Biennial, schmiennial

“Biennial” means “every two years” in, I suppose, every language from Amharic to Tongan. Even in Italian.

But in Venice, “Biennale” has come to mean “The Voltron of international modern art exhibitions put on every single year to draw more people here for longer so they’ll, you know, spend money.”

The original event was inaugurated in April 30, 1895 and was dedicated solely to art.  Back then, that meant painting and sculpture.  But scheduling it to skip a year meant losing momentum, and limiting it to painting and sculpture was dangerously droll.

By now some Venice Biennale opens every spring, so they have worked around the logistical and etymological complications of “bi” by having created an assortment of choices — there is, alternatively, the Biennale of Art, Architecture, Dance, Music, Theatre, and the Venice Film Festival, which has always been once a year, though I suppose if there were a way to have one every four months the city would rejoice.

The opening weekend of the annual Biennale, of whatever sort, as I have chronicled in other years, is a spectacular spasm of art objects and art people in the zone of the Giardini, where the national pavilions are.  You have to pay to see what’s in there, but for these few triumphant days the neighborhood is bestrewn with art of the performance and/or concept variety.  Or something.

It’s hugely entertaining to see this gathering of the art clans in their startling garb, as well as the blithe spirits who come to demonstrate their feats of skill and daring.  They’re here to exhibit something about themselves, about the world, about what’s wrong with the world, about what’s wrong with everything, about I don’t really know what the heck what.

I dimly recall that perplexed unenlightened viewers used to be sneered at because they didn’t understand the work before them — peasants!  But now I have the impression that artists have ceased to concern themselves with being understood.  If these artists were people who had undergone years of therapy, I’d think that this state of mind represented progress.

As it is, I don’t know what it represents.  My grasp of the convoluted symbolism now in vogue is extremely feeble, and certain exotic forms of irony are evidently beyond my mental or emotional capacity to comprehend, much less appreciate.

But I’m cool with all this now.  If they don’t care about being understood, I’m not worried about not understanding.

Two thoughts have taken up permanent residence in my brain.

One: That much of contemporary art has gotten trapped in the Dadaism Room and can’t get out.  (The room has no doors, being Dadaist and all, ha ha).

Here’s the five-second rundown on Dada, helpfully summarized by Wikipedia:

The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades.^[2] Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois.^[3]

The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media.

So if it seems that art and politics and social causes have thrown themselves into a hot-tub together and are drying off in the Biennale, there is a long history of this already.  Nothing new going on here, folks, sorry.

Two:  That much of the art seen here, and anywhere else these artistoids go, doesn’t refer so much to culture as it does to other art.  It’s the visual equivalent of novels that are really about language.  Conclusion: As it gets broader and covers more conceptual territory, art is becoming shallower and shallower.  Western culture itself may be in the process of shallowization, but art is only making it worse.

Paul Gauguin noticed something of this already happening in the late 1800’s: “The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience,” he observed.  “Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”

We wandered, baffled and bemused, around and through the throngs over the weekend, and below are some examples of what we saw on Friday and Saturday (Opening Night!).  The Biennale will go on till November 22; this divertissement gets longer each year.  If they continue at this rate, eventually it will just be simply the “Ennale.”