Centaurs and Reindeer Transfix at the Venice Biennale

The Danish and Sámi pavilions stand out, Canada’s is a dud, and news from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I’ m in the Swamp for ten days working on my biography of Allan Stone, the visionary New York dealer among whose artists were Wayne Thiebaud, Joseph Cornell, Richard Estes, and Willem de Kooning. His archives, 60 years’ worth, are at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. They’ve never been plumbed, so it’s virgin scholarship as well as intense work since I’m reading each and every piece of paper. It’s exhilarating, too — Allan had a covetous appetite for vitality, craftsmanship, and intrigue.

Today we’ll venture from Washington to Philadelphia, Venice, Denmark, and the Arctic, from the venal and mendacious, and D.C.’s got a bumper crop, to the frisky and fleet, and I mean reindeer.

Last week I saw The Outwin, the very good triennial at the Smithsonian on the state of American portraiture. I liked it. It’s nice to see an exhibition that people actually anticipate. It’s too bad the curators slathered it with social-justice sludge and always sad to see curators using the art to serve themselves rather than serving the art.

Here in D.C., I’m surprised to see so many masked young people, even in museums and libraries, where the HVAC-treated air is the cleanest they’ll breathe in this city of stinking windbags. There’s the Shakers, the Wiccans, and Jews for Jesus, but in Washington the established church is called the Clingers. Covid is their Satan and their crutch, when, of course, it’s not climate change. As for Whole Foods on H Street, in my wake people whisper, “Who was that unmasked man?”

When I was young, I was a country-club Republican and no stranger to conformity but naturally looked at any line pushed by the federal government with skepticism, having been the youngest member of Connecticut’s Go Go Goldwater Club in 1964. Why would a young person still buy the Covid crap, especially in 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity? As my mother would ask, “Who’s gonna marry a dope like that?”

Though working on a book, I’m following the art news. This week’s big story is the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s appointment of a new director. Sasha Suda, the director of Canada’s National Gallery, will take over from Timothy Rub, the director for the past eleven years. I’ve known Rub for 30 years and admire him a lot. I knew Suda when she was a student at Williams. She’s a very good curator. I saw her Gothic boxwood miniatures show and loved it.

Suda has been director of Canada’s National Gallery for only three years. That’s an impossibly short time to do much, but she’s a high-stepper. The chair of the NG’s board praised her for developing its first strategic plan. This suggests that the place existed as a museological Stone Age where a harvest of low-hanging fruit seemed miraculous. Suda led the charge in picking Stan Douglas to represent Canada in this year’s Biennale in Venice. I thought his work in the Canadian pavilion was awful.

Suda is smart and serious. I’ve never met a giddy medievalist. I think she’ll do very well. People will want to support her. The PMA is a great museum, known, at least now, for quality.

Leslie Anne Miller, the head of the PMA’s board, said Suda has “a proven commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” That’s word-for-word dogma in museums these days and another fake religion. Suda’s board chairwoman in Ottawa said that during her time as director Suda “embraced reconciliation, justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.”

In this context, “equity” means that differences in performance among staff are likely caused by racism or sexism. That’s a pernicious trap and a false value. Putting that aside, all of these other pop words sound good, but let’s get real. A museum director isn’t a therapist or a priest or a community organizer or a social worker. His or her job revolves around quality control, fundraising, marketing, and audience-building. The director sets standards, and that includes fair pay and evaluations, competitive hiring, and a balanced exhibition-and-acquisitions program. It’s not rocket science.

At a high-power place like the PMA, you hire the best, not tokens. HR lingo such as equity, diversity, and inclusion means, as a practical matter, race-based hiring, quotas, mediocrity, and high-salaried HR bureaucrats meddling in what curators, educators, fundraisers, and visitor-services staff do.

The PMA just hired Alphonso Atkins as the six-figure salaried equity-and-diversity czar. Though he has never worked in a museum, his title at the PMA is the deputy director. He’ll ensure that exhibitions, catalogues, labels, and school programs embed race and gender in their intellectual content. His new department will also inevitably develop into part of a two-tier HR system, one for preferred minorities and one for everyone else. And Atkins comes from the worst possible place: higher education. There’s no institution more corrupted by race obsession, speech codes, and trigger madness.

His department won’t want strife to ease and disappear. It’s in the strife business. The more, the merrier — for the bureaucrats, that is. Alas, his position is endowed, and by the chairwoman of the PMA board, which means it’s got the whiff of eternity. Miller, the board chairwoman, is a high-powered Philadelphia lawyer and Democratic Party potentate. She’s drunk the PC Kool-Aid.

The first thing I’d do as director is nuke the equity-and-diversity department before it’s entrenched. That’s the last thing, of course, that the PMA’s going to do. The museum staff just unionized. Between this and a new, expensive, powerful grievance fief, institutional energy is likely to be spent on navel-gazing.

I want to return to the Biennale in Venice. I’ve written about the American pavilion and Milk of Dreams, the Biennale’s big anchor exhibition. I visited every national pavilion, some 80 altogether, and have three in mind today.

Since Canada is our neighbor to the north, I’ll write a little more about their pavilion. Stan Douglas, a Vancouver artist, does installations combining photography, film, and jazz, and treating imperialism, utopia, and rebellion. His installation in Venice, 2011≠1848, starts with four massive wall murals. Each is a re-creation using both original photography and images that Douglas contrived to reconstruct forensically aerial views of the start of the Arab Spring uprising in Tunis, a riot after the Stanley Cup hockey championship in Vancouver, the Occupy Wall Street mass arrest in lower Manhattan, by the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Hackney race riot in London. Douglas then contrasted these four events, all in 2011, with the 1848 revolutions in Europe.

The experience is esoteric, nebulous, diffuse, confusing, frustrating, and, ultimately, fatuous and a bore. It’s about so much that it ends up being about not much. Vastness of scope doesn’t make for coherence or seriousness. The music component of the Canadian pavilion is in the Dorsoduro district in Venice’s old salt warehouse. That’s on the other side of the city from the pavilion. An installation that unfolds in two sites, not near each other, sends two messages. First, it’s for groupies. Second, the artist and, in this case, the National Gallery of Canada, the pavilion’s sponsor, cares less about people seeing the total work and more about art critics writing about it. Douglas’s installation has a music component, too, in the salt warehouse, to make things even more convoluted.

I suspect, and this is only an intuition, that few visitors to the Canadian pavilion know much about the 1848 revolutions, and I knew nothing about the Hackney race riot and had never heard of the Stanley Cup, much less a riot in Vancouver in its aftermath. There’s lots happening, so much that it’s all cursory and shallow. And trendy. And old hat. I couldn’t get “You say you want a revolution” from The White Album out of my head. That’s from 1968. If I’m going to be bored by time travel, I’d rather look at art by Canada’s early-20th-century Group of Seven landscape painters, whose works are, at least, scrutable and pretty.

There’s superficial and scattered, and then there’s visceral and Delphic. Yes, Denmark’s the home of Hans Christian Andersen and the “Little Mermaid,” but Hamlet is the most famous — and gloomiest — Dane, and dour Ibsen is considered Norwegian but wrote in Danish. Kurt Trampedach, one of my favorite weird artists, was Danish. We Walked the Earth, Uffi Isolotto’s sculptural installation in Denmark’s pavilion, is anything but glib and nothing like a romp through a forest of historical asterisks.

The entire pavilion is designed as a dilapidated Danish farmhouse, not charming but innocuous. After a few steps, though, I turned a corner and gasped. Living and dying there is a hyperrealistic family of centaurs. Centaurs, half horse, half human, are staples in Greek mythology. They’re caught between two essential natures. They’re prone to barbarism on the one hand but, on the other, the centaur Chiron tutored Achilles, Theseus, and Heracles.

In one space — it looks like a stable — lies a possibly dead female centaur, her eyes open and bloodshot. Between her legs is a fetus, possibly dead, possibly still alive but in a transparent blue sack. The figure was made under Isolotto’s direction by a Danish special-effects studio used by the film industry. She looks very, very real. In the next space, a male centaur hangs from the ceiling, a chain around his neck. Is it suicide? Is it wartime rape and pillage? When did it happen? Yesterday, or in mythological times? Their tools and sculptures of their food are nearby. Scattered on the ground are weird animal shapes made from glass. They seem to have crawled from shells and then died. They’re small but look contorted like the plaster casts of figures killed in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

It’s startling and haunting, and though I’m a natural optimist, We Walked the Earth seems to suit the mood of our times. I don’t believe in collapsology. Still, the installation oozes depth. It’s original, and it’s very good art. It’s not speed dial or Cliff Notes art. It made me think. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

The Sámi pavilion is something new and the joint effort of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. It’s dedicated to the art and culture of the Sápmi region, once called Lapland, stretching from northern Norway across Scandinavia to a peninsula in northwestern Russia bordering Finland. The Sámi are Europe’s only indigenous people. They’ve been there for thousands of years. Like the First Nations in Canada and Native Americans here, they’ve faced racism, exploitation, and encroachment on their land and water rights.

I’d never heard of Pauliina Feodoroff, Anders Sunna, and Máret Ánne Sara, the three Sámi artists whose work in on view. Sunna is a reindeer herder whose series of big paintings, Illegal Spirits of Sápmi, show scenes from each of the past six decades when his family contested some aspect of Indigenous rights with either big business or the government in Stockholm. They’re not beyond the scope of human imagination, but the drama is earnestly conveyed. They believe if they take care of the land, the land will take care of them. Their art expresses both their conviction and their present and historic affinity for the land.

They make Douglas’s big photographic murals in the Canadian pavilion seem like chic but fake bravura. I don’t mind revolutionary spirit in art but don’t like it when it’s à la mode, since art for the chattering classes is never really revolutionary. Sunna started as a graffiti artist, when he wasn’t herding reindeer. His work, more formal now, still looks urgent.

Sara makes sculptures from reindeer tendons and reindeer skulls. Feodoroff, represented in three films, is a performance artist who considers matriarchal social organization among the Sámi. She’s Finnish but has family ties to the Russian part of Sápmi, so her art treats forced relocations and collectivism from the Communist era.

The Sámi fiercely oppose wind turbines because they wreck reindeer migration patterns. Of course, I think wind power’s a hoax, a big corporate rip-off, and, like most renewable energy, a dandy little ornament for bourgeois socialists.

I found the art frank and informative. The pavilion feels like a very well-done information center. It’s a big, open space with sections for each artist and Sámi young people answering questions. The art and space are very much about now. There’s a first-rate catalogue, too.

Knowing nothing about the Sámi before but having a soft spot for Indigenous people, I think the pavilion’s powerful and an example of art that teaches something worth learning. The artists produce ecological art, but they’re neither lachrymose nor unhinged. They’re not against harvesting lumber or mining. They just want responsible, sustainable stewardship.

Canadian elites, who profess to care so much about justice and reconciliation, should use the country’s 2023 Biennale pavilion to promote a range of Indigenous artists. Douglas’s work is much ado about things that don’t resonate with real people. I learned more — and was provoked to look and think more — via reindeer and dead centaurs.