A Vibrant, Vacuous American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Joy and Brat galore in Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition but not much else

B etter late than never. I got to the Biennale in Venice last week, five months after it opened, but we in Vermont operate using biblical, even geological time. It’s the 60th iteration of what has become the world’s biggest art fair and the Olympics of the contemporary art world. This year, 88 countries are participating, including Palestine, which calls itself a country. Of course, it isn’t. While pavilions are scattered throughout town, nearly all are in the Giardini, Venice’s public garden park, and the Arsenale, once the shipyard for the Republic of Venice.

The Biennale is a dense experience and, this year, a gloomy, rote, and smug affair. Immigration control, imperialism, capitalism, Israel, and, of course, the Big Satan take a few hits. Otherness is fêted. Xenophobia is panned. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It all seems performative, serious on the surface but insincere. It could have had “Made in Davos” stamped on it. The international mood is so sour, and elites so tentative, that good art was hard to find. Both disaster and prosperity make for art that lasts, though in different ways. Waiting for the other shoe to drop doesn’t.

I’ll write one or two more pieces about the Biennale before it closes on November 24, but for today I’ll write about the American Pavilion and Jeffrey Gibson’s the space in which to place me. No caps, which makes it more artsy. Gibson (b. 1972) is the first Native American artist to represent our country, though not the first to display. Until the last 30 or so years, the American Pavilion was filled with a group show.

Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, though he lives in the Hudson Valley in New York and, as far as I can tell, has never lived in a tribal community. He’s part Cherokee as well. The title of Gibson’s exhibition comes from a poem by Layli Long Soldier, a Native American poet who writes about what she calls systemic oppression of Indigenous people. I read the poem, which is very minor indeed.

Gibson made paintings, murals, sculptures, flags, and a video, most especially for the American Pavilion. He uses beads, and lots of them, Native blankets, rawhide, neon spray paint, and lots of it, and found objects such as ribbons, plastic flowers, and slogan buttons. He’s made sculptures from punching bags, too. His format is big, his colors bright and zesty, and his forms geometric and packed. He’s a good artist, and I enjoyed my visit. He has created a dazzling pavilion. I can’t help thinking that his art is fluent and silky but without much depth.

The American Pavilion is a small Palladian-style building from 1930 built in the Giardini specifically for the biennial U.S. show. In the last few Biennales, all single-artist shows, the outside became part of the project. In 2022, Simone Leigh fashioned it as a rough hut in Africa, though it seemed like a luxury safari bungalow. This round, it’s the honky-tonk look. I like sumptuous color, but lush and lurid are different kettles of cuttlefish. A lipstick-red gallery wall makes for a space that looks like a bordello where the ladies have mastered zigzag positions. It’s a total experience, I know, but I wonder how these works would handle a more neutral color.

Putting aside the overall look, I focus on each object. Yes, the pavilion is a total work of art, but each object is autonomous. Each will go to a collector’s home or a museum, where it will stand on its own.

Gibson is a word and image artist, inserting slogans — or titles — in his paintings. I’ve never liked words slapped on a work of art. Titian, for example, didn’t need to add lyrics from “Volare” to his Assumption of the Virgin. Form and color are the basic tools, and if the artist can’t deliver his message without them, the message might very well be defective or trite, or the artist’s lazy or, thinking as a marketeer, wants to make it easy for the viewer. God forbid it’s demanded of us to look and to think. We might think wrong thoughts.

Words are sometimes part of the subject, as in advertising posters, or Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico, from 1848, in which one of the subjects is a newspaper, or Jasper Johns’s map paintings that have lusciously painted letters. Advertising is ubiquitous in America, and, in part because of our Protestant roots, the word, or the Word, is decisive. Even Mel Bochner’s Blah, Blah, Blah paintings and prints are ingratiating, though shallow as a puddle. Then there’s Christopher Wool and Richard Prince, for whom the cryptic word is a shtick, and Jenny Holzer, who’s a writer as well as a bore.

Gibson’s work? We Are Made by History, We Want to Be Free, and Give My Life Something Extra are among banners appearing in geometric script in his work, so the title’s embedded and a design element. They aren’t strictly banal but are incongruent since they’re attached to serious art and not to a Coke ad. They buttress my response to Gibson’s work, which I’ve followed over the years. It’s decorative and certainly buoyant art that might comfort the afflicted but won’t afflict the comfortable. There’s nothing wrong with that, but a little goes a long way.

I can’t argue with If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress — not as art, but as a political sentiment, a mantra for students, or a banner on a fitness-center wall. The Right of People Peaceably to Assemble is tried and true. I’m not sure how the composition of a particular work augments the title, though, so they seem arbitrary. And since the images of words — also the titles — are part of the work of art, I can dicker with them. We are not, in fact, made by history, since that disowns agency. And if you want something extra in your life, go get it.

Gibson’s work would be much improved without the lingo, which seems lightweight intellectually and, aesthetically, a distraction or a crutch. It’s happy-clappy. I wonder whether the words are rhetorical devices, allusions to a Native resistance-to-oppression stance that Gibson himself doesn’t take too seriously. I couldn’t help thinking as I walked through the American Pavilion that this is Gibson’s peak. He might settle into a comfortable careerism.

His very latest work is predictable. He made a video, The Spirits Are Laughing, for New York’s Climate Week in September. He seems to think he has something to add, from a Choctaw and Cherokee perspective, to the corporate hustle called the climate emergency. I haven’t seen the art but have seen stills from the video. On his signature bright, geometric background of one frame the word “sky” appears on top, “wish upon my stars” on the bottom. I haven’t wished upon anyone’s star since I saw Pinocchio. In another still, below “the animal” is “we can teach you.” Ho hum. The spirits must be chortling and chuckling at such vacuity.

As for the Venice show, Gibson’s palette is neon and psychedelic, and since he describes himself as both gay and queer, there are lots of variations on the rainbow flag. Patterns abound. There’s nothing wrong with this, either. His bead sculptures were weird, even fantastic. The symmetry, dense beading, intense color, and geometric shapes — round, wild-eyed – make for a pagan intensity. I think I might have been detoxing from all the Archaic Greek sculpture I saw at the archaeological museum in Naples and at the Paestum archaeological museum.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the State Department collaborate on the selection of who’s representing the country at the Biennale. I wouldn’t count on either of them, much less a collaboration of both of them, to do anything adventurous or to be naturally oriented toward quality. It’s not that the final choice is political in a log-rolling way, or like a squeaky wheel, or stinks of “who-knows-who.” Gibson’s selection is based in part on the prevailing winds as felt in the Swamp, which aim at identity first and foremost. DEI is a religion – a fake one — in Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is also focused, not exclusively, on the country’s image abroad.

The American Pavilion gets very little federal money. The building itself is owned by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation. Once an artist is selected, it’s up to him and his dealer and collectors to raise the money, in Gibson’s case $5 million, to program the space. “Who do we want?” and “who can raise the money?” become simultaneous and overlapping questions when we’re looking at mid-seven-figure effort. It’s a disqualifying dimension as well since artists without big-time Manhattan dealers aren’t going to be able to raise the money. It’s just another example of the government privileging the rich over the not-so-rich.

And $5 million is a boatload of wampum. The pavilion’s an extravaganza this year, and I’ll save the Jingle Dancers for later, but no other country does its pavilion up so Hollywood. I suspect that Gibson’s show was on top of everyone’s agenda for theatricality alone. The American default MO is “can you top this?” So what’s next? No one peddling victim chic is going to ask Elon Musk to lend a few rockets.

Gibson’s exhibition was organized by the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and Site Santa Fe in New Mexico, which means they lent their curators, not that they paid for it. They’re both good organizations. Though I don’t love the show, they should be proud of it. The Biennale is a prestigious, must-do immersion in international art.

Gibson was selected in 2023 long before Joy and Brat became a party platform. Is that eek n’ siss I hear the sound of Lady Bozo’s bright balloons deflating? We’ll learn soon enough. I’ll leave “brat” to dictionary writers, but Gibson is certainly an artist of joy, which is a good thing overall and a relief after the sonorous Simone Leigh pavilion at the last Biennale or the deadly Martin Puryear one before that. Gibson’s art draws from 1980s pop music and gay club culture as well as Native American design, regardless of tribe. What’s gay about his work, or queer? He has talked about joy and a feeling for community, which might very well have been his experience as a young man, when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. His selection checks multiple boxes.

Gibson’s work is big and bold but not heavy, and he’s certainly benefitting from a vogue among critics, private collectors, and curators who shop for identities as much as art. Europeans have always been fascinated by the American Indians, which is what they still call them. A better idea, though, would have been a Native American group pavilion with half a dozen or so artists from different tribes, working with different styles, media, and themes, to display together. That’s diversity in action. I would have been curious to see how the international art chatterers would have seen Gibson’s work in this context. Alas, the American Pavilion has been a single-artist proposition for a long time now.

I’m sorry I missed the Jingle Dance program engineered for the opening of the pavilion on April 20. Performers from the Oklahoma Fancy Dancers and the Colorado Inter-Tribal Dancers jingled and jangled from St. Mark’s Square to the Giardini. For centuries, Venice looked east, so it was about time it looked west.

Jingles aside, Gibson is immersed in the Indigenous grievance movement, which, like Black Lives Matter, makes oppression a lucrative business model. I looked at the American Pavilion’s upcoming programs, which include a three-day symposium, though they call it a convening. It’s a salute to Gibson’s show and sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Indigenous Studies. It ends, according to Gibson’s website, with a performance called a “White People Killed Them Closing Celebration.” White People Killed Them is a band I didn’t know, but I listened to some of its music. Disco has nothing to fear. It’s grating, pompous, and soulless. Joy and Brat in practice, I presume.