THE VENICE BIENNALE Reformed, Renewed, Redeemed

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

The mother of all international art exhibitions returns, confounding naysayers with a show that is smart, young and wired. Meanwhile, an enterprising Biennale administration looks to new space and new money to keep the show afloat.

Harald Szeemann celebrated his 66th birthday during the June preview of the 48th Venice Biennale, making him the most senior visual arts director of that exhibition in recent memory. A 40-year veteran who remains best known for organizing two landmark shows--"When Attitudes Become Form" in 1969 and Documenta V in 1972--that marked the ascendance of conceptual, land and installation art, he is today a rumpled, avuncular figure of apparently boundless optimism, forbearance and good will. Why mention his age? Szeemann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: he has rejuvenated a moribund institution that was widely considered irrelevant at best, pernicious at worst, by staging a big, vigorous, sometimes spectacular and thoroughly pertinent exhibition, one that places its faith in youthful invention, installation and new media. More than the usual number of delays had fed speculation that the Biennale would be postponed one year to coincide with the millennium. Instead, in just six months, Szeemann assembled a show so engaging as to overshadow the individual national entries that traditionally supply the Biennale's star power. He has done this as the Biennale assumes a new entrepreneurial identity, and as dramatically enhanced exhibition spaces are inaugurated.

No longer an ente, or government agency, the Biennale di Venezia debuts in 1999 as a societa di cultura, a form of foundation that mixes government and private support with earned income in an attempt to minimize the political meddling and fiscal uncertainty that has paralyzed the organization in the past. This year's government outlay amounts to about $4.8 million (compared to $4 million in 1997), with an additional $3.2 million projected in revenues from admissions, catalogue sales, in-kind contributions and gifts. The foundation's first president, Paolo Baratta, is a Cambridge-trained economist and former cabinet minister whose resume reads like a made-in-heaven blend of financial expertise, political know-how and cultural sophistication. Baratta's aggressive agenda includes fostering interdisciplinary endeavors by the Biennale's historically territorial sectors (music, dance, theater, film and architecture in addition to the visual arts), transforming the Biennale's neglected archives into a working center for cultural documentation, sponsoring events year-round to engender a steadier revenue flow and overcoming a chronic shortage of exhibition and performance space.

New Spaces for Art

Progress on that fourth point is already measurable. The current Biennale occupies 27 national pavilions in the Giardini di Castello, the park at the eastern end of the city that has been home to the exhibition since its inception in 1895, and parts of the Arsenale, the 400-year-old shipbuilding and naval facility located midway between the Giardini and the historical center of Venice, Piazza San Marco. Szeemann's show is divided between the Italian pavilion and the Arsenale. This year, several additional structures within the Arsenale complex have been rehabilitated to add 43,000 square feet of exhibition space to the nearly 65,000 of the Corderie, the 1,083-foot-long former rope-manufacturing space that has served as a supplemental Biennale site since 1980.

Never before open to the public, the broad masonry halls, high timber sheds and narrow walkways along landing slips make an extraordinary ambient for installation. Lee Burs wall of preserved fish and sequins in plastic bags, Lori Hersberger's harlequin patchwork of rugs and mats bobbing on dockside platforms, Pipilotti Rist's bubble machine that slowly emits heavy globules with oily, iridescent skins--all seem to take into account Venice's incongruous cocktail of carnival delirium, maritime industry, theatrical fantasy and petroleum refining.

The works installed by Cai Guo-Qiang and Serge Spitzer could scarcely be more dissimilar in concept, yet the two powerfully and intelligently engage the intrinsic narrative potential of the old spaces. In the barnlike shelter of a former munitions magazine, Cai has re-created a cardinal work of China's Cultural Revolution. Venice--Rent Collecting Courtyard is an ensemble of 81 lifesize, naturalistic clay figures, peasants young and old who toll to pay their portion of grain to cruel overseers protected by armed guards. The prototype, which the artist saw as a child, was a 100-figure, "site specific" work installed in a landlord's courtyard in Sichuan Province; replicas toured the Communist world. Cai treats the warehouse as a workshop, and his version as a work-in-progress. His assistants, one of whom had worked on the original some 30 years ago, continued to fashion figures on wood-and-metal armatures as the exhibition opened.

Spitzer's Reality Models--Re/Cycle (Don't Hold Your Breath) is an installation of thousands upon thousands of drinking glasses which have been paired and poised rim to rim (or "mouth to mouth") on every available surface of the floor, rafters and beams. In one instant the glasses seem as fragile as droplets, in another as menacing as the hordes of roosting birds in Hitchcock's nightmare. From time to time they fall and shatter with shifts in the old structure and incursions by seabirds. When the Biennale closes in November, the remains will be recycled in the factories on Murano, reborn as "Venetian" glass and carried home in the suitcases and backpacks of tourists.