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Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

There is No Big Bang

This year the central group exhibition and the assortment of national entries tend to merge into one large visual buffet. Celant's artists address the visitor as free agents, not unlike the artists featured in pavilions. With its simple scheme of a 30-year survey of creative individuals, the group exhibition becomes a variety show, a savvy succession of booked acts. Established artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Daniel Buren, Gerhard Richter, Gilberto Zorio, Rebecca Horn and Tony Cragg all come across not as showing new work so much as delivering one-liners from their stores of trademark shtick. The beneficiaries, of course, are the younger artists who have freshness on their side.

Measured by its ubiquity and undeniable impact, video rules this Biennale. Installation holds its own, and painting and sculpture fight for attention. The Corderie is particularly tough on painting. The cavernous space devours Tuymans's allusive paintings, with their ghostly indications of a building facade, a carnival entertainer, a flower. The letters and figures encrypted into the black-on-black surfaces of Glenn Ligon's canvases are all but unreadable in the glaring light. Luca Pancrazzi fares a bit better, since his eight-panel, near-monochrome mural of clock faces alternating with mundane details (auto, highway, desk) is all about shifting experiences of image resolution.

With its better-defined gallery spaces, the Italian pavilion is kinder to painting. Richard Tuttle's shy little waferboard cutouts work very nicely in a room of their own. Ed Ruscha has a long wall with nine paintings based on brief obliterated texts. The original B-movie tough guy lines ("It's Payback Time," "A Colombian Necklace for You") can be read on the labels, but in the paintings the words have been distributed in several rows and covered by colored bars and rectangles. These forms look like blank word tapes from old telegrams, like the Suprematist compositions of Malevich, like the bars which mask faces and body parts on porn posters -- take your pick.

As the recipients of previously announced Golden Lion awards for career achievement, Agnes Martin and Emilio Vedova share a raised platform in the center of the Italian pavilion. They are back to back, like incompatible roommates in a little play. Her horizontal bands are meticulous, pristine, luminous and obediently planar. His gestural slashes are improvisational, impure, glowering and defiant as they abandon the wall to take the form of freestanding disks. It is fitting that Martin and Vedova be honored, but paradoxical that they preside over an exhibition that otherwise is largely indifferent to their medium.

Outside Celant's group show, two important painters in the Biennale are Juliao Sarmento, representing Portugal at the Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini, and Robert Colescott in the United States pavilion. Sarmento's 10 paintings essentially continue the means and motifs of his "White Paintings," the series which has occupied him since 1990. Utilizing the white ground, graphite marks and repetition characteristic of conceptual practice, he portrays various versions of a slender, faceless woman, little more than an outline clothed in a sleeveless black shift. She/They stand, squat and probe each other's bodies with penile fingers.