Venice Biennale, part 1: The Milk of Dreams

Venice Arsenale, 23 April - 27 November 2022

The spermy title of the 59th Biennale's curated exhibition comes from a children's book by the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Like the Surrealists, the curator, Cecilia Alemanni, professes a dissatisfaction with Western rationalism, looking for alternative worldviews. The exhibition sets out to find them, pursuing dreams, the irrational, metamorphosis, myths and mysticism from around the world - and shepherding them along the highway of Surrealism into the fold of contemporary art, to propel it to a more enlightened future, in symbiosis with the Earth. 

It needs a better map. Surrealism is used so broadly as to be nearly meaningless, and the exhibition lurches about without direction. Each of the two exhibition venues opens with single, monumental sculpture. The Giardini has Katharina Fritsch's statue of an elephant on a plinth in a mirrored room. Its counterpart in the Arsenale is a bronze, impassive bust of a woman without eyes by Simone Leigh. These solemn heads of the procession are spectacular and a bit mysterious, but give little more than photos for your Instagram story.

Next are Andra Ursuţa's sculptures which combine casts of the artist's body with futuristic, biomechanical forms and bits of what look like the alien from the film Alien. Again: fantasy, but little value as sculpture. Instead of material investigation, they give you image. Instead of viscerality, spectacle.

Then The Milk of Dreams really loses its way. Huge paintings with cringey centaurs spilling onto the wall; ever-so-tasteful figural canvases with a dreamlike twist to complement some millionaire's dining room. A load of work intent on shocking us with sexual taboo, as if we were still capable of being shocked by that. And spare a thought for the dancers having to writhe around on the floor for Alexandra Pirici's unbearably solemn performance, everyone talking loudly over them.

Lilianne Lijn's tall, shaggy sculpture made from scoubidous is a signpost in the confusion, its wackiness grounded satisfyingly in the familiar. But even the good work seems lost. The pure, naive joy of Jadé Fadojutimi's paintings is winning, but they owe more to Abstract Expressionism than to Surrealism. Noah Davis' paintings are fantastic but so far removed from Surrealism you wonder why they're here.

There are some rooms displaying works from the past, to try to get a historical grip on the exhibition. It is exciting to see the wild spirals of newly art-canonised Spiritualist, Georgiana Houghton, drawn under otherworldly influence. They anticipated the Surrealists' automatic drawing methods, but Houghton's drawings also lead the show in a completely different direction: to God. 

Portia Zvavahera's large paintings take up the theme of God, and seem to be sincere expressions of Christian faith. We've left Surrealism far behind now, and joined a different, much older road. very unlike what we've come to expect from contemporary art. But Zvavahera's paintings are also too tidy, a bit slick, and the image floats away into the large blank spaces, not anchored firmly enough to mediate effectively between their materiality and divinity. It seems like nothing is working in The Milk of Dreams.

Soon you're completely lost and can't wait to get out. Someone has installed a garden near the back of the Arsenale, which you take at a near sprint, not knowing where the road you've just trodden was headed, other than to the café. Was it the road to God, like so much art of the past? Or to a vague, anything-goes esotericism? Back to Surrealism? Anywhere at all?