Bruce Nauman. Eat/Death, 1972; neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame; 7 3/8 x 25¼ x 2 1/8 in (18.7 x 64.1 x 5.3 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

The biggest shock in this Biennale is that painting looks out of sorts. It’s not obvious at first, but it becomes evident after combing through the vast offerings. In part, this is due to painting’s long and continuing history of being the poster child for the powerful, a precedent that feels at odds with the show’s filters; but this goes deeper than that. The brutal truth is simply that painting is always first about being a painting. A painting about class struggle isn’t just about class struggle, it’s a painting about class struggle—a bit like listening to someone letting you know how smart they are while explaining the subtleties of Marx’s Various Formulæ for the Rate of Surplus-Value—by design, painting is selfish that way. The content of a painting is always subordinate to the medium, otherwise a different material would have been chosen. But what this surprisingly suggests is that there isn’t much room for painting in thematically curated shows, that is, unless those shows are about painting.

The Romanian Pavilion triggered this sweeping observation. Its installation of paintings by Adrian Ghenie called Darwin’s Room (2015) is sorely out of place in this pavilion, in stark contrast from its critically received previous offering of An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale (2013), where Manuel Pelmuș and Alexandra Pirici offered performances that encapsulated the entire history of the Biennale within a single day. Ghenie’s are not bad paintings, but there is no way that they can be properly considered. They immediately feel too self-absorbed in being painterly, too alien for the larger topic at hand. Technically, parts of the installation probably tie into the Garden of Disorder filter, but the work with Ghenie’s reoccurring theme of self-portraiture as historical figures withers in the dominate shadow of painterliness.

Marlene Dumas. Skulls, 2013-15; installation view, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice. Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

After the Romanian rub, I came to see everything else at the Biennale conventionally classified as a painting in the same light. Chris Ofili was an obvious choice for this curatorial effort, and under different circumstances his work would have been electrifying. But separate the historical context of the artist from the work, and it becomes harder to decipher the content from the decorative. To say that it took almost a full second to dismiss Georg Baselitz’s paintings would be generous; and Marlene Dumas’ brilliantly fun skull paintings could have single-handedly reversed the plight of painting for the entire exhibition, but by that point, it was too late. It read more of an epitaph for the medium of painting itself than a plausible warning on global excess. It’s demanding enough to take time to consider a work of art; placing a painting into a situation where it’s forced to supersede its primary function would appear to be asking too much.

Chris Ofili. Installation view, the Corderie building, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice. Courtesy of the Artist and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

For the most part, this Biennale has been overwhelmingly well received. Nevertheless, there are some that find the critiquing filters too rich for their tastes. Evidently, the show is too Marxist–which is to say that any possibility of a Marxist critique is too Marxist. So it isn’t surprising that these guardians of capitalism have found refuge in the very thing that is at odds with the exhibition. As if it wasn’t tough enough for painting, it also has to deal with an enabler reinforcing its quandary.

BGL. Canadassimo, 2015 (detail); mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists, The National Gallery of Canada, and la Biennale di Venezia. Photo taken by the author.

To be clear, there were also plenty of non-painting works that lacked the ability to rise to the occasion, but when they failed, they did so independent of their respective medium. In the context of this exhibition, painting’s failure is a double jeopardy; its content offers a critique while simultaneously being a manifestation of the subject of that same critique. Either the content of a piece is undermined, or else the viewer is left with a lot of painterly naval gazing. (The Canadian Pavilion offered the only feasibly resolution of this point with BGL’s Canadassimo, 2015, but then it left painting deconstructed as sculptural remnants manifested from an accumulation of every Pollockian gesture ever made). Hence, viewers of this Biennale will have to decide if they can get past the paradox of critical painting’s self-defeating precondition or write it off as collateral damage of the greater critique.

All the World’s Futures is on view at the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia through November 22, 2015.

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Jean Fouquet – Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim (1452)

Although I’d like to believe that we’re on the verge of a shift in mentality there is no getting away from the fact that we live in a consumerist society where we are constantly bombarded with images trying to manipulate us into buying things. The Image is very powerful in this respect, and often more powerful than the Word because it easily triggers our brains to make associations. Marketers know this, and use images in lies to sell us goods. Artists know this too, and use images in art to make us think and reflect. This slight difference explains why I rather spend time in museums than in supermarkets.

The exhibition currently on show at MAS (Museum on the Stream) explores the history of the image over the last five centuries in Antwerp. The currently underappreciated Belgian city played a pivotal role in the creation and distribution of the Image in Western Europe, especially during its heyday in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. As a consequence, according to the exhibition catalogue, Antwerp has a unique understanding of the function of the image. MAS calls this one of the city’s biggest qualities and chose it as the concept behind the show. It’s a very fluid concept to build an exhibition around, and arguably not especially profound, but the execution of the project is interesting and definitely worth mentioning and seeing.

On a subdivided floor in the contemporary architectural structure that houses the museum, paintings by Jan van Eyck and Jean Fouquet (both considered Belgian’s master painters) are placed next to old Roman coins as well as video installations and sculptural works made in the 1960’s and 1970’s. ‘Art’, as the wall text says at the beginning of the show, ‘is a means for artists to communicate their relationship with the world.’ Images are used to visualise this relationship and to show how we see ourselves, the world we live in and our place within it.

Marlene Dumas, Blind Joy (1996) – foto Syb’l. S. – Pictures, collectie M HKA

Religion, saints and sins were crucial in our relationship with the world five-hundred years ago, but we increasingly started to look for meaning in human emotion, natural products and seemingly banal everyday objects like urinals or bread rolls. Seeing works from all these different times in the same space, not necessarily chronologically, but intermingled in order to see the similarities, made me reflect not only upon the history of art but on the history of humanity and what crazy animals we actually are. Whereas art has changed substantially, humanity at it’s core seemed to have some sort of stability. We live and experience things and we like to document these; we use the world as our source of inspiration, reflect upon it and try to relate to it. We can embrace what we see, or oppose it and fight against it, but either way we like to translate our feelings about it into something visible and tangible, captured for later generations to reflect upon and explore.

In this, MAS is right, the role of the image has remained the same. The need to capture our relationship with the world is inherently human, it’s only the way in which we do this that changes over time. That is, at least, in art. Whether it applies to supermarkets too, only the future will be able to tell.