I fly into Italy the day before the opening of the Venice Biennale, which happens to coincide with Sigmund Freud’s (and my) birthday. A good friend takes me to dinner. I savor it, along with a fantastic white wine, while reminiscing about grad school and how we met in Venice twenty years ago. In my jet-lagged overconfidence, I bravely polish the night off with a shot of espresso, after which I can’t fall asleep till 5 AM.
In my futile and demented state of insomnia, verging on panic, knowing perfectly well what lay ahead of me in the next days, I begin to remember Kafka’s diaries:
“…I’m completely awake, have the feeling of having slept not at all or only under a thin skin, have the work of falling asleep ahead of me anew and feel rejected by sleep. And the rest of the night until toward 5 it goes on in such a way that I do sleep but at the same time intense dreams keep me awake. I am practically sleeping next to myself, while I myself must grapple with dreams. Toward 5 the last trace of sleep is used up, I only dream, which is a greater strain than being awake.”
I fall asleep at dawn and dream that my son is calling to tell me a rabbi is in our home. I run to the house thinking there is an emergency. The rabbi points to my mother, who is staring blankly at the wall and ripping up our family photographs, which are scattered all over the floor. I wake with a gasp — at least the night was not a total waste.
In the morning I am barely sane. I plan to meet another friend for coffee — the same friend I met for coffee two years ago on the opening day of the Biennale, when a vegetable boat plowed into our vaporetto. I was fine then, but my friend had to get X-rays. This time she spills my cappuccino all over herself in the worst possible way. Luckily, she has pants at the dry cleaner next door. It all works out, as it always does in Venice.
Perhaps this is why every two years, I convince myself to go to the opening of the Biennale, even though the last memorable edition I can recall was in 2007. It was around the time Charles Saatchi’s Sensation artists dominated the scene — perhaps the beginning of the end, or the beginning of what we now know as the art world: big emotions, big messages, big money, and now massive Disney-like sculptures and installations. The Biennale has become exhausting, overwhelming, and, quite frankly, existentially dreadful — the Costco of the art world.
While I still have high hopes for certain countries — those that have resisted falling into the trap of didactic narratives — I watch with sadness every two years as yet another artist is chosen to represent the pro- or anti-flavor of the year, regardless of curator or theme. As the saying goes: if you can’t sculpt it big, paint it red — or in today’s case, red, green, black, and white.
Even so, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, I tell myself as I walk into the Giardini and head toward the Japan Pavilion, hoping for the likes of Rei Naito. Instead, I encounter Los Angeles–based performance artist Ei Arakawa-Nash literally handing out Instagrammable rubber babies for visitors to carry around while contemplating “care.” I have done my time contemplating care for fifteen years, and on one hour of sleep from the night before, this is not the parenting flashback I am in need of. I suppose the ineffable parameters of Japanese aesthetics begin to wobble when competing with curatorial concepts such as Luxembourg’s immersive audiovisual installation personifying human feces — La Merde.
Not today, Satan. Not today.
I avoid Pussy Riot’s self-promotional concert protest outside the Russian Pavilion and Florentina Holzinger dangling from a bell outside the Austrian Pavilion in the name of climate awareness. I rush past informal protest spaces, fashion parades, self-congratulatory activists, and “Top Ten Things to See at the Venice Biennale” peddlers. I walk past cafés packed with curators, critics, and art-world interlopers, bypassing the Arsenale entirely. I do not know where I am going, only that it is as far as possible from this pantheon of hyperbole.
I stop for an espresso and a palate cleanse in the form of D is for Duchamp, an archival presentation of documents, publications, and critical writings around Marcel Duchamp and his legacy at Rive dei Sette Martiri. Perhaps Duchamp is the one who got us into this postmodern art mess in the first place, but who will be clever enough to get us out?
I wander through various other national and collateral presentations with little to report beyond the proverbial same ol’, until I find my way into what is presented here as a Taiwan presentation (Collateral Event), installed in the Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice, a former prison from which the infamous Casanova once made a jailbreak. In it is the work of Li Yi-Fan, an Amsterdam-based Taiwanese artist working with digital simulation and game-engine aesthetics in his work Screen Melancholy.
The second I walked in, I knew I would stay for the full duration of this video artwork. An image of a naked man — a generated corpse-like figure without a broken skeletal system — moves about a virtual replica of the space we ourselves are situated in. The occasional conceptual, dystopian, philosophical anecdote forces me to stare into the digital abyss of the now. Li Yi-Fan, in a single video work, has delivered me into the abysmal future in which we already lurk but are afraid to open our eyes to. I return another two times after that to watch it. I cannot yet describe what the attraction is, but it feels to me to be the most relevant and important work in the Biennale. Like the screens we look into, it reflects the ongoing state of impermanence and our lost souls within it.
The digital poetry I see in museums coming from Asia these days relegates Western object art into the realm of craft — not to say that this is irrelevant, but it does not harbor the same immediacy it once did for me. So what does that say about the next generation?
The exception and highlight being the new Dries Van Noten Foundation at Palazzo Pisani Moretta. It has been a long time since beauty has been the goal in art, but desperate times call for desperate measures. What a relief it was to experience Beauty is the Only Real Form of Protest, which, like no other exhibition, lived up to its name. Curated by Noten himself, I had to pick my jaw up from the floor several times — not just from the beauty but from the overwhelming sense of gratitude. We want to eat the rich, but in this case the wealthy foundations are the only filter standing between the everlasting and the oversaturated market of slacker art cloaked as hyper-activism.
I begin the next day with the Canicula exhibition at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, screening eight major video works under the title Canicula, including favorites such as Baby I’m Yours by Janis Rafa and Wishful Thinking by Roman Khimey and Yarema Malashchuk.
Most impressive of all was a psycho-spiritually haunting work, Jarkov by Maya Watanabe, centered on the circumambulation of a fossilized mammoth in a Siberian cave. It feels unnecessary to describe the work in detail because it functions on a purely experiential level, yet it answered one of art’s oldest calls: to remind us of what Carl Jung referred to as the “two-million-year-old man” within us. Or the forty-thousand-year-old mammoth. A fundamental reminder that there are still artists who will dig as deep as it takes rather than chasing the wind.
That evening I head to the Yiddishland Pavilion presentation (Collateral Event), curated by Yevgeniy Fiks and Maria Veits, to see Words That Fit in My Mouth, hosted in a tiny space in Venice’s Jewish Ghetto — the original ghetto from which the word itself derives.
Few exhibitions possess the intimacy of these nightly gatherings: improvised talks, wine, performances, and conversations not entirely engulfed by the wrath of the day’s headlines. Arndt Beck, among others, examines Jewish culture’s influence on anarchist movements, while Eliana Pliskin Jacobs performs songs in Yiddish. This small but mighty pavilion provided exactly the respite I needed.
It is there that I meet an eighty-year-old true Venetian-French-Algerian Jewish doctor named Valeria, who lives on a yacht in the lagoon with her grandchildren. I am immediately invited to stay with the family on my next visit. Enchanted, I walk back to my little palazzo right outside of the Giardini. I hear helicopters overhead; Venice is playing a football match against Palermo. I am going home to dream.
If visiting Venice also make sure to see collatoral exhibitions:
Strange Rules @ Palazzo Diedo
Tadeusz Kantor @ Piazza San Marco
Dreamers/ Erwin Wurm @ Palazzo Fortuni
Helter Skelter; Arthur Jaffa and Richard Prince @ Fondazione Prada
Torundot; To Daughters of the East @ Palazzo Franchetti