Again and again bodies and plants, biomorphs and vegetables, growing and proliferating: in the end, at the main exhibition of this 59th Venice Art Biennale, one has the impression of having seen human, especially female bodies with plants sprouting more often than ever before – and vice versa. The curator Cecilia Alemani has laid out an enchanting course on which an enormous number of works can be seen, mostly by women, from superstars to rediscoveries and up-and-coming talents, which, despite this considerable range, often revolve around certain themes.
Alemani, in turn, has accentuated this with micro-exhibitions called “Time Capsules” within their major exhibition. And if there were also Goldene Löwen as a prize for entire rooms, which one would like to recommend to a museum for purchase, then the jury here could throw them around. The intimately staged cabinets deal with historical chapters of art history, exclusively by women. The titles include “The Witch’s Cradle”, “Seduction of the Cyborg” or “Technologies of Enchantment”, and it’s about the self-proclaimed coven of witches of surrealists around Leonora Carrington, from whose writings the title of the whole event comes: ” The Milk of Dreams”. It’s about early fusion fantasies of man and machine as a prelude to what would later be called the cyborg. And again and again it’s about “re-enchantment”, a re-enchantment with all possible means to counteract the “disenchantment” of the technological world once stated by Max Weber, for example technology of all things.
This is also based on the pioneering work of the large Frankfurt Surrealist Show from last year and is flanked at the same time by an exhibition in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the other side of the Grand Canal, which deals with “Surrealism and Magic”, subtitle: “Enchanted Modernity “, enchanted modernity. (From October in the Museum Barberini Potsdam.)
The return of magical thinking is often understood as an emancipative project
To have surrealism now jubilantly portrayed as a movement for feminist empowerment may be astounding, actually a bit frightening, but it is extremely contemporary. Because people with a penchant for the occult have known it for a long time, and those who are skeptical or even averse to the esoteric have had to take notice all the more in recent years: the return of magical thinking is understood under the rubrum “alternative ways of knowing” as an emancipative project and with a large institutional one success driven. At this Biennale, too, the word “spirituality” appears in the explanatory texts on the wall with as much frequency as the art business terms “position” or “position”.
Rosana Paulino,, from the series “Jatobá” (2019).
(Photo: Bruno Leão/Rosana Paulino/Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, and New York/Rosana Paulino)
Terms from the depths of the seventies blow one’s mind again: Soma, ie the body. Of somatization Sociologists of religion spoke at the time when the political revolt withdrew into the body, society rolled inward, and one’s own body became both a temple and a place of execution. The figure of the “shaman” is also popular again, at least as long as the indigenous animal urine drinkers of Siberia don’t refuse it as a cultural appropriation, that the term is constantly being used by Westerners, who feel the medicine man, the healer and the savior in themselves. Since the heyday of the sex commune, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich has probably not been invoked as often as he is today. This now mixes with keywords of the present such as the Anthropocene, mindfulness of other species and the global south. The “relational” is back from the 1990s, at that time friendly interaction with one another was already a subject of art, for example cooking.
Next door, an artist inserted a gene from her own body into a plant
Perhaps it is more than just a coincidence that the creator of the concept of “relational aesthetics”, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud, is now also opening a new private exhibition a few streets away. And that there a young artist, Dana-Fiona Armor, had a gene from her own body inserted into a plant; red hairs gradually grow on the tobacco leaves in question. It’s a bit techno-scary, but Bourriaud’s exhibition is also called “Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime.” The theory-loving Frenchman promises to renew the aesthetics of the sublime for a world stuck in the “feedback loops” of technology and climate change. Today, the sublime is no longer what makes the Romantic painters shudder because of its size and distance, like mountains or the sea. In a “shrinking world” it is much more comparable to “what a rabbit feels when it is blinded by the headlights of a speeding car”.
Just as in this biennial exhibition one can see physical forms growing into all sorts of extensions, so the exhibition itself can be seen as a body sprawling across the lagoon. Here and there one of the country pavilions seems grafted on thematically, and out in the city umpteen collateral exhibitions revolve around the whole thing like macrocosmic stars, which should not only fascinate astrologically sensitive people.
There is a reference in the Polish pavilion to Aby Warburg’s famous investigation of the “afterlife” of ancient star beliefs in the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia, only in contrast to Warburg not to analyze culture (in this case it is about the myths of Polish Roma), but to re-mystify. And there is, to quote another Warburg term, “energetic inversions”: In the Fondazione Prada, the artist Taryn Simon and the curator Udo Kittelmann have an encyclopedic exhibition about the “Human Brain” – from archaeological skull openers to the current state of neuroscience. It is difficult to imagine a more cerebral counter-show to the Biennale, which argues very much from the feelings and the physical, not least from the sub-corporeal.
From there it is not far to the room of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation for the Ukraine, where, for a change, the “West” does not encounter you as something that is accused of being critical of rationality, but for whose affiliation people die, who would rather not succumb to the rule of mysticism. There you can also see war debris from eastern Ukraine hanging on a rack: bent metal that, the way it’s hanging there, is oppressively similar to the amorphously swelling bodies in some of the works in the Biennale. Forms can change content and charge when migrating, Warburg also teaches this.
Still from Melanie Bonajo’s film “When the body says Yes”, on view in the Dutch Pavilion.
(Photo: Melanie Bonajo)
Next door, Melanie Bonajo transformed a church into a psychedelic haven for the Netherlands’ contribution; there, too, the pillows and bodies morph around one another like vinegar and oil. Very similar shapes can also be seen wafting across the new paintings by Daniel Richter, who is exhibiting at the Ateneo, where execution candidates were once prepared for the last course. Milky Dreams? Neo-Surrealism? Would be nice. In a second room, the Berlin painter reveals in an unusually brutal way what his semi-abstract forms allude to: war invalids and their prostheses.
Meanwhile, the Russian pavilion remains closed; the only thing to see there is the year “1914” surrounded by stucco on the facade. A coincidence, of course, but what a coincidence.