Art As It Stands Now?

La Biennale Arte di Veniza 2019

Venice, Italy is a world-heritage city under siege by water and tourists.  Huge cruise ships are towed along waterways, dwarfing the ancient buildings.  An ex-Russian billionaire’s massive metal super-yacht is docked near Piazza San Marco, towering over it too.  Elevated walkways for flooding are stacked in every piazza.  But it is a beautiful, unique place nevertheless.  It is now hosting the bi-annual ‘Biennale Arte 2019’ in several locations, the largest and oldest art show in the world. It show-cases what the curators consider the best of the world’s present art, along with artists chosen by various nations to represent them.   

Here are some takeaways from 2019 from a Left point of view:

 

Post-Modernist Nonsense

     1.   Painting is now a minor art form.

     2.   The Biennale could have been called the Venice Short-Film Festival for the many ‘art’ exhibits that consisted only of short films or documentaries. 

     3.   Post-modernism is still the main way artists look at the world.  Incoherence, pastiche and shock reign. Full of plastic rivers and actual rocks.  Motorcycles chopped in half or turned upside down. A wrecked airplane fuselage.  A floor of glass jars with a raptor and stereo equipment on it.  Large lumps of hollow plastic painted gold with floating legs inside.  Laughable, stupid junk. Styles definitely representing ‘the end of art.’

     4.   Nations choose their artists with political intent.  Some exhibits might be called ‘art washing.’  The brutal and theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia had a beautiful construction of paper or leather gourds attached to glowing golden tents.  Smart choice!  Russia's paper democracy had a dark and morbid exhibit based on the Hermitage.  It included mechanical wooden puppets that exhibit notes said was a ballet, which others saw as a mass hanging.  So that did not ‘wash.’  The billionaire-run U.S. had an exhibit of massive hats that you could not recognize as hats, centered around a vague theme of ‘liberty’ that was not apparent at all.

     5.   Many artists are in a dark, sad, creepy mood and evidently don’t know why.  For instance Belgium’s exhibit consisted of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker behind bars.  Hanging human-like forms drape from ceilings in the Arsenale building.  Abused Asian girls surrounded by chopped manikins populate large photos.  Poems are embedded on funereal spikes in a dark room.  Junk lies on floors.  Twisted faces are sculpted.  Grotesques abound. A reflection of capitalist life, 2019?

     6.   The standouts at Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale locations (the two main Biennale locations) were two Chinese artists from the People’s Republic of China, Su Yuan and Peng Yu.  One of their works I’ve christened ‘The Blood Machine’ – a huge metal arm that continually tries to sweep up a vast pool of blood-like liquid and fails.  Another I’ve christened ‘Lincoln’s Chair’ – a massive replica of the chair in the Lincoln Monument with Lincoln missing. What ‘sits’ on the chair instead is a whip-like hose that flails about like a snake.  Both have immediate political meanings, so you don’t need to read the wall notes to find out what the fuck is going on.

     7.   Technology is the basis of new digital art. To illustrate this, one art film consisted of just computer code streaming by in various colors.  At the Biennale large, complex, immersive 3D installations rule, many using electronics, lights, music and motion. Some of them took many, many hours of work to create and construct.

     8.   Many pictures of Africans or darker colored folks on the walls substitute for the real thing.

     9.   In the same light, some countries highlighted indigenous people like the Sami or Inuit (Finland and Canada) or refugees (France).

The Blood Machine - PRC

ISRAELI EXHIBIT

Of special strangeness was the Israeli exhibit, a form of immersive theater.  It consisted of ‘Field Hospital X.’ (Like we want to go to a hospital!) You had to take a number, sit in a waiting room until your number was called while watching a woman on a TV screen talk to you really slowly like you were stupid.  Then have a wristband attached, put on hospital booties, are taken upstairs, then stand in a booth and yell. Lame ‘Rolf’ therapy.  I did not. Then you are told to sit in a reclining medical chair and watch one of 4 videos on social injustices - Palestinian oppression and resistance, family abuse, abducted immigrant children, along with one other.  

I chose the Palestinian one.  It started with a man wearing a sheep’s head jacking off below the screen.  I got up and left at that point.  I was told by my partner who watched the whole video that that was part of a story about Palestinian cooks jerking off into baba ganoush as ‘acts of resistance.’ Given the exhibit was endorsed by the Israeli Culture Ministry and there is an ongoing actual Nakba resistance, this is pretty strange tea.  Why not have the Palestinian ‘artist’ wear an Abu Ghraib hood?  Why visually suggest jerking off as ‘the’ form of resistance? Obnoxious and trivializing, but then a Lacanian (neo-Freudian) psychologist was involved.  According to the exhibit notes the ‘viewers’ are sick and need to go to a hospital – but not the Israeli state.  Then there is the highly controlled ‘order’ and submission demanded by the exhibit.  Just a flavor of present Israeli society? A weird form of national ‘art washing.’

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POLITICAL ART

There were political exceptions to the general rules of the decorative, the incoherent or the creepy.  A Mexican artist moved a whole school wall full of bullet holes from Juarez and rebuilt it onsite.  The red Venezuela exhibit had a picture that changed from a woman to Trump as you looked at it - Trump, like Obama, is trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government.  The Finns, Swedes and Norwegians focused on nature and global climate change.  Photos of the Israeli wall in Palestine in Arsenale was a model for the lengthening U.S. wall. The India exhibit contained wooden peasant sandals with a symbol of each person’s labor sometimes attached.  The Chilean exhibit was dedicated to ‘opposing subaltern, colonial and imperial hegemony’ or something like that.  A final room at the Arsenale made fun of consumerism, which was labeled as done by Slavs and Tatars. 

THEORY?

This Biennale was called “May You Live In Interesting Times.”  The word ‘interesting’ has several meanings and one of them is that ‘interesting’ is a euphemism for challenging or menacing. The phrase was first used by British diplomats in 1898 and 1936 in just that way, though attributed without evidence by them to a Chinese ‘curse.’

This Biennale was sponsored by Swatch watches – evidently a commodity where commerce and art pretend to meet.  One of the curators, Ralph Rugoff, introduced the Biennale in the booklet so:  “It presents types of art that variously illuminate the notion, articulated by both Leonard da Vinci and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that everything connects with everything else.” Dialectical materialism, a holistic method, says something of the sort, as does science, another holistic method.  Lenin might add that some things are actually more connected than others. 

P.S. - The predictable flooding that has inundated Venice over the past week reminds us once again the whole city is a work of art.  It seems the politics and planning for climate change is not commensurate.  

Other reviews about art below, use blog search box, upper left: 

Museum reviews - The Walker:  “Hippie Modernism,” “Frida Kahlo" and “Edward Hopper.  Museum of Russian Art: “Women in Soviet Art,” The Hermitage: “Travel Notes - The Hermitage,” The Minneapolis Institute of Art: “Discovering American Art Now.”  Uzbekistan Art Museum: “Desert of Forbidden Art.” The Tate Modern:  “Art is Dead.”

Book reviews:  “9.5 Thesis on Art and Class," “The Marxist Theory of Art” and Berger’s “Ways of Seeing.”

Commentary: On Banksy's street art: “Left in London.” Also: “The Minneapolis Spectacle” and “Slavs and Tatars.”

The Kulture Kommissar

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

September 27, 2019