ARTS Biennale at the crossroads
PAUL GRINKE
The thirty-fifth Biennale Internazionale d'Arte at Venice held its vernissage some few weeks ago with the customary disburse- ment of curled-up canapes and curiously laxative champagne. As an institution which in many ways reflects the pre-war art estab- lishment the Biennale is going through a difficult period and it is easy to feel that the neat little national pavilions scattered around the grounds of the Public Gardens stand as monuments to a kind of art which no longer has any great relevance to the world at large. Freed at last from the onus of prizegiving, their eagerness this year to plunge into situa- tions, manifestations, happenings, events or whatever you will, shows a hesitancy about the whole role of the Biennale which is en- couraging even if entirely contrary to the nationalistic spirit in which it was originally conceived.
The theme of this year's Biennale, un- announced as such from the press pavilion but largely bruited abroad through the café network, was to be work in progress; artists actually doing their thing on the spot. Any- one who expected another Woodstock, or to be more topical Shepton Mallet, for those who follow the calendar of extra-mural pop events, was going to be disappointed. Ad- mittedly Egon Fischer played the bagpipes with considerable gusto at the opening of the Danish pavilion, but regrettably his own works lacked the considerable wind he put into his pipes. The only organised anarchic faction present was the German KEKS (Kunst, Erziehung, Kybernetic, Soziologie) or, if one must be insular, CAES (Cybernetics, Arts, Education, Sociology), who made a deter- mined attempt to infiltrate hordes of Venetian children into the Biennale grounds and organise them into play groups on very didactic lines. Much as I admire any attempt to foul up the almost impenetrable Italian bureaucratic machine which governs the Biennale, I confess to being highly tickled by the total failure of very earnest Germans to persuade the children to attach a number of coloured plastic cones together to make a long, and no doubt 'eventful', chain. Evi- dently all they wanted to do, and did with great feeling, was to thump each other over the head or indulge in pre-pubescent sex play. In spite of the conflict of aims between organisers and participants it was un- doubtedly a huge success and much enjoyed by everyone present.
The American pavilion, which is always watched with great attention, was put in a considerable quandary this year by the re- fusal to show of some twenty artists whose work had been selected for exhibition, as part of an anti-Cambodian involvement and general anti-war and anti-Nixon stance—a position which was adopted, albeit briefly, by a great number of American museum per. sonnel and artists. The American com- missioner could only state, rather lamely, that 'other equally concerned artists from the group selected have felt that art and the artist best serve society by keeping in touch with those human values accessible through art which can so easily be crushed by social or political pressures'. As the artists who re- fused to show included such luminaries as Baskin, Cage, Dine, Kitaj, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Oldenburg, Rauscheburg, Stella and Warhol the American presentation was effectively decimated by this strike at home, and it would perhaps have been better if they had followed the example of the Czechs, whose pavilion was closed with a cryptic chalked notice on the doors referring inter- ested parties to the Russian pavilion. The notice itself was rubbed off on the second day by a cheerful crew of Italian charladies who were evidently unaffected by the poig- nancy of the message.
The one impressive gesture the Americans did make, and very much in the spirit of the Biennale of the future, was a permanent demonstration of print-making techniques by a handful of resident artists who will be there throughout the summer. The ,great thing about it is that it doesn't matter how good they are but that there are enthusiastic people on the spot who are actually doing something and are happy to talk about it.
At the risk of seeming impossibly partisan it must be said that the British pavilion put on a show of Richard Smith's work which was at once crisply presented and in many ways a fulfilment of many years determined work on a theme which could well have been a blind alley. With his new canvases, suffused with colour and billowing like the taut sails of a circumnavigator, his work has never looked better. The only other pavilion, to my mind, to put on a really dramatic show was the Polish, with Jozef Szajna's cutout photo- graphs of those artists of Cracow who were deported to Auschwitz, complete with striped prison pyjamas like the disjecta membra of some unspeakable English boarding school, and a cluster of decayed easels with faded photographs of their owners pinned to them as silent sentinels of the dead. His co-patriot Wladyslaw Hasior tuned into the same mood with some very disturbing tapestries, gutter- ing candles and a series of sculptures like Indian burials.
In the other pavilions Venezuela showed Cruz-Diez with a splendid 'chromosaturation' consisting of interconnecting rooms each painted entirely in -a single colour; the Bel- gians had a gifted cartoonist, Jean-Michel Folon, Spain's Arcadio Blasco showed some interesting ceramic works which evidently owed much to Gaudi, and the German pavilion showed some of the first exponents of nail-constructions. The French pavilion was the most extraordinary of all; a corpor- ate work by a group of artists which can best be described as an obstacle course of rough carpentry and hazardous slopes. It was perhaps the most pointed comment on the futility of having national pavilions at all,
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