Since 1895, art professionals, and those who want to be considered as such, travel to the island city of Venice to attend the Venice Biennale. The city itself is maybe the only one not built near water but on top of it. Built on a wooden support system that reaches the bottom of the sea, Venice hides a petrified forest underneath its shining glamour. As the sea levels move higher every year, the future of the Venice Biennale sinks further into uncertainty. While nobody might know when the forgotten sea-gods will finally swallow the city, it is very clear that every visitor to the city somehow contributes to this ongoing process.
Meanwhile, parallel to this real-world reality, the Venice Biennale as the symbol of the city’s commitment to contemporary art itself seems to be slowly decreasing in quality with every edition, this time around with a little help from a salvaged sunken ship which was ready-made into art. Even though this edition’s Artistic Director Ralph Rugoff genuinely attempted to elevate the Biennale’s quality by stepping away from didactic political art, his strategy was largely unsuccessful because of the way the shock generated by the work of Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel overshadowed most discussions about his otherwise decent exhibition. The atrocious artwork at the center of controversy consists of the rusty wreckage of a ship which sunk on the night of 18 April 2015 while carrying migrants across the Mediterranean sea to Europe killing many. While some of its passengers were fleeing war, for others, the escape was the result of climate catastrophe which has been a driving force behind famine and poverty in the south. Since the vessel was only built to hold a crew of 15, that’s 53 times lower than the number of people it was carrying. Its collision with a freighter from Portugal brought the ship and its inhabitants down, sinking after only sailing for 96 kilometers from the Lybian coast. None of the nearly 800 refugees ever made it to their destination, all drowning in the icy cold waters of the Mediterranean Sea with their hopes and lives extinguishing in a split second.
This giant sculpture was installed not inside one of the halls of the Biennale but outside, facing the canal on one side and, on the other, one of the several pop-up restaurants where art professionals gathered to drink and perhaps discuss the exhibition. Many people took selfies with the boat as a backdrop. Little did they know that the ship with its blue color and rusted incisions was once a ship of false hope, a moving coffin for many people. Surely, it was a tragic and dramatic scene akin to the painting “Le Radeau de la Méduse” by Théodore Géricault that depicts the aftermath of the wrecking of the French naval frigate in 1816. In the painting, we see a barely seaworthy raft that holds the remaining survivors, some of them on the brink of death. Such a painting is painful to perceive as we can identify with the humans on the vessel. However, it would be hard for anybody to stand in front of such a direct depiction and not realize its significance and symbolism. With Büchel’s piece there is the absence of actual victims as well as of proper contextualizing information for visitors, which is all that could raise awareness.
A curator needs to understand just how artworks might be understood, how they will be repurposed, and how their placement will heighten certain discourses while putting others in the shadows. It is unethical to diminish important works in an exhibition by including something that should have never been declared an artwork. Stockhausen’s idea that the atrocity of 9/11 constitutes an artwork was wrong. Historical fragments of catastrophes do not constitute art, especially because an artwork needs somebody who made it an artwork. This is where the idea of the “ready-made” leads us if we shun representational ethics – Büchel’s “artwork” holds the histories of more than 800 dead people who can no longer fight the cooption of their murder weapon and their mass grave. This act of display transcends and mutilates history of the object; if the visitors had been clearly made aware of this history, far fewer would have used it as a quirky backdrop for their next hundred Instagram “likes.”
Claiming that the ship is only a singular work and that we can find a plethora of crucial and groundbreaking work by other artists like Hito Steyerl, Slavs and Tatars, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan cannot be an antidote for the blatant misuse of exhibition-making for pure shock value; while Büchel’s work is void of any direction, other works create poiesis out of their respective topics. When themes and topics are used purely for generating shock, they create just a momentary catharsis. Meanwhile, real poiesis and actual critical thinking would require art to punch us so hard in the belly that we are not able to finish our expensive coffee inside the premise of the Biennale exhibition. This certainly was not the case with this installation.
Without a bold curatorial framing, the spectators of such a sensitive monument would, unfortunately, end up being used for taking selfies and other self-positioning purposes. Complex and difficult art must come with pedagogy. It needs a direction for ensuring that its misunderstanding does not disrespect the very issue it tries to address, so nobody can say afterward that “we did not know.”
The pedagogical models for dealing with difficult artworks that were conceived by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack for their Documenta exhibition are now more than ten years old. Thus, it is shocking to see how so few curators have learned to use them to enhance their exhibitions. Pedagogy can be just one necessary safeguard against the display of artworks that are better off remaining in the void of ideas from which they are derived. We can only hope that this edition of Venice Biennale and the controversy surrounding the work of Büchel could create the opportunity for a shift in pedagogical framing so that complex and difficult artworks are better integrated into their related discourses that function as their pedestal.