Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Two years short of its centenary, the Venice Biennale struggles with government scandals, international politics and curatorial pretensions as it searches for a new rationale.

Even before the 1990 Venice Biennale closed, observers were hazarding predictions about its successor. it would be delayed a year to line up with the odd-numbered centenary of 1995, Achille Bonito Oliva would be appointed the next visual arts director, and the next edition of this mammoth exhibition would be steered by some comprehensive vision of contemporary culture responding to, if not wholly deflecting, the accusation that an international art show conceived in the chauvinistic image of a 19th-century trade fair is at best irrelevant, at worst pernicious, at the end of the 20th century. With some modification, the forecast came true for the 1993 Biennale [June 13-Oct. 10].

Unforeseen, however, were the government corruption scandals that have utterly traumatized Italy, and the ethnic conflicts which are savaging central and eastern Europe. The essential domestic political lesson of 1993 is that the troubled administration of the Biennale is an expression the Italian multiparty spoils system which now is drawing its last breath. The essential geography lesson is that Venice lies less than 350 miles from Sarajevo. These considerations showed the performance of Bonito Oliva, lent a particular air of gravity to the best work in the national pavilions, made a sensible viewer additionally impatient with the puerile ephemera which flooded the young artists' Aperto section, and opened the door for some of the smaller associated exhibitions to advance thoughtful propositions about the power of individual expression.

Some of the differences between the present Biennale and its predecessor are evident upon preliminary inspection. The entire show is simply bigger. There are more sections or "satellite" exhibitions installed throughout the city, and the opening schedule of coordinated events featured performances, video transmissions and film screenings, including the premiere of Derek Jarman's Blue. Foundation and corporate sponsorship is more pervasive and more visible, and the redoubtable Philip Morris finally has been bested by Swatch in the contest of self-promotion. With a largesse that rendered its corporate logo ubiquitous, Swatch picked up the tab for two of the major sections of the Biennale; instituted the "Swatch Prize," a fully funded traveling exhibition to be awarded to an Aperto artist; and left its mark at several of the Biennale's key sites by erecting versions of the "Swatchanschauung," a colorful cross between a clock tower and a mooring pole designed by the architect Alessandro Mendini. Private funding helped shore up the Biennale's diminished public support, which fell from about $5.7 million in 1990 to roughly $3.8 million for '93.

A change in sensibility can be detected as well, if one is to judge by each Biennale's succes de scandale. The 1990 edition was stirred up by two sensational and explicit entries, both in Aperto. An installation by Gran Fury united photos of the pope and an erect phallus with texts pertaining to condoms and safe sex, while Jeff Koons shared his coupling with Ilona Staller in polychromed sculpture and airbrushed paintings. Biennale officials found Gran Fury's AIDS activism inappropriate for an art show. Three years later, this Biennale included "Drawing the Line Against AIDS," a week-long exhibition of more than 150 works on paper whose sale will benefit Italian AIDS organizations. The show premiered at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and will travel to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo this fall.

Far from getting worked up over an instance of anatomical frankness, the present Biennale is awash in genital representations. For many viewers it begins in Aperto with Oliviero Toscani's photo suite "United Colors Portraits," a patchwork of 162 views of unclothed crotches (male and female, young and old, dark and light - you get the picture) made for a Benetton ad which all but one publication have declined to run. Aperto cocurator Rosma Scuteri is offering the ensemble as an instance of transgressive yet democratic "popular" art. And certainly it is more inclusive than Gianfranco Gorgoni's all-female One Hundred Tight Shots of 1978, the ancestor of Toscani's shock piece, which is hanging in the main pavillon's vast exhibition of Italian art. Penises and vulvae abound everywhere, from Kiki Smith's wax figure engrossed in auto-fellatio, to the surreptitious penile prosthesis sported by a doll in one of Paul McCarthy's photographs, to Song Haidon's array of 68 plasticine casts of hands grasping and splaying male and female genitalia, one of which (male) was stolen from its platform during the last day of the press preview.

Indeed, it was not the morals squad but animal rights activists who found themselves in a lather at the June opening. The most notorious couple at this Biennale is bovine, not human. British artist Damien Hirst is presenting a cow and a calf longitudinally bisected and displayed in four tanks of formaldehyde. The work is inflammatory for its sheer gratuitousness, though Hirst hardly helped matters when he observed about his work, "I think cows do look bigger than life. I mean it's bigger than a hamburger; they're kind of like walking meat. They have no personality." Since it was clearly too late for Hirst's victims, protesters turned their attention to Yukinori Yanagi's fourth version of his 1990 World Flag Ant Farm, in which tunneling ants destroy the configurations of national flags made of colored sand in plastic cases [see A.i.A., Sep. '91]. The work was denounced in court by "Dingo," an Italian society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and an inquiry was opened into the well-being of the insects, which had been procured in the hills surrounding Bassano dal Grappa. Yanagi (winner of the aforementioned Swatch prize) released the ants shortly after the inquest, the liberation covered by Italy's national press. The work remained on view, antless.