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Right now, I’m housebound, convalescing from a leg injury, while my artist friends and curator-critic colleagues swan around Venice, downing spritzes and checking out the latest art at the Biennale. I’m observing them all and it all on social media, trying to suppress my jealousy, wishing I could be there.

Although it began in the late-late nineteenth century, for New Zealand the Biennale is a twenty-first–century thing. We’ve only been going since 2001. Getting on board signalled our entry into the international art world at a moment when the international art world was itself going global. Venice is the oldest and biggest of the world’s regular contemporary-art mega-shows. It has three components: a ‘state of the art’ show (curated by the Biennale’s director, who is different each time), national pavilions, and collateral projects (official and unofficial). 

The national pavilions set Venice apart from similar projects. As participating countries choose, develop, and present their own shows, they have agency—they get deeply involved and competitive. Consequently, the Biennale’s three-day professional preview, or ‘vernissage’, has become a massive networking event, greased by parties and receptions.

The Biennale has two main locations. The Giardini is home to the Central Pavilion—a museum-standard space that houses half the curated show—and purpose-built, dedicated national pavilions maintained by their countries. The Arsenale, more rough and ready, houses the other half of the curated show, and, increasingly, space there is also rented for national pavilions. The Biennale overflows into the city, with offsite national pavilions and collateral projects. If you’re in the Giardini or Arsenale, you’re guaranteed foot traffic; elsewhere, cross your fingers. Seeing the whole thing takes time: the Giardini and Arsenale each take a day, offsites a couple more. Plus, there are other art distractions on hand, contemporary and historical. No one sees it all.

For their pavilions, most countries do solo shows. New Zealand favours new commissioned artist projects—typically sculpture, in some form or other. We usually send one artist, but twice we’ve spread our bets (or dissipated our message) sending two. Of the eleven artists we’ve sent, five were women, four were Māori. Apart from 2017, with Lisa Reihana in the Arsenale, New Zealand has always had offsite pavilions. CNZ funds the pavilion to the tune of $700,000 a pop, plus there’s support from patrons and from the artist and their dealers. For artists and dealers, there can be a big pay day at the end, if work is purchased. In the past, Te Papa has often acquired New Zealand’s Venice works. Parts of Simon Denny’s 2015 project were acquired by Te Papa and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

This year, Dane Mitchell is our artist. His project, Post Hoc, lists things that have become extinct, that have disappeared. It’s a brave theme in the context of a Biennale that has seen so many artists come and go, that feels at once permanent and evanescent.

New Zealand artists have barely featured in the curated component of the Biennale, and then it’s usually been those already operating offshore—the Berlin-based Denny in 2013 and London-based Francis Upritchard in 2017. No Biennale director has ever visited New Zealand to scout for artists for the curated show.

Presenting a national pavilion is costly and complicated, requiring endless site visits, negotiations, consents. Supplies have to be moved around on canals and carts and it’s hard to get and do basic stuff that elsewhere you’d take for granted. Work is shown in protected historic buildings that you can’t bang a nail into and that often overwhelm the art. Some spaces flood during the acqua alta. Even the Giardini’s purpose-built national pavilions have issues. Some are architect follies quite unsuitable for art—Canada’s has trees growing through it. Once the biennale is up, pavilions need to be invigilated and maintained for months. The Biennale keeps the city afloat: venues rented, hotel rooms and restaurants occupied, a local workforce engaged. It goes for about seven months, but there are also Venice biennales for architecture, music, theatre, and dance, and the Venice Film Festival—Venice is a perpetual biennale. National representation is crucial to its business model, even if not to the artists.

The Biennale is a welter of contradictions. There’s aggressively contemporary art in a picturesque, kitschy, historical city that’s crawling with tourists buying glass baubles and carnival masks, eating gelato, and riding gondolas. Bridges are impassible because of selfie sticks. The vernissage is attended by artworld insiders, but also by the rich and famous and by know-nothing journos on junkets. You see serious, politically righteous, save-the-world art (the centrepiece of the 2015 Biennale was a marathon live reading of Das Kapital) with obscene wealth (super yachts, oligarchs, Elton, Cate). But, if you’re in the business, the Biennale is compulsory viewing. It creates common reference points. Art baggers synchronise their watches in Venice.

In our globalism era, when artists don’t necessarily live in the countries they were born in and show all over the place, the Biennale’s national-pavilion structure feels anachronistic. However, it also exposes the real competitiveness of the art world, as countries bankroll their artists to make absurdly ambitious projects. There’s a lot on the line. It can be make or break for an artist. You see amazing stuff, but also terrible, bloated, bridge-too-far stuff. Schadenfreude reigns. Doing Venice can be uplifting, traumatising, or both—a moment of truth. And truth is a great teacher.

With national pavilions, there are different approaches. Some countries treat them as lifetime-achievement awards for doddery national-treasure artists, others as springboards to propel younger talent into the big leagues internationally—that’s New Zealand’s approach, generally speaking. Timing is crucial. We don’t simply pick a good project, we pick one that we anticipate will work in Venice this time based on the artist’s professional trajectory and our reading of art-world weather patterns. The tea leaves!

The Venice Biennale has transformed New Zealand art. It’s a matter of scale. The US is a big country with lots of artists, New Zealand a tiny one with far fewer. Both countries send a representative artist each time. So, New Zealand artists have a far greater chance of being a national representative than US ones. Consequently, as an opportunity, Venice looms large for our artists—for us. And, it’s not just about the few artists who get to go, it’s also about the many artists who contemplate it. In New Zealand, there’s a selection process, with a number of artist-curator teams pitching each time. They all imagine grand, blue-sky projects that could hold up in the Biennale context. Even if their pitches are unsuccessful, this ambitious thinking feeds into other projects they go on to do. Going to Venice also activates the wider scene, engaging not only our artists and curators, but also our arts administrators, dealers, critics, patrons, and media. Venice has become our window on the world and integral to our domestic art ecology—a talking point.
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