Summer art: the-grand tour

In a once-a-decade astral alignment, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel (which is presented every five years) and Skulptur Projekte Munster (every ten years) will all run this summer, along with the annual Art Basel.

The Venice Biennale (June 10-Nov. 27) is being guided for the first time in its 112-year history by an American, Robert Storr, now dean of the school of fine arts at Yale. Presented in the Arsenale and the Italian Pavilion at the Giardini, Storr's exhibition, "Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense" will present roughly 100 artists, among them some with whom he is closely associated (Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Elizabeth Murray), other midcareer artists (Jenny Holzer, Susan Rothenberg), and younger stars (Francis Alys, Luca Buvoli, Emily Jacir).The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who occupies the U.S. pavilion this year, is a key figure in Storr's exhibition, too; Guillermo Kuitca, from Argentina, and Sophie Calle, from France, will both also represent their countries as well as appearing in "Think with the Senses."

In a controversial decision, Storr has brought under the umbrella of the main event exhibitions showcasing art from Turkey and Africa; for the latter, he enlisted a panel of artists and curators who chose a proposal by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami. Turkey's inclusion will help bolster the presence of Muslim countries, which before now have been represented in the core of the Biennale only by Egypt. A record 77 countries are sponsoring exhibitions at the Biennale, among them Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon and the republics of Central Asia. Artists featured in national pavilions include David Altmejd (Canada), Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan and Cao Fei (China),Tracey Emin (England), Isa Genzken (Germany), Giuseppe Penone and Francesco Vezzoli (Italy), Masao Okabe (Japan) and Ugo Rondinone and Urs Fischer (Switzerland).

Documenta 12 (June 16-Sept. 23), under the directorship of curator Roger Buergel assisted by curator Ruth Noack, will address three questions of rather immodest scope, beginning with "Is modernity our antiquity?" Little specific information has been released in advance of the opening; among the few confirmed participants are Ai Weiwei, who plans to bring 1,001 fellow Chinese nationals to Kassel during the summer; Croatian Sanja Ivekovic, who will plant the greensward in front of the Fridericianum, where Joseph Beuys's 7,000 Oaks (1982) once appeared, with a field of red poppies; and Peter Friedl, of Austria, who is showing a taxidermied giraffe that he found in a zoo in the West Bank; it died during an Israeli attack and the zookeeper had it stuffed. Other artists include Saadane Afif, Cosima von Bonin, James Coleman, Sheela Gowda and Allan Sekula. These, anyway, are among the living contributors, but at least one third of the works in Documenta 12 will be historical, some deeply--Buergel is reaching back as far as 14th-century Persia to trace his concern with "form in migration."

Exhibition sites include the Neue Galerie (for videos and projections) and the Schloss Wilhelmshohe as well as the traditional Fridericianum and Documenta Halle. Most noteworthy is a new temporary "Crystal Palace," a giant plastic structure designed by the French architects Lacaton and Vassai.

For the fourth Skulptur Projekte Munster (June 16-Sept. 30), founding curator Kasper Konig (director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne) is being joined by two younger colleagues who work in Munster, Brigitte Franzen and Carina Plath.Thirty-seven artists will create new works (down from 74 in 1997--though, as Konig has pointed out, 39 works from previous rounds remain), including Pawel Althamer, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the ubiquitous Isa Genzken, Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, David Hammons, Mike Kelley (who will set up a petting zoo, in which the animals will lick a statue made of salt), Gustav Metzger, Martha Rosier, Thomas Schutte and Pae White. As he has for each of the three previous Skulptur Projekte programs, Michael Asher will bring around his caravan--an ordinary trailer-style mobile home, now a storied antique. Also drawing on the program's history, Bruce Nauman is realizing a piece he proposed in 1977--an inverted pyramid dug into the lawn of the city's Institute of Sciences. In a gesture of civic virtue, H.P. Feldmann is renovating a public bathroom.

Among younger artists, a striking proportion work in film, video or audio, perhaps signaling a decisive turn in public art projects. Guy Ben-Ner will outfit a stationary bicycle with a flat screen attached to its handlebars; pedaling makes the movie run, pedaling backwards allows you to rewind. Marko Lehanka will create a large flower with petals made of surfboards cut in half; at its center, a monitor and loudspeaker will broadcast a computer-modulated narrative. As if to challenge participating artist Andreas Siekmann's observation that marketing has replaced "social space" "function" and "geography" as the key term qualifying public art, Deimantas Narkevicius is thinking about placing a sculpture of Karl Marx in downtown Munster.