Reality Check: Art Is Having Another Realist Moment; Is Architecture Next?

Is it better to turn away from the mess we have made of our world and imagine a better place, or should we look at what we have done so that we may find beauty within it? If we turn towards an aesthetic release we invent, can we still make it out of materials and images that bring with them their materiality? If we decide to look at what is around us, must we edit or look through rose-colored glasses? These are the questions that came to my mind after visiting two of the mainstays of the global contemporary art calendar, the Venice Biennale and New York’s Whitney Museum Biennial.

To some observers, both shows, as well as other recent movements in the art world, reek of either conservatism or a retreat. Certainly, we are seeing a resurgence of realism and the depiction of things in ways that make sense at first glance, even as the accepted (exhibited, bought, feted) makers of such recognizable forms are now much more diverse than they have been for a long time. The arguments for a return to depictions that make sense to those not tuned to what for a long time were the art world’s higher aspirations of abstraction or problematizing the image have, however, taken a new twist. Recognition in this new form of anti-colonial and anti-racist aesthetic means a breakdown of barriers and inclusion, while the very idea of a hierarchy of standards is seen as a Western barrier erected to protect the time-worn privileges of the high art world.

The Venice Biennale had stellar examples of the new realism, but it seemed to be an entryway for people into what to me looked like a new version of academic painting. Whether it was queer artists such as Louis Fratino doing a good job of presenting a new version of post-Impressionist still lives, or Omar Mismar reinterpreting the art of mosaics to make street scenes in Beirut look heroic, the work was pleasing in a familiar way and carried little of a sense to me of destabilizing our sense of who or where we are. Curator Adriano Pedrosa didn’t help his case by ghettoizing the “foreigners” to which he dedicated his exhibition (“Foreigners Everywhere”) into different areas by what kind of outsider, whether geographically or sexually, these artists were. He also mined provincial museums across the Americas and Asia to pluck painters from the last fifty years out of what to me seemed like a well-deserved obscurity, displaying them in dense groupings that further undercut the value of individual pieces.

Ironically, some of the best work is more lyrical and abstract. I was drawn to the mini-retrospective the Victoria & Albert Museum organized as a collateral event at the Biennale’s main site, the Arsenale, on the Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes, as well as to the sheets of “medicinally dyed silk” that Dana Awartani hung in the middle of the long Corderie section.

The photographer Kiluanki Kia Henda shows photographs of security gates in Luanda in such a way that their decorative patterns play off the couches, seats, and wall textures behind them.

I was even more impressed by such country pavilions as Bulgaria, which pushes realism into reality with a set of immersive environments curated by Vasil Vladimirov that brought back the days before the fall of communism, or Hong Kong, which commissioned Trevor Yeung to evoke his youth growing up in his family’s restaurant by building assemblies of fish tanks in stacks and arrays that are both evocative enough to bring that past to mind and abstract enough to stand as sculptures that are minimal interruptions of our sense of scale and material.

Even better were the installations at Palazzo Diedo, organized by the philanthropist, art collector, and billionaire Nicolas Berggruen. There Hiroshi Sugimoto’s completely abstract color fields and Urs Fischer’s Good Omen, a storm of sperm-like silver nodules offer a glorious contrast to the remains of the baroque building, while Jim Shaw and Ibrahim Mahama both riff on the tradition with site-specific paintings that provide a modern commentary on these forms.

One of the best abstract painters working today, Julie Mehretu, (over)filled the Palazzo Grassi with her endless explorations of line, field, and color, which never cease to amaze me. Most poignant of all are the films the South African artist William Kentridge is showing in a small storefront on the waterfront near the Arsenale, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot. He displays himself in conversation with himself while drawing, the animations and the conversations both exhibiting his great skills at depiction and engaging in a continual eddy of discourse that casts doubt on what it all means or is worth.

The Whitney’s show is, by necessity, much more focused and compact, though here as well the tension between realism and abstraction come through. In some cases, it resolves itself beautifully in one body of work, like the rediscovered paintings by Mavis Pusey from the 1960s and 1970s. They hark back to early 20th-century compositions developed by Russian Constructivists and artists at the Bauhaus, now built up out of building components you might have seen on New York streets. In a different way, you the waver between the unreal and the real is on display in the wall pieces by both K.R.M. Mooney and B. Ingrid Olson, both of whom combine different materials to create what are non-referential artworks whose finely honed craft anchors them in a sense of tactile recognition.

Similarly, Charlise Pearlina Weston’s tilted glass plane, which fills most of one of Renzo Piano’s bland and confusingly arranged galleries, is a piece of window or skylight assembly that might be recognizable to either architects anywhere or inhabitants of Manhattan’s glass and steel forest, but here in a position and arrangement that makes you marvel at it as a thing in and of itself, undecidable in its meaning.

Perhaps my favorite artwork is Lotus L. Kang’s installation of colored acetate sheets that turns another space into a labyrinth of color that is a Pop Art blow-up of film left over in a darkroom that takes on the character of curtains or wall hangings now not serving as the limits of, but shapers of space.

The danger of much of this work is that, both in trying to navigate between abstraction and realism and in thereby relying on its own craft for its core attraction, risks becoming a fetish that gives into the easy pleasure of the human-made artifact that has no function or meaning other than its own existence. A little like those architects who have recourse to meticulously detailed hand railings, over-scaled brick or concrete walls washed by skylights, or wood details showing off their construction, all to hide their design’s lack of purpose or idea, these works might just be pretty.

What I missed in this survey of two this summer’s signal art events (and a few other gallery and museum shows I saw along the way), in other words, was art that is truly transgressive or that irrupts out of the medium in which it exists to astonish, confuse, confound, scare, or delight us. For that, a salutary detour into some of Venice’s museums to catch up with some favorite Veronese's and Tintoretto's was an abrasive balm. Similarly, a trip to the crazy eruption that is the Guggenheim Museum reminded me what can spiral out control into art. And, all of it made me wonder how long it will be before the experiments in which the best artists I saw in either Venice or New York will find their way into the work of those architects and designers still navigating between blobs and banal minimalism, or between reactionary recall and alienating abstraction. That ultimately is the reason that, whatever their limitations, I would encourage visits to these other such displays of the best R&D into reframing reality in lyrical ways art has to offer.

he views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.

Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.

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