Final Thoughts on the Biennale: Yarn, Salt, Pepper, Sludge, and a Shark

And will the American pavilion’s so-so art be stranded for lack of money to ship it back? 

I’ m writing this on Halloween and hear that the sponsors of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale are going door-to-door wearing tattered sweaters, baggy pants with frayed hems, a battered fedora, and old, scuffed shoes. And carrying a tin cup.

My spies told me a couple of months ago that the American Arts Conservancy, the nonprofit that delivered the modest, snoozy Alma Allen show, an embarrassment for America’s 250th, was deep in the hole, unable to rub two lira together. The New York Times confirmed the other day that the group is a million dollars short and doesn’t have the money to transport Allen’s artwork, all heavy sculpture, from Venice back to the U.S. It’s making a Hail Mary appeal via a letter to prospective donors. The Biennale closes in three weeks. My advice to them is “Don’t waste your money.”

In reading the NYT, I tend to add no, niente, non è impossibile, or aspetta e spera — my grandmother’s favorite, it means “only in your dreams” — to negate what I’m reading and, thus, arrive at the truth. Not for the art reporters, though. They’re very good.

I’m far from berserk with glee, as are other art critics. The Biennale is the Olympics of the contemporary art world, and, for America’s 250th, it was our time to shine. The pavilions are national, and the art gurus who do the selection in each country are political, so we get themes such as climate change, open borders, imperialism, and colonialism, along with dull, shallow art. You work with it and around it. Freedom, the primacy of the individual, discovery, the open road, endless bounty, and the charisma of the lone hero are among many themes that define us.

Instead, we sent a dud, in part because the State Department discarded a process that’s sound but, more often than not, run by bad people. It shed the standards and picked the wrong people. It selected a brand new group, the American Arts Conservancy, headed by Jenni Parido, smart and enthusiastic, I’m sure, but her last job was ten years running a high-end pet-food business. She was a friend of a Trump friend, Erin Scavino, and she was clueless. I like high-steppers, but for some things in government, you need to know what you’re doing. Parido and Scavino did a just-closed exhibition called Passport to Patriotism, which I reviewed — it was a stink bomb.

The State Department ought to cover the cost of bringing the art back to the U.S., since it caused the problem, rather than stick Parido and her group with the bill. And I’d can every federal employee involved in this flop.

The American Pavilion’s sad denouement reminds me to ponder the other 95 pavilions. What was the good, the bad, and the ugly among them?

The good? The pickins’ are few. I think many visitors would say the Japanese pavilion, Grass Babies, Moon Babies, was the most ingratiating, but I thought it was among the most perverse. Still, it surprised me, which is good. Artist Ei Arakawa-Nash (b. 1977), American but born in Japan, bought 208 convincingly real baby dolls from a Florida company and outfitted each with reflective sunglasses and baby clothes made by his mother and her friends in Japan. He arranged the dolls on a treehouse structure and surrounded it with chairs and benches. The dolls are portable, so visitors can pick them up, carry them, and see themselves reflected in the doll’s sunglasses. “He looks just like me,” I heard. The mostly Asian crowd cooed. Each doll has a date tagged on its clothing that corresponds to a date, sweet or sour, in Japanese history, from its fascist imperial days to more recent times.

Arakawa-Nash is gay, and he and his American husband just had twins via surrogacy. Good for them. We need more babies. Japan needs them, and desperately, since it’s so geriatric. It’s pathetic to see young-adult visitors savor the fantasy of parenthood for a few minutes, willingly enlisted in performance art. They’re adults acting like kids. The dolls were creepy.

The artist admits that Japanese art czars wanted something “woke or liberal,” so he dwells a bit on Japan’s heinous colonial past. Still, he leaves us thinking, which is something that “woke or liberal” overlords hate. Our prosperous, risk-averse culture has programmed young people to be pessimistic. They’re smitten with ephemerality, but a baby is there and foursquare about it. Arakawa-Nash says babies put the past in perspective, because, for them, it means nothing. Living in the present is all we can do since the future is the stuff of providence. Realizing this, Arakawa-Nash suggests, is the first step toward acceptance and reconciliation.

Argentina’s pavilion also makes the visitor a performer rather than a spectator. Matías Duville (b. 1974) created a spacious environment called Monitor Yin Yang, a floor drawing that uses piles of salt and ground charcoal. It’s walkable, but visitors must stick to the black path. Of course, many feet change the path, which becomes more and more abstract, a Rorschach test viewed through a funhouse mirror. There’s the primeval element — salt comes from the ocean and charcoal from fire — but also the aesthetic one as black and white and permanence and transformation jostle. There’s no spectacle and, praise the Lord, no Oppression Follies. Things unfold slowly. Duville replaces the salt and charcoal every couple of days to start the design anew. The pavilion isn’t in the Giardini, where each of nearly 30 countries has its own small building, but in the Arsenale, once Venice’s naval shipyard, in a vast factory space. It’s rare to find pure beauty — at this Biennale, at least — so I found Duville’s installation soothing.

Nearby is Italy’s pavilion, in the Arsenale this year, since the artists needed lots of space for With You, with Everything. Chiara Camoni (b. 1974) created a dual-gallery, dual-format look. In the first space, we’re welcomed with 24 human-size figure sculptures made from flowers, plants, plastic, debris, and small objects. It’s dark and spooky. They look like archaic sculpture dedicated to a nature deity channeling Arcimboldo, the 16th-century Italian fantasy painter who depicts human heads using the forms of fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books. Camoni’s figures are arranged asymmetrically, but, like the totems at, say, Stonehenge, they’re laid out with purpose. Again, there’s no visual shock. In this silent figure forest, there’s some ritual at work. It’s up to us to ponder it.

The second section, brightly lit by sun pouring through tall windows, depicts floor sculptures of the foundations of an imaginary, very horizontal ancient city, not ruins but more like fingerprints. Camoni arranges comfortable chairs and creates an indoor garden in this space so people can absorb and contemplate. It’s slow-looking, in contrast with so much in this needy, noisy Biennale.

Israel’s pavilion struck me as pretentious and unoriginal. It starts inelegantly with a black rose encased in a block of ice in an open commercial freezer. Then, in the next gallery, water drips from above into a black pool. It’s called Rose of Nothingness, and the artist, Belu-Simion Fainaru (b. 1966), says the steady drops are meant to evoke breathing, time, restraint, and a sense of flow and pause. The water’s delivered via an overhead grid system fitted with agricultural drippers delivering water to an exact spot. This kind of dripper is an Israeli invention, so the work of art evokes measured intervention and a fragile environment.

The object isn’t compelling, but at least Israel is represented. The country couldn’t open its pavilion in 2024 because of an antisemitic uproar and support for Hamas among artists and art chatterers. This year, Israel staged Rose of Nothingness in the Arsenale rather than in Israel’s permanent pavilion in the Giardini building — possibly for security but officially because the Giardini’s in restauro — but at least Israel’s pavilion opened.

The five-member Biennale prize jury said it would refuse to consider awards for pavilions from countries facing International Criminal Court warrants for crimes against humanity — Israel and Russia — and quit when the Italians running the Biennale overruled them. I love the Meloni government. Russia’s pavilion opened for the press preview in May and then shut.

With nearly a hundred countries sending art, it’s impossible to hew to common themes, but, theoretically, pavilions are told to correspond, somehow, to the themes of Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, the Biennale’s anchor show. It’s musical thinking but, for visual art, it’s work that has emotional structure, eschewing what the recently deceased Kouoh called “orchestral bombast” and instead evoking moods, laments, and allegories. “Turn the volume down on politics and especially grievance,” she seemed to want, but curators have become addicts. Most don’t know how. Hence, the state of the Biennale overall and the state of the Smithsonian and most high-profile museums.

Nothing could be more orchestrally bombastic than the Austrian pavilion. It’s called Seaworld Venice, created by Florentina Holzinger (b. 1986). She’s an Austrian choreographer and performance artist who mixes spectacle, acrobatics, apocalypse, and music. A female nude dangles from a suspended bell, acting as a mock clapper. Each passing hour apparently means one hour less for the exhausted patriarchy. Another female nude operates a jet ski in a deep pool, speeding in circles and creating turbo waves that refer to the impact of turbo tourism on Venice, which, Holzinger adds, is a sinking city. There’s also an all-woman version of the Deposition of Christ, depicted as a performance on a weathervane, robot dogs, and a central altar that’s an aquarium flanked by Porta-Potties and sized for two people. Under the aquarium — a big, clear-glass tank — is a portable water purifier that treats sewage, supplying the tank in which two nudes cavort.

The themes are Venice’s unstable, unsure future as a city on the water and concepts of purity and impurity. Give me a good Renoir any day of the week. Moods? Laments? Allegories? The Austrians didn’t get the memo.

Steps away, the Swiss pavilion revisits a 1978 Swiss-TV documentary, evidently a sensation, that explored “the problem of homosexuality.” Now, I remember gay life in 1978 and assume that it was as twisted in the land of yodels, fondue, punctuality, and the Matterhorn as it was in the U.S., but in a very Swiss way. The pavilion’s called The Unfinished Business of Living Together and works best not as art but as a documentary or a play. I liked the deep dive into archives, and a contemporary film imaging gay life as the Swiss understood it in the 1970s — pick-up sex by seedy piers — had the ring of perceived truth. A wall-mounted shark with a man’s legs dangling from its open mouth suggests a Swiss sense of humor inscrutable to me. The shark, representing gay people as predators and aliens, suggests the irrational moral panic surrounding them, I’m told. There’s a wall-mounted crossword puzzle, too. An example: Across, Who is the oldest known lesbian? How the hell am I supposed to know? “Eleanor Roosevelt” doesn’t fit.

The pavilion was one of many that closed for a few days at the beginning of the Biennale to protest the inclusion of Israel. “We stand with Palestine,” a fake thing, “because we know that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the world,” a sign posted at the pavilion read. I know, you can’t beat dumb animals, but really? The Austrians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, of all people, the French, and the Dutch closed, too. Have they no self-awareness? Don’t they know their own history?

I loved the Morocco pavilion, which displays tried and true art that’s a triumph of craft and humanity. It’s hard to believe that Morocco, not an unimportant country and with an ancient, revered heritage in textiles, architecture, and design, had never sent a national show to the Biennale, in business since 1895, but it’s true. Asǝtta, which means “the ritual of weaving” in Amazigh, the Berber language, is the name of the exhibition created by Amina Agueznay, the country’s grande dame of textile art. She gathered textiles from 300 weavers, mostly women, from all over Morocco to present a survey.

The pavilion is huge and divided using the theme of thresholds to suggest spaces between the public and private worlds. Weaving is often a communal activity among women who use — and tweak — pattern, colors, and styles with generations of lineage.

I wish the Biennale would do a craft-only season that ditched painting and sculpture in favor of textiles, metalwork, furniture, jewelry, ceramics, glass, fashion, flowers, even downcycling and upcycling. And, please, let’s ditch the climate, Gaza, colonialism, slavery, and oppression. They’re the fodder of hack artists and dead-end imaginations.