Absurd, Partially Self-Aware - But That’s the Charm: How to Enjoy the Venice Biennale

Venice: the churches look like cakes and the cakes look like glass, the glass looks like sweets and so do the nipples on the breasts of the painted Virgins and goddesses. Everything in this city is made to perfectly delight a round, painted mouth which will receive only the sweetest of glistening, candied red cherries. But through such deliciousness runs seams of something disgusting, like veins of mould through a cheese, and those delicate lips curl into a sour shape, disturbed by a foul smell, or by the sudden sad flatness of piazza-musicians’ grisly gaiety, behind which glaring tiredness pounds.   

Piazza San Marco.

Venice might quickly become a beautiful and crumbling mass of confectionary irrelevance if not for La Biennale. This enormous show of contemporary art honours Venice’s Renaissance heyday, with continued dedication to exploring and celebrating ideas that challenge their predecessors. 

The Biennale is everywhere in the city, but it is concentrated in two areas - the Arsenale and the Giardini. In these areas you’ll find the central exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and the pavilions of most participating countries. 

Giardini Central Pavilion entrance.

Alemani’s exhibition takes its name from Leonora Carrington’s Leche del Sueño (The Milk of Dreams), stories Carrington told her children at bedtime, and later transcribed and illustrated in a private notebook. The stories weave fantastically between fear and fabulous absurdity: a forlorn but hideous vulture is trapped in gelatine and a boy’s head becomes a house after he eats its walls. In a rare shadowy corner at the Giardini, original pages from Carrington’s notebook twinkle quietly. Her spindly ink drawings are easy to miss; yet, in these unassuming drawings, Alemani finds a magical universe, through which to project a transhistorical vision of perpetual transformation and boundless possibility.  

A vision of transformation: everyone can change into someone or something else, indeed everyone must, to survive ‘the pressures of technological change, the heightening of social tensions, an ongoing pandemic, and the looming threat of environmental disaster’, which Alemani defines as the exhibition’s context. 

To make this vision, Alemani asks us to shift our attitudes, heaving the contemporary art world’s bulk out from the Western and male-centric histories, where it has lazed like a middle-aged man drunk and asleep after lunch, beginning to fuse with his mattress. Out of the 213 artists included in this year’s Biennale, only 21 are men. 95 artists are dead, most of whom were overlooked during their lifetimes, including Overtarci, Safia Farhat and Tecla Tofano. For the first time, an (admittedly slim) majority of artists are *not* based in Europe or America.

Here at last, are artists who have been waiting in the wings, set centre stage. The contemporary art world begins to roll out of its stupor, twitching as new voices clamour and old voices, heard for the first time, stir rustles, that old as they are, are no less disruptive. A pressure is released, and the space feels suddenly new, lighter and fresher, belonging to everyone. 

Some artworks seem to stretch themselves lavishly across this new space, like the fisherman in Mexican-painter Roberto Gil de Montes’ El Pescador (2020). The fisherman reclines in a golden scallop shell, his chest open with legs coyly crossed in a wry queering of Botticelli’s Venus. Unlike Venus, this God of love meets the viewer’s eyes with a resistant and insistent gaze. Other artworks seem to quiver with a bright energy, half-afraid and half-electrically excited by the possibilities of this new space.  

Roberto Gil de Montes, El Pescador, 2020 - Sunset discoball man [Source: https://south-south.art/biennale/roberto-gil-de-montes-at-venice/].

Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan’s film First Rain, Brise Soleil (2021-ongoing) has this quality. Sounds of fluttering fans, wooden instruments, forest birds and running water, noisy boat engines and few words tell a folktale of young love and grief; Phan’s storytelling is sparse, measured and achingly beautiful. In Phan’s world of exquisite and simple symbolism, everything is precious: where there is symbol there is meaning, and where there is meaning there is care.  

Simone Leigh’s bronze sculptures claim the new space with all the grace of a pride that is at once very vulnerable, strong, and brave. Untold or unjustly told narratives arrive in the space with urgent energy, expressed through female bodies, of African women specifically, and through materials and processes associated with artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ Re-enchanting the World project for the Polish pavilion covers the walls with brilliant quilts that tell Roma-Polish histories of migration and survival. The room is a blaze of colour, into which your mesmerised eyes settle with time, as wonderfully intricate stories emerge. 

Before the show becomes too dazzlingly radiant with hope and possibility, a motley collection of gimmicks appear, gurgling and flashing in empty rooms having failed to capture viewers’ attention for more than a moment. Sandra Mujinga’s installations of ghostly textile figures could have been majestic if not for being lit with a green light the colour of aliens in an unimaginative primary school classroom display about space. Meanwhile Mire Lee’s sculpture, Carriers (2020), is a noisy machine made of tangled pipes through which a brown sludge struggles to flow.

Anyone missing their dose of good-old white-American-male artistic arrogance will be comforted by Robert Grosvenor’s sculptures Untitled (1987–1988), Untitled (2018), and Block of Water (2019). Three corrugated iron structures occupy a whole room; one roofless, one containing a shiny red motorbike, and the other containing a dark pool of water. According to the exhibition commentary, they are ‘at a peculiar cognitive remove from the forms and spaces they resemble’. Absurdly predictable and gloriously mockable; I wasn’t convinced. 

So: brave, beautifully self-aware and prescient as the Biennale is in parts, in other parts it blunders clumsily. It is only partially self-aware, but herein lies its charm. Its faults are almost affable: this huge, extravagant, and revered display of contemporary art-world opulence becomes a spectacle, ripe with ridicule, but for this it is certainly no less enjoyable.  

Though the selection of works veers between insightful, self-conscious and fresh, and stale, archaic and oblivious, Alemani’s and her team’s curation is consistently meticulous. This is certainly testament to the tender pride with which each artwork has been considered. With a gapingly vast geographical and temporal span, the showcouldbe baggy and vague. But the exacting arrangement of artworks easily communicates relationships between them, guiding the viewer through thematic progressions. The exhibition design, by Italian studio Formafantasma, is equally careful and delightfully inventive. A room called ‘The Witches’ Cradle’ exhibits art by historically unrecognised women and non-binary artists working with or alongside surrealism.

Detail from Polish Pavilion, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ Re-enchanting the World [Source: https://culture.pl/en/gallery/re-enchanting-the-world-by-malgorzata-mirga-tas-at-the-venice-biennale-2022-image-gallery].

These artworks are, for the most part, relatively small and intricate, so are unsuited for and thus excluded from the high-ceilinged-gilded-frame gallery formula, or in its white-cubed cousin. So,it is with poignant love and respect that Formafantasma imagines a space in which these artworks are so comfortably at home. The divide between the room’s floor and walls is smoothed over by thick, curved carpet, so that the space is enchantingly round and soft. It feels deeply interior, not unlike a womb-space, protected and honoured. 

Like excellent curation, high accessibility standards demand fastidious attention to practical detail, and so I’d expect one to come with the other. I was surprised to find films without subtitles, badly signposted ramps, and kilometres of exhibition without benches for rest. Artworks were beautifully arranged and stunningly spot-lit, though this was often to the detriment of accessibility standards. One example is Luiz Roque’s 2020 Super8 film Urubu, in which an Urubu bird soars among Sao Paulo sky-scrapers. The placement of the film, high above a doorway, is utterly enchanting, but also out of sight for anyone much shorter than me (I’m a towering 5’5) let alone for visitors in wheelchairs. 

Another bizarre curatorial oversight came in the form of trigger warnings, formatted and tucked away so tastefully, that they were rendered quite ineffectual. Sprung upon us is Diego Marcon’s film The Parents Room (2021), an eerily sung story of a father’s murder spree of his family, then suicide. I watched from the doorway, too chilled to enter the room, as horrified faces passed. Other times, the lack of effective trigger warnings was made apparent with wonderful comedy, as wincing parents steer their kids away from Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia (2021), sixteen minutes of naked Nordic male dancers thrusting vigorously towards pine trees.

And again, away from Marianna Simnett’s The Severed Tail (2022), which tells the story of a piglet lost in a dog show. It’s presented in play-dough colours like a children’s television show, except the dogs, pig and their owners are actually humans in (hopefully not pig) leather gloves harnesses and helmets. The human actors spank, pant and wag their tails in what the exhibition commentary called ‘extreme episodes of fetish and play’. The film is exquisitely terrible.  

Next on the Biennale trauma-tour is Uffe Isolotto’s We Walked the Earth installation for the Danish Pavilion, in which a giant female-Centaur, made with prosthetic realism, lies dead by her centaur-calf in its amniotic sac, while its male counterpart hangs by its neck. So unfathomably weird and perplexing is this installation, that it attracts long queues of visitors coming to marvel at such a sublime and expensive display of artistic misfortune.  

Half the horror concealed: a tamed view of Uffe Isolotto’s We Walked the Earth [Source: https://www.designboom.com/art/danish-pavilionwe-walked-the-earth-uffe-isolotto-venice-art-].

The same children, who are dragged (with necks craning) from everything fascinating and risqué, are blighted again, this time by coarse and relentless reprimands from gallery-attendants, to whom, it seems, children are biohazards, who might at any moment turn feral, and begin to scrape at paintings and hurl themselves at sculptures. In the dusky gloam as 6pm closing-time approaches, these heroic children can be made out, withered and staggering behind crazed parents who actually begin to run at high speed from pavilion to pavilion, leaflets and tote-bags flying, because this is a serious sport and they will not let the Biennale best them.  

‘LA MOSTRA CONTINUA’ (the show continues), say signs in huge block capitals, laughing at your naïve idea that you might manage to see everything. The wise know the Biennale to be an unconquerable, bulging beast. It will digest and belch out anyone who panics, and tries to lay their eyes (or for the more desperate, their camera lenses) on as much art and information as is humanly possible. I owe my survival to my sketchbook; drawing was a way of spending time with artworks and slowing down.  

This is how to enjoy the Biennale. Bring a sketchbook, allow yourself to be drawn to that which interests you. Don’t worry about seeing everything. The things in which you’re interested might not necessarily be ‘the best’ artworks - there is plenty to be said for enjoying the Biennale’s offering of comic artistic malfunction. Laugh at the absurdity of the whole spectacle.

Come my third and final day there, I found myself unable to look, read or think anymore, forgetting why I’d come in the first place. I went back to the room where I started - the artworks appeared transformed. When you see so much art in such concentration, your frame of references that make up the lens through which you see the world, changes quickly. My vision was, indeed, transformed by Cecilia Alemani’s vision of transformation, and I came away feeling well-fed and inspired.  

[Source: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/a-practice-for-everyday-life-venice-biennale-2022-graphic-identity].

I left Venice at dawn. I waited for the boat from the Grand Canal, crumpled after 3 days in a hostel, wondering at the changing light in the sky. The Grand Canal is busy even at dawn, with couples, families and lots of women who are fully made up, dressed in gowns and suits, high heels. They’re posing for pictures. Not everyone comes to Venice for the Biennale, but everyone comes for a show.  

Written by Rosa Picard

Year 2 Liberal Arts, History of Art Pathway