83Or is this more a ‘now’ we need to move
past? Mitchell notes the delectable industry term
‘frankenpine’ for the cell towers he has selected. His
piece is itself a monstrous hybrid. Two models for
the authorisation and distribution of knowledge,
the library—on the way out—and the internet—its
replacement—are stitched together, presenting the
worst features of both. We can ‘interact’, choosing
which list we hear read through our own device, but
like the piles of spilled paper, the months’ worth of
robotically calm enunciation are as much a wasteland
as they are a mirror for our existing thoughts and
feelings. If a ‘listicle’ is a digestible journalistic
incentive to click through, in this case we are
sightseeing a listberg. The opposite of being informed
is being drowned by information.
Another real ship that ran into trouble in Venice
this year was presented as an artwork. Swiss-Icelandic
artist Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra (2018–19),
exhibited at the water ’s edge in the Arsenale, is the
recovered hull of a fishing boat in which hundreds of
migrants drowned in 2015 attempting to reach Europe
from Libya. The issue was neither that it told us what
to think or how to feel but, in stepping back from so
doing, asked its audience to take responsibility for
their responses to the physical fact of an object so
impossibly charged. A patiently argued critique by
Alexandra Stock, for example, pinpoints the self-
serving blind spot of privilege involved with such a
purportedly objective provocation.^2(^) While a cruise ship careening smoothly and awfully
along its collision course is clearly a ready-made
metaphor for something, activating suggestive
connections between already existing things, getting
facts to work figuratively, can hand over too much
as well as too little to an audience. This is the risk
Post Hoc, also, ultimately runs. Despite Mitchell’s
disavowal, there does seem to be a lesson put forward
by the fogging of the notion of loss in the work’s lists:
that we should reflect longer, inspect our instincts,
perhaps be suspicious of nostalgia in the face of
change. Unfortunately, the ambivalence in this echoes
nothing more than the expensively funded campaigns
of disinformation that, for example, have tried to
keep afloat the idea that there is ‘no consensus’ on
anthropogenic climate change. The artist in not taking
sides does just that.
- Mitchell is quoted to this effect, for example, by both Megan
Dunn (‘Don’t look now’, Art News New Zealand, Winter 2019,
https://www.artnews.co.nz/profile-winter-2019/) and Sarah
Messerschmidt (‘Incalculable Losses: An Interview with Dane
Mitchell Ahead of the Venice Biennale’, Art Link Berlin, 17 April
2019, http://www.berlinartlink.com/2019/04/17/incalculable-
losses-an-interview-with-dane-mitchell/). - Alexandra Stock, ‘The privileged, violent stunt that is the Venice
Biennale boat project’, Mada, 29 May 2019, https://madamasr.com/
en/2019/05/29/feature/culture/the-privileged-violent-stunt-that-
is-the-venice-biennale-boat-project.
(opposite above) Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc, at the New Zealand
Pavilion, 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
(opposite below) Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc, offsite at the Parco
Rimembranze, Sant’Elena, New Zealand at Venice, 58th
International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
(below) CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL Barca Nostra 2018–19
Shipwreck 18 April 2015
58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, May You
Live In Interesting Times
(Photograph: Andrea Avezzù)