Venice and Kassel

Felix Salmon submits:

The Venice Bienale is part of the International Art World in the way that Documenta is not. Just consider the way that the curated section is bifurcated: younger, edgier artists tend to find themselves in the Arsenale, while more established art stars are exhibited in the Italian pavilion in the Giardini. The very distinction would make little sense at Documenta, certainly this year, where very few of the artists come with much in the way of name recognition. That said, however, it's interesting to compare the two.

Documenta is no stranger to large-scale artworks by international stars, of course: think Joseph Beuys planting 7,000 oak trees in 1982; or Jeff Koons's Puppy, in 1992; or or Jonathan Borofsky's Man Walking to the Sky, originally exhibited for 100 days the same year, but who's still making his way skyward to this day.

This year, however, Documenta has avoided art stars to an almost laughable degree: the curators, Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, have trawled the world, seemingly in search of anything which sits in the intersection of the didactic and the marginalized.

Meanwhile, Robert Storr's installations in Venice are more mainstream and also more interesting, with the Arsenale, normally lumbering and unfocused, providing a real vision and even a narrative as the viewer walks through it from beginning to end. In the Giardini, the art stars are very well represented, with Germany's two master painters Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter both installing tour-de-force rooms full of new paintings.

There's very little overlap between the two shows, but where there is it's generally strong. Nedko Solakov is excellent in both locations, and the sprightly 87-year-old Argentine León Ferrari is also fresh, funny and invigorating, although he's badly hung in Kassel. (In general, the way that the art is presented in Documenta is atrocious this year, with overbearing spotlights picking out artworks in darkened rooms, and the temporary Aue Pavillon starting to fall apart almost before it opened. Documenta also marks the first and hopefully last time I'll ever seen an Agnes Martin painting look really bad – that takes some doing.)

In terms of theme, both shows exhibit a decided move into the documentary, with an emphasis on bringing attention to war-torn parts of the world. But where Documenta has a tendency to hector, Storr has a lighter touch, or at least an eye for beauty. Gabriele Basilico's large photographs of Beirut in 1991 pack a dual punch, first from their subject matter, but then, equally strongly, from their formal composition. Bernd and Hilla Becher would certainly approve of the featureless gray skies.

Both shows also seem to be part of a slow move away from video art, which no longer dominates the surveys as it did a few years ago. That said, my favorite piece in the Arsenale was Sophie Whettnall's "Shadow Boxing", a very powerful work wherein she stands, stock-still, as a shaven-headed boxer swings barrages of lethal punches millimeters from her face and body. And one of the best pieces in the Giardini was Shaun Gladwell's "Storm Sequence", a slow-motion skateboarder (the artist himself) performing on a wind- and water-swept Bondi Beach, which my wife Michelle described as "like a Richard Serra" in its emotional impact. Interestingly, both Whettnall and Gladwell are young, born in 1973 and 1972 respectively: maybe, finally, a new generation of video artists has learned how to create excellent works without being boring about it.

Other standouts at the Arsenale are Yukio Fujimoto, playing with sound (a theme echoed by Saadane Afif at Documenta), and Adel Abdessemed's "Wall Drawing", made of nine circles of razor wire, which echoes the great Iran do Espirito Santo's "Untitled (Fence)" in the Giardini.

Exciting art in Kassel is harder to find, although I did like works by Kerry James Marshall, Andrei Monastyrski, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Lin Yilin. I suspect, though, that for art-world success they would all have been better off being exhibited in Venice.