The Vatican in Venice
A Convergence of Values
Moral, political, and aesthetic controversies are something we have come to expect of contemporary art: Nan Goldin battling the Sackler family over its contribution to the opioid epidemic; Ai Weiwei lying on a beach in Greece in the pose of a migrant child who died while crossing the Mediterranean; or, the clownish antics of Maurizio Cattelan who exhibited a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall (Comedian). Needless to say, we don’t expect the Vatican, the religious and political seat of the Catholic faith, to lead the headlines in contemporary art news in quite the same way. In March, however, the Vatican did just that. Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Vatican’s culture designate, held a press conference and announced that the Vatican will be hosting a pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Not only would the Pope be attending the event – a first in the whole history of the Biennale – but the venue for the pavilion would be located not in a traditional white box gallery but in Venice’s Gauduzzi Prison for Women. Located on an island in the Venice lagoon, visitors will have to travel by boat, pass through regular visitor security, and be guided by prisoners to see the pavilion exhibition. Even more startling was the announcement that Maurizio Cattelan would be the star of the exhibition.
To understand why this news is out-of-character, we can begin by considering the historical relationship between artists and the Church. The Vatican and the Catholic Church were once the primary patrons of artists in Europe, but gradually, since the Renaissance, and even more so after the rise of the artistic avant-garde in the 19thcentury, the Church’s influence as a major patron in the Art World pretty much disappeared. This is not to say that religious art is no longer produced or that some contemporary artists still accept commissions for the Church, only that the cultural institutions that recognize contemporary art – the museums, curators, and collectors – have largely excluded religious art. Moreover, the Vatican has had a difficult relationship with both contemporary art and the Biennale. An AP News story from 2013 related that in the Biennale’s founding year, 1895, an official of the Church demanded that a painting by Giacomo Grosso, featuring a coffin and naked women, be removed from the exhibition. The mayor of Venice refused and the work won one of the event’s most popular prizes. In 1990, the Vatican complained again, this time over a work by the American art collective, Gran Fury. The artwork, Pope Piece, featured an image of Pope John Paul II alongside an image of an erect penis. The work was meant to challenge John Paul’s stand on condom use as an AIDS prevention. The Pope was again the subject of an artwork at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Maurizio Cattelan’s, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) – a life-size sculpture of the pontiff lying on the ground after being knocked down by a meteorite – became the event’s cause célèbre. The Vatican was not amused.
From the beginning, then, the Vatican has not been an active participant or supporter of the Biennale. But, ten years ago, in 2013, the Vatican took a new approach; the Holy See decided to move towards a reconciliation of sorts by joining the Biennale and hosting a pavilion exhibition of its own.1 That year, Micol Forti, the curator of contemporary art at the Vatican Museum, selected three artists to produce works inspired by the story of Genesis with the title, Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation. The exhibition was not well received as The Guardian reported:
Reactions to the the [sic] pavilion have already been mixed – from admiration at the Vatican's willingness to engage with the art world to disappointment that the Holy See, historically the most important patron of art in the western world, has fielded what in some quarters is regarded as a kind of all-purpose spiritual mishmash.
Since that year, the Vatican’s participation has continued but gained little or no attention until this year. So what is different?
First of all, rather than relying on their in-house experts, the Vatican has recruited two contemporary art curators, Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine. Both curators have strong connections to contemporary art in France and Italy where they have managed significant art venues. Parisi was born in Italy but has spent most of her working career in France where she is now the Director of the Centre Pompidou’s Metz museum. Prior to that appointment she spent two years as a curator of contemporary art at the Villa d’Medici, France’s cultural outpost in Rome. Racine was born in France and spent most of his career as a public servant which, by the late 1990s, led to an appointment as director at the Villa d’Medici followed by a stint as the director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Now he is listed as the director of the Palazzo Grassi, a private contemporary art museum funded by French billionaire François Pinault. While Parisi and Racine are not A-list curators, they have earned their place within the institutions of contemporary art. They bring significant cultural capital to the project and demonstrate the Vatican’s willingness to engage fully with the expectations of the contemporary art world.
Second, the curators have been given free rein with planning the exhibition and selecting the artists which is allowing for an interesting convergence of values between the Vatican’s religious mandate and the kinds of values that support the valorisation of contemporary art. The curators have begun by selecting a roster of established international artists, all of whom have already built recognition in either popular entertainment or in the contemporary art world. Along with Cattelan, the artists include: Corita Kent (1918-1986), an American nun who became an artist-activist; Sonia Gomes, a Brazilian mixed-media fibre artist; Claire Fontaine, an Italian-French feminist collective; Bintou Dembélé, a renowned dancer; Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American ceramicist; Claire Tabouret, a French painter; and American-Italian filmmaking duo, Zoe Saldaña and Marco Perego. Cattelan is the most renown of the artists and ranked in the top 1,000 contemporary artists in the world on Artfacts.net. The plan is to have the artists work with the prisoners to create some of the artworks and the exhibition inside the prison while Cattelan has been commissioned to do a site-specific piece on the exterior. No one knows yet what Cattelan’s work will be. Considering his 2001 debut at the Venice Biennale with La Nona Ora and his more recent banana piece, one might be surprised, offended, or just laugh.
The curators have also chosen to avoid an obvious religious theme like the 2013 pavilion. They titled the exhibition, With My Eyes, which is supposed to suggest looking directly at the reality of the world. In this case, visitors will enter a prison and, with their own eyes, see a place and people that are typically hidden from view. The location and theme then fit well with the Biennale’s theme for this year, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere. The phrase, “Foreigners Everywhere” was taken from an artwork produced in 2014 by the collective, Claire Fontaine. As the Biennale curator, Adriano Pedrosa, explains the phrase is taken to mean two things:
First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners— they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.
The objective is to bring visibility to the many marginalized people of the world. In keeping with this objective, the central international exhibition curated by Pedrosa, Nucleo Contemporaneo, will focus on the “queer” and the “strange.” As he explains, these terms reference
the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist, who is located at the margins of the art world, much like the self-taught artist, the folk artist and the artista popular; the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.
Choosing to highlight the lives of prisoners, and include them in an art project and exhibition, then meets the Biennale’s theme. But, it also meshes with the Vatican’s Christian values. As the Vatican News explains the exhibition is
dedicated to human rights and people living on the margins of society, and seeks to draw the world’s attention to those people who are largely ignored while fostering a culture of encounter. The Holy See Pavilion invites the viewer to take Pope Francis’ words literally, as he invites everyone to look others directly in the eyes, looking beyond their social status to encounter their humanity.
Moreover, the project resonates with the Church’s emphasis on mercy and forgiveness. As Courtney Mares of the Catholic News Agency notes, “visiting prisoners is one of the Catholic Church’s corporal works of mercy originating with Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘I was in prison and you visited me.’” Biennale visitors to the pavilion will be, like Jesus, taking “part in this Catholic tradition by entering an active women’s prison on Venice’s Giudecca island.”
Making the exhibition a collaborative effort between artists and prisoners also works well with the values of contemporary art. Contemporary art institutions have long embraced artistic practices that breakdown the division between artists and community. Ai Weiwei, for example, brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany as part of his artistic project, Fairytale, at the Documenta 12 in 2007. More recently, in 2018, Tania Bruguera involved local residents in a “community-driven response to the global migration crisis” in her Tate Turbine commission, 10,148,451. Both projects enlist ordinary people as collaborative partners and have been, through their presentation in art events and museums, recognized as contemporary “artworks.”
Finally, the Vatican exhibition, like contemporary art, embraces a belief that art can be transformative for the viewer and/or participants. Both institutions – the Catholic Church and the institutions that contribute to making contemporary art – have a history of making objects and actions “special.” That is, both valorize the significance of certain objects and ritual actions and attribute extraordinary meaning to them.2 The Church, for example, has long supported the importance of artworks and special objects such as relics, chalices, and crucifixes, in their canon of beliefs. One of the first officials to defend the use of imagery and art in the Church was the 13th century, Cluniac monk, Abbot Suger. Suger responded to the criticism of iconoclasts by extolling the virtues of contemplating beautiful objects like stained-glass windows as a way for believers to realize the divinity of God, or to teach the untutored the important stories and tenets of the Church. Art, whether ancient, modern or contemporary, is still valued for its transformative benefits. These are attributed to the sensual or emotional experience of the formal qualities of a work, or to a conceptual revelation that inspires the viewer to understand something differently. In both cases, art is understood to instigate a change or revelation in the viewer.
The Church and the contemporary art world, however, understand this transformative effect differently. This difference is clearly evidenced in how the respective media reported the Vatican’s participation in the Biennale. The art press (ArtNews.net, ArtNews, HyperAllergic, and ArtForum) uniformly, and provocatively, focused on Maurizio Cattelan’s participation in the pavilion and, all but ArtForum, coupled their report with a large image at the beginning of the article of La Nona Ora, a work that is not expected to be featured in the exhibition. The Catholic press (Vatican News, Catholic News Agency), on the other hand, focused on the Pope’s planned visit to Venice and the pavilion, and on the spiritual purpose of the Vatican’s participation in the Biennale. These reports were coupled with scenic images of Venice and/or an image of the Pope washing the feet of prisoners at a juvenile detention centre in Rome. None of the articles mentioned Cattelan or the other artists by name and only gave a short quote or reference to the curators. For the Catholic media, the principal story is the Pope and the Vatican’s entry into an art event. In the art press, the artists make the headlines while the pope’s planned visit is barely mentioned. The writers provide only a few quotes by Cardinal Mendonça to explain the purpose of the pavilion and, then focus on Cattelan’s participation as if anticipating some sort of scintillating scandal on the opening day of the Biennale (April 20).
These two media approaches highlight the challenge that the Vatican faces in meeting the expectations of the Art World. Contemporary art, with its origins in the historical avant-garde, is valorized for its dissident, irreverent, and challenging practices which are often aimed at revealing, criticizing, and breaking down the values of traditional institutions like the Church. The Church, on the other hand, like any autocratic state, is determined to maintain its doctrines and traditions despite the changing values in the world around it. The Venice Biennale then provides a fascinating proving ground where different values meet and sometimes converge in the making of contemporary art.
The Vatican is viewed politically as a nation within Italy and therefore qualifies to present a national pavilion at this international event where different nations present the work of their contemporary artists.
See my archived posts, “When is a Chair Art?”
Super interesting Marie. Thanks for all that digging. I had no idea about any of this!