Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

The only other artist who confronts the pavilion as a resistent institutional context and not a neutral or cooperative container is Kabakov. He has encircled the Russian Federation pavilion with wooden fence and left the darkened interior cluttered with ladders, dropcloths, paint cans and lumber. Outside, a diminutive red-and-pink pseudo-pavilion blares Soviet-style martial music to the neighboring national pavilions. As the USSR shrinks in geography and in memory, Kabakov suggests that it is impossible for an artist to "represent" the new Russia in either sense of the word. If Kabakov renders the pavilion a vacuum, Joseph Kosuth treats it as a blackboard. On the walls of the Hungarian pavilion, painted a dark gray for the occasion, he has screenprinted various headlines and features culed from international newspapers, including editorials protesting ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the puzzling tale of an unfortunate guy trapped in a WC on the Paris-Bordeaux high speed train. The "clippings, are interspersed with multilingual quotes from philosophers, scientists, novelists and essayists. Kosuth's humanitarian intention is made clear enough by Einstein ("Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind") or Voltaire ("People will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe in absurdities"), but ultimately the work admonishes more than it inspires. The chastened visitor escapes around back to the work of Hungary's other entrant, Viktor Lois, who creates threatening mechanical constructions which prove to be benign devices for making music.

In contrast to the artists who are motivated by the gravity of the historical moment, two soundings of the private imagination are offered by the United States and Japan. In both cases the artists stand as marked departures from their countries' choices in 1990. A suite of 13 recent sculptures and installations by Louise Bourgeois has succeeded the computer-driven message boards of Jenny Holzer. The coercive voice of public address yields to the intimate musings of a sensibility which reformulates experience in terms of an embodied sexuality. Bourgeois's pieces wed the heritage of European Surrealism - the fragmented body, biomorphic abstraction, the compulsion to dramatize - to the material audacity of Process art. The result is a tour de force within a circumscribed range. Despite Bourgeois's considerable command of materials and techniques, despite the vigor of her formal invention in works such as Needle, the cumulative result of the exhibition is stifling, not liberating, as if the artist's prerogative of catharsis left room for only a passive and admiring concurrence on the part of the viewer.

Personal obsessions and sexual imagery also figure in the art of Yayoi Kusama, though their intensity at first may be camouflaged by her use of colorful fabrics and by the hyperkinetic proliferation of polka dots throughout her work. The exhibition includes samples of her "net" paintings of the late 1950s and early '60s, but the emphasis is on recent work, which includes finely patterned paintings in acrylic on canvas, three-dimensional constructions, and a mirrored installation within an environment of black polka dots on raucous yellow. Kusama stitches and stuffs cloth into shapes which are alternatingly pouchy and penile. The forms multiply, congregate and eventually overrun armchairs, rowboats, ladders and the rectangular compartments of large wall pieces, all in a process which the artist describes as her personal battle with mental illness and fin-de-siecle malaise. Anyone who expected a follow-up to Japan's last presentation in Venice - an austere installation of large and muscular works in charred wood and iron - was jolted by Kusama's nakedly eccentric oeuvre with its message of individual struggle.