Taking Venice

In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the New York Art Guild’s Golden Lion at Venice Biennale which is an international exhibition of contemporary work. Taking Venice is a documentary that describes the ins and outs of creating the event in which Rauschenberg ends up being the winner. Did we mention that Amei Wallach, who is also an art critic and who specializes in fine-art documentaries (having directed, amongst others: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here and Louise Bourgeois: The Mistress and the Tangerine), depicts Rauschenberg’s victory as a demonstration of post WWII America supremacy?

A group of politically astute American constructors connected with the various sectors of the art world took it upon themselves to make win-win situation for Rauschenberg whose creative thoughts integrated collage, painting and, screen printing and even included some appurtenances, trinkets and rubbish. It was the pop-art era, in which the general public started viewing exhibitions in museums, very particularly in the US and asked, Is this art?’ Togehter with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg was one of the exemplars of the movement. Even before coming to Venice, he had faced flak from the critics both in America and the other countries when he was called by him “‘a joker” or “a gimmick. Most of it formed the background, for, he also was getting more famous and selling works for big money, so it was not as if Philip Glass was still driving – and sniping – a cab after “Einstein on the Beach” was premiered at the Met. There is a phenomenon that people occupy cultural hierarchy over the years and advance in their careers that should be Rauschenberg and which he had. He appeared like someone who was already on top of Mount Everest about to corner the last bit of the edge What Thomas meant he was half way there and needed a nudge rather than a lengthy trail down.

This meant he became the ideal target for the keen interest of the American administration at the Biennale.

The United States suited up to be a superpower and one of its Presidential occupants, John F. Kennedy (who had already been used as a prominent figure in Rauschenberg’s work and indeed would face assassination six months before the Biennale) occupied office and was most known for supporting arts than any of his predecessors. The Kennedy administration’s State Department sought to demonstrate that America was making tasteful and significant avant-garde art rather than shipping out for sale in foreign markets, commodities such as blue jeans and coca-cola, and this brand of Americanism was why people should be with the US rather than the Soviet Union.

In this situation where Wallace was a journalist – exactly under the wire, so to speak – managed to interview among others some of the main figures of the Venice Biennale of 1964 who were then in their seventies and eighties and still mentally capable and also eyewitnesses. The biggest get is Alice Denney, former vice-commissioner of US pavilion in US pavilion and pivotal in this circus of art history. Denney’s husband was a deputy director for the United States Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Together with her, she proposed a man called Alan R. Solomon for the position of US commissioner for the Biennale.

Apprehending people was in Solomon’s performance range. So described by the writer Calvin Tomkins from New Yorker: “And he also had a fine hand in his aggression”.

He also had a knack for understanding that every printed rule is often an exception to the rule. So long as the rules are broken for a good cause-subject matter that adds positive emotion (probably overshadowed to some jealous) and as long as the benefactor looks impressive, then almost any rule can be changed. Rauschenberg certainly fit the bill. He was getting more and more in the Finnish gallery scene but he was also a showman, ad provoker, a brand what we would now call, and what’s more a significant player in the gallery art world. The combination of Rauschenberg’s game-for-anything ‘macho’ confidence and the background operations of Solomon and his allies created for a wave of momentum that no-one was going to stop.

As the New York Times obituary for Solomon recalled: “Insisting such a large amount of one man show about eight one-man shows are there for the artists, [Solomon] rather quickly got to the limit of what spatial resources were available in the extremely narrow so-called American pavilion in the public gardens,” the site where all the official exhibitions were held and that each artist was entitled to put on show one painting.

“After secret deals, the careless authorities of the Biennale handed over to Solomon properties for his show which was an American consulate and other national exhibited parts to other nationals happily who had denied such privileges” Beneath the costumes, there were other improvisations as well. One of the construction crews during the night prepared a sort of addendum to the courtyard area located in front of the place which had been official surrounded by a roof to protect her from the weather (today we would call it a “pop-out exhibition) which housed Rauschenberg’s work and shielded the complaints with regard to his work being on display at an auxiliary site from popping out of the auxiliary site. The idea was to make the audience see much more of Rauschenberg than any other artist at the biennale.

That is a very interesting story and still, there are such counterproductive style choices that take away from the accomplishment of the story. ‘Taking Venice’ overstays its welcome, or rather, ‘Taking Venice’ just overstays its welcome because as much as the movie could be interesting in the conventional sense – as in, ‘who would take Venice?’, ‘Let us do everything and anything to make it very exciting and hip and very commercial. Strained images of motion graphics and overzealous re-creations, and digital cut ones and added ones which should have been aimed at sparing scenes and montages suggest otherwise. There’s also an over the top soundtrack from a Steven Soderbergh robbery to a Michael Bay action movie.

If the aim was to put in the pictures Rauschenberg’s typical feeling towards pop culture, a lot of factors impede that. This includes the fact that Rauschenberg’s work around 1964 was viewed as something that was ‘exotic”, while these skills in non fiction filmmaking are so commonplace that they are really astonishing when not present in a film.

“Taking Venice” also makes non linear leaps to Rauschenberg’s growth as an artist and a man. Some of these sidetracks include Rauschenberg’s affair with Jasper Johns or the `experimentation and collaboration’, which he undertook at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with people such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham (the latter did ultimately show up in Venice, staging a performance the night before the awards deliberation that became the hottest ticket in town). They redirect the attention from the actions of the US, who attempted to skew the exhibition towards Rauschenberg. This is a short film in terms of time duration, but is thus crammed and chaotic that on ocassions, it feels like it was about to become an unadorned, critical-biography of Rauschenberg and suddenly, it followed the other direction.

So what is the lesson to be drawn from this. Denney, says to the filmmakers, “We might have won it anyway, but we really engineered it.” At some point in time, Rauschenberg himself began to doubt the political goal that aimed him to the first place.

That was how uneconomical the marketing victories were. Central paradox: we love to see an encounter where America destroys immovable gatekeeps from Europe in a fair fight; instead he says that Poland found help through lent money from the US, rather than a good and fair fight of a new emergent America and stagnant and inflexible Europe. The movie skates over that irony instead of digging into it. US wanted their cultural imperialism and set about Domestic Policy with reckless abandon like an economic hunter with no keener and opposed deficiencies in their Domestic Policy. They imagined themselves as great emancipators, albeit, Ray Johnson caricatures such realities: they are omnivorous snakes who arrive in a “country without clothes”. Indeed, Tom, Rauschenberg’s victory only gave rise to such dissatisfaction. However, here the Venice operation is flaunted as a typical ‘go get ‘em yankee’ move that worked for Rauschenberg and the US.

Watch free movies like The Return on Fmovies