Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

In the second category - artists strong enough to beat the Biennale - are Francis Bacon, John Cage and Peter Greenaway. The Francis Bacon retrospective, housed in the Museo Correr, suffers from inevitable redundancy after the recent Lugano retrospective. But it is redeemed precisely by its modesty - just 33 works from 1945 to 1988 - and by offering an opportunity to see seven monumental triptychs in close proximity. The tribute to John Cage - organized by Alanna Heiss, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Ludovico Pratesi and Angela Vettese - does more than any other part of the Biennale to give heart and soul to Bonito Oliva's woodenly didactic themes of transnationality and interdisciplanarity. It is also unabashedly sentimental in its evocation of a free and generous imagination. The show is divided between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which is exhibiting a striking suite of works on paper by Cage from 1990, and the Giudecca, where Cage memorabilia is accompanied by art works and documents from collaborators and colleagues. Of the many objects which establish the long and mutually appreciative relationship between Cage and Italy, none is quirkier than the mural-sized photo of Cage's 1959 appearance on the now-legendary quiz show "Lascia o raddoppia?" The young Cage, with a jaw that Dick Tracy would envy, stands beside Mike Buongiorno, his suave host and an icon of Italian television. The two dark-suited men calmly survey a table laden with the appliances, Ping-Pong balls and other paraphernalia soon to figure noisily in a new Cage composition.

The Peter Greenaway exhibition, "Watching Water," achieves splendid autonomy in the Palazzo Fortuny, though officially it is part of the group show on the Giudecca of artists who work across the conventional boundaries of the visual arts. The British director and his production designers have enhanced the already decadent opulence of the palace's facades and main rooms to set the stage for a sight and sound excursus on the theme of water in Greenaway's art. Video monitors flanked by like-sized tanks of water present his films, beginning with Intervallo of 1969, a black-and-white short shot in Venice that perversely turned its back on any glimpse of water, and progressing through Drowning by Numbers, Death in the Seine and Prospero's Books [see A.i.A., June '92]. Greenaway's drawings, paintings, script notes and props are displayed throughout, and the final large space is given over to the purely theatrical illusion of water through the manipulation of lights and rotating plastic disks. It's a perfectly effective showcase for a master of increasingly baroque indulgence.

Both the pleasure of discovery and the sense of deserved recognition start to wane when we turn to the core of Bonito Oliva's program. Of the shows he projected back in 1992, the sole casualty was a survey of the Western avant-garde and its creative responses to "other" cultures since the time of Delacroix. For lack of funds, the show was deferred to 1995, when its comprehensive sweep will be more appropriate to the retrospective temper of a centennial. In its place has been inserted "Punti dell'Arte" (Points of Art), a fiscally feasible show of 16 more recent masters pedantically organized in four groups according to the points of the compass. The blue-chip roundup (George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Gino De Domenicis, Lucio Fontana, Anish Kapoor, Per Kirkeby, Jannis Kounellis, Robert Morris, Sigmar Polke, Susana Solano, Cy Twombly, Emilio Vedova) makes for a sluggish and unsurprising essay in the varieties of artistic temperament. Kounellis's installation of weathered tarps and rope is distinguished by its impressive theatrical power. The vast canvas sheets rise through the heat and glare to the skylight, and the effect is of being aloft in the rigging of a great ship. A second historical survey which did survive the early cut is "Muri di Carta" (Paper Walls), an exhausting and emotionally inert exhibition of photography from the beginning of the century to the present. The hundreds of images in "Paper Walls" were reduced to wallpaper thanks to the brutish installation of the photos, which were stacked and hung edge-to-edge in endless ribbons of frames.