Daniel Birnbaum on “The Milk of Dreams”
I COUNT NINE strong solo exhibitions by male up to date artists in palaces scattered throughout Venice: Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Hermann Nitsch, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Daniel Richter, Ugo Rondinone, and Stanley Whitney. I later understand that there are much more, however 9 is the variety of “malic moulds” in Marcel Duchamp’s Bachelor Machine, the male a part of his The Bride Stripped Naked by Her Bachelors, Even (the Massive Glass), 1915–23. Carrying uniforms, they symbolize masculine varieties, and so they make me consider the central exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, because the bride.
Simply as in Duchamp’s erotic allegory, the bride is “milky.” The bachelors, caught in masturbatory monotony, can’t fairly attain her. She stays the motor of their need and has “feeble cylinders.” There isn’t any direct contact, however the proximity makes doable electrical connections.
“The Milk of Goals,” Alemani’s spectacular exposition of principally ladies artists from all components of the world, takes its title not from the Milky Approach within the Massive Glass however from a youngsters’s guide by Leonora Carrington. The present is nothing lower than an try and rewrite the greater than century-long historical past of the avant-garde, highlighting key ladies in early modernism and making seen innumerable experimental practitioners whom we are inclined to encounter solely as fascinating footnotes to essays on legendary males.
A living proof: Nadja, the eponymous character of André Breton’s autobiographical novel, recognized to most as an elusive Surrealist muse who quickly disappeared into psychological sickness. Breton’s dreamy account of their encounter has been learn for almost a century, however what traces did Nadja herself depart, past the writer’s metaphysical projections? From the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet, in Paris, Alemani has excavated the unique illustrated letters Nadja despatched Breton, together with a self-portrait in ink on a chunk of paper tablecloth and a lipstick print on paper. On the Biennale’s Central Pavilion, these poetic paperwork are displayed in a dimly lit, mustard-colored gallery named “The Witch’s Cradle,” one in all 5 historic capsules that punctuate the shows of latest artwork. It’s my favourite area within the present: a sublime cupboard of curiosities that includes better-known however not precisely overexposed pioneers, equivalent to Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, and Mary Wigman, and a few twenty further artists, lots of whom I had by no means heard of.
To completely assess Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a member of New York Dada and, in keeping with some students, the inventor of the readymade, requires some radical rethinking. Identical to Duchamp, she had a penchant for cross-dressing and would incorporate discovered objects into her wardrobe. And identical to him, she stretched and manipulated the English language to create experimental poetry: “‘Say it with’— — — / Bolts.” she writes in her posthumously revealed “A Dozen Cocktails—Please,” (1923–27). “Thunder! Serpentine aircurrents— — — —Hhhhhhhhhphssssssssssss! The very phrase penetrates!”
What her work makes abundantly clear is that I ought to rethink the Duchampian vocabulary I initially used to characterize the association of the exhibitions in Venice. If anybody is performing some stripping right here, it is going to be the baroness herself. I encounter her works within the flesh for the primary time: the readymade God, a ca. 1917 piece of plumbing cosigned and documented by Morton Schamberg; Charles Sheeler’s authentic {photograph} of a sculpture titled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1920; and the assemblage Limbswish, 1918–20, which exemplifies her follow of incorporating discovered objects into her work, thus collapsing the excellence between artwork and life.
Imagery of the baroness dominates a historic capsule named “Seduction of the Cyborg,” a survey of tech fantasies of the following a long time—Hershman Leeson’s exploration of the lifetime of a cyborg, say, or Lu Yang’s shamanistic overload. And but the exhibition as an entire doesn’t mirror the explosion of virtuality and technological abstraction that we now have skilled globally through the pandemic—no holograms, no mixed-reality apps, not a single VR headset. Fairly a aid for audiences eager for artwork and other people within the flesh.
Three years in the past, I felt that your complete exhibition was near a tipping level, with each second work using applied sciences anticipating whole digital immersion. “The Milk of Goals,” a present with extra lifeless and elder artists than any earlier installment of the Biennale, is a refined museological experiment that in a few of its most stunning moments appears towards the previous for glimpses of doable futures.
A captivating gallery dedicated to visible applied sciences and types of speculative diagrams options works by Agnes Denes, who renders seen human thought techniques in encyclopedically wealthy prints, and Ulla Wiggen, who in meticulous work from the mid-Sixties portrays the insides of mechanical units. The character of a diagram is to be summary but representational. It’s a means of coding data pictorially that’s not depending on naturalism—although practical parts are readily included into its symbolic vocabulary. Wiggen’s latest work of the irises of eyes might seem to flee technological obsessions and demand on the opportunity of a direct and unsullied gaze. If the machinic work offered a technical world with an engineer’s precision, and with out atmosphere, tone, or particular perspective, Wiggen’s latest works could possibly be their soulful opposites.
However that might be a simplification. Irises have been interpreted as diagrams, too. Practitioners of iridology match their observations to charts that divide the iris into zones that correspond to particular components of the human physique. Iridologists see the eyes as home windows into the physique’s state of well being. In medical “image atlases,” the human iris is offered as a sort of technical handbook for scrutinizing the interior organs. And as we speak’s scanning applied sciences flip our eyes into surveillance instruments. Do not forget that the digital world now’s sutured to our nervous techniques.
The exhibition doesn’t mirror the explosion of virtuality and technological abstraction that we now have skilled globally through the pandemic—no holograms, no mixed-reality apps, not a single VR headset.
“The Milk of Goals,” says Alemani, focuses on three themes: “the illustration of our bodies and their metamorphoses; the connection between people and applied sciences; and the connection between our bodies and the Earth.” All of them appear rooted in methods present in Surrealism. One other Surrealist theme is the obsession with the attention, ecstatic or blinded. And certainly, Simone Leigh’s magnificent Brick Home, 2019, which greets guests on the entrance of the Arsenale, is partly notable for her lack of eyes.
As in all exhibitions of this measurement, there are works referring to key themes that I might relatively neglect. In reality, I’ve already forgotten them. What one remembers are, I feel, singular moments of visible precision and depth: for example, the big luminous work by Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera, combining patterns harking back to textile design with ghostlike creatures. There are many figurative work that translate the energies of historic Surrealism into up to date vocabularies in startling methods—Jana Euler’s grotesque bodily convulsions, Christina Quarles’s smears and drips on prime of bare flesh. As for the connection between our bodies and the Earth, I keep in mind Zheng Bo’s video of Nordic males engaged in copulative intercourse not with each other however with nature itself. And naturally, I’ll at all times recall exiting the exhibition through Treasured Okoyomon’s overwhelming To See the Earth Earlier than the Finish of the World, 2022, with its increasing invasion of kudzu vines, a seemingly unstoppable type of life, and a gaggle of huge mysterious creatures silently watching your each step. Maybe these are the guardians of the Earth—the final ones to depart earlier than it’s throughout.
Contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum is the inventive director of Acute Artwork in London and a professor of philosophy on the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His novel Dr. B., revealed in French final 12 months by Gallimard, seems in English translation this summer season (HarperCollins).
