La Biennale e morte ARTS
PAUL GRINKE
The traditional three-day vernissage of the Venice Biennale, when the national pavilions are opened to an invited audience of painters, critics and dealers, has come under heavy fire from militant Italian students. The students, based in the Accademia Art School which they have occupied for three months, and strengthened by some of the Milanese students who successfully closed the recent Milan Tri- ennale, object to the whole set-up, the 'Biennale dei Padronr as their banners call it, as a corrupt capitalistic enterprise. Sterner Maoist elements in their ranks would do away with art itself as an irrelevance.
But their chance to make an effective protest was foiled from the start by the unwelcome presence of several hundred armed police and platoons of soldiers guarding the bridges and entrances to the public gardens, where the Biennale is held, and by the ruthless double- checking of credentials which successfully im- peded the entrance of many people who had a perfect right to be there. A note of irritation from all parties set in fairly early in the week, and was aggravated by the students' refusal to offer any guarantees to the artists, many of whom had expressed some sympathy with their cause, that their work would not be damaged.
Thwarted at the site of the Biennale itself, the students concentrated on Piazza San Marco which is already overrun with tourists in a fairly warm June. An attempt to raise the red flag in the Piazza was met with a baton charge by several hundred riot police who had been waiting all day against just such an event. Among the casualties was the badly beaten commissar of the Swedish pavilion, one of the first to close its doors in protest against the military pickets. Other pavilions followed this example, including two thirds of the French contingent, and during the week most of the Italian artists covered their work with signs reading 'la polizia treacle la ettliztra' and 'No, alrintimidazione stztdentesca e poliziesea.'
The almost total lack of communication between -the students, the artists, the art estab- lishment and the police produced a confused situation that was obviously not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of any parties. The decision of individual artists not to show their work did not placate the students. turned the Biennale into a kind of patchwork quilt and hardly endeared them to the organisers. Rumours of the imminent appearance of Cohen-Bendit at the head of 10,000 students proved unfounded. Nor were there any demon- strations in sympathy with Julio le Parc. winner of the last Biennale, who had just been expelled from France for his part in the Renault factory manifestation. Such demonstrations as there were had a uniformly whimsical character after the violence of the first few days. The Grand Canal took on a sudden luminous green hue, after the introduction of several cans of marine dye from the Accademia bridge and a strangely clad figure, painted from head to toe in bright green and red and carrying an identical life-size dummy, caused-some consternation among the police in Piazza San Marco but was left un- molested to enjoy a cup of coffee.
Inside the Biennale grounds, a group of Danish anarchists calling themselves situation- ists ran gleefully amuck in the Swedish Pavilion with aerosol paint sprays and yards of sticky tape, to the evident relief of large numbers of press photographers. Their manifesto, a model of garbled brevity, proclaimed a four-stage plan for the overthrow of the art establishment, delightfully summed up as 'scolarships and coc-tail parties together with museum-directors, well-known art dealers with bad bank-connec- tions, stripe-trousered ministers of culture with hanging ass from east and from west.' Their rallying cry was 'Follow Courbet, who set up his own pavilion as the Paris World Fair, but there were few volunteers for their 'inter- national pavilion of revolt' and the Swedish or- ganisers were not amused at having to clear up after them.
The political manoeuvres of the vernissage entirely overshadowed what must go down as one of the most pedestrian Biennales to be seen in many years. Excluding the Swedish. Italian and French pavilions, all of which are virtually closed in protest, there are very few excitements this year. At the risk of appearing partisan, it must be said that the British pavilion offers a crisp and dramatic presentation of Bridget Riley and Phillip King, though there is hardly enough competition for them to show to the best advan- tage. King's pieces looked well out of doom and include, among recent work, some of the most articulate and uncompromisikag sculpture he has yet produced. Bridget Riley's paintings include an entire new series of highly associative coloured works, less austere in their mathe- matical progression than the earlier black and white pieces, and warmly compelling.
The American pavilion- has come in for a good deal of criticism, not so much for its choice of figurative painting instead of the pre- dictable mixture of minimal sculpture and funk art, but for the weird and rather second-rate gaggle of painters who have been selected. Edwin Dickinson and Fairfield Porter carry the banner for the older generation of Ameri- can figurative painters steeped in the European tradition, and Richard Diebenkorn, probably the best painter on show but badly represented, suggests a more recent, Matisse-inspired man- ner. Of the sculptors the extravagant cartoon, 'City of Chicago,' by Red Grooms, seemed almost masterly after the giant encrusted torsos of Reuben Nakian, subject of a current New York gag: 'I hear you, Nakian, but you can't come in.'
In the other pavilions there seemed to bt a fairly uniform mood of mediocrity, apathy and
a melte of exhausted styles. The South Ameri- cans were as inventive as one has come to expect, with a splendid retrospective of the Brazilian Lygia Clark's folding architectonic sculptures and environmental toys; and the Venezuelan pavilion's exhibition, of mixed media wooden figures by Marisol, included a complete cocktail party of positively mordant satirical tone. Artists, after all, can make a statement in their work quite as radical as all the banners and slogans decorating the Acca- demia, without the accompanying violence.
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