P
resident Zelensky of Ukraine
said something marvellously
true about art when he
popped up so fiercely, so unex-
pectedly, at the 59th Venice
Biennale. Speaking on a live
feed from Kyiv piped into the Scuola
Nuova della Misericordia, a typically
immodest Venetian hall designed by
the great Renaissance architect Jacopo
Sansovino, Zelensky, dressed cheaply
in his trademark olive, pointed out that
only art can capture the emotional real-
ities of war: the feelings of soldiers
coming across heaps of rotting bodies
in the city of Bucha; the feelings of chil-
dren searching hopelessly in the rubble
for their dead mother; the feelings of
medics trying to save the mutilated
while their hospital was being bombed.
Facts cannot convey those horrors,
Zelensky said. Art can.
Before him on the same Ukrainian
feed, a startling samizdat broadcast
from a young woman in Mariupol took
us into the dark basement in which she
had been holed up since the Russian
invasion. She was astonishingly direct.
I don’t recall ever having witnessed
such tangible defiance as we saw from
the wild-eyed basement dweller in the
shaky video from Mariupol. Later the
news emerged that she’d been killed a
week before her Venice appearance.
Zelensky’s words and the heart-
breaking testimony of the Ukrainian
woman felt like a knife slicing through
the plate of wobbly panna cotta that is
the Venice Biennale. It turned your
critic into a teary wreck. And that was
the state I was in when I staggered out
into the cool Venice air and was
engulfed by the pampered, privileged,
Gucci-clad, party-loving horde thatconstitutes the art world. Where’s the
next party, they buzzed. Can you get
me a ticket? Do you like my shoes?
Two worlds collided at the 59th Ven-
ice Biennale. One was the powerful,
crucial, history-changing force that is
art. The other was the corrupted,
expensive, dismaying force that is the
art world. My head kept switching
between the two, like the Centre Court
crowd at Wimbledon watching a Nadal
rally. Venice is the perfect location for
the oldest and most important of the
world’s biennales precisely because it
feels so cut off from the quotidian. The
moment you step on to your first boat,
and leave behind your last car, you
know you are somewhere different. Art
can usually thrive in these circum-
stances. Occasionally the sense of
being cut off becomes an issue.
So it was at the 59th Biennale.
Delayed by a year because of Covid,
planned and themed before the pan-
demic, sidebarred by developments in
Ukraine, it felt like an occasion over-
taken by real events. There was plenty
of good art on show. More perhaps
than usual. Yet the sound of the art
world fiddling crazily while Rome
burned was audible from every calle.
This year’s theme, The Milk of
Dreams, was taken from a children’s
book by the surrealist painter Leonora
Carrington (1917-2011). The book
describes a magical world where “life isART
THE WORLD
IS BURNING
SO WHY IS THE ART
WORLD FIDDLING?
This should be art’s moment. But the me, me,
me issues obsessing the pampered Gucci-clad
hordes at the Venice Biennale feel terribly
out of step, says Waldemar Januszczak
constantly reimagined through the
prism of the imagination”. Carrington
would make up stories for her children
and illustrate them with paintings on
the walls of the living room: the tale of
Little Angel who does “pipi” on people
from above while an elephant poos in
her tea; Headless John whose mother
sticks his decapitated face on back-
wards with chewing gum.
There are people who thought the
book charming. I found it silly, and not
a little weird. As the inspiration for a
biennale, it’s about as far away from
events in Mariupol and Kyiv as it is pos-
sible to get on planet Earth.
Inspired by Carrington’s wacky fan-
tasies, the biennale’s curator, the per-
manently smiling Cecilia Alemani, has
set out to reflect a world where “every-
one can be transformed, become some-
one or something else; a world set free,
brimming with possibilities”. So we get
a lot of robots (Carrington claimed she
was the product of her mother’s
encounter with a machine!), muta-
tions, cut-up realities and things turn-
ing into other things as artist after artist
in the central show scuttles down the
rabbit hole of lukewarm surrealism.Only the strong survive. Surrounded
by creepy sci-fi and dotty fantasies
of transformation, Paula Rego
impresses mightily as a giant in a world
of Lilliputs. Her twilit gallery feels sud-
denly mature and deep. A ring of ang-
sty self-portraits interspersed with her
rarely seen sculptures prove to every-
one else at the event how a seasoned
imagination can transform dark child-
hood imaginings into profound rumi-
nations upon adult life. I have seen a lot
of Rego displays. I don’t think I’ve seen
a better collection than here. Right
now, in a world’s greatest artist vote,
she would get my tick.
Carrington herself features in an
archive display devoted to the forgot-
ten women of surrealism: an uber-
trendy subject that has become an art
world staple. She hangs alongside a
team of like-minded contemporaries —
Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Toyen —It felt like an occasion
overtaken by real events
Right now, in a world’s
greatest artist vote, PaulaRego would get my tick
ZSOLT CZEGLEDI/EPA6 1 May 2022