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Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Linda Nochlin

Women are omnipresent in this year's Venice Biennale, beginning with the two visual-arts directors--Maria de Corral, organizing "The Experience of Art" in the Italian Pavilion, and Rosa Martinez, producing "Always a Little Further" at the Arsenale--and ending with the women who walked off with the lion's (or lioness') share of the prizes. That the major curators were women is a noteworthy fact in itself: the first time in 110 years that women have held this important position. Both have proven records and are well known on the international contemporary-art circuit. De Corral was curator of the Spanish pavilion at the 1988 Venice Biennale and has served as director of the visual arts sector of Spain's La Caixa Foundation (1981-91) and of the Reina Sofia Museum (1991-94), organizing exhibitions for both institutions. Martinez has been artistic director of the Barcelona Biennale (1988-92), co-curator of Manifesta (1996), curator of the Istanbul (1997) and SITE Santa Fe (1999) biennales, and of the Spanish pavilion at Venice (2003). She has also been involved in explicitly feminist issues. In the catalogue to "Fusion Cuisine," a show of international women artists at the Deste Center for Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, in 2002, she published two outspoken essays, one titled "New Feminism (First Manifesto)" and the second "Thinking Sex is Thinking Power." In the "First Manifesto," Martinez poses a question: "If we write the word 'new' before the word 'feminism,' would some people still be suspicious or even afraid?" And in the next sentence she declares:

They should not! New Feminism is an inclusive movement that gathers a series of radical but flexible strategies to reinvent the emotional, sexual, economical and geopolitical distribution of power.... New Feminism is aware of the strong role of women in the economic development of their societies and asks for a better distribution of the benefits.... New feminism puts into question the backlash of the nineties that still pretends that equality between men and women has already been achieved.

Martinez puts her words into action in the Arsenale exhibition at the Biennale. Almost exactly half the works in "Always a Little Further" are by women. The exhibition includes many younger women artists (as well as the ever-young, over-90 Louise Bourgeois), and is introduced by an antechamber featuring the production of those famous feminist furies, the Guerrilla Girls, and a spectacular large-scale chandelier by Joana Vasconcelos that close inspection reveals to be made not of the delicate glass for which Venice is famous, but rather of many thousands of tiny o.b. tampons, signifiers of basic femininity throughout the world. The Arsenale show is broadly international in its reach. It includes the Spanish artist Pilaf Albarracin, the Egyptian-born Ghada Amer, the Lebanese-born Mona Hatoum, the Turkish Semiha Berksoy, the Guatamalan Regina Jose Galindo, the Palestinian Emily Jacir, the Korean Kimsooja, the Pakistani-born Shazia Sikander, the German Paloma Varga Weisz, the Brazilian Valeska Soares and the Japanese Mariko Mori.

"The Experience of Art," curated by de Corral, encompasses a larger time span; in addition to many young artists, it features a number of more established figures (some of them dead, among them Philip Guston, Agnes Martin and Francis Bacon). This show, too, contains an extensive range of art in a variety of styles and mediums by contemporary women of many nationalities, including the Americans Barbara Kruger--who won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement--and Jenny Holzer; Monica Bonvicini of Venice; Candice Breitz (based in Berlin) and Marlene Dumas (who lives in Amsterdam), both born in South Africa; Tania Bruguera of Cuba; Tacita Dean and Rachel Whiteread, both from the UK; as well as Finland's Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

The national pavilions include fewer women artists, yet those who do represent their countries are, almost without exception, outstanding. They include Annette Messager, who won the coveted prize for the best national pavilion for France; Rebecca Belmore, representing Canada with an ambitious performance-based video; Miyako Ishiuchi, a veteran photographer who is presenting a powerful group of images relating to her mother in the Japanese pavilion; and, off-site, the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, who created a site-specific ceiling video projection for the church of San Stae. Kiki Smith's off-site, adjunct exhibition, "Homespun Tales," at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, is one of the artist's best shows in recent years. Even such relatively modest work as Jelena Tomasevic's small, figurative "Joy of Life" series in the Serbia and Montenegro pavilion offers food for thought as well as visual pleasure.

Yet what I find particularly admirable about the wide array of women's art at this year's Biennale is not only the high quality of much of it, but the fact that I cannot make any striking generalizations about it. "What befits a woman?," philosopher Sue Larsen asked in a memorable lecture presented at the beginning of the Women's Liberation Movement, in the late '60s. And her answer was a resounding "Nothing." This does not mean that women are not socially conditioned in a way that differs from the social conditioning of men; of course they are. But it is to say that whatever is good is good for both men and women; whatever bad, bad for both sexes. In a way, the triumph of the 2005 Biennale lies in the fact that there is no single women's style or iconography or medium that stands out as the dominant one--nothing that tells you right away, "Yes, this is by a woman artist, this is the way art by a woman should be." Of course, there are certain themes--the body, for instance--that in some cases are self-referential and hence, gender revealing. And in other cases, certain art or craft forms traditionally associated with women in certain societies are employed, but usually in greatly altered form. Being a woman and an artist does make a difference, in the same way that nationality, so crucial but so ephemeral in today's transient art world, does. But one might say there are as many differences as there are different women. There is no single signifier of femininity on view in the work in Venice.