Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

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

No jolts were delivered by three well-known senior artists also present in the gardens. Great Britain is offering a mini-retrospective of Richard Hamilton's works, from some early Pop-flavored assemblages through his more recent political paintings to a mesmerizing painting of 1993, Testament, which is invariably mistaken for a painting of Japan's crown prince and his new bride but reportedly is based on an anonymous photo retrieved in 1969. Hamilton's wit is steady if sometimes strained, but the show suffers from an air of overexposure, which is only abetted by the sales desk with catalogues from the artist's recent Tate Gallery retrospective and his exhibition at Anthony D'Offay. Nam June Paik, who shares the German pavilion with Haacke, has programmed a jumpy collage projection of his too-familar video imagery, fish and mountains, girls and Beuys. Antoni Tapies seems a perfunctory presence in the Spanish pavilion, where he is represented by an installation of bed frames and white folding chairs which barely hints at the usual eloquence of his assemblages.

If you don't get bogged down by the celebs, determined digging around the gardens will turn up a few revelations. Sharing the Spanish pavilion is Cristina Iglesias, a deft sculptor whose work engages the architectural environment. Using cement, aluminum and glass, she has erected thick, freestanding walls which are positioned with respect to the walls of the pavilion and to one another in order to create short passageways and partial enclosures. Awninglike constructions with membrane-thin sheets of translucent alabaster installed high above modify the illumination of the pavilion's skylights and offer another experience of shelter. The room devoted to Carol Rama is all but lost in the overstuffed Italian pavilion. Little known outside her native country, the 75-year-old Rama is represented by paintings, drawings and collages from 1936 to the present which convey violent and erotic fantasies of arousal, defecation and disfigurement. Unlike the healing hand of Bourgeois, which can ennoble the basest material and relieve the suffering body in art, Rama lays out a raw psychic landscape, marked by the recurring imagery of glass eyes, tongues, dentures and high heeled shoes. The work is ill-mannered, uncompromisingly physical, and tough.

Though painting is in short supply at this Biennale as a whole, a wonderfully indulgent display of it can be found in the Swiss pavilion, which Jean-Frederic Schnyder has hung with a uninterrupted line of 119 standardized canvases. The small oil paintings record two-way traffic on highways encountered during a "walking-tour" from St. Margrethen to Geneva. The scenery changes from train yards to forests, skyscrapers to mountains, but the paintings are staged uniformly from the vantage point of an overpass with a clean sweep to the horizon. With technical facility and a wink at the history of 19th-century plein-air painting, Schnyder repeatedly transforms his palette and brushwork to convey changes in weather and times of day. The ensemble effects an unexpected rapprochement between the now-established conceptual project of the documented walk and the hitherto irreconcilable appetite for the painted surface. No less driven as a sustained investigation of a theme is Miguel von Dangel's The Battle of San Romano, a 30-meter-long mixed-medium frieze which, unfortunately, is divided among the separate spaces of the Venezuelan pavilion. Named for Uccello's 15th-century tribute to Florentine military pageantry, von Dangel's work is a sometimes macabre meditation on the bloody clash between the cultures of the Old World and the New. The irregularly shaped components of the frieze are encrusted with jewels, shells, coins, weapons, masks and bones, which punctuate areas of vivid paint and seem to roil beneath the glistening resinous surface. The work is beautiful and harrowing as it recapitulates the deadly course of colonialism, in which resources became cargo, cargo became wealth, and wealth collapsed in death and decay.