Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

Back in the gardens, Bonito Oliva sought to temper the spirit of competition among nations with the recommendation that national pavilions present artists from other countries, a recommendation to which only a fraction of the participants responded, and these to varying degrees. The United States is exhibiting Louise Bourgeois, French by birth but a resident of the U.S. since 1938; Germany presents both Hans Haacke, born in Cologne and living in New York, and Nam June Paik, born in Seoul and living in New York and Dusseldorf; and Hungary has invited the American Joseph Kosuth. Japan is showing Yayoi Kusama [see A.i.A., Apr. '90], who moved to the U.S. in 1957 and only returned to Japan in 1973, while Rumania exhibits recent collages and constructions by Damian, who left Bucharest for Paris in 1946. Venezuela selected Miguel von Dangel, who arrived in that country from Germany as a child and whose work dramatizes the collision between Europe and the Americas. Israel has turned over its pavillion to the Yoshihara retrospective. (It also is sponsoring Avital Geva's advanced eco-tech greenhouse; the temporary structure offers a worthy mixture of environmental and nutritional advice, but is appreciated mainly as a damp and soothing oasis amid the dusty gravel paths.)

Other changes and choices serve as sharp reminders of contemporary geopolitical and ethnic realities. The "Ex-Yugoslavia, pavilion is housing an international show of seven artists on the theme "Peace Machines." The republics of Croatia and Slovenia were constrained to find sites elsewhere in the city, while a group of Bosnian artists, prevented from leaving Sarajevo by the United Nations command, sent a video of their work to Venice instead. The former Czechoslovakian pavilion has been neatly divided between the Czech and Slovak republics. The USSR pavilion now belongs to the Russian Federation and has been turned over to Ilya Kabakov, once an internal dissident and now a resident of New York. For the first time since World War II, a unified Germany is sponsoring a single pavilion, while post-apartheid South Africa returns after its 1968 banishment.

Haacke's transformation of the German pavilion stands pretty much unchallenged as the strongest spatial/visual/auditory experience. The visitor is greeted at the entrance by a photograph of Hitler at the 1934 Biennale, and passes under a giant plastic Deutschmark of 1990, the year that the reunification machinery revved into operation with economic ambition as its fuel. The huge coin is installed on the ledge which once bore the swastika and eagle of the Third Reich, for this pavilion, completed in time for the 1938 Biennale, survives as an embodiment of official National Socialist cultural taste. Behind the false wall bearing the Fuhrer's image lies the main hall of the pavilion, empty but for a sea of shattered marble flooring beneath the name "GERMANIA" in the distinctive lettering seen on the principal facade. As people pick their way across the devastated space, their weight disturbs the stone shards underfoot, and the pieces groan and creak in what becomes a belated choral response to the smashings of Kristallnacht, another landmark of 1938. Haacke has restrained his usual propensity for sarcasm and finger-pointing to create a terse, desolate image of the spiritual fragmentation at the heart of today's Germany.