Monday, Jul. 26, 1976
Phoenix in Venice
By ROBERT HUGHES
Probably no one will remember the mid-'70s as a great moment in the making of modern art. But there is a great crisis in our ideas about it, and that crisis is the content of the 1976 Venice Biennale, which opened to the public last week. We know the pieties--that the avant-garde is embattled, that culture transcends politics, that abstract art speaks a language uncontaminated by ideology, that modernism somehow makes us free. Throughout the '50s and early '60s, the Biennale--that sprawl of art exhibitions devoted to the newest of the new, held every two years in a cluster of national pavilions beside the oily green waters of St. Mark's basin--was the symbol of that creed. In 1976 it is otherwise.
Mythic Purity. The purpose of the festival--if one can generalize about this mass of dozens of exhibitions containing thousands of pieces, documents and photos--is to inspect and debate the mythic purity of modern art, to see how it really has worked in society and not just how it hoped to work. Ten years ago, anyone who argued that the Bauhaus tradition of functionalist design might suit the totalitarian spirit would have been dismissed as a loon. The main architecture show in Venice this year, a fascinating assembly called "Rationalism and Architecture in Italy During the Fascist Regime," irrefutably demonstrates how it could and did. Likewise, we suppose that the "advanced" movements in Spanish art during the past 40 years must have threatened Franco's commissars. But a historical show entitled "Spain, Artistic Avant-Garde and Social Reality 1936-76," suggests that it was otherwise, that after the moment of heroic protest symbolized by Picasso's Guernica, the regime itself started to exploit, for its own benefit, the success of the Spanish avantgarde.
After the Biennales of the '50s and '60s, such self-questioning enterprises may strike the visitor as strange. But the shift had to come. The Venice Biennale is the oldest of modern art festivals (it started in 1895), but by the mid-'60s it had degenerated into a trade fair, riddled with favoritism and lobbying. The prize system came under attack for setting artists against each other like cocks in a pit and serving only the dealers' interests. None of the slightly tacky glamour of the Biennale, with its conspiratorial gossip, could restore its lost prestige. Even the system of national exhibitions, organized by the cultural attaches of the world, took on a form of threadbare officialese. In 1968 the prizes were abandoned, but Italian students, demonstrating against "cultural imperialism," almost closed the Biennale. Then, woefully unsure of itself, the festival staggered toward its demise. In 1974 none was held.
The 1976 version is an irritable phoenix, and the most interesting Biennale in a dozen years--thanks to rethinking and changes in structure. The role of the national pavilions has been played down. There are more survey shows with an overriding sociological emphasis. There are no prizes, but plenty of mea culpas. As one of the international commissioners, Tommaso Trini, remarks in the catalogue, the original use of the Biennale has evaporated: "In the last 20 years avant-garde art has ended up by establishing another tradition, with its own economic power, its own Mafia, its own conservative tendencies, and hence the end of its innovatory experimental aims."
So this year, it is a didactic festival. The announced theme is ambiente --environment--meaning, among other things, the way in which fixed social contexts affect our reading of images.
The Biennale's centerpiece is a particularly good one organized by the Italian critic Germane Celini: "Ambient Art," an astutely chosen selection of room-sized, environmental sculptures and murals by artists through the past 50 years. These document the recurrent desire of modern art to escape its role as commodity by becoming too big to be traded--to grow out of the picture frame and spread through a real, architectural space. There are reconstructions of such lost classics as Piet Mondrian's spartan Salon of Madam B. The list of artists continues through the futurists, dadaists and surrealists to such present-day figures as Robert Irwin and Mario Merz.
Tower of Babel. The largest single show, however, lies on the other side of Venice in the cavernous, abandoned spaces of the naval shipyard on the Giudecca--a vast potpourri of work by some 80 artists, entitled "International Events, 1972-1976." Every style in the lexicon is there, from earth art projects to nudes; this is Venice's Tower of Babel, a demotic monument to what would have seemed, in formalist eyes, an intolerable permissiveness. One passes from official Marxist history painting like Renato Guttuso's Funeral of Palmiro Togliatti to the horrifying sexual tableaux of America's Ed Keinholz, and back to Alan Shields' jungle-like "tropical play shelter," without worrying much about the clamor. Half the show may be rubbish. The rest is a salon exhibition in new garb. But at least it is more open than the old Biennales, and its messy vitality is not to be ignored.
The same does not hold true in the gardens, where the national pavilion shows are. The outstanding piece there is by England's Richard Long, an earthwork artist. It is an angular spiral winding through the whole pavilion, traced in several hundred lumps of red limestone taken from a quarry in Verona and laid on the floor. It is an unexpectedly moving work, a metaphor of landscape done with elegant economy and, oddly enough in view of its material, as unaggressive as any English watercolor.
The U.S. exhibition is a disappointment. Entitled "Critical Perspectives in American Art," it was originally organized at the University of Massachusetts as a small show of work by 15 living U.S. artists. There are a few good things in it, notably a Robert Motherwell entitled In Plato 's Cave I, an exquisitely subtle geometrical painting by Agnes Martin, and some sculptures by Joel Shapiro and H.C. Estermann. But the art has been jammed into a Procrustean set of categories -- "cultural irony," "narrative art," "objecthood" and so on. It all comes out looking pedagogical and unreal. To read Art Historian Sam Hunter laboring to convince himself and others that Andy Warhol (represented here by one 14-year-old painting) is really a narrative artist, although "nothing actually happens in the sense of conventional storytelling," is to witness one of the finer absurdities of recent writing on art.
As for "cultural irony," the best example of it is unconscious. It takes the form of a stick of unpainted wood, three-quarters of an inch square and about four inches long, glued to an otherwise white, empty wall in the U.S. pavilion and entitled Portrait of Marcia Tucker, 1976. It was made, if that is the word, by a 34-year-old New York artist named Richard Tuttle. Here, apparently, is the end of the American cultural imperialism that has been such a topic of recent discussion in the art world: the work evaporated completely, nothing to look at, only the support system -- a white wall, a catalogue, an official role and the usual supporting grants -- the last move in the institutional avant-garde game.
Robert Hughes
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