«I side with a history of art that ends up attributing perhaps too much centrality to the figure of the curator»: with this warning to sailors Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the penultimate generation (51 years old) guides the reader through 14 editions of the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition. Gioni interviews his colleagues and having himself curated a Biennial in 2013, to tell it he relies on questions from a predecessor, Robert Storr (Biennale 2007), while it was the turn of Jean Hoffmannwho perhaps will occupy the same role in the future, remedy the loss of the registration of the declarations of Harald Szeemann (curator in 1999 and 2001). If this repeated series of comparisons with blood relatives does not produce pathological outcomes, it is only because all those interviewed make an effort to limit theoretical drift as much as possible and to retracethrough their answers, a piece of history of the most famous art exhibition in the world.
We start with Achille Bonito Oliva (editor in 1993) and we end up with Adriano Pedrosa, who signed the current edition. These are the thirty years in which the Venice Biennale has experienced what has so far been its own maximum development in terms of exhibition area (with the incorporation of the entire Arsenal complex), the public, the artists and the participating countries. And the consequence of the parallel economic, social and geographical growth of contemporary art. Whose history, of course, is not made only by the exhibitions, while the question remains open as to how much the ideas and theories developed or embraced by that hybrid figure, the curator (critic, manager, entrepreneur, theorist, communicator, demiurge) , which has gradually consolidated over the past thirty years, can impact on the professional lives of artists, if not even on their way of “thinking about art”.
If this were the case, it could be explained paradox: the extreme formal and disciplinary heterogeneity that characterizes today’s art does not eliminate the sensation of a disconcerting homologation with respect to a codified way of “making art”. The book induces its ideal reader, a fifty-year-old (at least) who for age reasons has been able to visit all the Biennials described in full knowledge of the facts, to reflect on which editions and which works have left a mark on his memory. The one from the is missing 1997 (Celant died before Gioni managed to interview him), but the others? The one of Francesco Bonami (2003) was it really, as he himself defines it, «the last true Biennial», spectacularly «catastrophic» and the only worthy heir of that grandiose art festival offered by ABO in 1993? Or even: why later Jean Clair, who curated the centenary edition amidst many controversies in 1995, no president of the Biennale dared to call him a “heretic” with respect to the contemporary system? Or: why did Harald Szeemann’s 1972 Documenta in Kassel or, three years earlier, the exhibition «When Attitudes Become Forms» at the Kunsthalle in Bern go down in history, but not his two Venice Biennials?
What was told by the interviewees is also the thirty years of “first times”: of the first foreign director (Jean Clair), for example, while 10 years later Maria de Corral And Rosa Martínezin tandem, were also the first women at the helm of the exhibition. Robert Storr he was the first American curator and Bice Curiger, in 2011 sensationally cleared, with Tintoretto in the Central Pavilion, the presence of ancient art in an exhibition that until then had been increasingly focused on the present. The fact is that from then on the number of artists, if not ancient, at least deceased, has gradually increased in the central exhibition. The one curated by Cecilia Alemani it was instead the first to exhibit, overwhelmingly, more female artists than male artists. Okwui Enwezor (in 2015) and now Pedrosa have imprinted a a markedly political, sociological sign And anthropological to their curators, but the Venice Biennale, apart from these two moments of particular proximity to the latest editions of Documenta, has never derogated from an identity that embraces some aspects traditionally implicit in visual art: visionaryness, for example, or formal experimentation, pure aesthetic pleasure. Over the past thirty years, it has been the increasingly numerous national pavilions that have become the bearers of political, economic, environmental and identity issues and emergencies.
Because there are always two Biennials: that of the curator in chief who with his collaborators and artists dines at the «Paradiso» café at the entrance to the Gardens and that of the participating countries. This is why a history of the Biennale told only through the central exhibitions risks being, as well as partial, vaguely “colonialist”.
Caffè Paradiso
by Massimiliano Gioni, 295 pp., Johan & Levi, Milan 2024, €23.00
