In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, an international exhibition of contemporary work. The documentary \u201cTaking Venice\u201d is about the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that resulted in Rauschenberg taking the prize. Director Amei Wallach, an art critic and\u00a0specialist in fine arts documentaries (she also did \u201cIlya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here\u201d and \u201cLouise Bourgeois: The Mistress and the Tangerine\u201d), portrays Rauschenberg\u2019s victory as an exercise in postwar American power.<\/p>\n
A band of sharp-witted American diplomats and art world players\u00a0figured out how to manifest a win for Rauschenberg, whose work mixed collage, painting, and silkscreen and sometimes utilized ordinary household objects, curios, and junk. This was the Pop-Art era, in which\u00a0many exhibits, particularly in the US, prompted visitors to ask, \u201cIs this really art?\u201d Rauschenberg was one of the exemplars of the movement, along with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, and Andy Warhol.\u00a0Prior to Venice, he had been criticized both at home and abroad as, in his own words, \u201ca clown\u201d or \u201ca novelty.” But he was also becoming more popular and had begun to sell work for large sums of money, so it\u2019s not as if he was Philip Glass still driving a taxi cab after \u201cEinstein on the Beach\u201d had premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. There’s a mysterious inevitability to the way that certain cultural figures keep rising throughout their careers, and Rauschenberg had that kind of aura. He seemed like somebody already headed for the summit of the mountain who just needed a push to get to the top.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This made him the perfect candidate for special attention from the American government\u00a0at the\u00a0Biennale. The US\u00a0had become\u00a0a superpower, and President John F. Kennedy (who was prominently featured in Rauschenberg’s work and would be assassinated six months before the Biennale) was the most enthusiastic supporter of the arts that\u00a0the country had ever had in the White House.\u00a0The State Department under Kennedy wanted to establish that America was making unique, adventurous fine art that was meaningful and beautiful, wasn\u2019t just being dumped in overseas economies like blue jeans and Coca-Cola, and was proof of why people should be on Team America instead of Team Soviet Union.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a journalist, Wallace got in under the wire, as it were, and interviewed major players in the 1964 Venice Biennale who were in their seventies and eighties and still lucid, along with witnesses. The biggest get is Alice Denney, the former vice-commissioner of the US pavilion and a key player in this art history sideshow. Denney\u2019s husband was deputy director for the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She suggested a man named Alan R. Solomon to be the US Biennale commissioner along with her. Solomon was a smooth, smart man who, in the words of New Yorker <\/em>writer Calvin Tomkins, had \u201ca fine hand in his aggression.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Solomon also had a genius for realizing that any rule that\u2019s not written down isn\u2019t actually a rule and can be bent or broken as long as the gambit is so clever that people feel admiration or envy for not thinking of it first\u2014and as long as the person on whose behalf the effort is being expended seems like a winner anyhow. Rauschenberg did seem like a winner. He was a showman and provocateur and what we would now call\u00a0a brand, in addition to being an increasingly significant force in gallery art. The combination of Rauschenberg\u2019s game-for-anything confidence and the background operations of Solomon and his allies created a momentum that nobody could halt.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the New York Times<\/em> obituary for Solomon recalled: \u201cInsisting on eight sizable one-man shows for artists, [Solomon] soon ran out of space in the cramped American pavilion at the public gardens,\u201d the site of all the official exhibits, where each artist was allowed to display only one painting. \u201cWith the agreement of the careless Biennale authorities, Solomon extended his show into a vacant American consulate building, much to the dismay of other nationals who had been denied such privileges.\u201d There were other improvisations as well. In the middle of the night, a construction crew built a makeshift addition to a courtyard-like area in front of the official site with a roof to protect against the elements (today, we\u2019d probably call it a \u201cpop-up exhibit\u201d) where Rauschenberg\u2019s work could be ported over from the auxiliary site, to neutralize gripes about his stuff being shown outside of the\u00a0official exhibition venue. The strategy was to get people to experience more of Rauschenberg than any other artist at the Biennale.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is a fascinating story. Counterproductive style choices get in the way of the telling, though. \u201cTaking Venice\u201d wears out its welcome by making the movie seem conventionally exciting, hip, commercial. Motion graphics, re-creations, and digital additions and erasures in historical photos clutter up scenes and montages that would\u2019ve been more impactful if we\u2019d been able to contemplate the images as-is. There\u2019s also a hyped-up score that runs the gamut from Steven Soderbergh heist flick to Michael Bay action thriller. If the point was to convey a cinematic equivalent of Rauschenberg\u2019s pop sensibility, it doesn\u2019t come across for a lot of reasons. This includes\u00a0the fact that Rauschenberg\u2019s style circa 1964 struck people as\u00a0“new,” but\u00a0these filmmaking techniques are so overused in\u00a0modern nonfiction that you’re surprised when you don’t<\/em> see them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, an international exhibition of contemporary work. The documentary \u201cTaking Venice\u201d is about the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that resulted in Rauschenberg taking the prize. Director Amei Wallach, an art critic and\u00a0specialist in fine arts documentaries (she also did \u201cIlya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}