‘A Show Opened to All Artists’: The 1970 Liberated Venice Biennale and the Production of Dissent

Abstract

In 1970, a group of New York City artists sought to ‘liberate’ the world’s largest art exhibition – the Venice Biennale – reimagining it as a radical site for political dissent. Their target, the United States of America’s pavilion, had promised more than just an exhibition, claiming that its show of print works, accompanied by an active workshop, would provide ‘a non-political setting for direct exchange among people who share the common interest of drawing the international community into harmony’.1 Instead, before the Biennale even began, over half the exhibition’s original thirty-three artists withdrew, emptying out the pavilion and throwing government plans into disarray. This was an act of protest, a boycott by artists against the instrumentalisation of their work by a government embroiled in a brutal war in Vietnam and facing anti-war, civil rights, and student protests in the USA. For the boycott organisers, withdrawal was a political...