It's Biennale Time Again

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Venice, a profusion of flora, fauna and visual metaphors

The theme of this year's Biennale--that vast, sprawling international conspectus of current art that opens at irregular intervals in the public gardens of Venice and is one of the city's main tourist attractions--is "Dalla Natura All'Arte, Dall'Arte Alla Natura" (from nature to art, from art to nature). Appropriately, then, the star of the 1978 press week was not an artist but an animal.

Borrowed from a Lombard farm by an Italian artist named Antonio Paradiso, the beast, a massive bull named Pinco, stood ruminating in a corral in front of the Italian pavilion. The other half of Paradiso's artwork was a mucca finta, a fake cow, a four-wheeled chassis draped in a cowskin. It was to be wheeled into the pen, the deceived bull would mount it, and the results--as the Biennale catalogue noted, with the usual clarity of Italian art criticism--would touch "the central core of the present evolutionary-involutionary crisis." Finding the proposed event "degrading" (degrading, that is, to Pinco rather than art), one radical Italian journalist shot off a wire to the Italian equivalent of the A.S.P.C.A., demanding that the spectacle be stopped. It was, he said, "an exploitive example of coerced masturbation." The police came, and a compromise was finally reached. The mucca finta was trundled in, and Pinco would be allowed to mount it, but only once.

Since nothing in Venice goes down as well as a scandal, especially a sexual scandal, the corral soon drew a throng of artists, reporters, dealers, critics, museum folk and art groupies. As the massed cameras clicked and whirred, and the crowd of connoisseurs looked breathlessly on, the bull glared at his mechanical bride and abruptly scrambled up on her. Then, with the weary expression of Porn Star Harry Reems working off his debts, Pinco ejaculated on the ground. So ended Paradiso's work of art, which was, in its way, emblematic of the Biennale: a captive beast (Natura) struggling to inseminate a fictive one (Arte) under the gaze of an impervious public.

Pinco was not the only animal at the '78 Biennale. The place was a barnyard, rich with the odors of dung and urine-soaked straw. The Israeli pavilion was converted into a fold, with 17 ewes and one ram, their backs smeared with blue by the artist, Menashe Kadishman, a former kibbutz shepherd. The azure blots, "drifting apart or coming together according to the sheeps' movement," make up a painting, so the catalogue declared. One conceptual artist, Jannis Kounellis, exhibited a macaw on a perch--an old work, possibly touched up with a new macaw. Another, Vettor Pisani, had a rhesus monkey tied on a short leather strap to the top of a sinister-looking mirror table.

As with fauna, so with flora. Dried leaves, cacti, moss, shrubs, tree trunks: the vegetable kingdom was there in quantity. Usually these pieces were mock-scientific--prolix classifications of fruit stains or upside-down plants at the Dutch pavilion, or, at the French, Roy Adzak's archaeological pastiche of fruit and vegetables embedded in plaster. In the Finnish pavilion, a sculptor named Olavi Lanu set forth a whole environment called Life in the Finnish Forest--blurred human figures made of earth, live moss, birch bark and other organic material. Granted that these quaint vegetative trolls would have looked better if met by accident in the woods, rather than spotlit in a gallery, they were still banal as sculpture --but children who visit the Biennale will love them.

The other main approach to "nature" --landscape painting being hopelessly old hat--was via anthropology: artists playing Robinson Crusoe or Man Friday under an umbrella of structuralist jargon. Here, the palm for silliness must go to a Dutchman named Krijn Geizen, who built a reed hut and set a tuna to smoke on a rack outside it. This piece of mock primitivism was intended to say something about survival, in homage to the fishermen of the Po delta; but since the tuna was not caught by the artist but bought in the Venice fishmarket, the project looked vicarious, like Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. What it had to do with art was anyone's guess. But then, art is a matter of context. It is what you find in a Biennale.

The motto for such work might come from one of Byron's letters from Venice in 1817. Painting, the irritable bard declared, was of all arts "the most artificial and unnatural... I never yet saw the picture ... which came within a league of my conception or expectation; but I have seen many mountains, and Seas and Rivers, and views, and two or three women, who went as far beyond it, besides some horses." Just so, all art is a lie told in the service of truth, but however feeble art may be in the face of nature, one still cannot get the real thing into a gallery: those mountains and seas will not fit, and Byron's horses are less tractable than Kadishman's sheep or Paradise's one-shot bull. Consequently, the best things in the Biennale were the displays which allowed the galleries to work as containers for visual metaphor rather than cages for a withered reality.

There were perhaps half a dozen unqualified successes here. The American pavilion was the most "classical" and conservative: no shocks of the new, but a display of Harry Callahan's photographs and of Richard Diebenkorn's landscape-based abstractions, the "Ocean Park" series, whose airy Tiepoloesque blues and strict but expansive space seemed happily consonant with the city that lay beyond the Biennale. At a far remove from Diebenkorn's Matissean equilibrium, the Austrian pavilion was filled with the work of Arnulf Rainer, the leading European body artist. The photos of Rainer's twisted face and limbs, enlarged and then further distorted with whiplash strokes of black paint, are among the most violently irrational images in the past decade, but they are also free from the kind of confessional gratuitousness that mars most body art. Mark Boyle, at the British pavilion, showed excerpts from a long series of place pictures--"sites," chosen at random, cast full-size in fiber glass. These extracts from the world's surface -- a section of brick wall, some paving stones and curb, or a square of sand and pebbles -- were of singular density and beauty.

Finally, there was the Australian section, made up of the work of three artists:

Ken Unsworth, John Davis and Robert Owen. It is 20 years since Australia last showed in Venice, and in that time the look of Australian art has changed almost beyond recognition. But a certain preoccupation with landscape remains, and may clearly be seen in both Davis' delicate constructions of sticks, twine and latex and in Unsworth's more ponderous and dramatic groups of hanging stones. Davis' work is nature seen with a tracker's eye: it involves small displacements, fragile connections, scarcely visible interferences -- signs of passage of an ephemeral brush between imagination and environment. Unsworth's stone pieces, on the other hand, possess an almost crushing iconic power; his circle of rocks, hanging from a metal beam but seeming to float a few inches off the floor, is the most impressive new sculpture in the Biennale this year. The seriousness of such work reminds one that there is more to art than the melange of secondhand Duchamp, thirdhand structuralism, greengrocery and animal crackers in some of the other pavilions.

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