DIVIDING A WORLD OF 'ALTERNATIVE KNOWLEDGE'
Looking inward, and back, at a Biennale for the history books
It starts in the eyes: shy or seductive, gaping or sealed shut, aqueous frontiers between the mind and the world. There are the pupils of German surrealist Unica Zürn, cohering out of dense, automatic black squiggles. The giant irises of Ulla Wiggen, each unique as a fingerprint and capable of unlocking a credit card or blocking passage across a border, painted in close-up on circular canvases. All over town, on palazzo-side posters and the hulls of the vaporetti, there are eyes announcing the 59th Venice Biennale: ghostly, milky corneas, drawn by young Mexican artist Felipe Baeza, disembodied, floating in deep space.
It’s a commonplace (and one you won’t catch me using) to call an art exhibition, especially one as large as Venice’s, a “feast for the eyes”. The 2022 Biennale, or at least its central exhibition, is a feast of the eyes: a giant, high-spirited banquet of looking and scrutinising. Eyes emerge as the key metaphor of a show that’s all about bridging realms — the brain and the social network, the dream and the ecosystem. The eyes here in Venice are portals to the unconscious but also analysers of misrule. They stare out from paintings and bulge from videos, and on occasion (as in Simone Leigh’s bronze totem Brick House) clamp closed. We may be on display, but we are looking back, or looking inward.
This year’s edition of the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art exhibition has been organised with triumphant precision by New Yorkbased Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, who has mounted a major show in challenging circumstances: cancelled studio visits, choked shipping routes, galloping insurance costs and, now, a land war 1,450km from the lagoon. Alemani’s exhibition, titled “The Milk Of Dreams”, was meant to open last May.
The coronavirus pandemic pushed both this show and Venice’s architecture biennial back a year, and she has made very good use of the delay.
Her challenges were not only logistical. For a while, I’ve felt that biennial exhibitions of contemporary art may have run their course. No coherent new style or movement will be emerging from our perpetually imitative present, and if you visit this year’s largely appalling national pavilions (the other half of the Venice Biennale, over which Alemani has no control), you’ll see what slim pickings that contemporary art is offering up. So the curator and her team used their extra year to dip into the archives — in 2020, Alemani co-curated an exhibition on the Biennale’s first 100 years — and established a 20th-century lineage, notably through surrealist and feminist traditions, for the themes of this show.
One of these surrealist and feminist themes is that bodies and technologies can’t be cleanly cleaved apart. Nature and society are always reshaping each other — more than ever in time of climate crisis — and in this show, machines act like animals, bodies twitch like robots, flesh merges with prostheses, and metals and plastics keep drooping, leaking, melting.
Another theme is a re-enchantment of our spiritless world to arrest the political and ecological crises that empire and patriarchy have reportedly consigned to us. If modern life stripped the divinity out of Venice’s altarpieces and made art appreciation a secular enterprise, this show wants to turn the gondola back around. So prepare for a biennial chockablock with spirits and shamans, mutations and metamorphoses, where the world we live in — for better, for worse; in beauty and in kitsch — regularly takes a back seat to worlds beyond.
Junkies of recent continental and feminist philosophy will recognise the
mood music: Rosi Braidotti’s theories of the posthuman, Silvia Federici’s analyses of witch-hunting as gendered violence. And yet: When too many biennials let the labels do the theoretical heavy lifting, Alemani’s selections are strongly opinionated and deftly chosen (though not without following some recent fashions: Indigenous cosmologies; weaving as metaphor for computer algorithm; two whole rooms filled with piles of dirt). They include participants from all over, notably Latin America, and never decline into the tokenism that afflicts so many European and American museums.
The show is heavy on painting — return of the repressed, baby! — and, despite its posthuman inquiries, light on new media. It has frequent surprises and moments of stunning bad taste, such as a sculptural suite by Raphaela Vogel of a cancerous penis on wheels paraded by 10 cadaverous white giraffes. (You read that right.)
All this without mentioning what, from a less subtle curator, would be the headline here: This is the largest Biennale since 2005, and about 90% of its artists are women. Just 21 of the 213 participants are men, and all are showing in the Arsenale, Venice’s former shipyard; in the classical galleries of the Giardini, the number of men is exactly zero. Elsewhere around Venice, it’s still the old game, with concurrent exhibitions of Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Kehinde Wiley and other bombastic boys.
This Biennale would have been a failure if reversing the old gender bias were its mere endpoint. For Alemani, the exhibition’s disproportion has a much more precise aim: reconstituting the past to let us see the present with keener eyes. She pulls this off primarily in five shows within the show — historical parentheses that frame her contemporary selections, each set off from the main flow via coloured walls of dusty pink or robin’s egg blue. (The exhibition design this year is by young Italian firm Formafantasma, who have subdivided and tamed the Arsenale’s tricky wide spaces.)
One of the art world’s favourite recent catchphrases is “alternative knowledge”, cribbed from anthropology and misapplied to just about anything that defies rational expectations. A dream may be beautiful, a dream may be powerful, but a dream is no kind of knowledge at all.
A better sort of “alternative knowledge” is the knowledge imparted by art, at least at its most ambitious: the pulse-racing insight into our human condition we suddenly perceive when forms exceed themselves and feel like truth. The best artists in this determined, imbalanced and properly historic Biennale look right at that human condition, with unclouded eyes.