More Marx than Dante

At the start of Canto XXI of the ‘Inferno’, Dante and Virgil look down on the pit of Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Hell, in which sinners guilty of simony, hypocrisy and graft are punished. The last of those spend eternity immersed in a river of bubbling pitch. This sinister black liquid, the poet noted, looks much like the tar that Venetians boil up in their arsenal to smear over the hulls of their ships. Those lines came to mind more than once as I walked around the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, not least because a large section is installed in the ancient buildings of that very Arsenale.

The Biennale is always the same — the crowds! the people! — yet always different. One vast section, as large as half a dozen ordinary exhibitions, is selected by a curator. In addition there are pavilions organised by individual nations — 89 of them, including debut appearances by among others Mongolia, Mauritius and Grenada. Then there are 44 ‘collateral events’. It all adds up to an array of art on an epic scale that can seem exhilarating as one sets off in the fresh light of morning in the lagoon, and almost punitive towards the end of a hot afternoon.

There was a moment when, immersed in inky darkness in the bowels of the German pavilion, I experienced slightly Dante-esque panic. I was trying to leave what was described ominously as a 60-minute video loop, when for a moment it seemed that beyond the exit, there was only deeper blackness and a padded wall. Trapped for ever in a contemporary art installation! Then, a little sheepishly, I found the door.

The official Biennale exhibition, entitled All the World’s Futures and selected by this year’s curator — Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian — is a determinedly political affair: more Marx than Dante.