Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

Another new and distinctive feature of this Biennale is the raw determination of its visual arts chief to claim the prerogative accorded a Documenta curator and leave his personal stamp on the entire enterprise. Bonito Oliva has been a figure at the Biennale on several occasions since the early 1970s, most recently in 1990 as the curator of a show honoring the Fluxus movement. He is credited, with Harald Szeemann, with launching the first Aperto ("Open") in 1980 as a youthful corrective to the prevalence of established artists in the national pavilions. It was there that Bonito Oliva found an international audience for Italy's Transavanguardia, the promotion of which remains his best-known achievement abroad. Indeed, it is precisely his seeming preference - and undisputed talent - for promotion over research that has made him the bad boy of the Italian critical establishment.

Yet for all the potential professional controversy of his appointment, it was Italian politics-as-usual which delayed his confirmation. The Biennale board of directors appoints the directors of the five sectors (visual arts, music, theater, film, architecture); appointments to the board (18 members plus the mayor of Venice ex officio) are in the hands of the local, regional and national governments and a trade-union confederation. Because of delays in naming the new board, the outgoing members were left to make interim appointments. They finally named Bonito Oliva to the visual arts position on an interim basis by the fall of 1992, after months in which political factions had played a blocking game by proposing names of alternatives. Not until February 1993, with less than four months to the opening, were the new members seated, apportioned, as expected, among five principal political parties. Bonito Oliva prevailed as the visual arts chief (although the position's title has been changed from "director" to "curator"), with the senior film critic Gian Luigi Rondi having been named the president of the entire Biennale organization. Their political support, respectively Socialist and Christian Democrat, is the precise reverse of that of their predecessors, Giovanni Carandente and Paolo Portoghesi, and observers smelled yet another trade-off between the two powerful parties most profoundly disgraced by the ongoing kickback investigations. Insiders speculated that the collapse of his political support would cost Bonito Oliva the visual art chief's usual second term, in this case leadership of the prestigious 1995 centennial.

The political resentment encircling the Biennale boiled over one last time in a nasty confrontation between the art publisher Giancarlo Politi and exhibition authorities. In outright defiance of the exclusive contract awarded to Marsilio to publish one gargantuan, two-volume catalogue for the entire Biennale, Politi produced his own separate and bilingual Aperto catalogue, and sold it along with Flash Art and the newly invented Flash Art Daily, a tabloid which was published during the five days of the opening events with all the self-importance of a clandestine opposition newspaper. When his sales tables were rousted from the Biennale grounds and the unauthorized catalogue ordered out of circulation, Politi responded with cries of censorship and of cronyism between the Biennale bureaucracy and the owner of Marsilio, Cesare De Michelis, the brother of the former Socialist foreign minister Gianni De Michelis, who is under investigation for corruption. As one Italian artist put it with a mixture of hope and conviction, "This is the last Biennale of the regime."