The Venice Biennale is not what it was. It`s better.
As the world`s oldest international exposition of contemporary art, the Biennale always has as its centerpiece submissions from several countries that are shown in the pavilions of the Public Gardens at the southeast end of the city.
However, in recent years, supplementary group exhibitions have increased in number and importance, going beyond their traditional home in the Central
(Italian) Pavilion while making a greater claim on the viewer`s attention.
This is indicated by the present Biennale, the 42d and largest in history. Along with submissions from 40 countries, it includes nine group shows and a solo retrospective. To see it all (through Sept. 28) requires three full days, with visits to six locations. It is less a forum than a spectacle.
Critic Lawrence Alloway once suggested affinities between the Biennale and European expositions of the 1850s that brought together art, science and technology. His comparison now becomes particularly apt, as the theme of this year`s Biennale focuses on several ways in which art and science are related. As usual, organizers in Venice proposed the theme to participating countries without insisting they observe it. West Germany did, Great Britain did not, and both their representatives–painters Sigmar Polke and Frank Auerbach–still won the ”best artist” prizes. Themes are but guidelines at the Biennale; flexibility is more important.
The finest show of the 1984 edition was a survey on the art of the Hapsburgs. This time the Biennale authority wanted to avoid strict
examinations of movements and historical periods. Instead there is an aggregate of group exhibitions, all large and including works from both the past and present.
— ”Art and Alchemy,” at the Central Pavilion, presents 117 books and scrolls (from the 4th through the 18th centuries) and nearly four times as many modern and contemporary paintings, drawings and sculptures.
Working from the broadest definition of alchemy–a speculative philosophy rather than a medieval chemical science–curator Arturo Schwarz established four sectors that include pieces related to different stages of transmutation. The first sector holds art reflecting the alchemist and his instruments; the second, a reconciliation of opposites; and so on.
Schwarz did not limit himself to artists who actually practiced alchemy;
his selections included anything that visually suggests transformation. The core of the show thus is devoted to a great many Surrealist artists, male and female, major and minor. In fact, as an undeclared overview of vintage Surrealism, the exhibition could hardly be bettered.
The major drawback is its failure to reveal something essential about each of the contemporary works. A realist draftsman such as Maurizio Osti proceeds from different artistic premises than, say, conceptualist sculptor Stephen Cox, ceramic installation artist Ben Jakober or abstract painter and sculptor Eric Orr. Yet here they are, all together, grouped with
representatives of almost every stylistic tendency of the century. Works are used to illustrate the show`s theme, regardless of differing approaches and intentions.
Nevertheless, the virtue of ”Art and Alchemy” is its density: There are as many curiosities as masterpieces. The Surrealist complement is, at best, good enough to challenge holdings in Chicago; the brace of contemporary works provides introductions to such accomplished artists as those cited earlier. Despite its trumped-up theme, then, the show`s possibilities for discovery are rich–which is precisely the point of the Biennale.
— ”Wunderkammer,” a smaller exhibition at the Central Pavilion, again has an arcane source. The title translates as ”chamber of wonder,” referring to the cabinets of real and fake oddities that often were a part of European collecting after the 16th Century. Setting the tone is a reconstruction of one of those cabinets, with all its reliquaries, stuffed animals, horns and shells.
More than 125 artistic curiosities are included, many by anonymous craftsmen from earlier centuries. Along with older allegorical, still life and trompe l`oeil paintings is a generous representation of the 20th Century.
Some pieces are Surrealist, supplementing ”Art and Alchemy.” Much else is remarkable work from contemporary artists whom one does not generally expect to beguile or astonish, those with a more cerebral orientation such as Marcel Broodthaers, Rebecca Horn, and members of the Italian Arte Povera movement.
There also are several photographs of environments–homes, studios, exhibition spaces, installations–created by artists or collectors. Of course, not all were intended to stimulate wonder, but the exhibition is so well chosen that even some relatively mute objects have been assimilated, suddenly becoming provocative. The show is, literally, a marvel.
— ”Space,” an exhibition in the Central Pavilion that begins with Renaissance perspective and aspires toward Einstein`s fourth dimension, initially proves didactic, with models of spatial illusions, interactive computer programs and anamorphic paintings. But midway through, it presents another survey. We see how artistic notions of space have changed beginning with Cubism.
This is the Biennale`s only exhibition that proves less than comprehensive when dealing with historical material. Its emphasis falls more strongly on contemporary pieces, but rightly so, for the more advanced of them are breathtaking.
Wen-Ying Tsai`s ”Cybernetic Space of Tsai” presents an environment of water and fiberglass sculptures lit by strobes. The atmosphere is oppressive, like street scenes from the film ”Blade Runner,” but control is ceded to spectators. Any loud sound reverses the direction of a waterfall and substantially alters the movement of giant fiberglass rods. The effect is extremely eerie.
Tom Shannon`s ”Compass of Love” likewise is a piece the size of a room. Its two components repel each other, being magnetically opposed. Thus a vast needle hovers over an equally large dome, as both are bathed in serene blue light to achieve one of the most poetic works the former Chicagoan has produced.
— ”Color,” an exhibition just west of the gardens (at the Sports Center and Corderie of the Arsenale), is an in-depth examination of the different ways color has been used from the time of Fauvist painting (circa 1905) to Dan Flavin`s contemporary neon-tube installations. Once again, an enormous number of movements and styles are represented by examples that when taken together form a remarkably fine survey.
Beginning with books and scientific charts, then moving through the early moderns, one is given a sense of continuity that becomes especially valuable upon reaching the art of our time. By emphasizing evolution and being as all- inclusive, these Biennale shows lay a solid groundwork for the understanding of contemporary achievements. Nowhere is it clearer than in ”Color.”
Among the national exhibitions, Ange Leccia`s video piece (at the Old Prison in central Venice) completes a strong French contingent, including installations by Christian Boltanski, Marie Bourget and (in the pavilion at the gardens) the winner of ”best national participation,” conceptualist Daniel Buren.
A video installation, by Fabrizio Plessi, also is a highlight of the Italian group, though, unaccountably, it gained less official attention than workmanlike metal sculpture by Fausto Melotti, who was honored with a posthumous prize.
America`s sole participant–a much more distinguished sculptor–is 80-year-old Isamu Noguchi. Yet despite the design efforts of architect Arata Isozaki, most of Noguchi`s work looks uncomfortable in the American pavilion, a Colonial neoclassic building once said to be ”halfway between Monticello and Howard Johnson.”
The small lamps and maquettes for outdoor projects seem there because they are of manageable size, whereas two new stone pieces–good strong ones
–threaten to burst from the rooms in which they are cramped. The third new work, a marble slide, stands in front of the pavilion, frostily elegant.
One-man shows are featured by nine other countries, none stronger than those for the two ”best artist” prize winners, indicating some improvement of the Biennale`s erratic track record in giving awards. However, one has to keep in mind that prizes are not always bestowed for the works on view. Like the Oscars, they can be earned for earlier achievement.
This probably is what happened in the case of Polke, who took the alchemy theme so seriously that he created paintings quite unlike the ones so avidly collected. His new pieces are romantic, abstract and without any trace of the sharpness that is his forte. Here he works with gold leaf and various chemicals, recalling ornamental motifs from Albrecht Durer and seemingly reveling in the mystic German past. It is not a Polke anyone would know.
Auerbach, on the other hand, treated familiar landscape and portrait subjects with his usual deliberation, producing stern canvases that are as unmistakable as the work of the 1984 winner, countryman Howard Hodgkin. It can be argued that Auerbach`s drawings are more gratifying than his paintings, which sometimes look dogged. But however slim their immediate appeal, it is work of conviction and high seriousness.
In the remaining pavilions, the strongest artists are Max Peinter, a visionary draftsman from Austria; Enzo Mari, a philosophical installation artist from Italy; an Icelandic painter/cartoonist called Erro; and, to a lesser degree, Cristina Iglesias, a 30-year-old Spanish sculptor.
Normally, an artist as young as Iglesias would make her debut at
”Aperto,” the hodgepodge of ”emerging” artists that this year brings together 51 exhibitors at the Corderie. However, the more persuasive Americans here–Sarah Charlesworth, Mark Innerst, Mark Tansey and the late Rene Santos
–are pretty well known; and among the better Europeans, Niek Kemps, Lisa Milroy, Boyd Webb and Jan Vercruysse already have received an international push.
The world is smaller than it used to be, the art world is larger, and since such conditions have diminished the Biennale`s role as herald of the new, it currently operates on a scale that insures both the forward and backward look. Fine pieces by younger artists Brian Eno (of pop-rock repute), Thomas Huber, Kevin Larmon or Alfredo Jaar have antecedents and counterweights. Bring them together and you have the spectacle of continuity that the Biennale has come to be about.
PAVILION WALLS HID MASTER
The Biennale`s Central Pavilion was built in the winter of 1894-5 and originally displayed all the national submissions.
It was decorated quite elaborately in the early years, and as part of a general restoration last April and May, the Biennale reclaimed an important series of panels (see detail from ”The Primitive Arts” on preceding page).
These works, in the cupola of the first gallery, are scenes of the history of art, commissioned in 1909 from Venetian painter Galileo Chini. Lavish and nostalgic, they were an enormous success, gaining for its creator another commission, decorations for the throne room of the King of Siam.
Chini`s Biennale panels were visible until 1928, when architect Gio Ponti redesigned the gallery in a streamlined style. More than half a century passed without anyone rediscovering the works under Ponti`s shell, but now the Venetians have done it and, to enlarge upon the celebration, have mounted a retrospective of Chini`s easel paintings and ceramics at the Ca` Corner della Regina, the palazzo housing the archives of the Biennale.
In the main, Chini was a conservative painter occasionally flirting with Symbolism and, more rarely, the flat patterns of Art Nouveau. But he also was a complete master of the salon style and in the cupola decorations (if not always his independent canvases) achieved an eloquence seldom matched by prize winners at the time. Though Italian modernists were ridiculing Chini`s kind of expression even before the decorations were finished, modernism is not the only esthetic worth examining. As important to the history of the Biennale are the forgotten artists and traditions it brings to light.
SPILLOVER COMPLEMENTS FULL BIENNALE CUP
The unprecedented size of the current Biennale has caused a scattering of exhibitions that makes a few of the smaller ones easily missed. These are less important for individual works than a sense of how wide the exposition ranges. ”Technology and Informatics,” is a group show of computer, sound, light and video pieces at the Corderie. It has a sizable workshop and an obligatory group of holograms, but the best part is devoted to seven installations, ranging from Liliane Lijn`s interacting feminist sculptures to a Scriabinesque sound-and-color keyboard by Waltraut Cooper. Its finest piece is Bill Viola`s ”Stanza for S. Giovanni della Croce,” a video/sculpture environment at once virtuosic and quietly poetic.
Restoration is the primary focus of ”Science for Art,” at the Accademia, the city`s repository for Old Masters. We see various computer analyses of works from the Accademia`s collection along with explanations of new restorative procedures. The show is an educational complement to ”Art and Biology,” the gardens` audio-visual comparison of motifs found in nature and in several modern paintings.
”Sculpture in the Open Air” brings together monumental pieces by 19 contemporary Italian artists. Most of the works are ideally sited along the bank of the San Marco basin between the gardens and the Arsenale, but not one commands attention when viewed either from the land or the water. They all are irresolute, giving a false impression of the nation`s artistic character. The show is the weakest of the Biennale.
