At the Venice Biennale, the Woke Gondola Is Sinking

Themes of inclusion and exclusion seem muddled and worn.

B etter late than never. Last month I finally got to Venice to see the Biennale, which closes this weekend. If you’re a fast sprinter, you can get there, too, but if you haven’t seen the 60th edition of the world’s most prestigious contemporary-art extravaganza and won’t, today’s story starts with my reassurance that you can brook the lack unscarred. “The Sun’ll Come Up Tomorrow,” as Little Orphan Annie sang, and she never went to the Biennale, at least until she met Daddy Warbucks and got a suite at the Gritti Palace.

It’s not the Reparations Biennale, though it sometimes feels like it. Or the You Bad, Xenophobe Biennale, though that’s implicit. It’s not a dud, either. It’s elegantly done, I saw lots of work by artists I didn’t know, and what better backdrop than Venice? It’s just that, intellectually, this gondola treads water.

The Biennale has two components. The first — and, theoretically, controlling — component is the big, thematic exhibition organized by a curator of international stature selected by the Biennale’s masters. It’s called the International Exhibition and starts in the Biennale’s main building in the Giardini, Venice’s public park. This year’s show, Foreigners Everywhere, displaying the work of 331 artists, is meant to be the beacon light of inclusivity. Its curator, Adriano Pedrosa, is the director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil and the first South American to create the Biennale’s main event. The exhibition rambles over the Giardini and then to the Arsenale, the shipyard for the old Republic of Venice’s mighty navy, which ruled the waves from the lagoon to the Levant when Venice was imperial and Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese were riding high.

Foreigners Everywhere emphasizes living South Americans, Indigenous artists, immigrants, exiles, and outsider artists as well as dead artists the New York Times’ obituary page would list in its “forgotten no more” column. We’re all migrants — in life, certainly, since we’re all passin’ through — and we’re all foreigners, some through heritage or bias or idiosyncrasy or marginality, and some more than others. “Wherever you go,” Pedrosa said, “you will always encounter foreigners, and wherever you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down, a foreigner.” The exhibition is a salute to otherness, to what’s strange, and a call for empathy.

Pushing the point, I’d say we’re all individuals and unique, but Foreigners Everywhere explores herd states of thinking and being.

The Biennale’s national pavilions, and there are about a hundred of them, are meant to reflect, more or less, the core exhibition’s themes. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the American pavilion, filled by Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson’s bold, bright paintings and sculptures. Gibson, the first Native American artist to fill our pavilion, isn’t an outsider artist by any means — he studied art in Chicago and London and has a fancy New York dealer — but he ticks off the boxes “Cherokee,” “Choctaw,” and “gay.” His pavilion has more sparkle than substance, but it’s not at all bad.

Pedrosa is a brilliant curator with catholic taste. He abhors hierarchies, as do I, so there are galleries for textiles and lots of portraits, lots of video art, and plenty of colorful, buoyant sculptures along with the art world’s default style and subject, which is abstraction. Every medium except, odd to see, photography gets an equal and generous shake. That said, the canonical hierarchy — painting, sculpture, drawing, and down the list through decorative arts, photography, and textiles — has long ago melted. So a summary of his taste seems to be that he likes lots of different things, which isn’t a good curatorial strategy. To draw from Oklahoma!, he’s an Ado Annie who “cain’t say no.” He’s a far better curator, scholar, and tastemaker than this but that’s the result.

The search for the pudding’s theme from Foreigners Everywhere leads us to xenophobia. The show is a subtle rebuke to xenophobia, though Pedrosa doesn’t beat it over the head. It’s a more direct and profuse rebuke to what chattering classes everywhere see as anti-immigration fever, which is different from xenophobia. You can adore and respect, say, Latin American culture but still correctly decry many millions of unknown, unskilled illegals, many of whom are criminals, pouring across, say, the Mexican border. Our elites see this as xenophobia and racism.

I think one of the problems with Foreigners Everywhere is its foundational notion that we live in a xenophobic, Eurocentric, or, worse, Americanized monoculture that needs busting. That might have been the case 30 years ago, but no longer. There’s a section in the exhibition on gay artists. Puh-leeze. Gay artists, as well as Indigenous artists, African artists, and Caribbean and Latin American artists haven’t been art lepers, at least in America, for a while. I love the work of Louis Fratino and Salman Toor, but they’re mainstream. They depict not gay issues but human ones. They’ve never been transgressive. They’re superb artists in lots of other ways.

Another problem, and this happened in Milk of Dreams, the big Biennale show in 2022, is the preponderance of dead artists. The Biennale is about now, not then. Pedrosa believes — strongly — that a range of artists finally deserve a place in the Venetian sun, but it’s background noise from the grave. Madge Gill’s Crucifixion of the Soul, from 1936, is there, at 15 feet long an exhibition-wide statement picture. It seems to depict spirit guides leading the souls of women into the afterlife. It’s great, and Gill was an untrained unicorn artist, unknown in her lifetime — she died in 1961 — but she’s had dozens of shows over the past 20 years. She was unknown for so long because she was an oddball, but she was by no means erased, to use social-justice-warrior lingo. Okay, she never hit the marquee as an art star in her lifetime and, for a generation or so after her death, was forgotten. Vermeer was never famous in his lifetime and was forgotten for 300 years!

On the one hand, I’m not a meanie, and much in me thinks, “Oh, give the old gal a place in the Biennale.” On the other, an exhibition needs to be coherent.

And there are lots of dead artists who did indeed get star billing and never lost it. Goodness, there’s work by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the show. And Joseph Stella. And Gino Severini. All very long dead, and RIP, but they’re a distraction.

Not to dwell on the past, but speaking of 2022, that’s when I reviewed Afro-Atlantic Histories, a huge, muddled, but fascinating exhibition curated by Pedrosa at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It was vast and rambling, but also revelatory. I learned a great deal about Brazilian art, for instance, but the exhibition was messy and all over the place. That’s Pedrosa’s style. His style, also, and this is brilliant, is encasing paintings in glass and hanging them from the ceiling so they seem to float. He uses this approach in galleries about the Italian artist diaspora. The art becomes part of the space in which people move, and people look at it longer.

In Foreigners Everywhere, to its credit, we see that abstraction, for example, wasn’t a French or American phenomenon but was full of life in South America, too. Pedrosa must think that including abstractionists such as Rubem Valentim, a self-taught Brazilian painter who died in 1991, redresses the Biennale’s failure to recognize cutting-edge South American artists. But countries there did have national pavilions at the Biennale, even though fascists, juntas, and leftwing kooks were ruling these places at the time, over decades.

Banana republics of all hues hate cutting-edge art, it’s safe to say, so the reparative impulse isn’t all that bad, but it seems to belong in a different exhibition. Still, it’s a pleasure to learn about Valentim and also Ione Saldanah, another Brazilian, whose Bambus, a collection of bamboo-pole sculptures from the 1960s, is pure joy. Decorating the façade of the main Biennale building in fluorescent, tropical colors is a mural by MAHKU, a collective of Brazilian indigenous artists. Hell, Pedrosa’s got a platform, so it’s fine that he pushes his country’s heritage. He’s patriotic, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I hate the One World mindset.

Foreigners Everywhere has one, big, Grand Canal–size blind spot, and that’s Jews, the original and constant diaspora. There’s no section on them, which might be a case of standard antisemitism, but simple security might have been a challenge, too. Israel’s pavilion, in any event, never opened. Ruth Patir, the Israeli artist whose worked filled it, and the Israeli curators who worked on it kept it closed to protest their own country’s “invasion” of Gaza. There’s no question it would have been trashed by Hamas fans.

I’d suggest that the Biennale ditch the link between the anchor exhibition and the national pavilions, substantially reduce the size of the main attraction, and compel its curatorial team to focus on a narrow theme each Biennale, such as the art of a different part of the world, artists under 25, geezers like me, or a different medium. This will put a brighter spotlight on the national pavilions, which are the real greenhouses of the Biennale, and free them from even a loosely prescribed theme. Something leaner and sharper would save many millions of dollars, euros, yen, loonies, and dongs. Coming from Vermont, I’m naturally frugal.

A smaller exhibition would also save tourists from an exhausting day covering what, this year, is an exhibition that had to have at least 500 works of art. That deadens the senses. And speaking of deadened senses, let’s leave the dead artists to psychics, Ouija boards, and movie-studio digital-cloning technology. By limiting their representation at the Biennale, we let the new art speak for itself and articulate our world today.

Of the 331 artists whose work appears in Foreigners Everywhere, only 15 or so are American, which surprises me, considering that we’re the most successful, most prosperous, freest, and most great-hearted multiethnic, multiracial place on God’s green planet and a country made and nourished by migrants, outsiders, foreigners, and exiles.

That’s fine — we don’t have to be the Big Enchilada — since Foreigners Everywhere is really about the art of the global south and Indigenous people. It would have had more punch if it simply focused entirely on these subjects.

The Biennale awards prizes, called the Golden Lion, after the Lion of Venice, the city’s symbol as well as the symbol for St. Mark, Venice’s patron saint. Foreigners are everywhere in Venice, of course. The city gets 20 million tourists a year. A bronze sculpture of a recumbent lion oversees St. Mark’s piazza from a high column. It’s an amalgam of Assyrian, Greek, and Chinese styles and was probably cast in China around a.d. 800. Napoleon swiped it when French troops occupied Venice in the late 1790s.

The Maori group of four artists called Mataaho Collective won the Golden Lion for best artist in Foreigners Everywhere. They created a ceiling sculpture made from a woven structure of straps evoking cradles for newborn babies. It covers the ceiling in a rusticated warehouse gallery with old columns in the Arsenale. I didn’t think it was beyond the scope of human emotion. The thing looked like it came from a Venetian-blind trade fair.

The American artist Samia Halaby, who lives in New York, won a special-mention award for her “commitment to the politics of abstraction married to her unwavering attention to the suffering of the Palestinian people.” Of course she would and has and does and is. Her Black Is Beautiful, a painting from 1969, is in Foreigners Everywhere. It’s gorgeous, luminous, and entrancing. Halaby is an art teacher and artist but also a scholar and curator specializing in Arab art from what was once Mandatory Palestine. Black Is Beautiful has nothing to do with the suffering of Arabs or anyone else except Jesus, since it depicts a cross. She’s getting a prize for her political views, which, I suspect, are tinged with antisemitism, and, if so, shame on the Biennale.

The Argentine/Bolivian artist La Chola Poblete, who lives in Buenos Aires, also won a special-mention award. She “engages in critical play with histories of colonial representation from a trans indigenous perspective.” Poblete’s six big watercolors, displayed side by side, depict masks, dancing figures, little penises, slogans, fruit, vegetables, Andean goddesses, and plenty of Virgin Marys. They’re colorful and cartoony as well as blithe, even chipper. They certainly have wall power. I don’t know her iconography, but, looking at them, I’d call them Mestizo Rococo, an entirely new style.