Old-Fashioned Patriotism Pops Up in Contemporary Art’s Front Yard

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In this year’s Brazilian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the artists Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca have created a 20-­minute video celebrating swingueira, a wildly popular dance movement from the country’s northeast. Triumphant electronic music thumps insistently while projectors show teams of mostly black, gender-­nonbinary dancers in elaborate choreographed routines they organized themselves. People in revealing outfits stare calmly into the camera as they jump and lunge in a vivid demonstration of their autonomy and power.

In one performance, a woman leads a troupe as they bounce across what appears to be a beach. In another, a group salutes in front of a massive Brazilian flag.

“This is a very deep and very empathic vision of Brazil,” says the show’s curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. “Brazil always suffers from its image abroad. What do people think they know, and what do they not know?”

Brazil is one of dozens of countries at this year’s biennale that have become tangibly nationalistic, displaying a cultural pride or patriotism not seen in decades.

The Venice Biennale was founded in 1895 as a sort of World’s Fair for art, but it wasn’t until 1907 that Belgium built the first of the show’s permanent national pavilions. Set in the Giardini, a wooded park on the southeastern edge of the city, the pavilion was a large art nouveau exhibition space in the rough dimensions of a big suburban home.

Soon after, more countries built structures, including Britain (which converted an existing cafe in the Giardini in 1909), Germany (also 1909), France (1912), Russia (1914), and the U.S. (1930). Hungary’s, erected in 1909 as well, is covered in brilliant mosaics. Austria’s, built in 1934, was designed by Josef Hoffmann and resembles a light-filled, Bauhaus-style factory.

Each pavilion’s management is slightly different. Technically, the U.S. pavilion is owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, for instance, but its programming is determined by the United States Information Agency, the U.S. Department of State, and the Fund for Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions. There are now 30 permanent pavilions in the Giardini and roughly an additional 60 national participations, which are either in the nearby Arsenale, a ­former shipbuilding factory, or in temporary locations around the city.

The format, content, and presentation of these exhibitions evolved over time, but for most of the biennale’s history, each country’s program was intended to project cultural and political relevance to an international audience. “Contemporary notions of nationhood have been bound up with the biennale since its inception,” says art historian Claire Brandon.

This idea became particularly pronounced after World War II, as the U.S. touted Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other painters as proof of the artistic independence possible under a “free” society. “In the 1950s, the United States was very interested in exporting abstract expressionism outside the U.S. as a ­distinctly American enterprise,” Brandon says. “The biennale was one of the platforms where that brand of abstract expressionism was marketed.”

But in the 1990s, as the Cold War faded and globalism became an international fixation, the ­six-month-long event slowly transitioned into something more cerebral and ­artist-focused, turning into a showcase for cutting-edge, often deeply experimental contemporary art. This art can sometimes seem silly—in 2011, for example, the U.S. pavilion featured an installation by the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, in which competitive athletes took turns running on a treadmill that was mounted on an overturned 60-ton British tank.

It’s also considered one of the world’s most important forums for new and established artists. “The trajectory I’ve known from the 1970s up to the present is that the artist comes before the country,” says Paul Schimmel, an independent curator and former chief curator of Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles.

By 2013, art at the ­biennale might have aspired to be political, but a nation’s politics had nothing to do with the art in the national pavilions. That year, France and Germany hosted each other’s exhibitions, with the latter putting on a show of four non-­German artists who “establish[ed] a kind of universal visual language,” as the pavilion’s curator, Susanne Gaensheimer, said at the time. Nationality of any kind was relegated to the dustbin, a relic of a pre-globalized, unenlightened world.

But with the recent ascendancy of Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and their attendant populist movements in Europe, the U.S., and South America, something changed at this year’s biennale. (It runs from May 11 through Nov. 24.)

At the Australian pavilion, artist Angelica Mesiti made a video installation “that depicts the many faces of modern Australia.” The Korean pavilion features three domestic artists in a show dedicated to questioning the country’s “modernization that has been in pursuit of Western modernity.” Canada’s pavilion features work by an Inuit artist collective that has documented, and in some cases re-created, Inuit culture in multiple films and installations.

The Belgian pavilion’s exhibition waxes nostalgic (and weird) for a time gone by. It’s filled with 20 old-fashioned, almost life-size dolls, including a potter, a knife grinder, and, in side rooms, “zombies, poets, psychotics.”

These pavilions, along with more than a dozen others, have made a hard pivot from the intellectualized art theory of years past. “I think what’s happening in the broader political world is affecting artists,” Schimmel says. You could interpret the result as nationalist, he continues, “but I see it almost as being provincial in an isolationist way.”

“Politically now, we live in terrible turmoil,” says Mikhail Piotrovsky, the general director of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, who curated a series of installations at Russia’s pavilion. “Culture matters,” he says. “We had a lot of bridges between nations, but now most of those bridges are blown up. Our stance is to be a bridge over troubled waters.”

His exhibition centers around a Rembrandt master­piece, Return of the Prodigal Son, a treasure that’s owned by the Hermitage but is also part of the Dutch artistic heritage. It’s meant to be a vehicle for inter­national exchange. “In general, you have people showing [their] national identities as a basis for dialogue, because we need dialogue,” Piotrovsky continues. “We’re on the brink of war and in the middle of wars of culture and memory.”

Not everyone is a fan of this development. “It’s state-­inspired, do-gooder art,” says Schimmel, the former MOCA curator, who visited during the ­biennale’s opening. “The national pavilions seemed hokey.”

Back at the Brazilian pavilion, curator Pérez-Barreiro says he planned his show before the election of Bolsonaro, a far-right politician known for his anti-gay, anti-­conservation, anti-­human-rights policies. “I’m keen for people not to think that this is a reactive project,” he says.

Nevertheless, the exhibition has become an inadvertent repudiation of Brazil’s current administration. “It’s a self-­proclaimed, proud, confident vision of a completely different Brazil than what’s being pushed by the government right now,” Pérez-Barreiro says.

That might be the distinction between the Venice Biennale of the 20th century and the biennale of today. Whereas mid­century exhibitions might have proclaimed the particular values of nationhood the governments wanted to see—America’s abstract expressionism as a radical statement of self-­expression, Russia’s socialist realism as an assertion of the country’s proletarian pull—many of the artists in this year’s pavilions are carving out ideas of patriotism and nationalism that are often at odds with the ruling structures of the countries they’re ostensibly there to promote.

“It’s the zeitgeist,” Pérez-Barreiro says. “Artists are looking to push back against these very simplified ideas of what a nation is.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gaddy at jgaddy@bloomberg.net, Chris Rovzar

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