“Don’t try to intellectualize art,” Leonora Carrington said (1).
Sacred cosmogonies converse with each other in this hugely spiritual artistic journey that was the 59th Venice Biennale. And Carrington’s work was there to remind us what we missed by ignoring, in the way we talk about art, what is called the female gaze.
Tracing its provenance to the effects of Carrington’s creative production as a mother, The Milk Of Dreams (left; 2) is actually a series of illustrations she drew on the walls of her sons’ room in Mexico, which later survived in diaristic form. Her son, Gabriel, in his book The Invisible Painting (3) suggests that near the end, when she was close to her 94th year of life, she didn't really talk or communicate much. Other than
saying “yes” or “no” and expressing basic concepts of like and dislike, the once vivace Carrington didn't really use the eloquence of speech to communicate. It is also known that she grew more suspicious towards the obsessive search for meaning and artistic motivation behind the dreamy images of her paintings.
The form of Cecilia Alemani’s curatorial desires for a re-enchantment of a troubled (4), patriarchal world is, at first, human, then vegetal, then animal, then vessel, then machine, then land, then language. It is precisely that language that I know I can speak, the one I share with these women artists, the exiles from the male-dominated geography of art who have found a way to exist in this sacred silence.
Entering the Arsenale, Simone Leigh's huge, almost totemic sculpture without eyes acts as a living figure of the fantastic, a protective ghostly appearance which introduces us to the world of female artists with the ultimate symbol of art: the eye (below). There was a feeling that those missing eyes were all around us, watching us acting and judging as beholders. This internal shift of perspectivism, the sense of art as an embodied experience is what, despite the curational faults of an otherwise kind of chaotic Arsenale tour, managed to make Alemani’s curatorial choices profoundly successful.
Mythical beings and gods of the overlooked Haitian culture, brought to life by Célestin Faustin and Myrlande Constant, float around in the second room, showing the curatorial endeavor to cast light into a less eurocentric historiography.
The drawings of Rosana Paulino in The Wet Nurse Series (below) consist of entangled networks of veins leading from reddened breasts sprouting from nipples, indicating milk, while also suggesting blood and leave me absolutely stunned, intricating physicality with oppression and the hybridity of the female body.
In the third “capsule” of the Arsenale reigns nature and the omnipotence of plants. There is a strong feeling that one is too contained in the papier mache replicas of the uterus seen inside the big exhibition vessel, in the thorough and bright touches of Maria Sibella Merian’s flowers, or the morbid vegetation of Birgit Jürgenssen (above).
Reminding us the central part botanical study played in the work of many professional female artists, who could travel unaccompanied for the first time for the sake of epistemology and research, this part of the exhibition could also be examining the special relationship women artists have had with floral painting as a means of expression and liberation (5).
At the end of the room, the incredible illusionary work of Firelei Báez that casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm throws me into a dazzlingly spectral orbit.
The deeper we go, the ordinary seems to transform into extraordinary through objects. In the sculptures of Candice Lin, a kind of historical alchemist known for her inventive use of materials, we see intricate cartographies (6) lurking behind macro-narratives, while later the amazing kinetic sculptures of Mire Lee reinforce Asian surrealism in a way that seems to be missing from the rest of the exhibition. While thinking that Asian surrealism in painting could be more present, Raphaela Vogel's white, carcass-like giraffes fill me up with a sense of internal terror. Puppets, dolls, cyborgs and prosthetic parts reign in the hall of Dada art and post war art.
