2015 Venezia Arte Biennale: when beauty isn't enough

Entrance to the Arsenale

The curator of All the World's Futures, the central exhibition of the 2015 Venice Biennale, is Okwui Enwezor, a citizen of the world who has lived in Africa, the United States and Europe.  Born in Nigeria in 1963, he moved to New York in 1982 and entered New Jersey City State College in 1983 to study political science.  At the same time, Enwezor plunged into New York's art scene, which he described as having "surprising vitality....This was not about a name or an exhibition.  It was the energy accumulating when different worlds meet."

Self-taught, Enwezor launched his career by publishing a journal about contemporary African art and curating exhibitions, including one on African photography at the Guggenheim Museum.   Remarkably, without any formal training in art history or criticism, he went on to direct major exhibitions around the world:  Germany's Documenta 11, a Paris Triennial, and biennials in Johannesburg, Seville, South Korea, Mexico and Japan. Now he is the first Venice Biennale leader from Africa. And, he's a Marxist!

So, how has this extraordinary individual approached the opportunity to make a statement about the world of art, and the world itself? With an exhibition that presents an alternative to living in complacency and silence, and relentlessly alerts us to the dangers around us.  Enwezor explains:

The principal question the exhibition will pose is this:  how can artists, thinkers, writers, composers, choreographers, singers, and musicians, through images, objects, words, movements, actions, lyrics, and sounds, bring together publics in acts of looking, listening, responding, engaging, and speaking in order to make sense of the current upheaval? -- Okwul Enwezor, Exhibition Catatlogue

But it is largely directed at the mind instead of the senses and the heart.  Why are there so few works with the stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty of an El Anatsui, who was awarded the festival's Golden Lion awards on Enwezor's recommendation?  Did Enwezor feel beauty and wonder would detract from his central message, that we must look at the world around us with clear eyes and a critical understanding?

Enwezor commissioned this monumental site-specific work from Ibrahim Mahama.  It runs the length of the first building in the Arsenale complex, creating a somber corridor. Burlap bags from cacao, coffee and other exports are stitched together in manner reminiscent of the resplendent tapestries by fellow Ghanian artist, El Anatsui, who was awarded the Golden Lion for life time achievement at this Biennale.  El Anatsui created a legendary piece for the 2009 Biennale, draping a wall of Palazzo Fortuny with gold. Is Mahama's work an homage or a refutation?

A typical work by El Anatsui, woven from the metal caps of thousands of liquor bottles.

Energy Accumulates When Different Worlds Meet

Enwezor has brought together voices from around the globe -- 136 artists from 53 countries.  Many of these artists speak on behalf of the marginalized, oppressed, or endangered; they grapple with mystification, history and its omissions, memory and forgetting.  Reference to Karl Marx and revolutionary movements are woven through the exhibition spaces.

While curating one of the most established and long-standing (120 years) presentations of art in the world, Enwezor implicitly challenges the authority of the mainstream contemporary art scene by including many artists who operate outside of it and omitting work that is commercially appealing.  "'Art isn’t just made by white people in Europe with great patrons,' Enwezor told the Wall Street Journal. 'Sorry.'" (Quoted by Andrew Goldstein in ArtSpace -- reference below.)

As you make your way through the sprawling exhibition, hundreds of paintings and photos hanging on the walls (and if an artist can show one piece, why not show three, or ten, or twenty?), rooms of sculpture and installation work, the sounds floating in from video screening dens -- all clamor urgently for your attention.  Work by 136 artists from 53 countries has been shipped to Venice, harking back to the city's history as a crossroads and center of trade.  The exhibition is exhilarating and exhausting.  You do have the sense that indeed, all the world has been brought together to form a cacophonous labyrinth for visitors to explore.  You could spend months camped out, investigating. What you learn is not easy, though.

The Central Pavilion and spaces in the Arsenale are filled with urgent stories -- about violence, abuse of money and power, degradation of the environment.  There is a sustained and serious curatorial intent, not just to reveal important truths, but to honor the work of revealing truths.  The exhibition illuminates a meaningful, activist role for art that presents a difficult, but compelling, alternative to the ridiculous excesses of trophy art for the oligarchy.

Enwezor has said: "keeping art and political moods and events apart?  That wouldn't work.  An aesthetic choice is always also a political one." In fact, the exhibition makes the case that it is more urgent then ever that artists take on social critique -- exposing racism and nationalism, the exploitation of human, animal and environmental resources that accompanies global capitalism, inequities in wealth, power, and freedom of action -- precisely because "all the world's futures" are at stake.

But will it work?

In the white box of the exhibition venue, there is no context for the artwork.  With the exception of a "world poll" by Hans Haacke (where we can register opposition to our government's response to climate change) and Adrian Piper's invitation to take several vows of integrity ("I will always be too expensive to buy," "I will always mean what I say" "I will always do what I say I will do") there are few opportunities for action. Moreover, much of this art is intellectual, conceptual, and obscure -- requiring time and self-education to comprehend.  Moments of beauty and wonder are rare.  Without the emotional pull of compelling aesthetic experiences, will this exhibition achieve its hoped for effect? Will it wake up visitors, change their minds and actions, remove the layers of cultural mystification that support compliance and complacency?

But let's hope for the best, and admire this noble effort on behalf of humanity and the planet. Andrew Goldstein, writing for ArtSpace, put it well:

[All the World's Futures] could be a sleeper masterpiece, if the artists, curators, and writers who come to see the Biennale over the next half year internalize its message about an engaged artistic discourse. We need much more of that in our staggeringly venal art world, at a time when people around the world are rising up against injustice and need inspiration and direction. 

Engaged art and social activism is also alive and well in many of the national pavilions in the Giardini and Arsenale, and often with more immediate aesthetic or emotional effect.  I will write about some of these in other posts.

More about Okwei Enwezor and All the World's Futures:
How to Understand Okwei Enwezor's Venice Line-Up, Andrew M. Goldstein, ArtSpace
Observations on "All the World's Futures" at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Andrew M. Goldstein, ArtSpace
Art for the Planet's Sake at the Venice Biennale, Roberta Smith, The New York Times