Venice, After All

Reports of the imminent death of the Venice Biennale turn out to have been exaggerated. As soon as opening-day newsmen folded their notepads and shuttered their cameras, Venice's rebellious students hauled down their placards and disappeared. By midweek, most of the artists who had joined in the student protest quietly uncovered their works again, and crowds were thronging to the fairgrounds as in other years.

For Europeans, who have learned in recent years to look to the U.S. for stimulus (and a canny guide to future taste in the art markets), the U.S. pavilion was a disappointment. There were no minimal sculptors, no color-field painters, no visceral assemblages in the style of Edward Kienholz. Instead, under the

Smithsonian Institution's auspices, the U.S. pavilion displayed ten artists in the American "figurative" tradition. The dreamlike canvases of Edwin Dickinson commanded respect. The satiric Chicago of Red Grooms was a hit, and the sallow, sexy, epoxy-resin girls of Frank Gallo drew same fascinated attention. But otherwise the reaction was: "The U.S. has so many marvelous painters and sculptors. Why did they send us this?"

Still, aside from the U.S. exhibit, there were numerous diversions. At the British pavilion, there was a dizzyingly impressive retrospective of Bridget Riley's op eyebinders, and the slender, stark sculptures of Phillip King--possibly the only man alive who has successfully united the minimal and the baroque. In the Japanese pavilion, the most promising young artist was clearly Jiro Takamatsu, 32, whose large-scale pastel platforms were built on weird exaggerations of Renaissance perspective, aimed at destroying the balance between real and imaginary worlds.

Spain showed 23 artists whose displays were chockablock with social comment. Most notable was Eduardo Sanz's walk-in Chapel for an Important Man, where altar and stained-glass windows were replaced by abstract, luxurious designs of plastic, glass, polished wood, seemingly a bitter jest at the pious pretensions of the rich. As for Marisol, usually classified as an American artist, she scored a triumph of nationalist and artistic politicking by exhibiting as a Venezuelan, thus getting a whole pavilion for 35 of her delightfully inimitable dolls.

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