The main problem, as well as the original sin, of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition is that it was born old. As old as Europe and the entire Western civilization, in an irreversible crisis and now afraid that two wars in two crucial areas of the world, Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, risk evolving into a single, great planetary conflict. But all this seems almost non-existent in Venice, except through more or less fleeting signs: the closed Russian Pavilion, the almost closed Israeli Pavilion, the beautiful video in the Polish Pavilion, dedicated precisely to the conflict in Ukraine. This Biennial meditates, prays and sings (in the Italian Pavilion, in the Egyptian one). It inebriates us with perfumes in Korea or smells from parts of Japan. The United States, which should replace the eagle with the crying crocodile in its symbolism, is quick to throw the pedestals of every possible monument out of the pavilion, in the most didactic observance of “cancel culture”, and clings to a mediocre but colorful artist of Cherokee and Choctaw origin, Jeffrey Gibson.
In reality it is not the war, but the fear the subtheme of this edition. The most famous art exhibition in the Western world, direct heir to the triumphalism of the Universal Exhibitions of the early 20th century, those which celebrated the glories of industrialization and the undoubtedly magnificent destiny of modern man, officially declares that Western civilization is collapsing on itselfdevoid of ideas regarding politics, economics and, inevitably, art: the disastrous German pavilion is the most disturbing symptom.
So what does he do? He relies on a director who comes from Brazil, where he runs a museum, Adriano Pedrosa, who declares himself queer, with everything that this complex term includes, even difference and strangeness. Pedrosa, on the one hand, claims a modernist tradition in the South of the world, actually showing us how and how much non-European or North American artists struggled to keep up with the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that established themselves in Paris or New York. With all due respect, perhaps the Venice Biennale was not the right place to compensate those who had been left out of the loop, weighing down the exhibition with an overly large historical core. An old and faded section, but Pedrosa tries to remedy this by opening the doors to indigenous art, to brilliant pictorial tours de force, to the always welcome textile art (after all, when we travel in those parts, a piece of fabric to put on the sofa we always pack in our suitcase) and colorful performances in the more or less traditional costumes of the peoples represented. The audience, at the opening, was in raptures, especially in the presence of «Messaggeri del sole», which is not the name of an Italian musical group of the seventies, but the title of the duo’s «Afrofuturist» happening Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovica grotesque example of ecumenical hybridization.
This Biennial will be very popular, because it reaches various audiences, from political correctness whiners to ethnography enthusiasts. And hundreds of thousands of visitors will be moved because the famous South of the world is colorful but has a lot of problems (not excluding us, who exploit and pollute it). However, at the same time, they will travel along it happy and freed from the sense of guilt, and above all entranced by such explosive multi-ethnic beauty. This edition of the over one hundred year old exhibition is the replica of what happened from the 18th to the 20th century. Exoticism and Orientalism first became a fashion, then a necessity for artists on the run (Gauguin) or in search of those formal novelties, perhaps those of “Art nègre”, which the exhausted Western canon could no longer offer (Picasso docet). Today, when we all risk disappearing because we have no ideas (artists, where are you?) and projects, we all return to being convinced lovers of the exotic, unconscious explorers of Tropics that are no longer sad (so much for that jinx Claude Lévi-Strauss).
It’s still a way to escape fear, guilt and boredom.
