The new Venice Biennale opens in April. For those who haven’t been, Robert Leonard explains why we go and the difference it makes.
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In the past, isolation has been a problem for New Zealand art. We considered it our fate to suffer from the ‘tyranny of distance’. Our artists enjoyed local careers. International opportunities were rare—the occasional icing. However, that has changed. In the last thirty years, our artists, curators, and artbaggers have made international exchange a priority, shifting the dynamics of production and reception, transforming the way our art is made and understood. Now, we’re part of a bigger conversation. Participating in the Venice Biennale has been key.

The Venice Biennale may have begun at the tail end of the nineteenth century, but, for New Zealand, it’s a twenty-first–century thing. We’ve been going since 2001. Getting on board was a big commitment, signalling our entry into the international art world, just as it 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’ curated show (assembled by the Biennale’s director, who is different each time), national pavilions, and collateral projects. In addition, unofficial shows—some of them vast—piggyback on the opportunity, capitalising on the Biennale’s critical mass.

The national pavilions distinguish Venice from similar endeavours. Participating countries develop and present their own shows—they have skin in the game. They bring their own people to front them. They get deeply involved and competitive. Consequently, the three-day professional preview, or ‘vernissage’, has become a massive networking event, greased by receptions and parties—an art-world schmooze fest.

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 to purpose-built, dedicated national pavilions (developed and maintained by their countries). The Arsenale, more rough and ready, houses the other half of the curated show, and, increasingly, spaces there are also rented out for national pavilions. The Biennale also overflows into the city, with offsite national pavilions and collateral projects. For visitors, seeing the Biennale takes time: the Giardini and Arsenale each take a day, offsites a couple more. Plus, there are endless other art pleasures on hand, including historical ones. Titian and Tintoretto anyone? No one gets to see everything.

For the national pavilions, most countries do solo shows, unveiling new work. New Zealand usually sends one artist, but twice we’ve spread our bets—or dissipated our message—by sending two. Of the eleven artists we’ve sent, five are women, four are Māori. Apart from 2017, with Lisa Reihana in the Arsenale, New Zealand has had its pavilions offsite. Creative New Zealand funds our involvement to the tune of $700,000 a pop. Additional support comes from patrons, from the artist, and from their dealers. If the work impresses, artists get invitations to show here, there, and everywhere. There can also be a big pay day, if work is sold. In the past, Te Papa has often acquired New Zealand Venice works. Parts of Simon Denny’s 2015 project were acquired by Te Papa and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

New Zealand artists have barely featured in the curated component of the Biennale, and, when they have, it’s been those already operating offshore—the Berlin-based Denny in 2013 (before he was our national representative in 2015), the globe-trotting Lemi Ponifasio in 2015, and London-based Francis Upritchard in 2017 (after she had been our representative, in 2009). No Biennale director has ever visited New Zealand to scout for artists for the curated show, and there’re no New Zealanders in it this time. But New Zealand artists have been included in collateral events, including Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena, who presented their show Āniwaniwa in 2007.

In Venice, nothing is easy, nothing is cheap. Presenting a national pavilion is complicated and costly, requiring endless site visits, negotiations, consents. Things have to be moved around on canals and carts and it’s hard to get basic stuff that elsewhere would be taken for granted. (In 2015, Simon Denny had to rewire the Marciana Library to get enough electricity.) Work is shown in protected historical buildings you can’t bang a nail into and that often overwhelm the art. Some venues flood during the acqua alta. Even the Giardini’s purpose-built national pavilions have issues. Many are architect’s follies, quite unsuitable for art. Canada’s has trees growing through it, as does the Nordic Pavilion.

Once the Biennale is up, pavilions must be maintained and staffed for seven months. The Biennale keeps the city afloat: venues rented, hotel rooms and restaurants occupied, and a local workforce engaged. There are also Venice Biennales for architecture, music, theatre, and dance, and a Venice Film Festival. Venice is a continuous biennale, a biennale machine.

The Biennale is a welter of contradictions. It presents edgy contemporary art in a picturesque historical setting crawling with tacky tourists buying carnival masks and languishing in gondolas; bridges are unpassable because of selfie sticks. The vernissage is attended by artworld insiders, but also by the rich and famous and by journos on junkets. Serious, politically righteous, save-the-world art (the centrepiece of the 2015 Biennale was a marathon live reading of Marx’s Das Kapital) is attended by wealth and glamour (super yachts, oligarchs, Elton, Cate). But, for those of us in the business, the Biennale is simply compulsory viewing. Artbaggers the world over synchronise their watches in Venice. It creates common reference points.

In our globalist era, when artists don’t necessarily live in their birth countries and show all over the place, the Biennale’s national-pavilion structure feels anachronistic. However, it also harnesses and reveals the competitiveness of the art world, as countries bankroll their artist show ponies to make indulgent, ambitious projects. There’s a lot on the line. For an artist, doing Venice can be uplifting, traumatising, or both—a moment of truth. And truth is a great teacher, if you survive. Venice can make or break.

With national pavilions, there are different approaches. Some countries treat them as lifetime-achievement awards for national-treasure artists, others as springboards to propel younger talent into the big league—which has been New Zealand’s approach, generally speaking. Timing is crucial. New Zealand’s selectors don’t simply pick the best project, they pick one they anticipate will play in Venice this time, based on the artist’s professional trajectory and their reading of art-world weather patterns.

The Venice Biennale has transformed New Zealand art. It’s partly a matter of scale. The US is a big country with lots of artists; New Zealand a tiny one with far fewer. If both countries send a representative artist each time, New Zealand artists have a far greater chance of being a national representative than US ones. So, as an opportunity, Venice looms large for our artists. And it’s not just for the few who get picked; it’s also about the many who contemplate being picked, or pitch for it. The Venice prospect has changed the way our artists think about their work, their careers. The Biennale has become our window on the world and integral to our domestic art ecology—a talking point.

Of course, everything changed with Covid. No one’s been travelling and it’s put a major dent in our international strategy. At first, we wondered when we might be back on planes, grazing biennales, visiting art capitals, doing business. Now we’re thinking, when borders reopen, if they do, will there be biennales, art capitals, and art as we know them? Will the game change fundamentally? Will we go back to normal or will there be a new normal? Was our international moment just a blip?

Italy was hit hard by Covid. Venice closed down. After the tourists evacuated, dolphins were spotted in the Grand Canal. The 2021 Biennale, the fifty-ninth, was postponed. Taking a gamble that people will travel, it will now open in April. Director, Cecilia Alemani, borrowed her title, The Milk of Dreams, from surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

For its part, New Zealand is sending Samoan-Japanese artist Yuki Kihara, whose transgender credentials are press-release perfect for this moment. Like most Venice projects, details of Kihara’s exhibition Paradise Camp are under wraps. But Creative New Zealand has told us that this ‘politically urgent and creatively astute’ work will address ‘small-island ecologies, climate change, queer rights, Gauguin’s gaze, intersectionality, and decolonisation’, among other things. It will be in the Arsenale.

New Zealand typically sends a team to support its show, through the install, the vernissage, and for the duration. Our patrons organisation, NZ at Venice, is also usually out in force. But, this time, kiwis will be thin on the ground. We can’t travel. With Covid, Creative New Zealand is organising things by remote control, hiring in locals on the ground. ‘Ensuring that we could still deliver our planned artistic outcomes while also ensuring the health and safety of our people is a priority for us’, explains Creative New Zealand Chair Caren Rangi.

This may be necessary, but it’s unfortunate. In the past, the beneficiaries of New Zealand’s participation have not just been the artists and their dealers, but the whole scene, with our pavilion functioning as base camp and calling card for kiwis operating in the international art world, helping everyone to work the room. (Many of our curators and writers cut their teeth as pavilion attendants.) This time, there’s a lot in the balance, not just for the future of the Biennale but for the future of New Zealand’s international strategy. Will the art world return to Venice? Can we sustain our international strategy? And what will we do if we can’t? Here’s hoping.