Sticky teeth dispatch from my first Venice Biennale trip.
At the Giardini canteen, a British woman behind me in the queue loudly and proudly talked about her art project. Something about turning an archive into a coffee table book and not paying someone to help but giving them a cut of the profits (as if there’d be any). Her male companion said “yup” if she asked him a question. She kept repeating, “I’m just gonna do it. I will.”
I put my headphones on. With my espresso and four-euro Coke Zero can, I found a seat but still had the woman in sight, continuing to speak with little in the way of replies. I turned to face the wallpaper and text my friend back home in Melbourne, a fan of this year’s Biennale curator, Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa.
She gave me a glowing low-down of his work and said his theme for the exhibition – Foreigners Everywhere – was so good and so important. In theory, I agreed (afraid she’d think me a bigot if I didn’t). But, in truth, I didn’t trust the art world in its entirety, at Venice, to respond to it unless, somehow, they found collective clarity and criticality around colonisation and immigration.
Good intentions mean nothing in the arts but fake morality; I could, for instance, still see Israel’s exhibition through the glass at their closed pavilion. That, and the hovering armed military, were a greater statement than their poster stating their withdrawal (or is it a pause?) on the door.
It was midday at the Giardini – the parkland hosting half of the Venice Biennale – where I was spending my first day. So far, some of the art I’d seen had been loud, some obediently political. But I hadn’t been moved or stretched far. Except, perhaps, by John Akomfrah (Britain), Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag (Germany) and Wael Shawky (Egypt), with their art reflecting traditions of literature, theatre and cinema. The familiarity of these visual languages made their presentations immediate, fully fleshed and less art-school try hard than others.
Yet, there was still something youthful about more risqué and fresh pieces, especially from millennial artists taking their stake (France’s Julien Creuzet, for instance). Even if works like these took longer to sense out, they stayed on the nose. Like this reviewer said on their standards, “art can be surprising, complex and annoying.”
By then, though, I’d found that the Venice Biennale is more about site than art, anyway. If it wasn’t, they’d host it somewhere more accessible than an island without public transport and affordable hotels.
Still, the Giardini felt like a Ghibli film set with the lush terrain and mismatched buildings and their insides of art unravelling in random ways, a world at once magic but hostile, magnetic but exhausting.
I had expected the pavilions to be more museum-like; in photos, they looked more prominent and lost in the trees, as if it took some time to walk from one to another. But it was more like a snug and familiar college campus of mini buildings and reminded me of visiting Pompeii earlier this year, with the tight, compact paths making everything almost cheekily close by.
I also preferred that it took a day to get familiar with the layout and that it stayed exotic. But I didn’t acclimatise and, adding to this, the Venice Biennale’s curatorial was a blur of impact and thought. Though, I wasn’t sure if it was possible for them to say anything cohesive. And I’m still not sure if it’s possible to look at, en masse, such a variety of mediums, ideas and cultural contexts and get it and not just be overwhelmed, weary and clueless.
It felt criminal to see so much art at once as a spectator. It was like walking through a bookshop without a choice to bring anything to read home, or a cinema where you only get glimpses of frames of many films. It’d be more diplomatic to see one pavilion a day. But you can’t do that with 24 euros for a single entrance ticket. Instead, I was giddy with stimuli, limited by time and too naive to understand my surroundings.
Perhaps the structure of the Venice Biennale prohibits a satiating visit.
I could, at best, try not to see everything.
At the Arsenale on day two (the second major Venice Biennale site, a former shipyard), I slipped through. Attendants side-eyed me when I didn’t pause. I visited the main exhibition twice: once quickly, then, on my way back, stopping at pieces like the suspended hair braids in River Claure’s photographs. I went to the national pavilions of the countries where my friends are from to send them photos until I connected enough to stay, like I did at the Mexican Pavilion.
Here, Erick Meyenberg’s As we marched away, we were always coming back… featured a long dining table of white ceramics that looked fossilised from their original purposes. Behind, a warmly coloured video showed a family in the sun amongst grass, flowers, bees and horses that was very Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and I Am Love vibes. Then, the video transitioned to shadows of the ceramics – mirrored by the physical tableware in the exhibition – like a memory of its earlier scenes. Can people reconstitute themselves in new lands, or do they lose themselves, a ghost of connection to home and community past?
After leaving,* I found a bar to sit and take notes, letting my thoughts settle, as the sun slipped onto the water and dusk made the canals darkly reflective. I tried to write, but couldn’t pull apart singular moments – though, the rhythms of Wael Shawky’s theatrical film still rang in my head.
I ordered a spritz bianco. The waiter was worried, saying it wasn’t orange, pointing to Aperol spritzes around the terrace until I confirmed, “It’s fine, I’m sure!” But his concerns were valid; it was essentially watered-down wine, bland and just what I needed after 48 hours at the Venice Biennale.
*Being denied entry back in the Giardini, see my vlog.
