A Shambles In Venice

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: THE VENICE BIENNALE

WHERE: VARIOUS SITES IN THE CITY

WHAT: CONTEMPORARY WORK FROM AROUND THE WORLD

THE BOTTOM LINE: This dull, incoherent survey gives radicalism a bad name.

Any way you slice it, the 45th Venice Biennale of contemporary art, which opened to the public last week, is a failure. The more interesting parts of it tend to be the peripheral shows -- a fine homage to Francis Bacon installed in the 18th century rooms of the Museo Correr, on St. Mark's Square, and some multimedia pieces by filmmaker Peter Greenaway and stage designer Robert Wilson in a section called "Slittamenti," or "Trans-Actions." But as survey and analysis, this Biennale is quite incoherent and achieves the near impossible feat of making what still passes for "radical" creation look even weaker than it actually is.

The Biennale is the world's oldest modern art festival, dating back to 1895. Every two years a commissioner is appointed to oversee its structure and content. This year the task fell to a Neapolitan art critic named Achille Bonito Oliva. Bonito Oliva is a mini-celebrity in Italy, an imbonitore, or bustling promoter, of groups and movements, who gave the '80s its silliest piece of art jargon, "la transavanguardia," the "trans-avant-garde." He wanted to create a Biennale that would transcend national differences and illustrate "cultural nomadism." To put it charitably, his talents are not up to the task.

Bonito Oliva's curatorial "method" has been to jumble works together in the Italian pavilion under the title "The Cardinal Points of Art." The result is a shambles, featuring the usual notables from Joseph Beuys to Georg Baselitz, interfused with less famous figures and a large photography section. Many of the individual works are worth seeing -- or reseeing, since not a few have been round the international circuit already -- but since this is one of the worst-hung shows in recent memory, it is quite hard to do even that.

Of the other national pavilions, the best is the American one, showing sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Now 81 and at the top of her form, Bourgeois is the chief heiress of Surrealist obsession in America. Though her work is sometimes overpraised for feminist reasons, it carries a deep strand of % recollection interwoven with sexual fantasy and dreams of vengeance, refracted through strange uses of material. Included in the Venice show are some of her recent cage sculptures, including Cell (Choisy), a harsh essay on memory: inside an iron-mesh enclosure is a pink marble effigy of her childhood home in France, where her parents repaired Gobelin carpets. It has the enticing glow of a Magritte villa at dusk, but above the door to the cage, ready to be tripped, is a guillotine blade. You can't go home again.

The German pavilion contains a single installation by the political- conceptua l artist Hans Haacke. In the past Haacke has done many a verbose indictment of capitalist culture, but this time he seems to have got his epigram down. The first thing you see is a wall with a blown-up image of Hitler visiting the 1934 Venice Biennale. The floor of the rest of the gallery has been torn up into a litter of marble debris, which clatters ominously as visitors stumble across it. On the wall behind, the single word: GERMANIA. A one-shot piece, but right on target.

The main exhibit in the Spanish pavilion is a room-size sculpture, featuring an oversize bed frame, wire mesh and chairs, by Antoni Tapies. Tapies 30 years ago was a painter of great distinction, but on the evidence of this cumbersome and vapid work, he has no talent for sculpture; he is there because the Spanish fixedly believe he is the successor to Picasso and Miro -- a nationalist illusion. The British pavilion, which in previous Biennales walked away with the show -- Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin and the sculptor Tony Cragg -- contains a disappointing survey of recent work by one of the fathers of Pop art, Richard Hamilton, who split the Golden Lion, or main prize, with Tapies.

If there were a Leaden Ass award, it would have to be split between France and Australia. The French pavilion confirms the ongoing bankruptcy of contemporary art in Paris with a Warhol clone named Jean-Pierre Raynaud. His bright idea was to imprint 15,500 white ceramic tiles with the same photo of a Neolithic human skull and cover the walls of the French pavilion with them. As an exercise in prim, sterile chic, it's unbeatable. Australia is not short of talent, but the political correctness of its official cultural life has sent to Venice the whiny postfeminist images of Jenny Watson. Her paintings (of a victimized self, plus horses, with braids of hair pinned to the canvas) are comically ill done. This is the bottom of the barrel; it also links up with the other main section of the Biennale, known as "Aperto 93" and installed in the old rope factory at the Arsenal.

If you liked the Whitney Biennial, you may like "Aperto 93." Some of its 13 curators, like the American Jeffrey Deitch, are in fact dealers -- a further development of Postmodernist art ethics. Its title, "Emergency," signals that, like the Whitney fiasco, it will "address the issues" of sexism, racism, environmental decay, the drainage of psychosocial space from modern life, the hegemony of mass media and so forth.

The most noticeable work of art in "Aperto 93" greets you before you go in; it is a huge mural composed of hundreds of color photographs of human genitalia, he, she, he, she, ranging widely in age and size. It scored a palpable hit on the G-spot of the Italian press, partly because its author, Oliviero Toscani, does the advertising photos for Benetton. Despite Toscani's stance as a fearless realist, this Don Giovanni's catalog in Cibachrome is aesthetically inert, and after five minutes about as shocking as a mural of human elbows might be. Nevertheless, it wins (hairs-down, as it were) over Gianfranco Gorgoni's similar photomural in the Italian pavilion, which shows only women's genitals.

There are a few worthwhile things in "Aperto 93." One is The World Flag Ant Farm, by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi. Yanagi's conceit, a pretty good one, was to make scores of replicas of national flags in colored sand, behind Perspex. These are linked by tubes and populated by a colony of ants, which scurry to and fro between the flags bearing grains of sand in their mandibles. Over time the flags become illegible through migration and mixture; Yanagi's piece has the same concision and elegance as Haacke's in the German pavilion.

Otherwise, the "Aperto" is apocalyptic trivia, devoid of aesthetic impulse. Everything is on much the same dull, hectoring, narcissistic and politically simpleminded level; all complexity of artistic response has been ironed down into puerile rhetoric, one-liners that have no further resonance once you've got their meager point. Some have no point: How about a nice big wall covered in monochrome orange carpet, or a giant mound of Plasticine? The mix of witless conceptualism, pseudo documentary and weakly recycled minimalism is stifling.

If one were to choose a single work that summed up the enterprise, it would be the one by Sean Landers. A video monitor shows a tape of the artist + dropping his pants and going through the motions of masturbation. Behind it, on the wall, are sheets of yellow lined legal paper covered with the artist's ruminations: he set out to write 250 pages during the installation period of "Aperto." "So today I've still got to press on to page 250. I just feel so corny here writing like an idiot. Anyway it's hard to get my head out of the bummer this place is giving me. Dam it I can't write. I'm too bummed out." Ah, the anguish of creation! The visitor knows what he means.

But there is always Venice itself; one can leave the Biennale, visit the Accademia or St. Zanipolo and find relief from the stale and mannered exhaustion of the New in the perpetual freshness and vigor of the Old.