Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

Undeterred by the glitches in his selection and while still in an interim capacity, Bonito Oliva was ready in the fall of 1992 with a detailed outline for an aggressive program. He affected a kind of "auteur" status, presenting himself as the sole designer of a master plan which included 10 exhibitions beyond the national pavilions. He placed himself at the top of an elaborate organizational pyramid which channeled the energies of dozens of scholars and critics. Each exhibition was to be realized by an operative committee, an international team whose leader had to be called "coordinator" or "director" because Bonito Oliva was the Biennale's "curatore unico." The grunt work was delegated to executive committees, largely made up of students from an ad hoc curatorial school jointly sponsored by the Biennale and the Magasin of the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Grenoble.

Bonito Oliva planned to revamp the Biennale's two principal sections, the national pavilions in the gardens of Castello at the city's far eastern end, and the Aperto section, located a brief stroll to the west in the Corderie dell'Arsenale. Each participating country would be asked to modulate the traditional nationalism of its selection process, while the curatorial teamwork and consensus which in the past produced a single, sprawling Aperto exhibition would be supplanted by an organization of 13 people individually responsible for curating separate, thematically defined subsections. The governing theme for the entire Biennale would be "The Cardinal Points of Art," which Bonito Oliva explained as a reference to the four points of the compass, to the contemporary artistic experience of nomadism, and to the fluid and searching movements of creative energies. The new Biennale was to celebrate border crossings and cross-influences, to displace nationalism and even internationalism with "transnationalism." In an interdisciplinary disciplinary or, to use Bonito Oliva's preferred prefix, "transdisciplinary" spirit, the program would be particularly open to film, theater, video and performance.

Sadly but perhaps inevitably, a bloated and unfocused Biennale issued from this too-elastic program, which yielded anything but a set of governing criteria. "The Cardinal Points of Art" became, in Bushspeak, "A Thousand Points of Art." The intrepid viewer was left to excavate his or her own version of an art exhibition from the surfeit of entries. The fact is that the few shows of any lasting value are either those which have little or nothing to do with the hypertrophic theme, or those which center on creative personalities so potent that not even the Biennale can sink them. In the first category are two satellite exhibitions which did not figure in the original program. The Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa is presenting refreshing and unfamiliar work by 15 young artists of the Veneto region in "Deterritoriale." The standouts include a mixed-media installation by Costantino Ciervo, in which the Italian poverist sensibility encounters the electronic age; Daniele Bianchi's paintings, which capture and knowingly overstate the spirit of the 18th-century sublime landscape; and Mariateresa Sartori's mixed-medium "portraits," in which loosely defined yet insistent silhouettes emerge through the pallor of smooth surfaces. Zerynthia, a private Rome-based association promoting contemporary art, has organized "Viaggio verso Citera" ("A Journey towards Cythera") in the Ca' Vendramin Calergi, the winter seat of the municipal casino. Eighteen mature and maturing artists submitted earlier pieces or developed new works, all in response to the site, to one another's work, and to the enduring poetic image of the voyage. The sculptures of Reinhard Mucha, Ettore Spalletti and Haim Steinbach became downright romantic once they were transported from the art gallery to the eerie vacancy of the polished and frescoed gaming palace. Only here are Rodney Graham's "collector's editions" of James Bond novels witty and not merely clever, and the tricks of Marco Bagnoli's mirrored installation create a mesmerizing exercise in deception.