The art world would be worse without Venice

My friend Cecília calls it the art world’s “largest intended coincidence”, and quite frankly I’m inclined to believe her: by coincidence, we’re on the same flight to Venice. Just as, by coincidence, we meet a couple of other journalists we know at the departure gates. Then in the queue to board I spot, by coincidence, yet another familiar face, only this time a horror dawns on me. I know this man because I’ve seen him naked! (He’s a model at my local life drawing class.)

Spread across two sites hosting 63 national pavilions plus other satellite events, the Venice Biennale enters its 60th anniversary as still one of the biggest art exhibitions of the year. Last week, it opened to journalists for three days before the general public, yet there’s a reason it doesn’t close again until November. The sheer array of things to see is immense, and fitting it all in within three days can feel overwhelming. As you walk about the Giardini or the Arsenale, foldable tables laden with champagne spring up like daisies; such-and-such pavilion is having their opening, or so-and-so artist is putting on an impromptu talk. There is video art, video installations—so many videos!—then paintings, immersive experiences, sonic experiences, weird sculptures. Free coffee, free tote bags (far too many totes). And queues. Queues for everything.

This was my first time at the Biennale, and very quickly I learned that absorbing the art in any meaningful way is only possible once you’ve figured out how to approach the event itself, which is a bit like an errant garden hose somebody has dropped with the tap still running. Here we are, us journalists—alas!—scrambling over one another just to wrestle it back under control, all while trying not to get very, very wet.

I thought I’d come prepared, well-stocked with PR invitations and an outline of things I simply had to see and do, but even that did not quieten the insistent internal voice saying that I was missing out on something, somewhere, that was unmissable; I was keeping dry, all right, yet that wasn’t enough. This feeling may not have been entirely in my head. After all, this is the art world we’re talking about, where there’s always a secondary market fuelled by an even more lucrative currency than official invites and scheduled programming: rumour.

By the end of the first day, word had got around: Egypt, Germany and Italy are really good. There was no time to lose. The next morning, people were sprinting towards the German pavilion, literally bounding, with the effect being that other people, scared of what delights they were missing, also began sprinting. Within five minutes of the Giardini opening, the queue for Germany was two hours long. The converse also applied: Poland, which had done so well with its queue the day before, had suddenly been reduced to naught. Likewise, France. (By this metric Australia, which for the first time won the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion, was something of an outlier; its queue was steady but never out of control.)

I have to admit, not all the rumours were without foundation. Egypt, this year represented by Wael Shawky, was one of the most captivating works I’ve seen in a long time. Titled Drama 1882, it is a 45-minute video of a staged musical about the country’s Urabi Revolution against British colonial power. Aesthetically stunning, with a Dada-inspired set and costume design, its recasting of an overlooked period of history is smart enough not to wield its message too heavily—it was the first time I’ve ever watched a video installation where people applauded at the end. If anything captured the spirit of this year’s Biennale, it was this.

The overarching theme this year is “Foreigners Everywhere”, with the work of marginalised, minority or indigenous artists being the main focus. Many of the works broker the hard subjects of colonialism, slavery and racism with varying degrees of scale and ambition. The Danish pavilion, renamed this year to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), is a simple yet elegant collection of photography by Inuuteq Storch, depicting the lives of Greenlanders in ordinary, domestic settings—an attempt to normalise a group too often exoticised by western incomers. It’s deceptively pared-back, but its message is powerful.

On the other end of the spectrum is the British pavilion by John Akomfrah, offering perhaps his most ambitious and demanding work to date: a five-segment video installation capturing everything from Windrush to the Mau Mau Uprising and the impact of pesticides on climate change. (In my chat with Akomfrah, he estimated the work is about 31 hours of film footage in total—but more on this soon.)

Then you have the occasional pavilion that apparently didn’t get the memo, like Japan, where you’ll find weird kinetic sculptures made out of mouldy fruit.

Besides the work, most people I met in Venice regarded the national framing with the same sort of arch knowingness: it’s all a bit silly in this day and age, is it not? And yet, time and again, we were also quick to resort to old and tired national stereotypes in an attempt to make manageable what was going on. This was most acute when discussion turned to the endless afterparties. I heard that the Switzerland party is extremely fancy, with canapés, champagne and chandeliers, because (as we all know) the Swiss have loads of money. The joint party held by Ireland and Iceland was a notorious drunken riot, or so I was told, and thus the most fun. Nobody knew anybody who had an invitation to these parties, of course, which lent their falsified lore even greater meaning.

In the end, I can only comment on the British party, which—I’m sorry to say—lived up to its reputation a little too much, which is for being stuffy and tight-lipped as hell. For two hours I sat and watched from the side-lines as a DJ stranded in an empty courtyard tried his very best to entice the cliques from their corners. A diplomat from the British Embassy in Rome, who I am quite certain was speaking to me purely out of some professional obligation, told me she was struck by how everybody seemed to know each other already. No kidding.

Yet after three days of looking at “national” art in “national” pavilions, one thing did occur to me that had nothing to do with nationalism: here I was, viewing contemporary art made by living artists, and not once had I thought about how it all relates to the market. Commercial advertising and sponsorship are heavily regulated in Venice, and although most of the works will be for sale, this is not the main point of the exercise. It struck me how rare an experience this has become for modern gallerygoers.

The legendary art critic Robert Hughes suggested he was perhaps the last generation—he was born in 1938 and died in 2016—who could look at a work of art without immediately and habitually thinking about how much it cost. Not a museum for the dead and gone, but neither an out-and-out supermarket for the super-rich, Venice sits in that weird space between both worlds: contemporary without being flagrantly commercial; established but without being hoary. I can’t help but think that an art world without it—antiquated contradictions and all—would be somewhat diminished.

Before heading back to London, I had lunch with Cecília who—by coincidence—was also on the same return flight. By some miracle she had managed to snake her way into the coveted Iceland-Ireland party. Yes, she told me, the rumours were all completely true. The party was a drunken riot and, yes, Björk was DJing. Damn it all!