Venice Biennale: In Minor Keys Needs Major Work

Irony abounds at this year’s Venice Biennale. We couldn’t be further away from the front lines of any raging global conflict, figuratively speaking, yet war is thick on everyone’s pouting lips. The participation of Russia and Israel, both of whom argue that art transcends war, has sparked political protests and beefed up security at their respective pavilions. Not only this, but the uber-liberal, uber-woke artworld’s biggest event is being presided over by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who led an Italian neo-fascist youth movement. Pure parody.

And to top it off, to see some serious art, you must avoid the Biennale altogether and visit the shows scattered around town.

Barry X Ball’s The Shape of Time on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore is sublime because it evokes the painstaking craftsmanship of monumental sculpture by the likes of Michelangelo. It’s also worth popping into the late George Baselitz’s Eroi d’Oro at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini next door. It’s dripping in gold and made poignant by his recent death. If you can get in, Christie’s has a private selling show decked out with masterpieces by the likes Cy Twombly, Titian, and JWM Turner at the Palazzo Ca’Dario.

Compounding the Biennale’s ongoing slide into irrelevance is the fact its illusion of reverence is undermined by lacklustre exhibitions that, for the most part, fail to address anything that matters right now. The exceptions being Florentina Holzinger’s Seaworld Venice installation at the Austrian Pavilion – a rumination on climate change – and Maja Malou Lyse’s interrogation of fertility at the Danish Pavilion. Even then, I can’t help but think they only resonate due to their shock value. The former features the artist hanging naked upside down pretending to be a clapper in a giant bell, and the latter is essentially a soft porn show. It’s all very shouty.

The Biennale’s grip on reality has never been looser. As conflict, climate change and dwindling sperm counts force us to stare into the abyss, the artworld’s inconsequentialness comes into sharp focus. Art will not save us (it was never going to), nevermind bad art. Why must we all take it so seriously?

There should be more humour and satire. We want to be entertained. The Biennale's decision to fence off a nesting seagull on one of the Giardini’s paths has inadvertently raised a few rare laughs. More of this please. 

The soft-power plays by Russia, Israel and the US eclipsed the pavilions’ limelight in the lead up to the Biennale, and their political shadow is refusing to budge now that its doors are open. The European Commission condemned the Biennale on Tuesday for refusing to blacklist Russia. Thirty or so Pussy Riot members jumped up and down in front of its Pavilion on Wednesday morning shouting “Blood is Russia’s art!” Later the same day in the same spot, former Polish culture minister Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz held a sign up reading, "Money for Biennial with Russia.’ 

More protests are planned this week. They’re the only entertaining shows on offer, so bring them on. Anything to distract from the indulgent, zero-impact and repetitive musings on trauma, displacement, race, the human experience, identity and gender that dominate most pavilions, not to mention almost every major exhibition these days. The Swiss Pavilion is a good example. Its group show is titled, The Unfinished Business of Living Together and explores ‘contemporary forms of coexistence’. The project seeks to ‘examine the conditions and possibilities of tolerance and belonging as forms of social division’. There are boring black-and-white photos, some generic lights projected on walls, TVs playing old Swiss news… They had months to prepare for this! 

Creativity in the artworld has hit rock bottom. Nothing feels original any more. Curators, dealers and art hacks fetishise and intellectualise contemporary art by default, when most of the time it is devoid of meaning. It is unadulterated pseudo-intellectualism. Abstraction. Bad painting. Unintelligible scrawls. Pretentious texts. Adults pretending to be toddlers with crayons. Very few artists are academics, but their work is too often dressed up as intelligent, hard-hitting, analytical discourse. 

There is no other industry in which its participants are celebrated for rallying against craft, skill and substance. The contemporary art world is uniquely backwards.
The artists at Venice, who are meant to be among the world’s best, have done a great job at inciting indifference and disappointment in the crowds this year. It’s etched on their faces. If they can’t stir us, how about making something decent to look at instead? Is that asking too much? Why did it become passé to strive to dream up something objectionably beautiful, the craft, precision and impressiveness of which could be weighed on an empirical scale? Try creating something that makes us stare in awe, something mysterious and full of wonder. Something like Venice itself.

Chris Levine’s spectacular military-grade laser installation, titled Higher Power, almost does this. At face value it’s a mesmerising shaft of green light shooting up from the island ofSan Clemente, piercing the heavens. It appears to travel forever into space. People can’t help but look up in amazement. But he ruined it by turning it into a cheesy, pacifist protest with the tagline, ‘Make Light not War’.

We are confronted by scores of postcards stuck to walls (Spanish Pavilion), a load of creepy dolls (Japanese Pavilion), uninspiring paintings (British Pavilion). The list goes on. Alvaro Barrington’s Labor Day Parade ’91, a painted truck taking centre stage at the Biennale, sums up what the artworld has reduced itself to: frivolous splurges of futile expression.

Like the majority of top-tier artists, Barrington’s brand outshines his art. The hype drummed up by the curators, dealers and collectors in his orbit ensures that everything he touches, no matter how rudimentary, turns to gold. Call it artworld alchemy. The gravy train keeps on chugging. 

The shows at Venice are hollow. There is no thread weaving a unified vision through each pavilion. They are totally disconnected. The late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial text for the Biennale’s theme, ‘In Minor Keys’,”invites us to, ‘Take a deep breath; Exhale; Drop [our] shoulders; Close [our] eyes…To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues.’ She was right. As we face annihilation, the show rumbles on. Perhaps she was being cynical. She had every right to be.

Buttafuoco’s remarks, by contrast, dispense with any such ambivalence.‘The joy of authentic art, which so faithfully resembles real life,’ he wrote. The problem is that the art at Venice reflects anything but reality. It merely mirrors the terminal insularity of the conceited contemporary art world.