The 58th Venice Biennale "May You Live in Interesting Times"
Running: May 11 - November 24. 2019
Part One
By Lee Klein
Photo Credit: LaBiennale.org (Biennale Arte 2019 | 58th Exhibition)
Oscar Wilde, never did declare, that he had nothing to declare, but, his genius which is not to say he had nothing to declare...
It is fake news; alternative facts all over again, given a different name in a different context from satire or a byline owner attempting to proprietize a zinger from another word slinger. Therein when Ralph Rugoff the curator of the 58th Venice Biennale selected for his phrase of departure "may you live in interesting times", an ancient Chinese proverb which it turns was not an ancient Sino saying at all, he went straight into alternative practices, mirroring alternative facts, with one set of work by each main exhibition Biennale artist in each of the two main pavilions respectively; the Arsenale, and the Giardini.
This all sounded superb to this future viewer of the exhibition while watching the press conference on youtube while on an exercise bike at the New York Sports Club elite gym on East 23rd street after going on a thrift shop safari run and acquiring super size blue linen Ralph Lauren polo pants to be worn in Venezia. Once onsite it just seemed like a neat way to repackage curation and offer an avenue to see a more in depth selection of each artist's works . .i.e. less artists more pieces per practitioner then in the exhibitions which immediately preceded this one....
Having been (being) an obsessive-compulsive wikipedian it goes that a few of the artists in the survey 's English online encyclopedia pages are ones which I created. This gave this person onus to stay and watch Alex Da Corte's 57 varieties (title and numerical count taken from Heinz by an artist obsessed with Ketchup who did time in the Ketchup city of Pittsburgh and who doesn't love someone who loves ketchup look at me I am playing ketchup all the time) series of video vignettes. Rugoff has described this piece as monumental (think perhaps in a manner ala Christian Marclay's "Clock" which turned back time at the 2011 Biennale or "66 Scenes from America" by Jorgen Leth which is very close to Da Corte's artistic heart as for it is from whence Warhol's Burger King Super Bowl ad came and you guessed it in which he is playing ketchup). This work includes, among other episides, Elphaba the wicked witch of the West joining a silent Oscar the grouch on screen to croon blue over you and a reclining daisy self plucking ...
But a Mexican artist brought a wall; Teresa Margolies in the Giardini pavilion implanted a found object taken from a school in the city of Juarez where four young women died in drug related gun violence. This can be read as a reminder (as is the character based on Joseph Beuys in the stellar German film "Never Look Away" talking of the Berlin Wall and how it is [was] almost art) that it is a symbol of today which we cannot avoid. In the meantime the artist Laure Provost within her work "The Deep Blue Sea Surrounding You" announced in her movie in the super popular French pavilion "welcome immigrants" while looking down and talking to tidal fish.