One of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s Scots pines in the

All the World’s Futures kicks More Marx than Dante off with about a quarter of a mile of art displayed in the ancient and magnificent Martin Gayford finds a few nice paintings amid the dead trees, old warehouses of the Arsenale. The very first room contains a joint installation of clothes and agitprop of the works by and a French artist, Adel Abdessemed. The latter’s At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, light of morning in the lagoon, and almost work, entitled ‘Nymphéas’, with a bitter Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of punitive towards the end of a hot after- nod to Monet, consists of starbursts of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in noon. sharp machetes, opening like flowers of which sinners guilty of simony, hypoc- There was a moment when, im- evil. Nauman’s neon pieces flash abrasive risy and graft are punished. The last of mersed in inky darkness in the bowels phrases: ‘Stick it in Your Ear, Sit on my those spend eternity immersed in a river of the , I experienced Face’. One, shaped like a swastika, is en- of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liq- slightly Dante-esque panic. I was trying titled ‘American Violence’ — which tells uid, the poet noted, looks much like the to leave what was described ominously you as much you need to know about the tar that Venetians boil up in their arse- as a 60-minute video loop, when for a ideological slant of the All the World’s nal to smear over the hulls of their ships. moment it seemed that beyond the exit, Futures. Those lines came to mind more than once there was only deeper blackness and a as I walked around the 56th edition of the padded wall. Trapped for ever in a con- In inky darkness in the bowels of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large temporary art installation! Then, a little German pavilion, I experienced slightly section is installed in the ancient build- sheepishly, I found the door. Dante-esque panic. ings of that very Arsenale. The official Biennale exhibi- The Biennale is always the tion, entitled All the World’s Futures and I must confess that right-on agitprop is same — the crowds! the people! — yet al- selected by this year’s curator — Okwui one of my least favourite modes of con- ways different. One vast section, as large Enwezor, a Nigerian — is a determinedly temporary art. Partly, I object to its be- as half a dozen ordinary exhibitions, is political affair: more Marx than Dante. ing so ineffectively self-congratulatory selected by a curator. In addition there Indeed, at the heart of the central pavil- (it seems doubtful that a single vote has are pavilions organised by individual na- ion in the Giardini, there is an auditorium ever been shifted or a mind changed by tions — 89 of them, including debut ap- designed by the architect in an installation or art video). More impor- pearances by among others , which the main event is a reading of the tantly, it usually looks bad. Actually, that and . Then there are entire text of Das Kapital by a team of ac- does not apply to the Nauman/Abdesse- 44 ‘collateral events’. It all adds up to an tors directed by Isaac Julien, an artist (I med room, which is powerful. But it does array of art on an epic scale that can seem caught some of the preface to the second to most of the interminable rest of it. exhilarating as one sets off in the fresh volume). There are a few scattered high Patricia Cronin ‘Shrine for Girls’, at Chiesa di San Gallo, Venice. Photo: Mark Blower points: a group of naked men painted by straight-forward ghost story via multiple semble has visual pizzazz; on the other , dangling upside-down movies, drawings and objects). Another hand, it gives the impression of working — much as Dante placed Pope Nicholas leitmotif is trees, dead, or, in the case of a few ideas too hard: so only half marks. III, whom he encountered further on in the French pavilion by Céleste Boursier- In the traditional sculptural de- the Eighth Circle. Steve McQueen con- Mougenot, three living Scots pines com- partment, I preferred an installation by tributes a compelling short film, Ashes, plete with roots and large balls of earth, the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa in Pal- about the violent death of a young West surrounded by galleries empty except for ladio’s church of . Indian man. a loud humming noise (apparently elec- This consists in part of a huge human Over at the central pavilion, tronically generated by the rustling of the there is another memento mori in the trees themselves). It is doubtful that a single vote has ever form of a group of paintings of skulls by Piles of old clothes also turn been shifted or a mind changed by an Marlene Dumas. But the pickings are up frequently, perhaps most effectively installation or art video. slim, and the whole reveals what Marx in Patricia Cronin’s ‘Shrine for Girls’, would surely have called the internal con- heaped on the altars of the little church of face, scanned from that of a young girl, tradictions of the . All this politi- San Gallo, as a monument to the suffer- and made from stainless-steel mesh, so it cal correctness, while outside the yachts ings of young women in Africa, and is at once transparent and present, mate- of billionaire collectors are moored in a elsewhere. rial and immaterial. long line on the fondamenta. Sarah Lucas, batting for Britain, A couple of my most delightful The pleasure-quotient is a little stands out as an exponent of — relative- experiences, however, came from paint- higher among the national pavilions. ly — old-fashioned sculpture. Her work ing. Peter Doig has a fine array of new These are various — but follow certain largely depends on visual rhyme between pictures in the Palazzetto Tito on Dorso- trends. The late critic Hilton Kramer once body parts, private ones especially, and duro, including dreamlike but not quite told me that there were always tenden- objects ranging from kebabs to stuffed surreal visions of pirates, fishermen and cies at the Biennale (‘one year there were tights. Outside the pretty neoclassical lions. In the 15th-century Palazzo Falier Francis Bacons from everywhere, Bulgar- , she has place an enor- there is a splendid display of work by the ian Francis Bacons’). These days video mous tubular item, at once rampantly abstract painter , his rippling art is ubiquitous, but not necessarily on male, squalidly saggy and luridly yellow. stripes of colour evoking the waters of the its own — that’s becoming a little passé There is more vivid yellow paint inside, outside the windows: much — instead it’s often projected alongside together with a number of life-casts of the more paradisial than infernal, and some- other stuff. lower halves of women with cigarettes how very Venetian too. Among the better variations on protruding from their intimate crevices. this formula were works by Sean Lynch This last is outrageously daring, smoking This article first appeared in the print for Ireland and for the US (the being one of the few truly taboo subjects edition of The Spectator magazine, dated latter tells what turns out to be a rather in the modern world. And the whole en- 16 May 2015.