An Unorthodox Take on the Venice Biennale’s Milk of Dreams Show

There’s lots of religion there, and a subconscious salute to motherhood.

E arlier this week I wrote a story about the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Simone Leigh’s a very good artist, but she doesn’t have the heft to represent the zenith of American art. Black-femme subjectivity, her subject, is a niche appealing, no surprise, to big funders of the American pavilion such as the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Both make lots of race-driven gifts these days. The NEA and State Department’s education-and-culture division, together, select the artists showing at the American pavilion. Leigh’s work is oppression art but sleek and beautiful, and it looks good in a gallery. It’s smooth, not gruesome or dogmatic. A convincing case can be made that it’s historicist. It suits haut bourgeois, PC, Acela Corridor taste.

The Biennale is far more than the American pavilion. This Biennale is the 59th since 1895. It’s called the art-world Olympics, a decent analogy in that dozens of countries, 80 this year, send exhibitions, called pavilions, showing what their art honchos want to celebrate. It’s the biggest contemporary art show in the world. Of course, Venice, a unique proposition, adds sparkle. The Biennale began in the Venice of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Sargent, so it has always had cachet. It’s always been serious, too. The Italians have always been proud of it and covetous of its doings. As in the College of Cardinals, Italians have a disproportionate sway.

The extravaganza opened in late April and runs until November. The Biennale has two components. Eighty countries sponsored pavilions, some in the Giardini, where about 20 countries have permanent pavilion buildings in a leafy setting, but most in the Arsenale, once the shipyard for La Serenissima’s massive navy and, until the industrial revolution, Europe’s biggest manufacturer. It’s huge, covering about 15 percent of the city, and spooky even with the Biennale. Unused for years, the Arsenale today provides an industrial ambiance perfect for big, avant-garde art. Hefty, exposed-brick columns and big, open spaces make for an austere look.

Over the next couple of months, I’ll write off and on about the pavilions I liked the most. As a teaser, I’ll say now that one of the best is the Sámi art that occupies all of the Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish pavilions. It’s both enchanting and educational. Sápmi, once called Lapland, covers northern Scandinavia.

The Arsenale also hosts the bulk of the Biennale’s second component. A big thematic exhibition isn’t the hub to the pavilions’ spokes, though it’s said to set the tone. The Biennale’s artistic committee selected Cecilia Alemani to develop the show. It’s the art world’s biggest plum and biggest challenge. Alemani is Italian and curated the Italian pavilion a few years ago, but she lives in New York and is the chief curator of the outdoor art on the High Line greenway in Chelsea. The sculpture she has selected runs from witty to aloof to totemic. I admire what she’s done, at the High Line and at the Biennale.

I spent half a day at the Arsenale in her exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. It’s a massive production, with 213 artists and hundreds of objects. The show’s title comes from a book by the wickedly good Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington written in the 1950s for her children and not published in English until a few years ago. Hybrid creatures, some looking like boys with wings for ears, and some not known in any galaxy near us, feature in her story, with murder and abandonment among the themes. A story for little girls? I don’t think so — more likely for boys from a sophisticated milieu like Carrington’s.

Carrington’s art, her children’s stories, and the Biennale’s show are, broadly, about metamorphosis. Alemani questions how the definition of “human” is changing, what constitutes life, and what new kinships are possible among species and between the organic and inorganic. It’s all dreamy and Italian and I enjoyed it. I would call it, mostly, an exhibition about contemporary Surrealism.

Different people can take different messages from The Milk of Dreams. For instance, the metamorphosis that it develops has specific triggers current in our day. These are “the power of technology, the heightening of social tensions, the outbreak of the pandemic, and the looming threat of environmental disaster,” the show’s introduction tells us.

Exploitation, the patriarchy, and “extractivism,” which means “drill, baby, drill,” are there, too, and poor ole capitalism has a target on its back. Many artists in the show envision “a reenchantment of the world . . . to reconnect what capitalism has divided . . . to escape the gravitational pull of capitalism,” which they might say but, let’s face it, no one really means it. The Milk of Dreams tangentially links the new spirit of metamorphosis to gender fluidity as well.

Given so much fluidity and hybridity, I put all of these triggers and tangents to one side, or, more precisely, repurposed them. Metamorphosis, worlds of new possibility, and human autonomy are old subjects in that the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among lots of Greek and Roman literature, center them in Western thought, as does the Bible and its prophets hearing voices and climbing ladders, not to mention resurrections, ascensions, assumptions, and transubstantiations. The Milk of Dreams tips its hat to “nonbinary” and transgender artists but, “new hybridities” and “new possibilities” aside, 90 percent of the artists in the exhibition are women. An exhibition about rebirth, renewal, or whatever we want to call it, implicates what women, uniquely, can do, pregnant-man emojis notwithstanding.

I saw the exhibition on Mother’s Day, and as the only son of an Italian, though long dead, mother, and seeing it in Italy, I was liable to spot shades of a million Madonnas. I see The Milk of Dreams as far more spiritual, though ecumenically so, than the curator and other critics probably would. Ovid’s Metamorphoses supplied more subject matter for Titian, for example, than anything except explicitly Christian art. His zenith was the cycle of paintings based on Ovid that he did for Spain’s Philip IV.

In focusing on interiority, the fantastic, and the mercurial, the exhibition is escapist, too. Circuitously, then, the exhibition worked for me. I was more than a little enchanted by it.

Simone Leigh’s Brick House is the centerpiece of the first gallery in The Milk of Dreams. It’s a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture that fuses aspects of domed, earthen dwellings in Chad and Cameroon, old Southern pottery face jugs, and the Mammy figure made famous by Gone with the Wind. Alemani exhibited it two years ago on the High Line. It’s a powerful thing, so much so that it won the Golden Lion prize as the best individual work of art at the Biennale. Its theme is voguish, and that helps. Impressive as Brick House is, and it positioned Leigh to be a Biennale star, it also shows how much she recycles a narrow range of motifs, which all appear in her American pavilion show.

Her work was surrounded by giant collagraphic prints by the Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. They look like collages and have the loveliest, most subtle tones of gray. Yes, and she does a Resurrection drawing from an Afro-Cuban religious mix.

There are lots of ups and downs. Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985) is a Zimbabwean painter whose intense, larger-than-life works mix Pentecostalism and indigenous beliefs. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Gwendolyn is a near-life-size bulbous female form with painted hearts, flowers, and concentric circles. Originally from 1966, it was reworked in 1990, and the artist died in 2002. It’s noisy and hokey and dead-white-woman art. It looks like San Francisco grunge art. Tau Lewis’s epically big Sol Niger, from 2021, is a mask made from hand-stitched scrap fabric, fur, and feathers. Inspired by Yorba masks, Lewis “dramatizes otherworldly mythologies.” I think they’re big and ugly and that just knowing they were lurking in the house would give me bad dreams. Forget about Carrington’s kids with wings for ears.

An extraordinary number of artists in the show are dead. I’m not even considering the exhibitions-within-the-exhibition on Surrealist women such as Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Dorothea Tanning, all working mostly in the ’40s and ’50s. This show, The Witch’s Cradle, gives The Milk of Dreams a context in the history of art. While the Enlightenment developed the individual, ideally, as unique and autonomous, the technology revolutions of the 20th century made us more like cogs in a machine.

Psychoanalysis and new ideas about the subconscious provided raw material for the individual’s resistance to technology’s assault. Women didn’t experience the Enlightenment as men did, so Surrealism, as a way of living and a style, provided multiple paths to independence. Women artists sometimes used old tropes including witchcraft, the Sphinx, the femme fatale, and nature mysticism. Many of the artists had bastards for husbands, so men don’t fare well.

Back to dead white women. Carla Accardi is an Italian Abstract Expressionist artist who died in 2014. Her Assedio Rosso n.3 is startlingly good, with loops and tendrils in red against a black ground. Sofia Farhat, who died in 2004, was a fiber artist who brought traditional Tunisian textiles into the Modernist mainstream. These artists, both Modernists driven by forms and palette, and The Witch’s Cradle, a historical show, give the big Arsenale show a conservative spin that makes me think of traditional European religious painting.

I loved the work of Frantz Zéphirin and Myrlande Constant, both artists I didn’t know and both Haitian. Zéphirin (b. 1968) is a Vodou priest whose Slave Ship Brooks, from 2007, is a big history painting treating slavery, rebellion, and revolution as well as spiritual endurance, but with brilliant colors, pattern play, and a mermaid giving it a vernacular look. It presents history as folklore that people learn and repeat until it’s hardwired. The painting is about the past, but it has presence, both in terms of wall power and relevance. Constant, also born in 1968, makes flag-like wall hangings from sequins, glass beads, and tassels. Sirenes, from 2020, is an example. It’s packed with Vodou symbols and Christian saints. Hybridity is part of Vodou religion. Materials, palette, and forms spring from spiritual truth. Her work, however brash and gaudy, feels real.

Raphaela Vogel’s Ability and Necessity, from 2022, is made from steel, brass, and synthetic polymer, though I thought it was ceramic. A large, colorful anatomical model of a penis and scrotum appears afflicted, small plaques on the model tell us, with prostate and testicular cancer, warts, and other conditions. Sitting atop a carriage, the model is carried by a fleet of abstract white giraffes. It’s fantastical, funny, and disturbing. Vogel (b. 1988) is German. I suppose she references the hated patriarchy, but it’s a fairy tale gone to crazy land and beyond mere social criticism. It’s got too much Bosch in it.

Barbara Kruger was huge in the late ’80s and early ’90s when I was in graduate school. She’s still examining mass media’s, especially advertising’s, use of words and images to fashion desire and identity in women. Beginning/Middle/End is her site-specific installation using her characteristic big Helvetica Ultra Condensed type. It’s got a video and sound component. PLEASE CARE, PLEASE ADORE, and PLEASE MOURN operate as billboard, ad-agency tweaked commands. The Pledge of Allegiance appears on a screen surrounded by text reading IN THE MIDDLE THERE WAS CONFUSION, with Kruger tweaking the language to suggest a racist message. Kruger (b. 1945) is a geezer and a crank. I don’t know why she got the Biennale real estate.

Americans are accustomed to seeing work by women artists in big shows, but Italians aren’t, so The Milk of Dreams may be a bracing revelation for them. Italy can be so medieval. The only quibble I have with the exhibition involves its size. Alemani has acres of space to fill, I know, but Kruger, Tau Lewis’s masks, and Precious Okoyomon’s ponderous structural topography To See the Earth Before the End of the World could have been sacrificed on the altar of the Less Is More gods. Okoyomon (b. 1993) created the ruins of sugar-cane plantation fields with slaves, made of organic material, covered in degrees by wild growth. It’s about ecological revolt, and I’ve had smaller backyards. A video would have sufficed.

The Witch’s Cradle is one of five historical-context shows. Together, they’re so topically expansive that they come close to overwhelming the main event, which is The Milk of Dreams. A Leaf, a Gourd, a Shell is a show about women such as Ruth Asawa who make art about containers. I liked it, but all of these satellite shows, taken together, become a big survey exhibition about 20th-century women artists, and that’s a Queen Kong.

A word about Alemani. What she has achieved is heroic. The logistics must have been surreal in convolution, even though the Italians, their tourist economy crushed by Covid, were on their best behavior and wanted to present the best Biennale. From so many intellectual threads, Alemani built a coherent whole, which is itself a profile in determination and vision. She’s the real star of the Biennale.