Mawkish monuments and the beach from hell: our verdict on the Venice Biennale
It has dancing monsters, a smoking pigeon and a ship full of migrants that sank. But this year’s haunting, standout show is Lithuania’s beach full of doomed sunbathers
A black and white cow travels in endless circles on a circular track, going nowhere on a carpet of artificial grass. Chinese artist Nabuqi’s bovine installation is far from the most stupid and unnecessary thing you’ll find in this year’s Venice Biennale, which sprawls across the city, from the Giardini to the Arsenale, from the national pavilions to the dockyard warehouses, from the museums and churches to the palaces on the canals.
Dumb art for dumb times, then. Belgium’s pavilion is filled with animatronic figures, folkloric weavers, a baker rolling pastry, a tinkling pianist, a beggar quivering with the cold and other assorted personages going through their dismal mechanical motions. Some are locked behind bars, as though the pavilion, and perhaps the country itself, were a 19th-century asylum. Its German counterpart looks half-finished, a ruin in the making, one huge wall a concrete dam that appears about to break. Echoing Hans Haacke’s memorable 1993 intervention in the pavilion – when he tore up the floor with a jackhammer, referencing both German history and the splintered ice floes in a Caspar David Friedrich painting – the whole thing tells us that we are doomed to repeat ourselves.