Chloe Wyma on “The Milk of Dreams”

Humbert was essentially the most stunning boy within the city.
He had blue eyes and golden curls.
He was very stunning, however he was nasty.
He preferred placing rats within the beds of his sisters.
The little ladies cried.
Sooner or later, Rose, his sister, put a crocodile in his mattress.
“AI” yelled Humbert, “I’m afraid there’s a crocodile in my mattress!”
However Humbert was so stunning the crocodile gave him an agreeable smile. Humbert and the crocodile had change into associates.
The kid was even nastier than he was earlier than as a result of he may go all over the place with the crocodile.
—Leonora Carrington

PAINTED IN THE 1950S on the partitions of her sons’ bed room and later collected in a youngsters’s e-book known as The Milk of Desires, Leonora Carrington’s depraved fairy tales impressed the title and tenor of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Crammed with disobedient youngsters, deviant friendships, orphaned monsters, evil crones, sentient meat, hungry furnishings, misplaced heads, scatological warfare, and pharmacological magic, Carrington’s tales struck curator Cecilia Alemani for his or her building of what she describes as “a world freed from hierarchies, the place everybody can change into one thing else.” Alemani endeavored to create one thing like this world in her stunning and perturbing exhibition, and to an ideal diploma she has succeeded.

Within the rotunda entrance to the Arsenale, Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh’s sightless Brick Home, 2019, half feminine determine, half architectural envelope, is encircled by the gorgonizing black-and-white collagraphs of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón. A self-described atheist, Ayón devoted her oeuvre to deciphering the mysteries and rituals of Abakuá, an Afro-Cuban initiatory fraternity whose core legend considerations a girl who, very like Ayón herself, appropriated and redistributed patriarchal information. Whereas gathering river water, the princess Sikán captured in her vessel a sacred speaking fish that exposed to her ancestral knowledge reserved for males. In defiance of her father, she disclosed these secrets and techniques to her lover, stated to be the prince of a rival kingdom. Her Promethean crime was punished by loss of life. (Ayón’s personal story additionally ends tragically, with the artist’s mysterious 1999 suicide.)

Sikán seems in plenty of Ayón’s collagraphs, generally as a black determine, generally white, usually armored in fish scales. She cradles a sacrificial goat within the icon-like Sin título (Sikán con chivo) (Untitled [Sikán with Goat]), 1993, her large shiny eyes assembly our gaze. The print, the wall textual content tells us, was a present to the ceramicist Stellana Favaro Poletti, who hosted Ayón in Italy when she exhibited on the 1993 Biennale; its again is inscribed with a dedication: To Stellana with a lot love and gratitude. The work presages a lot of what’s to come back in “The Milk of Desires”: a revaluation of Indigenous and syncretic cosmologies over Enlightenment paradigms of data manufacturing; a recursive remedy of artwork historical past (particularly within the 5 thematic “time capsule” rooms scattered by means of the Giardini and the Arsenale); a pluralistic and affirmative feminist politics reflective of the present’s unprecedented demographics (with greater than 90 p.c of the included artists figuring out as feminine or nonbinary); an aesthetic embrace of Surrealism and magic befitting Silvia Federici’s name for a “re-enchantment of the world” towards the religious privations of capitalism; and an ethos of “symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood” throughout nationwide, identitarian, and speciational divisions. Key touchstones on this regard are Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman essential principle and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg” (1985) and “Companion Species” (2003) manifestos. Concluding the previous textual content, Haraway wrote, “Although each are certain within the spiral dance, I might somewhat be a cyborg than a goddess.” “The Milk of Desires” dances each components, sublating primordialist and constructivist imaginaries and enjoining us to entertain the decentering, hybridizing prospects of “becoming-animal,” “becoming-machine,” and “becoming-earth.”

Early on within the Giardini, we encounter “The Witch’s Cradle.” The primary of the time capsules, and distinguished by Alemani because the fulcrum of her exhibition, the gallery is dedicated to ladies artists who “undertake themes of metamorphosis, ambiguity, and fragmentation to distinction the parable of the Cartesian unitary.” Feminine Surrealist manufacturing predominates, from the room’s namesake 1943 movie by Maya Deren, which weaves an ensorcelling net by means of the Correalist environs of Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, to Jane Graverol’s L’école de la vanité (The Faculty of Vainness), 1967, a collaged-and-painted cyborg Sphinx that emblematizes, extra manifestly than another work on view, the Harawayan assemblage of animal, human, and machine that’s the present’s polestar. Carrington is represented right here (although with fewer works, and fewer spectacular ones, than may be anticipated of an exhibition flying her flag). So is her buddy and accomplice in witchcraft Remedios Varo, whose 1956 portray Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente) (Concord [Suggestive Self-Portrait]) glows like a cabochon behind museum glass, its central determine skewering numerous curios—seashells, crystals, a turnip, a scrap of paper bearing the quantity pi—on the traces of a musical employees.

A principled effort is made to replicate Surrealism’s worldwide and sometimes anti-imperialist trajectories. See, for instance, the colourful gouaches of self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine (hailed by André Breton because the teenage “queen” of a dawning period of “emancipation and harmony”) and the writing of Martinican mental Suzanne Césaire, who seen Surrealism as “the tightrope of our hope,” upon which “these sordid up to date antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilized/savage might be transcended.” “The Witch’s Cradle” deterritorializes Surrealism and ultimately exceeds it, as an example in a radiant Harlem Renaissance vitrine through which Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s plaster maquette for the Pan-African allegory Ethiopia Awakening, 1921, unites with a bronze mannequin of Augusta Savage’s misplaced World’s Honest monument Raise Each Voice and Sing (the Harp), 1939, accompanied by Laura Wheeler Waring’s neo-Egyptian covers (1923–28) for W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Disaster.

There are additionally darker, Mephistophelian energies at work. Valentine de Saint-Level, writer of the protofascist and anti-sisterhood “Manifesto of Futurist Lady” (1912) and the “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913), is represented by ten woodcut impressions of her Métachorie (Past the Refrain) performances. Likened by one critic to a “Swedish gymnastics demonstration in Merovingian costume,” the Métachorie had been synesthetic experiences incorporating poetry and dance with projections of airtight symbols and the effluvia of “unique and horrible perfumes.” Close by, footage performs of Mary Wigman’s propulsive, Orientalizing Hexentanz (Witch Dance). Conceived in 1914, the piece was restaged by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda in 1934, by which period Wigman’s neopagan aesthetics had developed towards what may charitably be known as an lodging of Völkisch atavism. The wall textual content euphemistically tiptoes round this historical past, describing Wigman’s performances as “instruments for addressing pressing points of contemporary life, such because the social function of girls or the insurance policies of German nationalism.” I point out this unlucky bowdlerism not as a result of I feel Hexentanz needs to be stricken from the reworked canon assembled right here. On the contrary, it’s helpful—and art-historically trustworthy—to confront the truth that reactionary artwork and concepts might be nurtured within the cradles of herstory and historical past alike.

A tender mythology of matriarchal advantage can be obvious within the first historic capsule within the Arsenale: a pink, womb-like Wunderkammer impressed by Ursula Okay. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Provider Bag Concept of Fiction,” which posited that the earliest prehistoric instruments weren’t weapons however vessels for gathering nuts, berries, grains, and water (recall Sikán’s miraculous catch). This serves as an edifying pretext for the presentation of myriad kinds suggestive of cavities, chalices, and containers: a floating show of Ruth Asawa’s ethereal wire sculptures; a sequence of nineteenth-century papier-mâché fashions of a fetus rising in utero (utilized by Aletta Jacobs, the primary lady physician within the Netherlands, to review feminine replica); a gaggle of frangible ovate sculptures by Maria Bartuszová, which the artist made by coating balloons in plaster; a miniature beaded purse by Sophie Tauber-Arp, valuable on its mirrored tray.

Within the Giardini, two different time capsules recuperate feminist artwork histories. “Corps orbite” considerably perversely pairs concrete poetry by Tomaso Binga, Ilse Garnier, and Mary Ellen Solt with proof of the mediumistic practices of nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton and disgraced Puglian necromancer Eusapia Palladino, amongst different examples of mystically inclined automatism. The ties that bind this room may be tenuous (fuzzy speak of l’écriture female), however why quibble within the presence of a lot marvelous paranormal exercise?

In “Applied sciences of Enchantment,” Alemani spotlights the ’60s manufacturing of feminine Italian artists sidelined by official histories of arte programmata. Offered right here, the glass-and-neon sculptures of Laura Grisi and Nanda Vigo, the syncopated rule-based abstractions of Lucia di Luciano, and the protodigital kaleidoscopic screens of Grazia Varisco appear to be vestiges of a bygone technopositivism. They depart me a bit chilly, however their cybernetic imagery and computational logics bleed into the actually enchanting artwork of the adjoining rooms, host to the drunken deductive buildings of Vera Molnar (an early adopter of algorithm-generated artwork) and to Ulla Wiggen’s precisionist gouaches of circuit boards and archaic pc innards. A scrolling diagram by Agnes Denes chronicles the longue durée of synthetic instruments and machines, a pleasant reminder that we now have all the time been cyborgs.

The present’s closing capsule, actually, proposes a lineage of cyborgian artwork—from the dumpster-diving genderfuckery of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to the robotic ectoplasms of Kiki Kogelnik—that anticipates Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg as an avatar of “transgressed boundaries” and “potent fusions” between nature and artifice, physique and thoughts. The room, titled “Seduction of the Cyborg” in homage to a 1994 work by Biennale artist and particular point out recipient Lynn Hershman Leeson, is host to many bionic marvels and extraordinary automatons. See, for instance, the cyberpunk trouvé of neoclassical sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd’s delicate prostheses for disfigured World Warfare I veterans; the mechanomorphic magnificence of Alexandra Exter’s costume designs for the 1924 Soviet sci-fi image Aelita, the Queen of Mars; the slow-moving bachelor machine of Rebecca Horn’s Kiss of the Rhinoceros, 1989. However what I’ll most likely bear in mind most is a sextet of wacky and fantastic Expressionist costumes by Hamburg dancer Lavinia Schulz and her accomplice, Walter Holdt, which maintain down the middle of the cavernous gallery. By all accounts, the duo had been completely devoted to their theatrical artwork as a better calling. “Spirit and cash are two antagonistic poles,” Schulz as soon as wrote, “and if you happen to promote religious concepts for cash, you bought the spirit to the cash and misplaced the spirit.” The lovable, Muppet-like costumes right here hail from 1924—the identical yr that, in determined monetary straits, Schulz shot Holdt after which herself, 4 days earlier than her twenty-eighth birthday. Their destiny, unremarked within the gallery, is a harsh lesson that the transformative energy of the creativeness has its limits when ranged towards financial actuality.

“The Milk of Desires” teems with iconographies of metamorphism—animal, vegetable, and mineral—from Shuvinai Ashoona’s platypus- and walrus-headed chimeras (which earned the jury’s second particular point out) to Felipe Baeza and Rosana Paulino’s germinating dryads to Silver Lion winner Ali Cherri’s movie Of Males and Gods and Mud, 2022, which overlays footage of brickmakers in Sudan with telluric creation myths from completely different world cultures. Myrlande Fixed brings forth Vodou mermaids from intricate tambour beadwork; Ambra Castagnetti furbelows an Amazonian breastplate with ceramic calamari; Frantz Zéphirin transmogrifies Atlantic enslavers into snouted beasts. The mononymous Ovartaci conjures misplaced Babylons populated by bipedal felines in work made throughout her fifty-six-year confinement in a Danish psychiatric hospital. (In 1957, she persuaded the docs there to permit her gender-affirming surgical procedure.)

“The Milk of Desires” enjoins us to surrender our “species supremacy” and embrace the decentering, hybridizing processes of “becoming-animal,” “becoming-machine,” and “becoming-earth.”

Because the fabulous menagerie assembled in “The Milk of Desires” attests, multispecies intermingling is fertile territory for artwork, however hybridity as such isn’t ontologically harmless or virtuous. (Keep in mind Carrington’s little Humbert and the way he ended up “even nastier” after his encounter with the crocodile?) As Braidotti cautions within the exhibition’s catalogue, “We can not naively take the posthuman as an intrinsically subversive or liberatory class,” and the present stumbles when its posthumanist topoi start to really feel panacean or programmatic. Take Eglė Budvytytė’s Songs from the Compost: mutating our bodies, imploding stars, 2020, shot in a lichen forest in Lithuania. The movie options indolent, fashion-y takes of engaging younger performers idling, frolicking, and sprouting umbilical cords and fungal excrescences as a soporific voice-over guides the viewers by means of “a strategy of mineralization” (a course of that includes “studying from the stone neighborhood” and “implementing stone values”) earlier than engaging us to enter the “moist moist slippery complicated” of the bacterial kingdom. Regardless of the posthumanist critique of such binary oppositions as bios/zoe and nature/tradition, a form of neo-Rousseauian primitivism reemerges right here, with the picture of the “noble savage” supplanted by that of a feminized nature (“micro organism . . . she is going to handle you”).

It stays to be seen what energy this imagined neighborhood—comprising, I suppose, all sentient and nonsentient matter excluding straight white shkotzim—would possibly flex within the electoral sphere, on the level of manufacturing, or within the streets.

Marianna Simnett’s porcine sexploitation fable The Severed Tail, 2022, is extra Carringtonian in its excesses and edges, embracing horror, obscenity, and grotesque humor. Ditto Raphaela Vogel’s Können und Müssen (Potential and Necessity), 2022, put in close to Simnett’s work within the Arsenale. A supersize mannequin of the male anatomy, labeled in German with numerous maladies and issues and hitched to a cortege of skeletal giraffes, Vogel’s bizarrerie parades previous the grand Pisser Triptych, 2021–22, by Louise Bonnet, whose microcephalic giantesses discharge formidable sprays of urine and breast milk. Resembling elfin fountains, Jes Fan’s cantilevered buildings comprise puddles of pearly goop laced with the hormone prolactin (an endocrinological riff on “The Milk of Desires”?), whereas Mire Lee’s kinetic structure of pumps and wiggling tubes secretes Bataillean surpluses of liquid clay.

Thirty-seven years in the past, Haraway envisioned “constructing a political kind that truly manages to carry collectively witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, moms, and Leninists lengthy sufficient to disarm the state”—a speculative alliance that comes near capturing the carnivalesque, if not fairly state-dismantling, hybridity on view in “The Milk of Desires.” In her catalogue contribution, Braidotti proposes one other coalitional politics: “an assemblage between ladies and LGBTQ+ because the others of ‘Man,’ and the opposite ‘others’ within the type of non-whites (postcolonial, Black, Jewish, Indigenous, and hybrid topics), non-anthropomorphic organisms (animals, bugs, vegetation, bushes, viruses and micro organism), and so forth—a colossal hybridisation of species.” It stays to be seen what energy this imagined neighborhood—comprising, I suppose, all sentient and nonsentient matter excluding straight white shkotzim—would possibly flex within the electoral sphere, on the level of manufacturing, or within the streets. But when one takes even a quarter-step exterior the artwork world’s magic circle, one can grasp how such rhetoric would possibly serve a revanchist Proper that’s constructing terrifying momentum off its personal people demons: on this case, a loony Left elite that has extra to say about making widespread trigger with mushrooms than concerning the rise of rural “deaths of despair.” Alemani has characterised the exhibition’s posthumanism as a response, partly, to “the looming risk of environmental catastrophe,” however framing this risk in idealist phrases—as a consequence of anthropocentrism, Enlightenment rationality, or the Weltanschauung of “species supremacy”—can’t assist however obscure its materials trigger. “International warming,” as environmental historian Jason W. Moore reminds us, “just isn’t the accomplishment of an summary humanity, the Anthropos. International warming is capital’s crowning achievement.”

That’s to not say I’ve no use for pondering with and thru the vegetation. Contemplate Candice Lin’s Xternesta, 2022. Half pagan altar, half mad scientist’s laboratory, the set up traces cosmopolitan enmeshments of nature and tradition, magic and medication, witchcraft and racecraft throughout late modernity. Numerous potions and tinctures (“clairvoyant testosterone,” “fermented face”) are displayed on pedestals crowded with taxidermied reptiles, talismans, and chemistry units, in addition to in niches lodged within the our bodies of polyhedral ceramic idols. The tales Lin tells along with her assembled supplies are too complicated to recount in full right here, however they’re implausible and actual, from the rake’s progress of eighteenth-century charlatan George Psalmanazar—who duped London society along with his declare that he was the primary indigene of Formosa (now Taiwan) to journey to Europe—to the institution, by fugitive Filipino slaves, of Saint Malo, Louisiana, believed to be the primary Asian settlement in the USA.

A jar full of a viscous, honey-like substance accommodates “fermented tea, sugar, dried shrimp, and clay” from the swampy remnants of this misplaced fishing village, swept away greater than a century in the past by a hurricane. Close by, Lin presents ceramic frogs fired from this muck—a tribute to a neighborhood she imagines as “a multi-racial house throughout time, the place Filipino and African enslaved and indentured employees escaped and had been later joined by nineteenth-century Chinese language and Indian indentured laborers fleeing debt-peonage situations.” One other show incorporates a container of kudzu root and bioplastics constructed from its starches. Historically utilized in Chinese language medication, kudzu was launched to the USA within the decade after the Civil Warfare, when it was championed as a treatment to the soil depletion wreaked by plantation agriculture. The plant’s westward migration, Lin notes, parallels that of Chinese language laborers, who had been “delivered to the US as a transition from and ‘resolution’ to slave labor. Later, each the plant and the indentured employees had been seen as invasive, perverse, and an unstoppable scourge.”

The identical invasive species runs wild in Treasured Okoyomon’s Southern Gothic backyard To See the Earth Earlier than the Finish of the World, 2022. An elegiac coda to the exhibition contained in the Arsenale, this overgrown crepuscular atmosphere concludes a roulade of installations portending civilizational extinction, from Sandra Mujinga’s Ozymandian effigies to Robert Grosvenor’s rusted husk of a corrugated-iron shed. Right here, a meandering path is superintended by feminine figures constructed from uncooked wool, yarn, dust, and blood, their morphologies calling again to Leigh’s monumental sculpture on the present’s entrance, their supplies to a paradisial Earthwork by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos at its coronary heart. But it surely’s the shared symbolism of the kudzu, in Lin’s altar and Okoyomon’s backyard, that captures my creativeness, as a result of it suggests hyperlinks between completely different historic origins and itineraries, and perhaps even the opportunity of a standard human path by means of the weeds.

Chloe Wyma is an affiliate editor of Artforum.