The 43d Venice Biennale has a conciseness and a cogency that has been missing from the important art event for many years.
As the world`s oldest international exposition of contemporary art, the biennial show focuses primarily on a group of international submissions in the pavilions of the Public Gardens at the southeast end of the city.
However, since 1972, an increasing number of historical and theme exhibitions have spread beyond the Central (Italian) Pavilion to various outposts. The 42d edition had eight such shows, most of them fascinating, if beside the contemporary point.
The present Biennale goes back to original premises by returning the Central Pavilion to contemporary artists, enlarging the show devoted to first- time exhibitors and dramatically reducing the role played by historical and theme exhibitions. A viewer still needs four full days to visit the six locations, but now the emphasis is almost wholly on art of our time.
No doubt, some expediency lay behind the decisions, as a new governing board took office in January and director Giovanni Carandente began work in February, leaving only four months for him and his consulting commission to assemble the Biennale for an opening late in June. Even so, the idea of minimizing critical theory and allowing living artists to dominate proved invigorating.
The absence of a central theme allowed for variety, which is the opposite of the Biennale`s chief rival, Dokumenta. Where last year`s Dokumenta 8 was strongly political, the 43d Biennale presents that tendency as one among many, emphasizing international plurality. The only generalization one can make is that there is an emphasis on sculpture.
Aside from incomplete construction on the Australian and Rumanian pavilions, the exposition is trouble-free, persuasively communicating its rationale, with an especially pleasing effect in the Central Pavilion.
This is a much-altered building that dates from the first Biennale in 1895. Two years ago, interior restoration uncovered a set of allegorical panels by Galileo Chini dating from 1909; exterior work this year also brought to light two huge allegorical paintings, by Giuseppe Antonio Santagata and Franco Gentilini, added to a modern facade in 1938.
The building originally displayed all the national submissions and, hence, is much larger than the other pavilions. In 1986, it housed three huge theme shows. Now, it presents 19 Italian artists, as well as eight Europeans and Americans who have worked in Italy. This pavilion is the Biennale`s national prize winner.
The native Italian group-16 painters and three sculptors-presents, in effect, a survey of the country`s contemporary tendencies.
In painting, Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio and Giuseppe Santomaso represent abstraction; Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, Neo-Expressionism.
Gianfranco Baruchello, Jannis Kounellis, Maurizio Mochetti and Marisa Merz work in unusual media. Piero Guccione, Ennio Morlotti, Franco Sarnari and Ruggero Savinio recreate natural forms, both figures and landscapes.
Each artist has a separate room. Kounellis, Mochetti and Paladino make the most of it with three of the finest pieces, installations. Cucchi shows large-scale iron and brass reliefs incorporating drawings. Clemente presents a series of psycho-sexual figurative canvases and two mural-like paintings, one a surprising geometric abstraction.
Strongest among the more orthodox paintings are the light-filled land-and seascapes by Guccione and the almost abstract segments of the human body, greatly enlarged from photo-images by Sarnari. Of interest, too, are recent canvases by Morlotti and Santomaso, primarily because the artists helped revitalize Italian painting after World War II and some of that older work may be seen in the only historical group show, at the Ca` Corner della Regina, the palazzo housing the Biennale archives.
Sculpture is at each locale, reflecting Carandente`s belief that
”perhaps even more than painting, it constitutes a piercing and vigorous presence in our everyday life.” The Italian pavilion includes work by Eliseo Mattiacci, Merz, Arnaldo Pomodoro and Renato Ranaldi, in addition to the sculptural components of Paladino`s installation. Particularly arresting are Mattiacci`s technological abstractions and Merz`s metal-wax-and-pastel heads, the one as heroically outgoing as the other is withdrawn.
”Ambiente Italia” is the section of the pavilion devoted to foreign artists. George d`Almeida, Jan Dibbets, Leon Gischia, Sol LeWitt, Markus Lupertz, Sebastian Roberto Matta, Niki de Saint Phalle and Cy Twombly each occupy a single gallery, showing work related to projects completed in Italy. The standouts are sequential paintings by Twombly that begin with a scribbled line from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and end by suggesting a meditation on death by means of the reflections and foliage common to late Monet. These pictures, often shaped, induce a queasiness tantamount to threat, a result both startling and unexpected.
The other artists contribute work in their ”signature” styles. Matta`s four-screen ”video paintbox” is by far the wildest. LeWitt`s geometric construction with wall paintings is the most coolly glowing. Saint Phalle`s raucously colored snake sculpture, a model for a fountain, is, as ever, a distillation of fun.
Traditionally, the national pavilions show no unanimity either in kinds of work or quality. This is because each country selects its own candidates without following a particular pattern. In years past, the greatest variety resulted whenever the exposition had a central theme. Then one really felt the difficulty of attempting to survey art that was so much more diverse than when the Biennale was founded at the end of the last century.
Perhaps it is coincidence, but Carandente`s emphasis on individual artists seems to have found favor among the 41 participating countries, as the majority present solo or two-person displays rather than larger group exhibitions that cannot show artists in depth. Of course, in most cases the work is very recent, tracing short periods of development. Still, there are exceptions.
The first is the Soviet Union`s entry on behalf of early-modern painter Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943). Virtually none of his work is known in the West, so even fewer than the 35 canvases on view would have been welcome. The exhibition is, however, a mini-retrospective that successively examines Lentulov`s Fauve, Cubo-Futurist and Soviet phases. Imagine a cross between the dynamism of Robert Delaunay and the luxuriance of the Russian Ballet. Lentulov is an exciting discovery.
The other important exception is America`s entry, a survey of the last 14 years of the art of Jasper Johns. Nothing else at the Biennale has quite the same stature or finish, and unlike the 1986 show of Noguchi sculpture, this exhibition has the virtue of looking at home in the spaces of the American pavilion.
The show`s drama involves a transition, from hermetic crosshatch paintings, abstractions made from small clusters of parallel lines, to symbolic and allegorical canvases that embrace representation even as they admit chunks of autobiography.
No previous exhibition focused on the development; this one, organized by Mark Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, can scarcely be bettered. In any case, where the 1986 jury split over Frank Auerbach and Sigmar Polke, here the majority went for Johns, who received the Biennale`s international prize. (The exhibition also will be shown in Philadelphia, between Oct. 23, 1988, and Jan. 28, 1989.)
Switzerland, France and the Netherlands used their pavilions for solo exhibitions but also put artists into a palazzo and two churches in a central section of the city. In consequence, the clearest advantage fell to Markus Raetz, who turned the entire Swiss pavilion into an installation.
Raetz is a draftsman, painter and sculptor who excels at amassing tiny gestures. Here, among much else, he ”draws” on walls with twigs, relates a miniscule Joel Shapiro-like sculpture to distant paintings and aligns shadows and reflections to create an eclipse. Neither his materials nor ends proclaim works of art, yet the sum of them creates a chamber of wonder. A pity the combination of playfulness and reserve makes the effort seem easy, slighter.
The French pavilion has Claude Viallat`s free-hanging canvases painted with an identical repeated emblem, thus requiring much theoretical support. However, paintings by Phillipe Favier and Dennis Laget (at the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista) are more directly communicative.
Favier provides paintings on glass that resemble single abstract gestures but actually are infinitesimal landscapes full to overflowing. Laget offers juicy still lifes that grow from Cezanne and Bonnard while giving a crucial role to wide overpainted frames of zinc plus the wood supports. Contemporary painting rarely gets more seductive.
The British pavilion shows 11 pieces from the `80s by sculptor Tony Cragg. Two are ”wall drawings” created by arranging and affixing cast-off plastic objects. All the rest are free-standing pieces, in plaster, sandstone, glass or metal. Several continue the poetic series of vessels and beakers that were the artist`s contribution to Dokumenta 8 last year. On the whole, it is an intelligent, good-looking complement that underlines a strong social conscience.
Curiosities include a sprawling installation of wood sculpture and paper cutouts by Felix Droese (German Federal Republic); Nikos Kessanlis` three-dimensional anamorphic portrait of critic Pierre Restany (Greece); and Juraci Dorea`s teepee-like leather sculpture whose aroma recalls buffalo chips and succeeds in driving almost everyone away (Brazil).
On the long avenue leading to the Italian Pavilion and scattered among the others are 25 pieces of monumental sculpture in a range of styles. Mythological, figurative works by Mario Ceroli, Lynn Chadwick and Paladino benefit most from fantastic associations with the city. But abstractions by Anthony Caro, Mark Di Suvero, Antonio Ievolella and Phillip King also make their case, despite some insensitive siting. The outdoor sculpture show is typically the weakest section of the Biennale; this year it is again.
Outside the gardens are younger artists, generally under age 40. Swiss photographer Felice Varini`s 360-degree piece that alters the interior of the Church of San Stae and six Dutch sculptors who use humble materials (at the Palazzo Sagredo) complete the national contingents.
The great old Corderie, a 16th-Century rope-making warehouse at the Arsenale, houses the ”Aperto” or ”Open” section now including 86 first-time exhibitors, all in capacious separate stalls. The work shown here usually is riskier than in the pavilions and invariably attracts more tolerant viewers.
This time the prevailing tone is Conceptual, which means a lot of objects aspire toward something else, as, say, photographs toward painting or furniture toward sculpture. Some of the more provocative pieces-Kari Kaven`s parquet floor relief, Simon Linke`s gallery ads, Peter Fischli and David Weiss` rubber household implements-overlay wit with a deadpan attitude, though that is the strategy only when work is not issuing a political protest or a rebuke to consumers.
All manner of installation is here, from the overtly theatrical (Thomas William Puckey, Jorgos Lappas) to the purely formal (Toshikatsu Endo). A few pieces transcend their means to achieve an otherworldly visual serenity
(prizewinner Barbara Bloom, Tatsuo Miyajima). Others use sound or light to create a profound unease (Sylvie Blocher, Judith Barry).
No one ever makes sense of ”Aperto.” Writers usually condemn it for being a hodgepodge. Yet artists find that to be included is enormously important, and this is true of the exposition in general. Yes, the Biennale is an old-fashioned way of trying to come to terms with an unmanageable amount of art, but when it is assembled as beautifully as this year, it almost convinces you that the world is, in fact, simpler.
”The 43d International Exposition of Art, the Biennale of Venice”
continues through Sept. 25.
