Arts editor Linda Herrick tests the waters at this year’s all-pervasive Venice Biennale
The Biennale is all-pervasive in Venice. You can't escape it. Right now, it has even invaded the tranquil haven of the Lido, where I am staying. It has stretched its tentacles across the waters and a hideous structure worthy of Frank Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em Spencer is arising in the gardens of my hotel just below my third-floor room, accompanied by much drilling, banging and swearing. The workmen aren't amused, overseen by a Biennale maven with a clipboard and a shriek worthy of a market fishwife.
The structure, which the receptionist says proudly is for a "Biennale collateral event tomorrow", consists of two tall, thin towers of shabby, recycled, green corrugated iron. It looks a bit wobbly. At the time of writing, it reaches the height of the hotel's second floor. Lucky devils, those house guests with ringside seats tomorrow night.
But that's the thing with the Biennale: it's a mixed bag with the bonus of being hugely entertaining if you're into people-watching. I've never seen so many well-dressed women packed into one place, nor so many middle-aged men wearing loud, checked suits and "fun" spectacles.
I also saw a few critiquing the whole exercise by taking a snooze on the lawns later in the hot afternoon. It can take it out of you.
The Biennale stretches across the former shipbuilding complex, the Arsenale, to the east of Venezia, and to the east of that, in the Giardini, literally, the Garden. Then there are exhibitions and pavilions sprinkled across the city's many islands. Most visitors are unlikely to see everything unless they allow plenty of time and eke out their energy.
It has rewarding moments. After wandering around the Arsenale for half a day, where the parameters of what constitutes art can be loosely defined, if at all, I stumble upon a man standing outside the exit. He wears a shiny red bodysuit and a toilet seat around his neck with the lid lifted behind his head. Across the lid is written: "Now every shit is art". What a superb piece of low-cost performance art.
This Biennale, titled All The World's Futures, is curated by Okwui Enwezor, a highly regarded critic who is head of Haus der Kunst in Munich. It's a loose brief, but the message in many works is that the future is a treacherous place, all of our own doing. There's a relentless mood of anger, grief and despair, which sharpens into a deep anticapitalist/colonialist manifesto in the group show in the Central Pavilion, renamed the Arena, at the heart of the Giardini.
I don't find much that excites me at the Arsenale, with a few really great exceptions.
A lot of it feels tired, amateurish and so-what-ish. A circular neon sign by American Bruce Nauman, for instance, reads "Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain". It was created in 1983.
Adel Abdessemed, of Algeria, presents a work called Nymphess (2015), a staging of immensely long, menacing knives stuck in the ground with sledgehammer captions like: "Stick it in your chest" and "American violence".
Monica Bonvicini, of Italy, creates Latent Combustion (2015), a mass of fused chainsaws and axes coated in black polyurethane, while Abu Bakarr Mansaray, of Sierra Leone, shares his Nuclear Telephone Discovered In Hell (2003), a large, child-like diagram in pencil accompanied by a range of smaller naive drawings depicting diabolical machines and battles, the sort of thing a teenager obsessed with sci-fi might scratch away at.
American Theaster Gates, on the other hand, lifts the game with Gone Are The Days Of Shelter And Martyr (2014), a powerful video of a shattered church outside Chicago. It could be footage of any urban scenario which has broken down under the forces of violence and decay. It is a hell zone, with a large bell and a man desperately trying to clear the mess accompanied by a resonant soundtrack of trickling water and bombs exploding.
After such trauma, the work of Ricardo Brey, of Cuba, is a feast of delicate loveliness. Pearl, an ode to the treasures of the beach, is laid out in 13 large cabinets in which lie a rich trove of exquisite botanical drawings, shells, notebooks, artefacts, wound balls of old pearl necklaces, small turtle shells and portfolios. This is a marriage of real talent and a full-blown engagement with minutiae.
Everything Will Be Taken Away by Adrian Piper combines a photograph of top Nazis with a blackboard phrase, left, to chilling effect. Photo / Linda Herrick
A gallery of photos by Americans Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick is highly engaging too, but it reveals an ugly truth. Their 1981 twin series, Ditch Digging And Field Work, from a larger work called Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex, depicts mainly black prisoners doing hard labour in the state of Louisiana. They are closely watched by a white mounted guard armed with a shotgun. Slavery in 20th-century America: it's an uncivilised cycle which continues to this day.
My tour around the Arsenale ends in a room with a floor-to-ceiling banner posing an important question. Created by the New York-based Gulf Labour Coalition, it asks: "Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on Saadyat Island?" The answer, recalling the unfortunates captured by Calhoun and McCormick, is modern-day slaves.
That is enough for me and, after being briefly diverted by the man wearing the toilet, I turn towards the Giardini, a gorgeous setting, with a park on one side and the lagoon to the other, with the site cut up by canals.
With openings staggered over a few days, some of the pavilions - the US, Serbia - are impossible to get into because of long queues. Closest to the entrance, the Spanish have a prime spot but their group show, featuring old news footage of Dali and an "erotic" film by Cabello/Carceller, feels irrelevant and random. Aurally, the pavilion is bedlam.
Next door, entering through a smog of cigarette smoke and wine fumes, the Belgian group show is much more coherent, focusing on that country's colonialist history in Africa. Photos called Forever Weak And Ungrateful depict statues of colonial bosses clutched by an African man, while another series shows mosquitoes pinned on specimen cards and aerial shots of mining excavations and miserable divided townships.
The British Pavilion hosts I Scream Daddio, by Sarah Lucas, mounted in rooms painted bright yellow to accommodate elongated yellow "female forms" and female half-torsos with cigarettes protruding from their belly buttons, vaginas and rears. Another so-what moment for me, I'm afraid.
But to make up for it all, a walk around the works in the Arena has a huge emotional impact. A stately building with white pillars on the front draped with long black flags, or garlands of mourning, has the words "blues/blood/bruise" in neon across the top.
Until November this will be the gathering place for readings and symposia on Karl Marx's Das Kapital, curated by filmmaker Isaac Julien, with the overall imperative of addressing the past, present and future of social justice in this world.
To proceed through this huge building is to have the senses hammered and bruised. Good title above the entrance.
In one small room, an endless looping film by the late Fabio Mauri shows a bound man writhing and gasping as blood spurts from his head; as a teenager Mauri had a breakdown after seeing photos of Holocaust victims.
In another room, a historic photo of Goebbels smirking at the Haus der Kunst in Munich forms part of a dreadful ambience called Everything Will Be Taken Away, by Adrian Piper, with those words scribbled endlessly on huge blackboards and Mauri's mathematical formula for evil, I Numeri Malefici, scrawled large at the other end of the room. Absolutely chilling.
There is so much to see in the Arena. If you are lucky enough to be heading to Venice, do not miss Vertigo Sea (2015), a three-screen, 38-minute film by British documentary-maker John Akomfrah. Using actors, readings, footage from the BBC Natural History Unit, hypnotic music and historical film, Akomfrah has woven a meditation on man's relationship with the sea and his compulsion to exploit it in a destructive way.
It has three threads: the conveyance of black slaves across the oceans; the slaughter of whales, seals and polar bears (the historic footage is terrible to watch); and the use of the ocean as a dumping ground for "The Disappeared" of Argentina during the period of state terrorism between 1976 and 1983.
At once stunningly beautiful, harrowing and profoundly moving, Vertigo Sea was so affecting I had to return to see it again the next day. That, for me, lifted the Biennale into a truly extraordinary experience.
• Linda Herrick travelled to the Biennale with support from Creative New Zealand; the Biennale runs until November 22.
