All the World’s Futures: three utopias and the inevitable catastrophe of things to come

by Marcus Miller

Okwui Enwezor’s linchpin to the 56^th Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, was the continuous live reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital over the seven months of the biennale. His blunt gesture worked both as a recuperation of the critical aesthetics that inspired the restructured 1974 Biennale for example—where special projects from Chile, then devastated by a violent coup d’état, were highlighted—and a slap in the face to the post political, red-hot spectacle of the contemporary art market. While Enwezor’s catastrophic backdrop and his dialectical response produced what many referred to as a “bleak” iteration, he managed to pry open the canon a tad by curating artists not on the radar of the one percent.

In the midst of the curator’s dystopian mise-en-scène and his “[dialectical] parliament of [contiguous] forms,” (from the curator’s statement, http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/enwezor/, September 15, 2015), were three national pavilions: Canada, Poland and Austria, who played host to projects that were distinctly, but very differently, utopian in character. And in keeping with the uncanny nature of utopias to repress nasty underbellies (that inevitably return), these projects helped elaborate the curator’s thesis and perhaps nudged it in ways that may not have been anticipated.

BGL’s Canadisimo, was a fantastic ode to the dépanneur, its (absent) proprietor and the place the little neighbourhood store occupies in the imaginative lives of its customers. The pavilion-cum-corner store was almost completely obscured by scaffolding, altered spaces and a spectacular excess of objects. It became a wormhole to Montreal’s St-Henri and the proletarian world of Chef Boyardee, big bottles of beer and lottery tickets. These typical offerings established what might be imagined as the very impoverished range of ersatz and quotidian possibilities available to Othered regulars: full belly, drunken ecstasy and false hope.

But a closer look at the hundreds of cans, boxes and jars on offer revealed a subtle but ubiquitous intervention: the product labels had all been blurred. What might easily have been overlooked nevertheless provided a (subliminal) signal that this dépanneurish utopia would not deliver its consumerist seductions as stated. Not only did the blurred labels resist easy photographic documentation, they seemed to permeate the entire faux-store and its contents with a surprisingly unsettling, even nauseating stench. This was perhaps the darkest and most disturbingly uncanny element in BGL’s pop contribution to the Biennale.

Moving through the pavilion, public space became private as the next few rooms led back to a large workshop for the production of earthenware-cast reproductions of cartoon animals, Hindi gods and miscellaneous kitsch that might be considered as aesthetic analogs to the offerings in the dépanneur: the proprietor’s side-line? The next (more private) room was an artist’s studio. Thousands of paint-dribbled cans with brushes and collected chachkas for inspiration and reformatting were piled, floor to ceiling, on shelving units and worktables. Here the owner was reimagined as an artist whose prodigious output mimicked the excesses (and inadequacies) of the dépanneur offerings. The private studio where we were witness to the means of production, but not the products, was the obverse of the fetishizing public store where productive labour and social relations remained hidden.

The roof of the pavilion dépanneur was another crowd pleaser with its elaborately improvised coin maze constructed with ladders, metal studs, scaffolding and sawhorses. Users were invited to drop their Euros into slots that led to a labyrinth and large double-pane windows on the ground floor, the coins coming to rest on a pattern of stops that arranged them in a beautiful Byzantine pattern.

If Canadisimo began on the ground floor with fluorescent lights and the mundane accoutrements of the daily grind, it ended with a heavenly sun-lit dream that nevertheless performed the same operation, bilking its users with the promise of an other place.

Pulling back from BGL’s fictive reproduction of the impossible excesses of the everyday, the Polish pavilion featured a minimal black-box video installation by Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper, Halka / Haiti: 18°48′05″N 72°23′01″W, was projected on a large, curved screen that was perfect for its fixed-shot panorama of the small Haitian mountain village where the artists staged Halka, the tragic romantic opera (first produced in 1848) that championed the Polish ‘folk’ and became the jewel of the Polish National Opera.

It’s no surprise that Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo provided inspiration for Halka / Haiti. Like Herzog’s crazed and obsessed hero, the idea of transplanting European high art to an obscure, rural site in the new world verged on the megalomaniacal and naïvely Universalist. Nevertheless, the artists persevered. Curator Magdalena Mosalewicz asked the question, “Could the opera’s social theme resonate with Poland and Haiti’s shared national histories to connect, for a moment, two geographically and culturally distant communities?” (from the curatorial pamphlet available at the Polish pavilion).

It’s the back-story that gave substance to the artist’s pretence and forced us to reconsider what on the surface appeared to be sheer condescension. In fact, it is the descendants of Polish soldiers, deployed by Napoleon in 1802-3 to squash the slave rebellion who now inhabit the village where the opera was restaged. Remarkably the soldiers, originally motivated by the emancipation of their own country, soon realized their common cause with the insurgents and mutinied against France to fight for Haitian independence. Their gallant support was recognized with the granting of special citizenship and to this day, their descendants use creolized Polish surnames and refer to themselves as “le Polané.”

The effect of the extreme widescreen panoramic projection was quixotic for how it intensified the collective moment while simultaneously beckoning the eye away from the performers at the centre to the village audience to the peripheries where animals and children looked on (or not) with distracted boredom. The opera, cherished as a symbol of Polish national identity, appeared to resonate only with the older villagers who allied themselves with the performance in a complex and supplemented national identity. Apparently the youthful stragglers on the edges hadn’t learned their history. With utopian optimism, we hope they will.

If BGL exemplified what might be considered a photographic impulse to fix the profusion of the world (or in this case, a dépanneur), one-to-one, Heimo Zobernig’s offering at the Austrian pavilion seemed to distill the world, boiling off its adornments to a point of near absurdity. Many people didn’t see anything at all and quickly left. To be generous, there really wasn’t much to see other than the purified spaces of the 1934 national pavilion opening to the courtyard outside; very Modern, very Miesian.

Zobernig’s brilliant gesture was to smooth over and cover up the retrograde and historicist details of the original building, the arches, the stepped floors, the ceilings, skylights and clerestories. Black, suspended ceilings hovered over black floors, leaving clean white walls and Minimalist furniture to contrast and refract light.

This temporary and very formal upcycle had profound political implications given the Third Reich’s propensity for the heroic trappings of Neoclassicism. Zobernig’s purge of historical reference amounted to a restatement of Adolph Loos’ radical Modernist fusion of ornament with crime (Loos, Ornament and Crime, 1908).

While we are past the most extreme denouncements of Modernism from the 1980s and 90s—conflating its international character with neoliberalism, post-colonialism and fascism, its reductionist and purifying tendencies with racism and genocide and its penchant for the monolith with patriarchy and god Zobernig’s—intervention deployed Modernism as a weapon against the fascist symptoms of the original pavilion.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloch recently described Europe as “the embattled fortress and the sinking ship” when he set the scene for his assessment of All the World’s Futures (Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Artforum, vol. 54, no. 1, September 2015, Biennale on the Brink, pg. 308). Who better, he asked, to curate an exhibition of this stature at this catastrophic moment than Okwui Enwezor? Nigerian-born, New York-educated, veteran curator of “Documenta 11” and countless other international art exhibitions, Enwezor’s fluid position and ongoing gestures to decentre and interrogate hegemonic power structures endowed him with the perfect credentials to extend the critique of Modernism. He did put pressure on the canon and he did reintroduce a critical dimension to the discourse around contemporary art. However, there were a few entries that extended his mandate beyond its original formulations. But that’s to his dialogic credit for conceiving and producing an exhibit that was more than the sum of his parts. Good art does that.

 

The Venice Biennale 56th International Art Exhibition – All the Worlds Futures ran from May 9^th to November 22^nd 2015. The exhibition took place at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations across the city of Venice, Italy.

 

Marcus Miller is Director of the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan. He has worked across Canada as a curator, writer, artist and teacher. He has worked in all capacities in artist run centres, especially painting walls white.