While many will come to the Venice Biennale to see new works by some of the greatest artists of our day, others will be here for the more historical sections of Cecilia Alemani’s main show given over almost completely to work by dead women and gender nonconforming artists.
These sections are unusual for an exhibition like the Biennale, which typically aspires to be a survey of the global art scene as it stands right now. But Alemani has taken the step of interweaving these areas of the show, which she has termed “time capsules,” to provide a historical backbone for some of the contemporary art.
Titled “The Milk of Dreams,” its name derived from a Leonora Carrington children’s book, Alemani’s main show aims to broaden the history of Surrealism. Do not come thinking you might see works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and others of that lineage—they are not here. Instead, the focus is figures who have not yet received their proper place in the art historical canon, and that is what makes these parts of the Biennale so fascinating.
Within the art world, the tendency to pull artists out of the past and suggest them as underrated people worthy of a greater look is known as making a discovery. That term, however, is a faulty one—it often doesn’t account for the fact that various communities knew just how importance these artists were and continue to be, long before the mainstream picked them up. But in the case of Alemani’s main show, many of the people in the time capsules really are discoveries, in the sense that they have only rarely been shown in an art context, whether because they did not receive a traditional art education or because they worked in an adjacent field.
Expanding the Surrealist lineage is a worthy project, given that most of the movement’s famous progenitors were sex-obsessed straight white men. Alemani makes some important contributions to that project, but she does not go far enough. Almost every artist in these historical sections is a white European or American. Surely there are decades-old aesthetic affinities to be tapped in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia, and among Indigenous nations, as well.
There’s also an eat-your-vegetables approach to these sections, which feature works packed into vitrines inundated with wall text. (Some of these pieces are lesser objects by important artists, which doesn’t help either.) But that does not mean that they are not intellectually stimulating and that there aren’t people worth greater study along the way.
To offer a close look at the sections, below is a look at six of the most intriguing inclusions.
-
Ovartaci
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews The greatest find of the historical sections of this Biennale is Ovartaci, a Danish-born artist who spent some time in Argentina during the 1920s. Ovartaci was born under the name Louis Marcussen and assigned male at birth. She would later on identify as a woman, and would ultimately undergo gender affirmation surgery at a time when doing so was unusual, though it took repeated requests and an attempt at bodily alteration of her own before a hospital agreed to it. (In the final stages of her life, Ovartaci began to identify as man, though as the Biennale’s organizers note, she/her are the most commonly used pronouns when referring to her.) The name Ovartaci ultimately translates to something like “Chief Lunatic,” and her persona and art became a project of evoking off-kilter mental states, perhaps in reflection of the alienation she may have felt. Lithe extraterrestrial beings populate her paintings—a winged harpy is superimposed over an austere building in one. These modestly sized canvases are gripping, but it is her dolls, some of which are roughly life size, that steal the show.
-
Minnie Evans
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews The Edenic visions of Minnie Evans may seem to have a lot in common with some Surrealists featured here, but Evans differs in one key respect: she never received a formal art education. Instead, Evans learned her craft while she was a gatekeeper at the Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, which afforded her close and sustained viewings of the bountiful blooms that appear in her paintings. While you can easily explain away the presence of flowers in these works, it would be harder to rationalize the humans that seem to blur with the flora. In one untitled work, for example, a psychedelic arrangement of butterflies, peacock feathers, and leaves conceals a set of eyes; above it is a female figure who has a crown made of stacked flowers. This painting points to a perfect synthesis between humans and nature while also conjuring a sphere beyond the real world.
-
Josephine Baker
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Josephine Baker can hardly be said to be a “rediscovery”—that old chestnut in the art world—since she is justly well-known for her various activities in the first half of the 20th century. But how, exactly, does a person known primarily for dancing figure in a show composed almost solely of artists? Alemani intriguingly draws on Baker as a parallel for what was taking place in the Bauhaus, where artists like Mary Wigman (whose choreographies are also showcased in the same gallery) relied on jerky, off-putting movements to imply uncontrollable bodies and altered mental states. Baker’s work is represented by a film of her performing at the Folies Bergère cabaret in Paris during the ’20s. In it, she scrunches up her face, flings around her body, and dances the Charleston, all while also maintaining a gripping sensuality—a tough balancing act to pull off.
-
Linda Gazzera
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews What is it about spiritual mediums that continues to attract us to them? Photographs documenting Linda Gazzera’s work during the early 20th century showcase just how alluring it is to communicate with spirits we can’t see, even if it is easy to rationalize the activity as a facile endeavor. Once named the best medium of her day by a noted Italian psychologist, Gazzera is shown in one image seated before a levitating mask. So sophisticated was her craft that it continues to elude contemporary viewers—even after scrutinizing this photograph, you’re unlikely to be sure how she did it. Gazzera’s work is included in the Biennale within the context of mediumistic communication as a forerunner to some of the more out-there activities of the Surrealists.
-
Aletta Jacobs
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Aletta Jacobs’s anatomical models were some of the most thrilling works included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “Like Life” back in 2018, and they shine again at the Biennale, where they appear in the company of other science-themed objects produced by women. During the late 19th century, Jacobs was, for a period, the only practicing female doctor in the Netherlands, and the models she created were a part of a larger effort to explain female sexuality to the public by peering into the body and displaying what was going on in there. In the Biennale, there are a few pieces by Jacobs that show wombs that are cut open to reveal the curled-up fetuses inside them. Various organs are visible, along with the serene facial expression of this soon-to-be-born babies. These models perform the difficult balancing act of making pregnancy seem a bit surreal while also literally peeling back the mystery to reveal biological facts.
-
Maria Sibylla Merian
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Some of the oldest work in this Biennale comes courtesy of Maria Sibylla Merian, who, in 1699, became the first European woman to take a scientific voyage. She traveled to Suriname, then under Dutch control, and studied the plants and animals that she saw there. From what she saw on her trip, she produced Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamesium, a grouping of 60 hand-painted plates, 6 of which have come to Venice. In these works, disproportionately sized snakes, flies, and caterpillars inhabit a white space that’s often populated by just a few large plants. They tickle the eye, and were ultimately used back home in the Netherlands to classify the nature she witnessed firsthand in Africa. If you find the apolitical context for Merian’s work in the show too kind to the colonialists, head to the Estonian Pavilion, where artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi use these plates as a jumping-off point for an inquiry into the role that botany has played in the oppression of people in Indonesia.