Letter from Venice

by Ed Gilbert

I first came to Venice in the sixties, with my mother, brother, and sister. We were living in Germany, where my father was in American military intelligence; my mother, a Filipina, had been born and raised in Manila—her father was half Italian, her mother half Chinese. My brother and I were born in Salzburg; our sister in Monterey, while my father was studying Russian at Fort Ord.

Neither German nor Asian, we could not have imagined, upon descending upon Venice, how experiences of cultural displacement— and multiculturalism—would in the nineties become a primary subject for artists—and fascinating to interpreters of art, like Harald Szeeman, the Swiss curator of this year’s 49th Venice Biennale, which he dubbed the “Plateau of the Humanities”:

Every day we see religious and ethnic differences—or even the bald desire for political supremacy—give rise to new conflicts that can lead to war. And in the reaction of artists now one can see a clear difference to that of ten years ago: there is no longer the intense affirmation of one’s own identity, but rather an appeal to what is eternal within humankind—

As my train this August rolled onto the bridge crossing the Venetian lagoon, I was under the spell of my CD player and Nat King Cole singing “Aquellos Ojos Verdes,” recorded in 1958 for the album Cole Espagnol.

On the cover of the album, Cole, brandishing his famous smile, wears a decidedly British tweed hat. With a camera around his neck, he beams at us through another one. He stands in front of a Peruvian market. Does this assemblage of different cultural icons, high in the Andes (or in a Hollywood studio, it’s hard to tell) presage the Plateau of the Humanities? Long before our over-use of multiculturalism, Cole had managed to cross social boundaries in his successful TV show. With his broad (Anglo) diphthong vowels, with his silky-voice, mispronounced Spanish words of love, he could charm—and unite—the world....

Ed Gilbert is director of Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.