ARTS

Artistic mayhem on the lagoon

Martin Gayford is disappointed by what he finds at the Venice Biennale T he most apt emblem for the 47th Venice Biennale is a vast painting by the German artist Anselm Kiefer in the entrance hall of the Coffer Museum. Half the size of a tennis court, apparently exe- cuted with a trowel, this represents a huge, pyramidal structure. The title, in starkly metaphysical Teutonic fashion, consists of the words `Himmel-Erde' (or Heaven- Earth). In other words, Kiefer is giving us an updated version of the Tower of Babel. And a thoroughly contemporary, artistic Babel is exactly what the Biennale (until 9 November) has become.

To find a more current analogy, however, one is driven beyond the borders of the visual arts — one is provid- ed by the United Nations, anoth- er by the Eurovision Song Contest. Like the latter, it is driv- en by national rivalry, and tends to result in national shame. The underlying idea is that nation shall compete with nation in the international language of modern art.

But as with pop music there are some countries which — per- haps to their credit — just don't seem to get it (Denmark — nul points' one can almost hear the international critical community intoning as they stagger round). And just as some phenomenally uncatchy Irish ditty may win the Eurovision Song Contest, the Biennale prizes — which are awarded according to an impene- trably Machiavellian multi-national com- promise — often come as a great surprise to one and all.

As they do with the UN, political reali- ties slowly percolate through to the artistic mayhem on the lagoon. The Biennale was inaugurated in 1895, when it was thought for some reason to be a suitable way of commemorating the silver wedding anniversary of King Umberto and Queen Margherita. Over the years, the Giardini di Castello have slowly filled up with national pavilions in contrasting styles — the Hun- garian one in a heavily gilded and mosaiced Slavic-revival manner, the Japanese in multi-storey-car-park concrete brutalism, the United States in Jeffersonian classicism — which are themselves often the most attractive things on view.

But the Giardini now seem to be full, so the political convulsions of recent years have led to some interesting pavilion-squat- ting and sub-letting. The Russian Pavilion, for example, which is given over to some rather old-fashioned Expressionist paint- ings, now has a much more go-ahead Geor- American choice: Robert Colescott's 'Hunchback Notre Dame' gian Pavilion installed in the basement containing a lawn of real turf with an obscene message in English burnt into it, a photograph of the artist wearing a dress, and a neat border of carrots. It is clear which country is taking on this capitalist modern art with greater vim.

Meanwhile, what used to be called the Yugoslavian Pavilion — which still has `YUGOSLAVIA' in foot-high lettering over the door — has been occupied by the Mon- tenegrans, with some rather sweet sub-Sur- realist paintings. The losers in this Balkan art-conflict, the Slovenes and Croatians, have been driven off to other sites in Venice. In fact, more and more countries want their place at the Biennale — just like their seats in the UN Council Chamber and the Eurovision spot. Consequently, suitable spaces all over Venice are filling up with off-site pavilions.

This year the People's Republic of China was exhibiting for the first time, as was Macedonia (though goodness knows what the Greeks thought of that in their pseudo- Byzantine Pavilion, with its strange sculp- tural installation sunk in a trench through the floor, to be buried after the Biennale closes).

But is any of it any good? 'Not much' came back the answer from the exhausted critical community. Nor is very much of it new. This time, the current director, Ger- mano Celant, has reinstated the non- national supplement to the Biennale which reviews contemporary art. This used to be called the Aperto, now it is dubbed 'Past, Present, Future'. Plus ca change — an old Biennale hand remarked that, in his memo- ry, the Biennale was re-jigged every time, and the result was always exactly the same.

`Past, Present, Future' breaks down into a younger set in the Corderie, an enormously impressive, and absolutely vast building attached to the Arse- nale. Within its austere columned interior, a good quar- ter of a mile long, are myriad works by early middle-aged Biennale hands — Jeff Koons, for example, who seems to have become less outrageous than of yore — plus new faces including the British video artists, Sam Taylor-Wood and Douglas Gor- don. In part of the Italian Pavil- ion, the older set — Tony Cragg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichten- stein, inter alia — are to be found. Age wins over outrage by several lengths.

In the national pavilions there is more old-fashioned painting on view, in the Swiss, Russian and Ameri- can Pavilions, for example, and less video and installation — which last time reigned supreme. This was good news for admirers of painting. Worse news was that very little of this painting was any good. America, which has opted for years for rather clinical avant-gardism, chose this year an elderly black American figurative painter, Robert Colescott.

The decision may have been motivated by political correctness, but personally I fervently hoped that these gutsy, engaged, contemporary allegories would turn out to be good. Instead, unfortunately, they turned out to be dreadful — garish, form- less, over-burdened with messages which were nonetheless generally obscured by the overblown excessiveness of the imagery. Not even a decent jazz band playing out- side on Wednesday afternoon made them seem any better.

A far more satisfactory conjunction between jazz, America and painting is rep- resented by the retrospective of Stuart Davis at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (till 5 October). This is, indeed, the single best show in town by a long way — it is unfortunate that it is not by a living artist. Davis, who died in 1964, came from a gen- eration of American painters of whom we in England know very little. Modern Amer- ican art, we tend to assume, began when Jackson Pollock started dripping in the late 1940s.

In fact, that view is gravely mistaken. Davis was clearly an important artist, and one very much in the American vein. Start- ing from conventional beginnings in Post- Impressionism and Cubism, he evolved a personal idiom in which the commercial lettering and design of such items as a Lucky Strike packet are melded with the flat patterning of abstract painting — the essence of pop art, in other words, four decades before the event. Later Davis evolved an abstract idiom of brilliant colours and regular shapes for which the word 'jazzy' is exactly right. Not only do these pictures jump and shout in syncopat- ed rhythms, but Davis really was a life-long devotee of jazz. Armstrong and Ellington are played in the galleries, and for once background music seems entirely suitable at an exhibition.

At the Correr Museum is the Kiefer show I mentioned at the start (until 9 November). His art, which came to wide attention in the Seventies, is an attempt at a monumental response to the horrors and disasters of German history. Hence the burnt-out wastelands, the inhuman follies, the sinister aircraft made of lead he has placed in the Correr Museum's pretty 18th- century library. The overall effect is impos- ing, but also stagey, and pretentious.

Rachel Whiteread, who has been select- ed by the British Council to be the British representative this time, has also been engaged of late on a monument to 20th- century horrors. But as the show opened the news broke that the construction of her Holocaust Monument for the Judenplatz, Vienna — a block-like mould of a room filled with archives — has yet again been postponed.

Many people of good judgment admire Whiteread's work greatly — and it's not hard to see why. It appeals to the taste for minimalist purity, while also referring to the real world (or, at least, the spaces under such things as baths and tables, which Whiteread, of course, moulds).

It's poetic and evocative, as a leading avant-garde pundit remarked to me (though he meant the remark as a dis- missal). Personally, I find it neither moves nor interests me very much; and I find the reliance on a single procedure moulding the insides of real objects — wor- rying. But it looks elegant; indeed this is one of the better pavilions, with the surreal objects of Joan Brossa in the Spanish build- ing. So, Gran Bretagna: six points. By the time you read this, we shall know who has actually won, not that it matters in the least.