Egos, Kitsch and the Real Thing

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Venice Biennale is the longest-running art festival in the world. It has too many shows, too many egos clogging the Grand Canal and not enough people on the switchboard. Even when it is bad it is still good because it is held in Venice--an advantage that few other cultural shindigs can claim. The 42nd Biennale, which opened last week, is the largest ever, featuring work from an unprecedented 41 nations. It divides into two main sections: the national pavilions and a set of shows arranged around a given theme. This year the theme is relations between art and science.

The centerpiece of the 1986 Biennale is called "Art and Alchemy." It was curated (if that is the word) by Arturo Schwarz, an Italian art dealer whose purplish prose has long been one of the hazards of Marcel Duchamp scholarship. Alchemy sought to change base metals into gold and silver. More broadly, it embraced astrology and occult religion, being founded on the picture of a fourelement universe (air, water, fire and earth) proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century B.C. There was an early link between alchemy, technology and art, since ancient glassblowers and metalworkers were always trying to make base stuff look like gold and silver. Over the centuries, alchemy gave painters, notably Hieronymus Bosch, a rich vein of fantasy to tap, partly because its metaphors of change, duality and syncretism lay close to their own creative processes.

All this, handled right, might have provoked a passable show. But Schwarz seems to think that alchemy is a major secret text of modern art as well, though all he can find to prove it is a mass of postsurrealist kitsch. A few good things come up in the net, but the show is a tendentious mishmash.

Two better shows in the central pavilion also take up the theme of technology, science and art. "The Representation of Space" has some painstaking reconstructions of spatial illusion in Renaissance and baroque art; its best moment (which will be the envy of all red-blooded interior decorators) is a full-size wooden replica of Borromini's false-perspective colonnade, made in the 17th century for the Palazzo Spada in Rome. The second exhibition, "Wunderkammer," is a delight. Wunderkammern--literally, chambers of astonishment--were an embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making--or outright fakes, like a dead mermaid fashioned from dried fish and monkey skin. Their cabinets were stuffed with baroque pearls, narwhal tusks, mandrake roots and fossils. The cult of the Wunderkammer rose where the demonic or angelic world view of the Middle Ages shifted into the classifying rationalism of the Enlightenment. "Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange." Ariel's song in The Tempest imagines the sea itself as the Wunderkammer of the drowned King of Naples.

The link between such things and the surrealist delight in dream images is the theme of this show, which contrasts old curiosities with a range of modern work that runs from Joseph Cornell boxes to a weirdly beautiful reflection on nature and culture by the contemporary Italian sculptor Mario Merz, involving a motorbike with buffalo horns for handlebars, a zebra's head and a string of neon numbers.

By custom, the national pavilions are the core of the Biennale. This year the Spanish pavilion goes all-out for young artists, the best of whom are the painter Jose Maria Sicilia and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. At the other end of the age scale, the U.S. is showing Isamu Noguchi, at 81 its greatest living sculptor. Alas, the pavilion does less than justice to the range and depth of Noguchi's art. Its centerpiece, near the entrance, is a spectacular but rather banal white marble slide; otherwise there are a number of exquisite basalt slabs and rocks, fairly brimming with wabi and sabi, some models for old garden projects and a plethora of Noguchi's akari, or paper lamps. There are too many of these, but even so, the seriousness and elegance of his work look outstanding.

The prize for best pavilion was won by France, with an environment by Daniel Buren. Buren's reputation is one of the real oddities of late modernism. For the past 20 years, his work has consisted mainly of green and white bands of equal width; of late, blue and yellow bands have also appeared. It is deadly boring and emptily chic, and it comes garnished with the kind of post-1968 social rhetoric favored by Jack Lang, Mitterrand's former Minister of Culture. Thanks to him, Buren is now the official minimalist of France. Thus the French pavilion resembles nothing so much as a Platonic Gucci concession in which the leather has vanished and only the stripes remain.

West Germany sent Sigmar Polke. Since the late '60s, Polke, 45, has been the Peck's bad boy of German painting--the possessor of a snappish, antic imagination that scavenges among kitsch, pop and high art, obliquely satirizing what it derides as the culture of Germany's "economic miracle." While neither his audacity nor the scope of his influence is in doubt, Polke's new work in Venice turns out to be a disappointment, filled with big, slack parodies of "sublime" abstraction that may or may not be meant as denunciations of corporate art. What they add up to is anyone's guess.

Poor and hasty as this effort is, Polke's reputation was bound to get an award. So he shared the Biennale's first prize with Frank Auerbach, whose work occupies the English pavilion. Auerbach's is the one genuinely memorable group of paintings Venice has to offer this year. His show trumps its rivals as firmly as the work of another Englishman, Howard Hodgkin, did at the 1984 Biennale.

At 55, Auerbach shares with his younger German contemporary, Anseln Kiefer, the distinction of being the finest painter now working in an "expressionist" mode. But he is not really an expressionist, if by expressionism one means an art that depends on a rhetoric of anguish and crisis. He is more akin to Giacometti in his stubbornness, his relentless formal probing of a small range of deceitfully familiar subjects and his desire to win back a classical order from the turmoil of visual impression by sheer tenacity of drawing. Thickly painted, scraped off, recomposed, his cryptic paintings of heads and cityscapes are extremely dense and yet open to light, air and buoyant gesture. The density is a form of realism--for the colored paste conveys the utmost physical reality without depending on the normal devices of illusion, like shading. His art looks fast but is slow: Auerbach works obsessively but finishes no more than a dozen canvases a year. Every square inch is laden with pictorial feeling. This is the real thing--and a sign that amid the secondhand babble of so much postmodernism, we are perhaps only beginning to know who the important painters of the late 20th century are.