Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

The other shows include "Passaggio a Oriente" (A Passage to the East), which comprises Lettrisme, the Gutai group [see A.i.A., May '92], and Fluxus participants Yoko Ono and Shigeko Kubota, and also considers more recent expressions of "easternness" in Russian art and in paintings from the People's Republic of China. From this shapeless array of sensibilities, Gutai emerges with the greatest relief and range, thanks to a handsome showing of abstract paintings by the group's founder, Jiro Yoshihara, and the re-creation in the Biennale gardens of several playful and interactive outdoor installations of 1995 and '56 by Akira Kanayama, Toshio Yoshida, Sadamasa Motonaga and Shozo Shimamoto.

Establishing that central Europe is a contemporary cultural crossroads seems to be the only motive for "La Coesistenza dell'Arte, (The Coexistence of Art), a flaccid show which features artists born or working in Italy, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic and the former Yugoslavia. "Fratelli" (Brothers), at Ca' Pesaro, traces the work of Francesco Lo Savio and Tano Festa, brothers who were central to the development of Minimalism and Italian Pop. It's a tired tale in Italy but perhaps unfamiliar to foreign visitors in Venice. "Slittamenti" (officially translated as "Transactions" with that favorite prefix, but more accurately meaning "Slippings" or "Declines") unites well-known and less-than-well-known figures in installations, performances and other interdisciplinary expression. Amid a lot of forgettable work is Luca Patella's curiously appealing mixed-medium meditation on the missing strut from the bed in Duchamp's readymade Apolinere Enameled. Also for "Slittamenti," Robert Wilson and collaborators created the installation Memory/Loss in one large brick bay of the Giudecca's old granary. In the warm and humid interior the visitor encounters an expanse of cracked earthen floor punctuated by the truncated upper body of a tortured man. The cumulative effect of the draped entrance, false exit doors, incomprehensible voice track and cloying air is to render the vast space a palpably oppressive nightmare. This is the work of pros.

For all the merit of a number of the satellite shows, Aperto and the national pavilions inevitably will claim the lion's share of the art crowd's attention. To dispense with the lesser of the two, the Aperto section is an undisciplined disaster, aptly subtitled "Emergency" and dedicated, it would seem, to establishing that the voice of conscience in art today is a smirking whine. Flash Art coeditor Helena Kontova led the collaborating curators, most of whom have been featured frequently in that magazine's pages. Each assembled a mini-exhibition of works which purportedly illuminate critical issues such as entropy, violence, survival, marginalization and difference. The hidden agenda may have been to induce the visitor to experience all five. The curators (Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud, Kong Changan, Antonio D'Avossa, Jeffrey Deitch, Mike Hubert, Thomas Locher, Robert Nickas, Rosma Scuteri, Berta Sichel, Matthew Slotover, Benjamin Weil) seem to have vied with one another for the most precious title ("Perhaps" or "Can Art Still Change the World" or "Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine"), yet their individual territories merge into a chaotic sameness, for virtually every section accommodates a work dealing with gender identities, or environmental disaster, or biotechnological anxiety, or oppression by governments and the mass media.