Chaos, conflict and the claustrophobia of consumer culture were at the heart of this year’s Venice Biennale, which ironically has rarely seen an opening week more crammed with activations by fashion and luxury brands.
Thousands of art works by hundreds of fine artists were on display, though people often seemed most excited by the activities of over a dozen fashion and luxury brands, including Prada, Dior, Tod’s, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens, Buccellati and Golden Goose – who staged fetes, cocktails, balls, gala dinners, rave parties and, even, fine art shows.
Like Monte di Pieta, the huge installation by Christoph Büchel inside the Fondazione Prada, entirely devoted to the final destination of many a failed couple or broken-down artist – the pawnshop. The entire building given over to a fictious bankrupt pawnshop crammed with the detritus of consumerism. In one corner, a mock church with cheap plastic religious statues on the altar, dozens of dusty wheelchairs hanging from the ceiling and scores of prosthetics making up a shrine.
Behind a series of mahogany pawnshop counters and metal grills one could discover stained exercise bicycles; discarded tools; giant mounds of smelly second-hand clothes; multiple decommissioned missiles and torpedoes and, of course, a white sheet covered in fake luxury handbags by Italian runway brands. One space contained hundreds of one-foot-thick ledgers from Banca di Napoli with meticulously hand-written records of people’s debts; another boasted a series of 1960s washing rooms, entitled Money Laundering.
A dark vision of our era’s obsession with owning things and a dramatic counterpoint to the whole raison d’être of the brand that financed the exhibition.
Crowds were also lengthy outside the British Pavilion, sponsored by Burberry. Inside, John Akomfrah, an artist of Ghanian heritage, presented a powerful commentary on the bitter legacy or colonialism, blending black and white footage of Europe’s brutal treatment of freedom fighters in Africa; the scandalous murder of Patrice Lumumba and the battering of Civil Rights marchers led by Martin Luther King. All juxtaposed by images of solitary contemplative figures filmed in giant landscapes in the Highlands of Scotland.
Burberry’s fete in Harry’s Bar to celebrate the exhibition turned into something of a clash of cultures too. Uptight restaurant managers kept on turning on the lights and down the sound of ace DJ Benji B.
Future shocks were evident after visiting the Danish pavilion where photographer Inuuteq Storch chronicled life in Kalaallit Nunaat, the local name for Greenland, in an exhibition named Rise of the Sunken Sun. While also blending images by John Moller, shot in black and white back in the island’s colonial era. Storch’s photos managed to be a crude yet poetic vision of the community in his hometown of Sismiut, capturing the nobility of his people, even as global warming and the chains of colonialism cast long shadows. Danish doctors continued to practice eugenics against Kalaallit women by forcibly inserting IUDs into teenage girls as recently as the 1970s. It’s a crime for which the Danish government has so far refused to pay any compensation.
While one could not help noticing that right around the corner from the festival’s favorite party bar – the Palazzina Grassi, inside the San Samuele church one found a collection of Old Masters drawing depicting the horrors of war by Goya, Callot and De Hooghe entitled Beati Pacifici, meaning blessed are the Peace Masters. And the most arresting image of the week was 50 meters away inside Palazzo Malipiero, where artist Miles Greenberg staged a “durational” performance. Clad in micro underwear and smeared in oil, with six silver arrows pieced through his torso, he stood for nine hours on a rough stone in a referential reference to Saint Sebastien, even as uber curator Klaus Biesenbach paraded around like a Bond villain. Surely the next 007 will have to save the planet from a mad art collector bend on destroying all the world’s Old Masters in an crazed attempt to gain absolute art power?
The mood was not dark overall. Especially at the multi-disciplinary installation inside the French Pavilion. Entitled, wait for it, Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon, by Julien Creuzet, with the exceptional support of Chanel. A multi-media mash-up featuring cloth hangings; mock gothic frames; baroque colors; and giant wall videos of Doges barges encountering aliens, it was the most visually optimistic display in Venice.
There was also a sense of buoyant optimism in the Guggenheim Museum at The Juggler’s Revenge, arguably the coolest retrospective ever on Jean Cocteau – the master illustrator, filmmaker, jeweler, poet, photographer and occasional prose stylist for Coco Chanel.
Elsewhere, Dior supported a slew of collateral events across the lagoon city, like the Cosmic Garden exhibition by Karishma Swali and Manu & Madhvi Parekh in collaboration with Ateliers Chanakya, previously revealed in Mumbai during the Dior Fall 2023 show; Eva Jospin’s exhibition Selva in the Museo Fortuny; Foreigners Everywhere where the Claire Fontaine collective hung 60 neon lights under the arcade of the Arsenale, and Exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, at US Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, the art festival’s nerve center.
On top of that, Dior threw a Saturday night Naumachia ball with Venetian Heritage, the dinner tables artfully dressed by taste-master Cordelia de Castellane riffing on heavy damask; Murano glass and gondolas. No dinner quite matched Tod’s, where Andrea Bocelli sang Nessun Dorma before giant Tintoretto canvases. Though, Buccellati’s ball on the Giudecca, at Officine 800, to fete its exhibition The Prince of Jewelers, Rediscover the Classics, was no slouch. While Schiaparelli’s supper in Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni on Canal Grande was perhaps the most insider of dinners, where guests were each given body part jewelry as gifts.
Rick Owens celebrated the birthday of partner Michelle Lamy in a giant rave inside a garage in the Lido, where the 80-year-old chanteuse sang, and DJ Honey Dijon was in scorching form. Golden Goose unveiled its new headquarters on terra firma.
Louis Vuitton supported a widely different vista, in a small jewel of an exhibition on the top floor of its Venice flagship devoted to Ernest Pignon-Ernest. A photographer and fine street artist, Pignon-Ernest uses his own brilliant black chalk on paper sketches to create bold life-sized drawings of great poets which he then plastered around the cities where they were famous – Arthur Rimbaud in Paris; Forough Farrokhzad in Teheran and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Many of these poets suffered harsh and early deaths. In keeping with this Biennale’s Hobbesian view of our times, where the life of man is nasty, brutish and short.
The 60th Venice Biennale which debuted on April 20 remains open until November 24 2024.
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