Future is an interesting word, isn’t it? The Latin futurus means “yet to be,” which is a neutral way of saying that what lies ahead is still unformed, neither negative nor positive, and it roots down into the oldest of linguistic origins, the Proto-Indo-European bheue, the earliest shaping of the verb to be, invoking being itself. In other words, what’s still unformed is matter—molecular, mysterious, before the strings of DNA and RNA have woven together intelligence, betrayal, negotiation, polis and politics, conflict and art. So to invoke the word future is to imagine the hidden possibilities of fundamental destruction and repair. And futures, as Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale, shapes the title of his big exhibition, “All the World’s Futures,” seems at once prescriptive, prognosticative, and deliciously open to the idea of many ways forward, a plurality of predictive hopes.
In fact, Enwezor is far narrower. His approach to the vastness of human activity fixes on capitalism—capitalism as scourge, corrupter, emptier of souls, engine of violence, with not much hope hanging on the horizon, just a lot of weapons and expropriated cash. Ambitiously, though to little actual serious effect, he goes so far as to stage a reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital over several months, ensuring that no one will actually listen to much of it at all. This is Kapital as symbolic capital only, which immediately sends a disastrously mixed message: scholarship turned into spectacle, a thousand pages of economic analysis and theory as a form of theatrical entertainment. This isn’t—it can’t be—Enwezor’s intention, as he’s shown himself over the past 20 years to be a brilliant, deeply serious and committed, sociopolitically activist curator. He’s been an organizer of beautifully precise exhibitions (“The Short Century,” “Archive Fever,” Documenta 11), with clear and eloquent nuances of complex ideas bracingly narrated. And yet, for him not to realize that the very mechanism of capitalist seduction is simply being used without a thunderous question mark, to do this without conscious awareness of the intellectual contradiction and therefore compromise, should be our first signal of alarm.
But it isn’t the first at all. Before visitors ever get to the center of the central pavilion, the “Arena” (designed by the British architect David Adjaye and programmed by the wonderful British artist Isaac Julien) where Kapital plays, the internal contradiction of Enwezor’s critique of capitalism has already begun. The crowds of art world denizens come up the gravel path among the national pavilions to Enwezor’s towering palace, and what do they see? Twenty dour shrouds of cloth, black and monumental, hanging among the imperial(ist) columns fronting the building. The work is by Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, now resident in London, central hive of the global art market. Murillo’s hugely inflated prices, which have escalated stratospherically in the past three seasons—turning the artist, complicit or otherwise, into a lavish subaltern of the 1 percent—could not be a better counterexample to Enwezor’s theme of endemic capitalist speculation and its consequences for labor and society. (Not, by the way, that capitalism is only an evil empire or the only evil empire.) How the curator could possibly imagine that Murillo, poster child of speculative market inflation, would be a clarion call to resistance and referendum on economic inequity is utterly bewildering, no matter what he and Murillo claim for the content of the work. The capitalist semiotics speak more loudly, I’m afraid. And as an acutely intelligent parser of such semiotics, Enwezor should have thought better.
After all, anyone can see what Enwezor intends. On the portico above the columns, he’s placed Glenn Ligon’s fluorescent work titled A Small Band, 2015, spelling out the words blues blood bruise.
Stepping through Murillo’s capitalist rags, visitors find the first installation inside, Fabio Mauri’s sentimental dirge for the Holocaust, with its forlorn stack of (presumably rifled and confiscated) old leather suitcases, The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, 1993. The proximity of capital and calamity are striking their clangorous, if all too obvious, chord. And we’re off to the atrocity fair: genocide, slavery, exploitation in a kaleidoscope of incidents—brutalities abound.
There is far too much art on view here and in the Arsenale (the other vast venue for Enwezor’s elegiac and ultimately nostalgic take on what futures means) for me to review gallery after gallery of works. One hundred thirty-six artists, 53 countries, 159 newly commissioned pieces—a staggering amount of art (typical of this and other oversize international “statement” platforms, think Documenta, São Paulo, Istanbul, Gwangju, Berlin) that raises a very different question than the economic one on the curator’s mind, but not unrelated: Why do we need so much art in any exhibition, as if the depth of ideas and the visual power of a handful of things wouldn’t be enough? In the digital age, when artists’ work from a lot more than 53 countries is visible at every moment of every day, a biennial is no longer about news. And so what a curator is left to do, funded ultimately by the capitalism of the art world as it spreads its metastable network into every corner of cultural tourism, is to make something impossibly sprawling to proliferate the ambling arguments of a distended theme. But Enwezor’s strategy is no less punishing, as what he’s given us instead is just one idea (the disasters of capitalism) over and over again until we’re bludgeoned into sullen outrage, resignation, or simply misery.
Among the cascades of grim, didactic art, rife with exclamatory cries of protest and pain, there are many, many works by major artists or major works by lesser-known artists that are worth attention (personal short list: Wangechi Mutu, Jeremy Deller, Marlene Dumas, Adel Abdessemed, Katharina Grosse, Ligon, Walker Evans [of course], Hans Haacke, John Akomfrah, Kerry James Marshall, Victor Man, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gary Simmons, Mika Rottenberg, Kutlug Ataman, Sonia Gomes, Chris Marker). Throughout, Enwezor follows in the footsteps of the past few curators of the Biennale by disregarding the selection of only the most contemporary work to include older art that supports his theme. For example: Christian Boltanski’s grainy three-minute color film from 1969, L’homme qui tousse, showing a man retching over and over again, whose abjectness would seem to be as much of a tutelary figure for the whole of this Biennale as the angel in Paul Klee’s famous image from 1920, Angelus Novus, which Enwezor grandly cites under the mournful aegis of Walter Benjamin as the emblem of historical catastrophe and catastrophes to come. Or let’s just call it catastropheism, which is Enwezor’s specialty here.
These figures are specters—a word much on the curator’s mind, rhyming in its foreboding sweep across the plane of history, past and future, with the debacles of capitalism. He writes in his text for the catalogue: “Already, at the meeting of the organizers of the national pavilions in Venice in early March 2015, shadows and specters were weaving their saturnine games.” But then this sounded familiar, and turning to Enwezor’s essay in his Documenta 11 catalogue from 2002, his introductory sentence reads: “Almost fifty years after its founding, Documenta finds itself confronted once again with the specters of yet another turbulent time of unceasing cultural, social, and political frictions....” This should come as no surprise, given the curator’s acclamation of Marx, first in that the word appears in the famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto, “A specter is haunting Europe— the specter of Communism,” and second, because Enwezor is haunted by his single purpose. What he did elsewhere, including that brilliant Documenta, shaping a broad diagnostic forensics of social troubles, he has now reduced almost entirely to the one note of the ills of capital (and of which, by the way, no particularly coherent post-Marxist reading is given. On that score, I suggest the 2010 anthology, bristling with propositions, The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, and its 2013 follow-up).
Of course, it’s true that “regarding the pain of others,” in Susan Sontag’s phrase, means to draw us in and agitate against the pain of all of us together. But Enwezor is preaching to the converted and the compromised. For the audience of the Biennale is composed largely of left- leaning sympathizers and the very, very rich—those who need no lessons about exploitative capitalism and those who perform it. And so in this exhibition of what is already an endeavor compromised by the very market that is emblematic of the forces implicated in its theme, the curator has failed to look beneath the rhetoric of the spectacle of capitalism and focus more forcefully and clearly (and, more radically, with less art to deaden our sense of it) on what’s really at the base of this: the violence society commits against itself; what humans do and always have done to one another, only now with more technological efficiency and global awareness. And this is to say that to discuss violence within the fundamentally aggressive nature of human animals is as if we were talking about air and light and water—fixtures of the very weather of human nature. After all, I heard Enwezor out in front of the central pavilion say that his show was “a series of essays on the state of things bearing witness to our time.” So to address violence as such has to be far more specific in its grasp of its subject, and that is to say that if we’re going to talk about the violence of capitalism as a mechanism and to protest against it, then the curator in his prognosticative mode should get down to business and offer a trajectory, an offering of ways to address the mechanisms of capitalism’s violence; to point, for example, to the theories of capitalism’s acceleration toward its own implosive collapse, which Marx himself spoke of in the vast collection of thoughts preliminary to Das Kapital that’s titled Grundrisse—akin to the English words outline, layout, blueprint.
To do this is entirely in keeping with other forms of violence that engulf us today, as we’re seeing now in the rise of ISIS, for example, and the ruin of Syria, which are nothing less than the implosive force of a cancerous society within and against itself. But if I’m calling for a more pointed response from Enwezor, I’m also curious about his curatorial project in general as an essay on the current and future condition of humanity. To address social cataclysm with such singular focus, and particularly for a vision of futures, ultimately seems to look backward through the rearview mirror of disaster rather than forward, a peculiar form of dystopian nostalgia. Which is to say that he never actually suggests anything at all about the unformed formation of the world ahead nor does he overtly address the nature of human nature in its very inclination to find and express various forms of escape from itself. That’s the basis of the ancient human impulse expressed in the Greek notion of the pharmakon, of the unleashing of the imagination through ritual and alternative means of perception toward a vision of alternative vocabularies of life unchained from our violence. And so Enwezor’s subject, which is finally about predatory economics as contiguous with economies of violence, should have had the breadth of vision with such a title as “All the World’s Futures” to delve into the broadest sense of the pharmakon, of the idea of the ways that art moves us beyond sheer mountains of misery, of the way artists actually do offer renovating visions for our future(s), and he should not have left himself (and us) stranded in the mechanical microcosm of capitalist repetition alone.
I keep thinking about one particular work in the show, speaking of repetition. It’s Adrian Piper’s Everything #21, 2010–13: four blackboards with a single phrase written out in longhand 100 times, like a bad student being punished, a student whose name could be Cassandra. (Piper, incidentally, won the Golden Lion prize for the Biennale’s best artist.) She writes: “Everything will be taken away.” That is Enwezor’s mantra. Everything taken away through economic hardship? Through political repression? Through old age? No doubt, yes to all. That’s to say, everything except the pain, which stings at first and then, through sheer, unrelieved accumulation, leaves us at sea in this show of troubled variations that become too much the same. With the grand stage of the Biennale as his bully pulpit, Enwezor is part of an elevated caste of curators, a word that comes from the Latin curatus, to cure or heal. But to use his eloquence to proffer nothing but dark witness instead of offering through art pathways forward into possible futures is not only not a cure, it’s a miscalculation in the name of activism that can’t possibly live up to that task of curatus whose mantle he evidently claims. To simply be Cassandra at the wall of catastrophe is not enough. I think of what Goethe was said to have cried out on his deathbed: “More light!” Dear Okwui Enwezor, show us the way.
A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
