The chaos, conflict and claustrophobia of consumer culture were at the heart of this year's Venice Biennale, which ironically has rarely seen an opening week more packed with fashion and luxury brand activations.
Thousands of works of art by hundreds of artists were on display, although people often seemed most enthusiastic about the activities of more than a dozen fashion and luxury brands, including Prada, Dior, Tod's, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens, Buccellati and Golden Goose, which hosted parties, cocktail parties, dances, gala dinners, raves and even fine art exhibitions.
As Mount of Mercy, Christoph Büchel's enormous installation inside the Fondazione Prada, entirely dedicated to the final destination of many failed couples or broken artists: the pawnshop. The entire building handed over to a fictitious bankrupt pawn shop filled 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 dozens of prosthetic limbs forming a shrine.
Behind a series of mahogany pawnshop counters and metal bars could be discovered stained stationary bicycles; discarded tools; giant piles of smelly second-hand clothes; multiple decommissioned missiles and torpedoes and, of course, a white sheet covered with fake luxury handbags from Italian runway brands. One space contained hundreds of foot-thick ledgers from the Banca di Napoli with meticulously handwritten records of people's debts; another had a series of laundry rooms from the 1960s, titled Money laundering.
A dark vision of our era's obsession with owning things and a dramatic counterpoint to the whole Reason to be of the brand that financed the exhibition.
The crowd was also outside the British Pavilion, sponsored by Burberry. Inside, John Akomfrah, an artist of Ghanaian heritage, presented a powerful commentary on the bitter legacy of colonialism, mixing black and white images of Europe's brutal treatment of freedom fighters in Africa; the scandalous assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the beating of civil rights protesters led by Martin Luther King. All juxtaposed by images of solitary contemplative figures filmed in giant landscapes of the Scottish Highlands.
Burberry's party at Harry's Bar to celebrate the exhibition also became something of a culture clash. Tense restaurant managers kept turning up the lights and turning down the sound for ace DJ Benji B.
Commotions to come were evident after visiting the Danish pavilion where photographer Inuuteq Storch chronicled life in Kalaallit Nunaat, the local name for Greenland, in an exhibition titled sunken sunrise. At the same time it combines images by John Moller, taken in black and white in the colonial era of the island. Storch's photographs manage to be a raw but poetic view of the community in his hometown of Sismiut, capturing the nobility of his people even as global warming and the shackles of colonialism cast long shadows. Danish doctors continued to practice eugenics against Kalaallit women by forcibly inserting IUDs into teenagers in the 1970s. It is a crime for which the Danish government has so far refused to pay any compensation.
While one couldn't help but notice that just around the corner from the festival's favorite party bar, the Palazzina Grassi, inside the church of San Samuele was a collection of old master drawings depicting the horrors of war by Goya, Callot and De Hooghe, titled Beati PacificiThat is, blessed are the Teachers of Peace. And the most striking image of the week was 50 meters away, inside the Palazzo Malipiero, where the artist Miles Greenberg performed a “durational” performance. Dressed in micro underwear and smeared with oil, with six silver arrows piercing his torso, he stood for nine hours on a rough stone in a referential reference to San Sebastian, even while super-curator Klaus Biesenbach paraded around like a Bond villain. Surely the next 007 will have to save the planet from a mad art collector trying to destroy all the Old Masters in the world in a mad attempt to gain absolute artistic power?
The general atmosphere was not gloomy. Especially in the multidisciplinary installation within the French Pavilion. Titled, wait for it, Attila's Waterfall, your origin at the foot of the green peaks will end in the great blue abyss sea that we drown in the tides of the moon's tears., by Julien Creuzet, with the exceptional support of Chanel. A multimedia combination with fabric tapestries; mock gothic frames; baroque colors; and giant wall videos of Doges barges encountering aliens, was the most visually optimistic exhibit in Venice.
There was also a sense of optimism at the Guggenheim Museum in The Juggler's Revengepossibly the best retrospective ever conducted on Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel's master illustrator, filmmaker, jeweler, poet, photographer, and occasional prose stylist.
Elsewhere, Dior supported a series of collateral events throughout the lagoon city, such as the Cosmic Garden exhibition by Karishma Swali and Manu & Madhvi Parekh in collaboration with Ateliers Chanakya, previously presented in Mumbai during the Dior Fall 2023 show; Eva Jospin's exhibition jungle at the Fortuny Museum; Foreigners everywhere where the Claire Fontaine collective hung 60 neon lights under the arcades of the Arsenale, and Exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, in the United States Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, the nerve center of the art festival.
On top of that, Dior hosted a Naumachia Ball on Saturday night with Venetian Heritage, the dining room tables artfully dressed by taste master Cordelia de Castellane with touches of heavy damask; Murano glass and gondolas. No dinner equaled the one at Tod's, where Andrea Bocelli sang Nessun Dorma in front of giant canvases by Tintoretto. However, Buccellati's ball at the Giudecca, in Officine 800, to celebrate its exhibition The Prince of Jewelers, Rediscover the Classics, was not left behind. While Schiaparelli's dinner at the Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni on Canal Grande was perhaps the most privileged dinner, where each guest was presented with jewelry containing body parts.
Rick Owens celebrated his partner Michelle Lamy's birthday at a giant rave inside a Lido garage, where the 80-year-old singer performed and DJ Honey Dijon was in top form. Golden Goose inaugurated its new headquarters on the mainland.
Louis Vuitton offered a very different vision in a small gem of an exhibition on the top floor of its flagship in Venice, dedicated to Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Pignon-Ernest, a photographer and street artist, uses his own bright black chalk sketches on paper to create bold, life-size drawings of great poets that he then captures in the cities where they were famous: Arthur Rimbaud in Paris; Forough Farrokhzad in Tehran and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Many of these poets suffered harsh and premature deaths. In accordance with the Hobbesian vision of our times of this Biennial, where man's life is unpleasant, brutal and short.
The 60th Venice Biennale, which debuted on April 20, will remain open until November 24, 2024.
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