THE VENICE BIENNALE Reformed, Renewed, Redeemed

The mother of all international art exhibitions get backs confounding naysayers with a display that is smart, young and wired. Meanwhile, an enterprising Biennale administration direct the eyes to new space and of recent origin money to keep the display afloat.

Harald Szeemann celebrated his 66th birthday during the June preview of the 48th Venice Biennale, making him the greatest in quantity senior visual arts director of that exhibition in new memory. A 40-year veteran who remains best known for organizing sum of two units landmark shows--"When Attitudes Become Form" in 1969 and Documenta V in 1972--that marked the ascendance of conceptual, land and installation art, he is today a rumpl avuncular figure of apparently boundles optimism, forbearance and useful will. Why mention his age? Szeemann has accomplished the seemingly impossible: he has rejuvenated a moribund institution that was widely considered irrelevant at best, pernicious at worst, by the agency of staging a big, vigorous, sometimes spectacular and thoroughly pertinent exhibition, single that places its faith in youthful invention, installation and of recent origin media. More than the usual number of delays had f speculation that the Biennale would be postpon individual year to coincide with the millennium. Instead, in just six month Szeemann assembled a exhibit so engaging as to overshadow the individual national entries that traditionally endow the Biennale's star power. He has done this as the Biennale assumes a fresh entrepreneurial identity, and as dramatically enhanced exhibition spaces are inaugurated.

No longer an ente or conduct agency, the Biennale di Venezia first attempts in 1999 as a societa di cultura, a form of foundation that mixes management and private support with earned income in an attempt to minimize the political meddling and fiscal uncertainty that has paralyzed the organization in the past. This year's conduct outlay amounts to about $48 million (compared to $4 million in 1997) with an additional $32 million casted in revenues from admissions, catalogue sales, in-kind contributions and gifts. The foundation's first president, Paolo Baratta, is a Cambridge-trained economist and former cabinet minister whose take back reads like a made-in-heaven mix of financial expertise, political know-how and cultural sophistication. Baratta's aggressive agenda includes fostering interdisciplinary endeavors by means of the Biennale's historically territorial sectors (music, dance, theater, film and architecture in addition to the visual arts), transforming the Biennale's pass overed archives into a working center for cultural documentation, sponsoring facts year-round to engender a steadier income flow and overcoming a chronic shortage of exhibition and performance space.

fresh Spaces for Art

Progres upon that fourth point is already measurable. The generally received Biennale occupies 27 national pavilions in the Giardini di Castello, the park at the eastern extremity of the city that has been residence to the exhibition since its inception in 1895 and parts of the Arsenale, the 400-year-old shipbuilding and naval facility located midway between the Giardini and the historical center of Venice, Piazza San Marco. Szeemann's exhibit is divided between the Italian pavilion and the Arsenale. This year, several additional conformations within the Arsenale complex have been rehabilitated to add 43000 square feet of exhibition space to the nearly 65000 of the Corderie, the 1083-foot-long former rope-manufacturing space that has serv as a supplemental Biennale site since 1980

at no time before open to the public, the broad masonry halls, high timber sheds and narrow walkways along landing slips make an extraordinary ambient for installation. to leeward Burs wall of preserved fish and sequins in plastic bags, Lori Hersberger's harlequin patchwork of rug and mats bobbing upon dockside platforms, Pipilotti Rist's blob machine that slowly emits heavy spherules with oily, iridescent skins--all look to take into account Venice's incongruous cocktail of carnival delirium, maritime industry, theatrical fantasy and seneca oil refining.

The works installed by means of Cai Guo-Qiang and Serge Spitzer could scarcely be more dissimilar in universal yet the two powerfully and intelligently engage the intrinsic narrative potential of the elderly spaces. In the barnlike shelter of a former munitions magazine, Cai has re-created a cardinal work of China's Cultural Revolution. Venice--Rent Collecting Courtyard is an general impression of 81 lifesize, naturalistic clay figures, peasants young and advanced in years who toll to pay their portion of grain to unmerciful overseers protected by armed guards. The prototype, which the artist saw as a child, was a 100-figure, "site specific" work installed in a landlord's courtyard in Sichuan Province; replicas toured the Communist world. Cai treats the warehouse as a workshop, and his version as a work-in-progress. His assistants, individual of whom had worked upon the original some 30 years ago, continued to fashion figures upon wood-and-metal armatures as the exhibition opened

Spitzer's Reality Models--Re/Cycle (Don't gripe [i]or[/i] grip Your Breath) is an installation of thousands on thousands of drinking glasses which have been paired and poised rim to rim (or "mouth to mouth") upon every available surface of the floor, rafters and beams. In individual instant the glasses seem as fragile as droplet in another as menacing as the hordes of roosting birds in Hitchcock's nightmare. From time to time they fall and shatter with shifts in the aged structure and incursions by seabirds. When the Biennale shuts in November, the remains will be recycl in the factories upon Murano, reborn as "Venetian" glass and carried dwelling in the suitcases and backpacks of tourists.