The greatest illusion of all

The 1963 film version of Jean Genet's play The Balcony shifted the action from a brothel to a film studio. Genet seems to have approved the change, so might have been equally content to see the play's themes of fantasy, power and illusion transposed to a museum.

That's the premise of the current Montreal Biennale, which curator Philippe Pirotte says is "loosely related" to Genet's play. In The Balcony, three men play out their erotic fantasies – as priest, judge and general – not just in the brothel, but in a real revolutionary situation. They decide to become the figures they imitate, implying that all power is founded in mimicry and illusion.

Art-making conventionally relies on illusion, though many of the works on view at the Biennale (subtitled The Grand Balcony) point to a sleight of hand operating beyond themselves. The system of social and political trompe-l'oeil in which we live is more demanding of notice, they suggest, than any trick of visual perspective.

In that sense, the work most directly allied with Genet's themes may be Michael Blum's video installation The PolEc Trilogy, which like most Biennale offerings is lodged at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Blum's subject is the shift in the world financial system provoked by the mortgage-backed securities crash of 2008, analyzed in a voice-over while we watch a man drag a suitcase through miles and miles of Shanghai. The aftermath of the collapse, according to Blum, was a fictionalization of finance, which somehow still produces real buildings like the ones we see in the video.

There's something cartoonish about Blum's narrative and form of representation; his ever-present solitary nomad is like Where's Waldo? with all other figures drifting out of the picture.

The influence of cartooning hangs over several works in this exhibition, including Nicole Eisenman's large painting of a man and woman having an encounter via Skype; Liao Guohe's slapdash send-up of a Chinese communist progress poster; Brian Jungen and Geoffrey Farmer's parodic drawings about snowboarding subculture; and Kerry James Marshall's short comic strips drawn onto a series of foot-high light boxes. Each of these strikingly executed strips, which are on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, shows an episode from Black Metropolis, an imaginary city Marshall has been elaborating since 1999.

Cartoons simplify the visual world, and can provide a clownish veneer to painful situations. Hassan Khan's video The Slapper and the Cap of Invisibility shows two rubber-faced actors squabbling in Arabic over a couple of items that may or may not have magical powers. Their dialogue is amiable and threatening by turns, like many political discussions, and the possibility of violence is seldom far away.

Other works offer perfect worlds or fantastic mythologies whose codes are veiled or opaque.

Luc Tuymans's real-life abstract paintings of a vacant blue gallery illustrate an empty ideal world, while Haegue Yang's monumental straw doodads resemble totems whose purpose has been forgotten. David Gheron Tretiakoff's ferociously beautiful burn drawings – made with lit cigarettes and scrolls of tissue paper – look like images of demigods appearing out of clouds, but they're actually portraits of Arab protesters at the moment of their self-immolation.

Pattern and ornament dominate a number of works, including Valérie Blass's void-tracing disco pants and other 3-D fibre installations; the pattern-filled figure imagery of Shannon Bool and Njideka Akunyili Crosby; and Zac Langdon-Pole's presentation of a printed text through photos of ornamented letters. Langdon-Pole forces you to puzzle through his beautifully decorative fonts, and in that sense is fully in sync with Pirotte's arch musings on the need for a tough kind of hedonism, "far from the easy rewards of consumption."

There's certainly no pleasure to be had from the arid descriptions of works presented by the curators in the galleries. "To explore notions of visibility through forms characterized by a potential for future transformation" sounds a lot less fun than Janice Kerbel's wall-covering concrete poetry opus, to which it supposedly refers.

The most hedonistic item in the Biennale may be Luzie Meyer's unpolished video response to The Balcony, in which she and three men perform scenes from Genet's play, freely interpolating their own reflections on the material and each other. Meyer's analytic voice-over has the repetitive simplicity of a children's book, implying that it's just a game, in the violent, deceptive nursery/brothel in which we all live.

Biennale executive and artistic director Sylvie Fortin says her event "combines risk-taking and experimentation with accessibility," but the unknowing visitor would search the program in vain for any information about the 55 or so artists and collectives or their works. This Grand Balcony could use a better map.

The Montreal Biennale continues at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and other locations through Jan. 15.