Entertainment
Review: Was the 1964 Venice Biennale rigged? The documentary 'Taking Venice' looks at conspiratorial claims
The Venice Biennale may have lost much of its singular luster, now that hundreds of periodic surveys of new international art have joined the roster of what was the first — and, for decades after its 1895 founding, one of the few — of its kind. An artist can still get an important career boost from successful participation in the venerable and widely publicized Italian exhibition, currently in its 60th outing. (It remains on view at the city’s Giardini and Arsenale through Nov. 24.) But no one anymore expects the extravaganza to dramatically alter larger perceptions of art, the way it once did — perhaps most notably in 1964.
That was the year Robert Rauschenberg, then 38, became the first American artist to win the coveted Grand Prize for Painting, now called the Golden Lion. At the announcement, all hell broke loose. “Treason in Venice,” yelled one newspaper’s overheated headline.
The unprecedented award to an American artist who, a decade earlier, portended the controversial Pop Art genre cresting sealed a slow but steady shift underway since the end of World War II: New York officially bumped Paris from the top slot of cultural taste makers. The critical press in Europe, especially France, framed the story as a scandal. Surely skulduggery was at work.
That’s a frame of reference that guides “Taking Venice,” a bumpy new documentary directed by filmmaker and longtime New York art writer Amei Wallach. “Taking Venice” doesn’t take a position on whether dishonest mischief sullied the jury’s process of choosing Rauschenberg, although it does leave the appropriate sense that the artist easily measured up to the honor. (The other Biennale prizes went to Hungarian-Swiss sculptor Zoltan Kemeny, German draftsman Joseph Fassbender, Italian etcher Angelo Savelli and sculptors Andrea Cascella and Arnaldo Pomodoro — all respectable at best.) Yet, the framing also gets in the way of an otherwise well-informed view of a significant historical moment.
Conspiracy theories drove the original “scandal” story line, but the maneuvering to get the prize was actually business as usual. When something unexpected and dramatic occurs, like the Biennale’s American “first,” the creation of a conspiracy theory is one way to make at least a semblance of sense out of a seemingly inexplicable event. An irrational illusion of rational explanation, it provides a veil of stability in a topsy-turvy world.
Rauschenberg’s anointing was all too much for those who simply could not fathom that Paris — fountainhead of Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Brancusi and even Duchamp — had been toppled on the international cultural stage by a supposedly vulgar, Texas-born parvenu who silkscreened commercial images of President Kennedy and phallic rocket ships onto canvas and famously slathered paint on the nose of a stuffed goat (“Monogram,” 1955-59). A cultural crime had occurred. Guilt needed to be ascribed. Conspiracies mushroomed.
The story of what actually went on in the run-up to the prize is certainly complicated. For clarity, Wallach smartly crafts the film around four primary players, starting of course with “The Artist.” A thumbnail of his artistic bio unfolds.
Then there’s “The Dealer,” Leo Castelli, a suave and affable Italian expatriate to New York who engineered the rise of American Pop, including Rauschenberg, to commercial success. Raised in Trieste, across the Adriatic from Venice, he also understood the European fascination with the democratic capitalism represented by Pop’s soup cans, Hollywood celebrity and comic strips, as postwar rebuilding relied on American commercial goods. That the gallery operated by Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli’s Romanian ex-wife, was located in Paris didn’t hurt.
“The Insider” is Alice Denney, a Washington, D.C., art maven, wife of a State Department lawyer, and friend of the Kennedy family. (Denney died in November at 101.) For the first time, the United States government was helping sponsor the privately operated American Pavilion in Venice, as foreign governments always did theirs. When a boost was needed, like getting a military cargo plane to transport large-scale art across the Atlantic, Denney was on hand to push the necessary buttons.
Finally, “The Commissioner” organizing the American presence at the Biennale was Alan Solomon. He had turned Manhattan’s Jewish Museum into an avant-garde hothouse during his brief tenure as director, from 1962 to 1964, including with solo shows of Rauschenberg and his former lover, Jasper Johns. Solomon, not well-known today, was a Harvard-educated bon vivant known for his erudition in new art’s European history. In 1970, when he died of a heart attack at 49, just a few months after the opening of his last exhibition, “Painting in New York: 1944–1969,” at the Pasadena Art Museum, he was chairman of the adventurous new art department at UC Irvine.
“Taking Venice” re-creates a last-minute move of big Robert Rauschenberg paintings via water taxis to the Giardini.
(Zeitgeist Films)
The artist, the dealer, the insider, the commissioner — the complexities of getting the Venice presentation together are clearly laid out in the film. Appropriate nods are also given to familiar elements of cultural context, which contributed to the ultimate commotion.
The list is long. Rauschenberg’s controversial work had been categorized as Dada-inspired “anti-art.” The sponsoring U.S. government had well-established Cold War propaganda interests. Solomon’s show was too large for the relatively small American Pavilion, so a rules-busting annex was pressed into service in the empty former U.S. consulate next to Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo-museum on the Grand Canal, adding to a sense of superpower pushiness. International resistance was greeting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s expansion of U.S. military presence in Indochina, which chipped away at global sympathy in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Sam Hunter, an influential American art historian, was an eleventh-hour addition to the prize jury. At Venice’s legendary Teatro La Fenice, a last-minute all-American avant-garde dance performance by Merce Cunningham and John Cage with sets by Rauschenberg was a wild success. And much more.
Still, all of that was merely packing the dynamite. For an explosion, the fuse needed lighting. It was Solomon who brought the matches.
The Grand Prize selection was always the result of obscure dealings among influential partisans in smoke-filled backrooms, but Solomon drew an aggressive public line in the sand. As the deadlocked jury deliberated privately, he held a press conference and distributed an official statement. Headed “Americans in Venice” — printed all in caps — the sheet featured a tourist photo of the ancient Rialto Bridge spanning the Grand Canal juxtaposed with a three-tiered painting of an American flag by Johns.
In case the pictorial story of crossing a Rubicon was not enough, the blunt text declared, “The fact that the world art center has shifted from Paris to New York is acknowledged on every hand.” Venice’s celebrated Biennale, Solomon implied, risked irrelevance.
Rauschenberg’s ultimate selection certainly gave everyone something to talk about — and they did, often loudly. (The pick sowed “the seeds of a new fascism” in the opinion of one particularly outlandish review.) The artist himself was happy but anxious, soon deciding to destroy all the silk screens he had used to make his exhibited paintings so he couldn’t repeat himself. In retrospect, he observed of the new career pressures, “There were moments when I thought things would have been much better if I hadn’t been so lucky.”
But a conspiracy? Despite the film’s annoying musical score (by CheeWei Tay), which pulses furiously like it’s a B-movie melodrama, that’s nowhere to be found. The horse-trading vote feels more like the norm, which is interesting enough. Thanks to the internet and social media today, conspiracy theories have become epidemic, since the multitudes can now hear the same fantastical whispers of a rigged game en masse. (For details, Google “Jan. 6, 2021.”) Sixty years on, their ubiquity makes “Taking Venice” seem rather quaint.
Much of the story’s factual scaffolding was plainly provided by “The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art,” the critically acclaimed 2010 book by art historian Hiroko Ikegami. (She appears in the film to offer welcome narrative detail.) Sometimes the story wanders off into lengthy but unnecessary asides, including staged re-creations of the lightly comic difficulty in moving (faux) Rauschenberg paintings on water taxis, Sonnabend’s dealer adventures in Paris and the American Pavilion shows held in 2017, 2019 and 2022. At 98 minutes, “Taking Venice” is a half-hour too long.
Still, the story embedded within it is an important one. A historic shift did occur. The account is well-told and worth knowing, even without conspiratorial murmurs.
A sneak-peek of the film is scheduled for Thursday at the UCLA Hammer Museum, followed by a Q&A with the director. Wallach will do the same on Friday and Saturday nights at the Laemmle Royal in West L.A., where the film opens for a one-week run.
‘Taking Venice’
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Playing: Laemmle Royal, Santa Monica; Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
If, god forbid, there’s a natural disaster in L.A. in the near future, Jena Malone might be one of your first responders.
“I’ve been studying Community Emergency Response Team training,” the actor-musician, 41, said, drinking coffee in the living room of her home overlooking pomegranate trees and a canyon in northeast L.A. “Whether it’s fire management or building a neighborhood tool shed, it’s less important for me to hit career milestones now than to transform how I live on this planet. Let’s build something where we’re all taking care of each other’s needs through mutual aid.”
Those are galvanizing priorities from Malone, who’s led generationally beloved films like the sci-fi noir “Donnie Darko,” played the axe-chucking Johanna Mason in two “Hunger Games” tentpoles and recently co-starred in the lesbian bodybuilding revenge flick “Love Lies Bleeding.” For almost as long, she’s also made experimental folk and electronic records that toy with avant-garde noise and quietly poignant songwriting.
This is a wild time in L.A. for anyone concerned about the city and its culture industries, and Malone is deeply invested in both. Just before the release of her new Netflix series, the Duffer Brothers-produced “The Boroughs,” she’s released her first album in nearly a decade. “Flowers For Men” is an effects-shredded, future-primitive record, written after the birth of her son upended her obligations — and expectations — toward the men in her life and the world they’ll inherit.
“It changed everything,” Malone said, about raising a son. “I grew up learning to thrive and mask in masculine spaces. Grind culture is a masculine toxicity that I inherited and indoctrinated myself in. But parenthood offers you this opportunity to burn your entire life down in sacrifice to finding out what’s real. I had no idea what it was to be a man. All of my ideas burned down and not much was being raised back up.”
For millennial film fans, Malone’s been a consistently compelling, trust-anything-she’s-in actor since her child-star turn in 1997’s “Contact.” Few embody a tortured, beguiling Americana quite like her.
“The Boroughs” — a high-profile follow-up to “Stranger Things” from the masters of unreality, created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews — has a stacked cast that includes Alfred Molina, Geena Davis and Bill Pullman, set amid a bucolic retirement community under supernatural threat. A ragtag group of Duffer Brothers misfits teaming up to fight off eldritch horror might be the last safe bet in television.
Yet that’s also how Malone feels about the current climate of Hollywood — a once-stable neighborhood fending off malign forces. Institutional consolidation and retreat, spiraling costs, technological upheaval — they all add to a creeping sense that an era is over, and worse is coming.
“Film is in such a delicate transition. I think that where music was 20 years ago, film is now,” she said. “It’s like being on an elevator where every floor is on fire. A lot of the things that I loved about it no longer exist, even if what I love about it is still wildly potent. My stress levels go down and my creativity goes up when I’m building a world that does not rely on the film industry, even though it’s my main love.”
That feeling called her back to music on “Flowers For Men,” arriving nine years after her last LP. The ego-shattering experience of giving birth in 2016 and raising a son prompted reflections about what men’s inner lives were really like, and she wanted to write about them.
“I was raised by two moms, and I had this strange aspiration to become the dad,” Malone said, laughing. “I was the breadwinner of my family then. But being a parent was all brand-new to me. I kept seeing my father in him, my grandfather, these older relationships with men. It was asking me to look at him with curious, childlike eyes.”
“Flowers For Men” was written from a sincere curiosity about mens’ strictures, bad influences and better aspirations. To inhabit someone else’s life, she had to sound different, too.
“Film is in such a delicate transition. I think that where music was 20 years ago, film is now,” Malone said. “It’s like being on an elevator where every floor is on fire. A lot of the things that I loved about it no longer exist, even if what I love about it is still wildly potent.
(Evan Mulling/For The Times)
The most prominent instrument on the album is its layers of vocal treatments. Malone has a lovely natural voice — intimately whispered, with hints of ‘70s country rock. But here she douses it in pitch-shifted digital acid, like a late 2000s R&B record dropped in the pool at the Joshua Tree Inn.
It’s an uncanny combo, but its lends modern melancholy to “Barstow,” which has the narrative structure of a Townes Van Zandt banger but is corroded with bleary effects. “Create In Your Name” has a Billie Eilish-worthy late-night murk, with lyrics so devotional they almost sound consumptive. “Disaster Zones” is all blown-out ambience, and the LP closes on a showstopping cover of John Prine’s classic “Angel From Montgomery.”
“I just love that a man wrote a song where the first line is ‘I’m an old woman,’” Malone said. “As a female songwriter, it gives me so much permission. Now all the doors are open. If I was to give flowers to all of the different men that have touched or changed things that deserve celebration, John Prine would be one of them.”
That idea — celebrating men for the good they’re capable of — felt transgressive enough today that it cohered the album for her. But it also came with questions about how romantic partnership fit into her life. Settling into motherhood, she read up on relationship anarchy — which she sees as not abiding by tiers of connection. She bought books on ethical nonmonogamy (“Sex at Dawn” was a big one) to learn how other lives were not just possible, but maybe even more fulfilling.
(Perhaps this was not a stretch from an actor who played the wild child Lydia Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.”)
“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, placing one partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that brought that up,” she said. “But while I’m learning to take care of this child, I’m realizing that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that felt like another love. And then my family, and how important friends were. And all of a sudden there’s no world where I would just have one love, not even just romantic love.”
“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, placing one partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that brought that up,” Malone said. “But while I’m learning to take care of this child, I’m realizing that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that felt like another love.
(Evan Mulling/For The Times)
“Flowers For Men” is, in her way, a bargain with that contradiction — to love men deeply, but never put them above all else, even as she got engaged to her partner, actor Jack Buckley, earlier this year.
She’s still sorting out how to present this album live. She said she’s a fan of the Dead City Punx model of renegade shows in forgotten corners of L.A. Maybe as the city seems to fall apart, she’ll find a leafy park or the back of a dingy bar that’s the right home for these strange, lonely yet hopeful songs.
“I want someone to walk into the bathroom and be like, ‘Whoa, why is there a woman singing to me?’” Malone said. “I like the idea that art makes you a little uncomfortable and you don’t have the previously held expectations to know how to hold it.”
Billie Eilish fans prepare yourself, the much talked about secret project has finally arrived on the big screens!
Billie Eilish has always been about intimacy over artifice, but her latest concert film takes that to a visceral new level. Co-directed by Eilish and James Cameron, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) manages to bridge the gap between a massive stadium show and the quiet grit of life backstage.
The film starts 18 minutes out from the show and builds the tension until audiences are literally folded into a box with her. Being taken under the stage, passing fans who have no idea she’s inches away, sets a tone of total immersion. What makes this film different is the balance between the spectacle and the behind-the-scenes reality. We see the creative shorthand between Billie and James Cameron as they chase what she calls the “best kind of sensory overload”.
The film is very much fan focussed, with the sound mix being so specific that you can hear individual fans singing along in sync with the visuals.
There are so many standout moments, the handheld camera work during “Bad Guy” that gives a dizzying POV of the band, and the chilling minute of silence Billie requests from the crowd to record a vocal loop.
The film captures her unique stage presence. Influenced by rap culture, Billie refuses to have anyone else on stage, unlike many female artists that use back up dancers. Billie can hold the entire stadium in awe by herself which is incredible to witness, until Finneas joins her for a beautiful, emotional piano set.
Between the high-tech visuals and the “Puppy Room” (where she keeps rescue dogs for staff to decompress), the film feels incredibly personal. While the film doesn’t give us any new insights into Billie, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) is an enjoyable experience that elevates the tradition concert film.
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