A Beyond-Human Biennale

Abstract

Nearly every review of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale cites its most impressive statistic: of the 217 artists participating in curator Cecilia Alemani’s international exhibition The Milk of Dreams, approximately 90 percent identify as women or gender nonconforming. This overwhelming majority enacts a radical reversal of the biennale’s statistical history, in which women’s contributions have typically hovered around 30 percent at best. Gender parity was only achieved in the most recent, 2019 biennale, with women-identifying individuals comprising 53 percent of artists in the central exhibition. The Milk of Dreams amounts to an intriguing course correction that signals not only new directions in contemporary art but reframes art history through alternative and gendered perspectives. I join the chorus of praise for Alemani’s exhibition, and I would add that there are other important representations afoot here. While some may (pejoratively) call this a “women’s biennale,” it is also (exuberantly) an exhibition of nonhuman actors: animals, plants, creatures, monsters, and cyborgs. In statements and interviews, Alemani has articulated her goal to illuminate the porous boundaries between human, animal, plant, and other nonhuman entities, in order to address such questions as “[W]hat are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?”1 The phrase “the milk of dreams” is taken from the title of an illustrated children’s book written and illustrated by Leonora Carrington in the 1950s. Carrington’s Milk of Dreams is a collection of tales and fables that range from darkly funny to horrifying. Most feature children and animals in concert with one another, bodies in various states of disassembly and hybridity. Heads fly off only to be reattached with chewing gum; a six-legged monstrous chihuahua woman wanders the streets bedecked in pearls. Abject images of bodily fluids and rotting meat foreground an insistently vulnerable corporeality of both human and nonhuman bodies. As cultural theorist Donna Haraway—whose influence is deeply felt in Alemani’s biennale—has succinctly written, “human beings are not in a separate compost pile.”2 Some artworks in the biennale grapple with these ideas head on: in the video Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars (2020) by Eglė Budvytytė (b. 1989, Vilnius, Lithuania), individuals move as though in a trance, bodies rhythmically contorting to slither, crawl, and flop in water, on lichen, and on sand, enacting the choreography of mysterious nonhuman organisms. Porous boundaries between bodies abound: in Christina Quarles’s (b. 1985, Chicago) paintings and drawings, for example, smears and drips merge already distorted bodies into one another, becoming a sexually indeterminate tangle of limbs. The global COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded our interconnectedness to nonhuman organisms, in that a virus too small for human eyes to see irrevocably changed our lives. Simultaneously, the virus galvanized a kneejerk reaction to double down on the myth of autonomy, as we desperately isolated to avoid infection. Consequently, a biennale that situates the human body in a nonhierarchical network of interspecies exchange feels at once complicated and crucial. Two initial galleries in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini illustrate the way in which the exhibition decenters the human experience and reconfigures established art histories. A monumental sculpture of an elephant by Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956, Essen, Germany) is the sole occupant of the first gallery. The hyperrealistic Elefant/Elephant (1987) stands on a pedestal, a dignified if not eerie emissary of the exhibition. While Fritsch’s sculpture is now historical—among her first forays into large-scale work in the 1980s—here it adopts a new, site-specific layer of meaning. The exhibition’s catalog entry explains that an elephant named Toni, nicknamed “the prisoner in the Giardini,” lived in the Giardini’s parkland grounds in the 1890s.3 While Fritsch renders the animal in precise detail, the skin’s green tint gestures toward the world of the inanimate— an oxidizing bronze monument, or rotting flesh. The otherworldly tint suggests not so much a triumphant return but simply that the ghostly traces of captivity remain part of our present. Following Fritsch’s sculpture—perhaps a matriarch presiding over the exhibition, given the structure of elephant social organization—the next gallery combines humancreature-machine figures by Andra Ursuţa (b. 1979, Salonta, Romania) with Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952, Schwerte, Germany) giant knit monochromes. Ursuţa’s hybrids—often cast from her own body and combined with inorganic objects—draw from a range of materials, including lead crystal, glass bottles, reclaimed trash, plastic tubes, and BDSM garments. Predators ’R Us (2020) takes the form of a recumbent nude, lounging in a pose that was one of the foremost tropes in Western art history from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The figure is faceless and fragmented, with a swirling blue and orange epidermis, legs terminating in tentacled appendages inspired by the alien from the movie Predator (1987). Fragments of plants, soda bottles, and humanoid features combine to form portrait busts, all rendered in a seductively iridescent palette that conjures radioactive contaminants or sci-fi visions of extraterrestrials. Surrounding these hybrids are Trockel’s knit paintings, which build on but also subvert a venerable history of the modernist monochrome. In the hands of someone like Kazimir Malevich, the monochrome was painting reduced to its purest form, a utopian vision of an unknown future in which all contingen-