TAKING VENICE - Mark Reviews Movies

Taking Venice, Zeitgeist Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

The Venice Biennale, an international art exhibition and competition that occurs every two years, seems to be a big deal, even if Taking Venice never makes a convincing case as to why. Art from around the world, with most of the artists sponsored by the governments of their respective countries, arrives in the Italian city, is displayed in each nation's respective pavilions on the exhibition grounds, and is admired by visitors and judged by a board of select experts. That's about all we learn of the event itself, since director Amei Wallach is so busy trying to figure out the story this documentary wants to tell.

On its face, the movie is about the exhibition of 1964, when the United States government finally decided, after decades of leaving the country's participation to private entities, to become more directly involved in its entries. The title suggests something akin to a heist story, and sure enough, the very first images of the documentary show people in boats, hauling various paintings through Venice's canal. It's not a robbery, though, unless one buys into the opinion of some contemporaries that the U.S. delegation basically stole that year's competition by way of a lot of displays of power and political machinations.

The setup is more interesting than the actual narrative here, which attempts to do too many things and ends up facing the unfortunate reality that the '64 Biennale turned out to be a pretty anticlimactic affair. Alice Denney, the wife of a State Department official and a friend to many political movers and shakers of the time, enlists Alan Solomon, an up-and-coming art curator, to organize the United States' entry into the exhibition. Solomon decided that he would prove to the world that the country, especially his home of New York City, had become the epicenter of art, and more specifically, he would find a way for one particular artist to win the competition's grand prize.

That artist was Robert Rauschenberg, a rather eclectic creator of art in found and mixed mediums who came to some prominence in the second half of the 1950s. He painted, yes, but he also made large prints from news clippings and photographs, while also blending paint and sculpture into pieces he called "Combines," which played with expectations of what paintings and sculptures "should" be.

Among the assorted threads of the movie, a biography of Rauschenberg is attempted here. It's thin, for one thing, and, for another, completely interrupts the flow of the central story. Then again, there's not much momentum to the tale of the exhibition. While Wallach may have assembled an impressive list of interview subjects (including Denney, art scholars and historians, and artists from the around the world who have participated in the Biennale), they pretty much have the same things to say over and over again.

Most of it has to do with the controversy of the United States' aggressive campaign for Rauschenberg, which is commonplace now, in a world where art is just as much a commodity as anything else considered valuable, but was seen as distasteful at the time. Solomon had print advertising for Rauschenberg's pieces, most of them housed outside of the exhibition grounds, made.

Some of the artist's old friends, namely composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, arrived in Venice for a last-minute appearance/performance, which many thought was a cheap way to bring attention to Rauschenberg. It was, apparently, and that's the end of that.

The conflict here never feels like it, especially with all the build-up Wallach creates. The fact that most of Rauschenberg's art is in a different location, for example, will obviously become an issue, but the opening tease tells us the solution to the problem ahead of time and, with a thud, the interview subjects simply inform us that the maneuver worked. Art experts, apparently, aren't exactly the best vessels for creating suspense, so maybe that's why the movie branches out so often—as a means of delaying the fact that none of the complications and little of the controversy amounted to much by the end.

The biggest issue with Taking Venice is that it's messy in ways it doesn't need to be. In addition to the main story and the biographical elements, the movie provides a brief history lesson of the 1960s (John F. Kennedy's assassination is treated as little more than a minor bump in the road), questions whether Rauschenberg's art is patriotic or critical, and raises concerns about nationalism and how a country presents itself to the world, only to forget those ideas until a lengthy coda that feels as if an entirely different narrative is starting. Even in their hasty form, some of these notions are more interesting than the story at the documentary's center.

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