ARTS
Exhibitions
The Venice Biennale (till 15 October)
Not even one Canaletto
Martin Gayford
The `Biennale' according to a veteran critic of my acquaintance, 'is such a sad thing to happen to Venice.' That may be so. But it is, on the other hand, an enor- mously jolly thing to happen to the art world. The Biennale may have many defects as a display of the current state of contemporary art around the world, but the opening .is at least a colossal party. It is a private view on a civic scale, an incompara- ble opportunity for networking in the most splendid of conceivable surroundings.
For a few dizzy days in June it is hard to get on a vaporetto without bumping into some dignitary from the Tate, South Bank or their equivalents in modern art galleries from San Francisco to Seoul. At times the sheer density of arterati reaches positively frightening levels. There was, for example, a reception this year at the Peggy Guggen- heim Museum in honour of the American representative, the video artist Bill Viola. It should have been a glittering event, but clearly someone had overdone the invita- tions, with the result that in the narrow alleys outside a seething, Armani-clad crowd accumulated, interminably queuing and jostling for entry. 'Let me in' shouted a Marcello Mastroanni-like individual, 'I am important critic of art.' Unfortunately so were hundreds of others. It had, as a friend remarked, all the makings of an art world equivalent to the Heyssel Stadium disaster.
But all this is of no interest, except socio- logical, to the private consumer of art. What is there on show in this 46th Biennale that is worth going to Venice to see? In 1995 the event celebrates its centenary, and one substantial answer lies in the centenni- al exhibition Identita e Alterita grotesquely rendered into English as Identity and Alternity — which takes place concurrent- ly in the Palazzo Grassi, the Correr Muse- um and the Italian Pavilion. The brain child of the Biennale director, Jean Clair, this is a magnificent, encyclopaedic, sham- bling, and extraordinarily erudite explo- ration of the depiction of the human face and body over the past century.
In itself, that of course is a controversial approach — the epoch of modernism has not always been thought of as an era of fig- urative art. There have been other scripts written — the Triumph of Abstraction for example. But with great ingenuity Clair manages to keep the focus on humanity, while cramming every notable figure and movement in somewhere or other. He believes that the art of this century regis- ters a struggle to preserve humanisation against the 'encroaching deserts of scientif- ic dehumanisation'.
At one point, about two thirds of the way round the Palazzo Grassi, one comes across a three piece canvas by Richard Rauschenberg entirely painted in monochrome black. And one thinks, this time he's really gone too far. Then, next to it you notice another work by Rauschen- berg, the drawing by his fellow New York modernist Willem de Kooning which the painter bought, then rubbed out, thus pro- ducing that curious work, 'Erased De Kooning Drawing'. Then suddenly you understand his point: that that kind of blank abstraction is all about effacement of the human figure.
Well, it's highly debatable, as are most of the provocative connections Clair makes in this show. But that is a virtue. On display there are innumerable works by — to take names almost at random — great figures such as Bonnard, Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Mir6, also Some fascinating stuff by much less widely known artists. (And many very dubious pieces, such as an array of portraits by the vastly overrated Georg Baselitz, who does nothing to disguise the mediocrity of his painting by turning it upside down.) But a good deal of the most riveting exhibits come from an area which is not generally thought of as art at all. In particular, M. Clair has dug up a mass Interval, video/sound installation (detail) by Bill Viola of quite startling material from the world of turn of the century psychology and anthropology. A meticulously classified set of photographs of the different ways beards grow, and a sequence of photographs of a man pronouncing the words 'le t'aime', for example, stay in the mind. Most extraordi- nary of all perhaps is a bust of Rene Descartes — by the anatomist Paul Richer — from which the face can be removed to reveal a reconstruction of the philosopher's skull beneath. Surrealism produced noth- ing so bizarre. Later on, M. Clair runs out of intellectual puff a little, but to make up for that there is a cracking display of major contemporary figurative painters including Balthus, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff (more about him below).
The other ,bits of this mammoth exhibi- tion are of much less consequence. The Correr section was closed for a visit by the President of Italy when I attempted to see it, but by all accounts it is not for the ner- vous, featuring as it does many pho- tographs of horrible mutilation and deformity (which are a strand in post-60s art which has recently, unfortunately returned).
Over at the Biennale site proper 1995 is above all the year of the video. Video art was almost everywhere, at its dullest in the Swiss Pavilion, at its grittiest in the Russian — a montage of shots of everyday post- Soviet life projected on the wall — and at its state-of-the-video-art slickest by Bill Viola in the American Pavilion. There one queues for up to an hour to enter a series of darkened spaces where nothing much happens, very slowly — an arcade of gagged heads mutter, a naked man in .a bathroom pours water over his head, a female head is projected on a series of gauze veils, three women slowly greet each other in mimicry of Pontormo's 'Visita- tion'. Perhaps I miss something — Viola has many fans — but this strikes me as por- tentous magnification of triviality.
In contrast to the ubiquitous video varied occasionally, as in the German Pavilion, with very dull photography there is little painting or sculpture: some cheery examples in the Uruguayan and Czech Pavilion, some ghastly glitzy ones in the Spanish. But the shining exception to the desolate mediocrity almost everywhere is the British Pavilion, which is devoted to recent work by Leon Kossoff. (There is also an exhibition of young British artists at Scuola di San Pasquale.) The decision to mount this major exhibi- tion by a major painter was — in the trend- crazy Biennale context — a boldly unfashionable one. The result is a triumph. The installation in the British Pavilion — itself a beautiful gallery — could hardly be bettered for spacing and lighting. The paintings in many ways so quintessentially Londonish — there are many views of tube stations, underground trains, and Hawksmoor's church of Christchurch, Spi- talfields — look marvellous in the Italian context. A majestic series of portrait heads in the shimmering light reflected from a canal take on overtones of Giotto and Masaccio. The sequence of studio nudes reminds one of the endlessly rich potential of oil paint to human flesh — the discovery of which was of course the great Venetian gift to the world.
The Kossoff show and Identita e Alterita are two good reasons — apart from Venice itself — to go to Venice this summer. The rest is mostly tinsel and carnival — another Venetian speciality, but one which leaves you afterwards with nothing more than the aesthetic equivalent of a nasty hang-over.
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