the sprawling 56th
Venice Biennale, which runs through Nov. 22. Organized by Okwui
Enwezor, a veteran curator of international undertakings like this, “All
the World’s Futures” brings out into the open a central preoccupation
of the moment, namely the belief that art is not doing its job unless it
has loud and clear social concerns, a position whose popularity has
made “social practice” the latest new thing to be taught in art schools.
In
its single-mindedness “All the World’s Futures” echoes its 2013
predecessor, Massimiliano Gioni’s “The Encyclopedic Palace,” but from
the opposite direction. More uplifting, Mr. Gioni’s effort opened
modernist art history to all kinds of self-taught and outsider artists,
expanding its origins to urgent expressions from around the world,
somewhat at the cost of contemporary art. Mr. Enwezor is less interested
in artistic urgency than in the urgent state of the world itself.
But
like Mr. Gioni’s show, Mr. Enwezor’s effort is shifting the center of
gravity away from the West and the art market. It proves once more that
art — or something like it — is everywhere, widespread beyond imagining.
Regardless
of whether you agree with his viewpoint or prefer considering art case
by case, this position provides Mr. Enwezor’s show with clarity and
purpose. There is something admirable and even heroic about its
morality-based approach. In addition, it includes a fair amount of good,
even great art, along with too much that is only well-intentioned. If
it is not perfect, it goes off-message in redemptive ways, including
artists whose work is not overtly political.
The
entire project swirls around “Das Kapital,” Karl Marx’s critique of the
effects of the Industrial Revolution and its reliance on exploitation
of workers. Daily readings are featured in the arena designed by David Adjaye
at the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, the public park that contains
the art-filled national pavilions. Labor and work of all kinds is a
recurring theme, whether we watch a gravestone of cast-concrete being
made in Steve McQueen’s excellent video “Ashes”; enter into the strange
world of Mika Rottenberg’s video installation “NoNoseKnows,” a mordant meditation on the rituals of cultured pearl production and utilitarian sneezing, or whiz past a big banner by Gulf Labor,
a human rights collective organized to protect migrant workers in the
United Arab Emirates. (I’m not sure the banner is art or even quasi-art,
but I hope Gulf Labor’s labors succeed.)
Colonialism,
perhaps the most extreme instance of the exploitation of labor, is a
visible subtext, as is the show’s intent to reflect more completely than
usual the diversity of the world’s population. It is full of women and
of artists from outside the West, most prominently in Africa, Asia and
the Middle East.
At
times it feels as if Mr. Enwezor has included everything that
interested him, with no thought to what the viewer can actually absorb.
His show presents works in nearly every conceivable medium — including
music, performance art and lengthy films and videos — by nearly 140
artists from 53 countries and several generations. Their efforts are
crammed into the Giardini and the seemingly endless string of galleries
that fill much of the medieval Arsenale, Venice’s former navy yard, a
short distance away.
As
with his 2002 Documenta XI exhibition, Mr. Enwezor’s proclivity for
camera-based work bordering on documentary is apparent, evidenced here
by Mr. McQueen’s work as well as Sonia Boyce’s “Exquisite Cacophony,”
which records the brilliant improvisations of three vocal artists who
mix the idioms of rap, jazz scat, Dadaist noise and gospel, and “Fara
Fara,” a split-screen documentary by Carsten Höller and Mans Mansson
about the vibrant music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic
Republic of Congo.
And
especially impressive are new hybrids of documentary, activism and
expressive artistic power as seen in the disorienting films of Rosa
Barba and Raha Raissnia and the multimedia installation of Lili Reynaud Dewar, a brilliant French artist and dancer who tackles issues of sexual orientation
while paying tribute to Josephine Baker. Precedents for this kind of
work include the word-and-music installations of the American
artist-composer Charles Gaines.
The
show is strengthened by art whose political impact lies primarily in
the example of the makers themselves. Among the high points of the
exhibition are the small, ebullient, if essentially Post-Impressionist
landscapes from the 1950s through 1980s by the Egyptian painter Inji
Efflatoun (1924-1989), a feminist pioneer who was imprisoned for being a
Communist. The larger point is that the identity of who makes art
matters terribly. Chris Ofili, Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1986) and
Kerry James Marshall are all represented by wonderful, even abstract
paintings whose political thrust is less than obvious.
Mr.
Enwezor’s talents as a master of theatrical presentation are often
apparent. The Central Pavilion’s facade has been hung with enormous
black and blue shroudlike cloths by the artist Oscar Murillo while just
above is a pale neon piece by Glenn Ligon that announces “blues, blood,
bruises.” Once inside, the first prominent piece is a large wall of old
suitcases and trunks by the Italian artist Fabio Mauri (1926-2009), an
obvious symbol of refugees and also the Holocaust, from 1993.
Things
are even more obvious at the start of the Arsenale. Five neon pieces by
Bruce Nauman, flashing with words like “eat,” “death,” “pain” and
“pleasure,” cast their lurid light on an installation work by Adel
Abdessemed: clusters of machetes stuck into the ground, suggesting
bushes, explosions and stockpiled arms.
One
of the best moments is an onslaught of sculpture by three artists made
from found objects: Terry Adkins’s combinations of musical instruments
shine, and Melvin Edwards’s small clenched welded-steel wall sculptures,
made from bits of chain and tools, dominate, raising the troubling
history of racial violence despite their beauty. Violence becomes more
overt in the obsessive drawings of extravagantly vicious imaginary
killing machines by the self-taught artist Abu Bakarr Mansaray.
Monica
Bonvicini’s clusters of chain saws covered in polyurethane resembling
black tar and hanging from the ceiling also use found objects, to
achieve a kitschy obviousness. Mr. Edwards teaches Ms. Bonvicini a
useful lesson in aesthetics: Subject matter must be empowered by form.
It cannot be left literally twisting in the wind.
Among
the rewards at the farthest reaches of the Arsenale is Emeka Ogboh’s
“Song of the Germans (Deutschlandlied),” which surrounds the visitor
with a recording of African refugees singing Germany’s national anthem
in their mother tongues, resonating with the pain of bigotry past and
present.
Mr.
Enwezor’s extravaganza is an argument embedded in the curatorial
equivalent of a food fight. Unlike other international biennials,
Venice’s is surrounded by the random crossfire of the art selected by
the individual countries for the national pavilions of which there are
89 arrayed in the Giardini, at the Arsenale and throughout the Venice
itself.
A
few pavilions stress formal purity, like the immense and stunning pool
of pink-tinged water that Pamela Rosenkranz has inserted in the Swiss
Pavilion — a fluid, girly version of Walter De Maria’s “Earth Room.” At
the Austrian Pavilion Heimo Zobernig has leveled the floor and lowered
the ceiling with planes of black, added a few white benches and planted
an array of new trees in its small courtyard. It becomes a stark
existential chapel in which thoughts of human folly contrast with the
logic of nature.
Some artists have outdone themselves, like the performance/video eminence gris, Joan Jonas,
who has filled the United States pavilion with the mysterious
installation “They Come to Us Without a Word,” weaving a shifting
tapestry of video, objects, music and ghost stories. Others, like Sarah
Lucas, one of the few great artists of her notorious Y.B.A. (Young
British Artist) generation, didn’t quite rise to the occasion,
scattering the British Pavilion with intermittently pervy sculpture
against dazzling marigold yellow walls.
Others
succumbed to tired forms of festivalism, exemplified by Camille
Norment’s expanses of broken glass in the Scandinavian Pavilion, which
frame a more interesting sound piece; and Chihaur Shiota’s seductive
presentation of two ancient fishing boats engulfed in a cloud of
crisscrossing red yarn strung with hundreds of old keys, in the Japan
Pavilion.
The
national exhibitions featured works that would have enhanced Mr.
Enwezor’s show, notably Hito Steyerl’s riveting parody of corporate
malfeasance, a film propelled by an Internet dance sensation and
projected in a gridded room redolent of the movie “Tron.” Visitors sat
on deck chairs and lawn furniture, a scene that for me conjured the deck
of the Titanic.
In
the group show “Personne et les Autres” at the Belgium Pavilion, built
during the reign of King Leopold II, the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen
had invited a roster of artists from Africa and Europe to exhibit with
him. But the gathering was dominated by his own documentary, “One. Two.
Three.” It expands the history of the European avant-garde known as the
Situationist International to include Congolese intellectuals, while
also recounting the writing of a protest song that emerges tantalizingly
as the film progresses.
The
one artist who really engaged the world was Christoph Büchel
representing Iceland. He orchestrated the conversion of a disused Roman
Catholic church in Venice’s Cannaregio neighborhood into what became the only mosque
in the historic part of the city, aimed at serving the many Muslims who
commute to Venice each day to work. Mr. Büchel outfitted the interior
with a convincing arrangement of prayer carpets, plaques and Qurans, and
after weeks of touch-and-go negotiations with city officials he was
allowed to stage the opening ceremony, complete with a sermon by an
imam. But no sooner had this taken place than rumblings resumed, with
the city threatening to forbid services
being held there. It could function only as art, not for religion. Even
so, the effort succeeded in shedding a harsh light on a failure of
civic tolerance and understanding.
Correction: May 16, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the artist whose work inspired one of the pavilions at the Venice Biennale. He was Walter De Maria, not Water DeMaria.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the artist whose work inspired one of the pavilions at the Venice Biennale. He was Walter De Maria, not Water DeMaria.
