By Christy Lange
The Ukrainian national pavilion at the Venice Biennale
In its tightly held, unrelenting focus on the conditions of labour in the world at large, Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures’ has the perhaps unintended result of making art-making itself – and viewing art – feel like work.
Twisting through a relentless labyrinth of screens, vitrines and small, framed series, the black-and-white, text-based work makes the exhibition as a whole feel colourless. ‘All the World’s Futures’ stands in sharp contrast, perhaps even as a reaction to, Massimilano Gioni’s ‘Encyclopaedic Palace’, which evoked worlds steeped in fantasies, utopias and borne of the artist’s mind. Here we get the world as it is, in the present tense, delving readily into the past but with few hopeful glimpses toward the future.
Filmography of Harun Farocki installed in the Arsenale as part of ‘All the World’s Futures’
Without pieces to punctuate the dire urgency of the conditions the works document, I found myself becoming numb to the impact. There is no counterpoint to their point, not antitheses to their theses. To find those alternative views, one largely had to look beyond the main show, to a few of the pavilions in the Giardini and plenty of possibilities off-site.
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Emeka Ogboh, ‘Song of the Germans’ (2015)
In the Giardino delle Vergini, tucked behind the Arsenale, there are a few spaces that allow room for contemplation. Here, a piece by Nigerian-born, Berlin-based Emeka Ogboh (Deutschlandlied, Song of the Germans, 2015) was unexpectedly seductive. The artist collaborated with a Berlin Afro-Gospel choir to record them singing the German nation anthem in 10 different African languages native to the choir’s members. At first the singing sounds almost hopeful, a possible sign that of reclaiming this heavily fraught anthem. But after the fourth or fifth rendition, the tune begins to sour. What starts out as a celebratory choral piece begins to feel oppressive, a turn that I felt viscerally, rather than witnessing its documentation, and that’s what gives the piece its power.
Installation by C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska in the Polish Pavilion
In the Polish pavilion, what seems like a massive Fitzcaraldian undertaking in Halka/Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W by C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska, turns out to be a relief because it is, at heart, one idea, well-executed. While other national pavilions strain to touch on multiple vague notions (I’m thinking of the Swiss, among others), and as a result, only did so lightly, this one relies on a single, conceptual performance. The artists staged the opera Halka in Cazale (a village populated by descendants of Polish soldiers who helped fight for Haiti’s independence) by employing members of the Poznan Opera House and musicians from the Philharmonic of Port-au-Prince. Themes of migration, transplantation and the dissolution of cultural boundaries are implied rather than exhibited, and the result feels refreshingly concise.
Off-site, the Ukranian national pavilion offered the title ‘HOPE’. But Nikita Kadan’s assemblage of burnt and rusted rubble collected during the country’s ongoing conflict and displayed in a glass vitrine was a jarring sight amidst the parade of yachts (Kadan has planted a bean plant inside the glass case, which, with luck, will grow to cover the artefacts). The other artists’ urgent responses to the dire situation in their country, are housed in the cool, modernist glass building astride the waterfront, sponsored by Victor Pinchuk. Here I felt the clash between the conditions in which these art works were made and the conditions in which they’re displayed – and all the contradictions about the ‘global’ art world it forces us to acknowledge – even far more sharply than anywhere in Enwezor’s show.
Installation view of the Martial Raysse retrospective at Palazzo Grassi
Beside the Grand Canal, the Palazzo Grassi hosted a surprisingly refreshing retrospective of the works of Martial Raysse, an artist ripe for rediscovery. After being a sensation of the French art world in the 1960s while only in his early 20s, Raysse subsequently disappeared for decades. He resurfaced in his later years making chaotic, brightly coloured, large-scale paintings. These works you can mostly gloss over, in search of the smaller, older, more delicate sculptural works in between. His large and small-scale assemblages are true revelations of ’60s pop – incorporating materials like paintbrushes, hairbrushes, plants, soap, toys and neon in unexpected ways. The patina of age around the consumer goods only serves to make them more like rare treasures recently uncovered. (Don’t miss the video of the now-79-year-old artist dancing in his studio in the café.)
Jean-Luc Moulene, ‘Rotor’ (2015) in ‘Slip of the Tongue’ at Punta della Dogana
Similarly surprising and out of character for Pinault’s usual fare, he gave over the Punta della Dogana to Danh Vo, who curated ‘Slip of the Tongue’, an elegant, understated show of little-seen minor masterpieces by Luciano Fabro, Carol Rama and Paul Thek, among several anonymous or unknown old masters. The presentation was for more varied than the usual names we’re used to seeing there, and the installation felt spare, if at times a bit too ambiguous – looking beautiful and mysterious but failing to coalesce into a large more meaningful whole.
Henri Rousseau, ‘Horse Attacked by a Jaguar’ (1910)
Two years ago, it was the Manet show ‘Manet: Return to Venice’ at the Palazzo Ducale that was the sleeper hit of the biennale. This year, it’s ‘Henri Rousseau: Archaic Candour’ at that same venue. Rousseau’s work is boldly presented together with that of his contemporaries (40 works by Rousseau paired with 60 works for comparison), showing how, against typical art historical notions, he may not have been the autodidact of lore. It illustrates his mingling with Paris intellectuals like Apollinaire and traces his inspirations from old masters. The wall texts are lucid and illuminating, and, above all, the paintings themselves still look fresh, and joyful, without being naive. Here is what an intricately and deeply researched exhibition can do for an artist’s work – an example of scholarly curating at its best.