The Dud American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Simone Leigh’s a good artist, but her work in Venice serves Ford, Mellon, and D.C. race grudges, not real people’s concerns.

I spent two days at the Venice Biennale last week and, of course, went to the American pavilion first. Simone Leigh, born in 1967, represents the United States with her exhibition, Sovereignty. It’s a dud. Leigh’s a very good artist. I wrote about her work when I reviewed the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Hers was a strong spot in the Buzzkill Biennial during which whining Whitney staff sabotaged the show because they didn’t like the way a trustee made his money. The American pavilion? The Venice Biennale? She just doesn’t have the depth or originality to carry it.

The introduction panel tells us that Leigh’s work “parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity.” It draws from ritual performances of the Baga people in Guinea, early African-American material culture from “the Edgefield District” in South Carolina, and the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Her subjects are “autonomous and self-sufficient,” conditions of sovereignty, though Leigh fudges the difference between the individual and the collective. Though her black women overcome oppressive circumstances, they still “indict the conditions” that force them to affirm their own humanity. “The Edgefield District” I assume, is Edgefield, where Strom Thurmond lived.

Leigh’s a ceramicist, and I’m drawn to fiber artists, ceramicists, silversmiths, turned-wood artists, and glassmakers because they don’t get the recognition they deserve. Their work doesn’t live on a wall but shares our physical space. Some of the objects in the show are cast-bronze versions of ceramic sculpture. Leigh’s work is sleek and attractive, too. I’ll never disparage beauty since art exists in the world of aesthetics. While the objects on view are, mostly, beautiful, their content doesn’t absorb, much less challenge. It’s of our time visually but, intellectually, remote from the aspirations of a broad public.

The façade of the American pavilion was thatched as part of Leigh’s show. It references, we’re told, a building in the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition that — surprise — trumpeted French colonialism. The curator then leaps to the Negritude movement in Paris starting in the 1930s and running through the ’50s. This movement, led by French black intellectuals and Communists, sought to pry black culture from colonialist tropes and to develop its essential difference from French culture. In America, the Harlem Renaissance and, in the ’60s and ’70s, the Black Is Beautiful movement are Negritude’s parallels.

This is all well and good, but it archaicizes black American culture. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition was nearly 100 years ago. It should go without saying — but so much that’s obvious seems lost to so many — that France is France and what happened at its colonial exposition in 1931, when so much happened here, in our country, mustn’t be imputed to America without a good reason. Then, as if we’d grown tired of intellectual jumping jacks, the curator enlists the American pavilion itself. The building, “designed by William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, opened during the height of Jim Crow in the United States and rising anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe.”

This makes no sense. Aside from the fact that the American pavilion looked, like a million other buildings in America, a little like Monticello, how did we get to Jim Crow, antisemitism, and fascism in the ’30s? Poor Delano & Aldrich, a boutique firm that worked for the Rockefellers and designed country clubs, banks, and Yale’s divinity school. Probably wouldn’t work for Jews, but Hitler made a racket, and Jim Crow was too Alabama. Why are they implicated, and in what?

When I read this, I thought about The Father, a movie I saw a couple of years ago. The subject, played by Anthony Hopkins, lives with dementia, an illness that excused the scriptwriter from developing a linear storyline. Nothing absolutely needed to make sense, and little did. Silly me, I like coherence, and, moreover, I like art history that’s not the stuff of bouncy leprechauns, who, by the way, are, originally, Italian, not Irish. The words “Jim Crow” aren’t an off-ramp from logic or evidence. Words aren’t magic.

Leigh’s Satellite is a 24-foot-tall bronze based on a Guinean D’mba figure, which Picasso appropriated well over a hundred years ago and that, today, Leigh is restituting as hers, or as an African-American collective’s, though she’s from Chicago. The D’mba figure, in Picasso’s hands, communicated conquest. It became a design element, too, rather than a religious object. Leigh has niftily recovered its spiritual messaging by capping it with a satellite dish that works. It’s a dead end since we don’t know what, if anything, Satellite broadcasts.

Last Garment is a bronze figure of a bent-over washerwoman in a pool, drawing from a late-19th-century postcard used to promote Anglo tourism to Jamaica. The photo presented the locals, we’re told, as “loyal, disciplined, and clean,” and I would add “tame.” I liked it, but, knowing Millet’s The Gleaners, found Leigh’s own appropriation far-fetched. I think someone in London contemplating a West Indies vacation imagined sun, beaches, and a Jamaican Crawler, not who would scrub his white-piqué bow tie.

Sentinel is a version of Satellite. Cupboard is a towering bell-shaped form covered in raffia and a version of Leigh’s signature image. It quotes Mammy’s, a 1940s restaurant in Natchez, Miss., in a building designed to look like a woman in a hoopskirt — Mammy in Gone with the Wind. Entering it was, we read, a violation of a black woman’s body, though, as an art historian living in Vermont (the anti-Natchez), I think of Las Meninas, by Velázquez. Leigh says she appropriates that, too, since Velázquez’s form suggests “the potentials of concealment, gathering, and invasion.”

This makes no sense, either. I taught Spanish Old Master art. We can’t toss Velázquez, Mammy, a greasy spoon in Natchez, a colonial exposition in Paris, D’mba figures, Strom Thurmond, and a satellite dish and expect moon glow. Leigh has grabbed, of all things, the Spanish Golden Age court painter whose court made slavery a business as big as Silicon Valley. How are these related?

I think Leigh has positioned herself as a cutting-edge black woman artist and, though talented, seems to have searched for motifs that have little connection with her experience. The Edgefield-related Jug concerns African-mask-inspired ceramics produced in that part of South Carolina in the 19th century. This is very esoteric indeed. Reference points that date to 100 or 150 years ago or more aren’t relevant to people living today and dealing with today’s concerns. It’s dead-end art.

Compelling art about race evokes empathy. Leigh’s show doesn’t. This might be a curatorial problem. The American pavilion is curated by the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. I like the ICA but think any art show coming from Boston and dealing with race is bound to be mechanical, blinkered, dogmatic, and cold. Boston is race-obsessed. I don’t know what “Black femme subjectivity” means, either. If it means black women artists finding their own vision, that’s been done.

Sovereignty is a show that belongs in a college museum. It is small and rarified, implicates multiple disciplines, so more classes will come, and treats racism, an academic fetish. Leigh’s a ceramicist. Young people more readily access ceramics, and that’s sculpture, than painting. They think about how sculpture is made and its materials. This propels them toward more complex inquiry.

After I saw Leigh’s show, I sat outside the American pavilion and read Sovereignty’s newsprint handout. I’m a people watcher. While I enjoyed the breeze and the very good text, about 20 visitors came and went. Very few stayed for more than a few minutes, maybe five or so. Granted, there’s lots to see at the Giardini, and I’m not clairvoyant, but the experience seemed to have been more humdrum than kismet. Sovereignty is modest and unoriginal. Leigh’s work represents the country. It’s not up to the occasion. It resonates with a tiny niche that, sad for American art and the public, has too much power and money.

Last year, I wrote about the Made in LA biennial at the Huntington and the Hammer. There were so many good, young, black artists in that show doing work about today. Los Angeles has great weather but also is today-centric. Why didn’t the D.C. PC snoots just bring a chunk of that show to Venice? It’s beyond the scope of their imagination. They’re sunk in a grudge-and-grievance swamp.

How did we get here? African-American artists represented the country in the past three Venice Biennales. I reviewed Martin Puryear’s show in Venice in 2019. He’s one of our best artists, but the work on view was a snooze. Puryear was near 80 then and seemed past his prime. I thought the Mark Bradford show in 2017 was something special and the most moving American pavilion I’d seen since the Ann Hamilton show in 1999. Every minute of the day, I’m proud to be an American. I was proud to see that, in Bradford, we put our best foot forward. Leigh’s a black woman, and there’s never been a black, one-woman American pavilion at the Venice Biennial. Other than this milestone, or asterisk, why is she there?

Politics govern the artists who show work in the American pavilion. A committee working for the National Endowment for the Arts selects finalists sent to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the State Department, which picks the American show. Leigh checks a box.

The American pavilion hosted group shows until 1984. After that, we’ve gotten single-artist exhibitions. That, to say the least, is limiting. While I loved the Bradford, Ann Hamilton, and Sarah Sze pavilions, I’d suggest a multiple-artist pavilion with lots of artists from the South and the Mountain States or California. Boston and New York curators develop most American pavilion shows. Anything would be better than another rehash race show.