FROM THE ARCHIVE: VENICE BIENNALE REPORT 2015

we seamlessly integrate with these benign information technologies, but the actual content isn’t always to be trusted. as we can assure you, we are not in the lagoon at lunch time.
some advice, visitors: BUY A MAP ON SOME PAPER. even if that notion flies in the face of your post-Internet hipster sensibilities, you’re not a true proletariat if you have unlimited roaming data. and you don’t want to be using piles of dogshit and grim restaurant signs as mental waypoints when google maps fails you.

feels good to be back, like a greasy salmon going upstream to spawn, in the biennale. a fitting place to locate the nexus of grand artistic reveal — in a city that itself is a relic and whose economy is very situated around selling tourists loads of shit. but let’s not get consumed by hate, we’ve just come across an Amalia Pica work!

a version of hyper-accelerated GCSE art therapy is an exhibition that purports to be about sustainability and the attitudes/aesthetics thereof, but is basically a series of rooms filled with daft electrically powered useless things. you might say that is part of the comment about sustainable lifestyle ideals, which cleverly insulates the work from having any errors. you might also be a fucking dumb motherfucker.

There is an interactive digital work that creates a printable 3D visual from a recording of your voice, so this guy has been shouting “I LOVE MY LIFE!” at the thing for 30 seconds. clearly this is the most exertion he’s had in a while, besides the 10 seconds or so of sex he can manage (though we aren’t one to judge, the most exercise we have is coughing in the morning). either that or his shirt is trying to escape from his body, so revolted at being worn by such a prick.

Sometimes you walk into a room and think “what the fuck is this shit? what is it for?” and then when a dorky guy poses for a mega-art-selfie, you realise that a lot of this bollocks decorative art has only 1 purpose and that is to behave as backdrop for Facebook profile picture or Instagram selfies. Which makes you think of a really good thesis: art activated by social media integration where agency collides with networked self beyond overbearing tactile situation. or another thesis: complete fucking arse.

uh-oh it’s hito! here is a work with some insane concepts and political undertone(s) which is self-aware and pointed, couched in loads of cultural symbols that nerds have fun recognising. it feels impossible to actually say anything bad about it — dunno if that is bias or some kind of critical blindsight. regardless it is a welcome change after looking at some fucking terrible bodily wood carvings lying on a marble floor.

This young lady has been doing this selfie for about 5 minutes. that is some dedication, the ‘biennalepublic’ wifi is just a sick joke that never connected and sucked your battery dry like a hungry river mosquito, while you enter the dumb sublime of gazing at buffering symbols and loading bars.gotta keep your social media presence strong in the biennale. Don’t let anyone forget you are having fun!

love too be inside an immersive Habitat spring collection catalogue, but drunk. Oh wait,

in many ways a biennale is like stepping back in time to a teenage foundation degree show, where the ideology of “ repetition-object-absurd = art ” was a handy fallback until adulthood. I suppose in art, you never have to grow up.

white people in expensive clothes drinking around a sci-fi wunderkammer. u know the biennale has started now! yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaa boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

a hot trend this year, aside from black suit trousers worn with black Nike lunarglides, is this architectural model presentation and harmonic wall images — might be related directly or obtusely. we’ve seen about 5 of these quasi-installations so far, not really sure how to feel about them because we like models and stuff that looks slick and utilitarian but it is also BOOOOOOORRRRRRING

sure everyone’s heard of the mini golf pavilion and it would be grinchy af to criticise it because it’s a laugh with some pretty weird courses, such as john akomfrah’s which uses a very mournful cultural symbol in an obviously flippant set up. there are equally valid forking paths of interpretation, but something originally fun left us uneasy. also, zabludowicz is a platinum sponsor! ha ha!

bless the fashion crowd

the incongruity of things is markable, such as the Spanish pavillion exhibition of Dali footage alongside this mouthbreathing lizardfucker who obviously just discovered tumblr/thejogging or has had michael manning tweets read to him in his sleep by alexa. so over it.

it’s almost an obligation at this point to be the de-facto hypocritical grumpy centrist and lament the constant use of cameras, the visitors spending more time taking their photos than actually looking at the art. Maybe it’s just a venice thing, but not many folks here have any fucking spatial awareness unless you are a mate, a glass of free wine/canapé or an instagrammable scene. if you’re not that you might as well be an invisible videogame wall.

You know what the world needs, even more than economic stability from the widening chasm between rich and poor generated by neoliberal market capitalism? Another biennale! Sweden had a party to announce theirs in a swanky hotel, lit up ostentatiously like the city is just a dead relic for the playtime of global art & privilege business. The toilet queues immense, the canapés rich and cheesy, the obligatory “political performances” cringeworthy like a 40yr old yung lean singing at your wedding.

We haven’t yet read through the obligatory frieze/artreview splurges on the main venice show, but it’s being praised for having some kind of social political content, right? in the giardini we saw a lot of info-analytical stuff that would work better as a seminar rather than detached crypto artwork for snoresville intellectuals to peer at inquisitively (just for show). the arsenale has the above gem, which in context is reduced to a token gesture of awareness. Being aware of it does fuck all though, people just feel a bit bad about going on to the zab yacht, but then they just think oh well, it’s survival. I’ll drink her booze and take her money, I’m so poor and precarious. What’s even lamer is that UAE worker abuse is so detached from us in the grey-skied west, we’ll never really care. It’s too othered. Our hotel waiter seemed to be doing 16 hour non-stop shifts, but I guess he wasn’t building an art museum so we can’t take the judicious mantle because it’s obviously totally beyond our remit of giving a fuck about things beyond object d’arts.

on that note, we throw our manufactured solidarity to the opressed into the waves! The canapés were 80% cheese based. There was some art that people will talk about for months (oh I loved the ISIS pavilion!) and there was some tote bags that people will put inside an even larger tote bag until it becomes a bartering economy thanks to nuclear war and climate change destroying civilisation.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: VENICE BIENNALE REPORT 2015

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