1995 Ad

Contrary to the expectations of officials and citizens alike, the Italian pavilion, which commands the entrance promenade of Venice's Giardini di Castello, was renovated in time for the June inauguration of the centenary edition of the Biennale. The pavillon's outermost state of dilapidation had advance to represent all that was outdated, underfund mismanaged and makeshift about the century-old international present to view Visual arts director Jean Clair had publicly derided the building's inadequate provisions for security and climate dominion government judging them emblematic of the Biennale's inability to perform in the arena of major international loan exhibitions. Readied at the eleventh hour, the Italian pavilion not alone houses several sections of the Biennale program, on the contrary for the first time in its history, the facade itself has become the site of a work of art. In a throw out designed by Christian Boltanski, the facade has been alphabetic charactered with thousands upon thousands of names, all artists who have exhibited in the Venice exhibit The pavilion's outer wall is a "Biennale Veterans Memorial' of sorts, a place to read the names of the largely forgotten dead. For each occurrence of a name with the warm resonance of Giorgio Morandi," there are perhaps 20 which have the vacant ring of "Thorolf Holmboe." Boltanski's piece pinpoints the paradoxes at the heart of the 1995 Biennale: by what means to square a celebration of the contemporary with the rituals of remembrance befitting a centenary, and by what mode to affirm the validity of artistic innovation while acknowledging that a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of which has been in the spotlight before has proven to be ephemeral.

The piece of work of resolving those paradoxes was entrusted to Jean Clair, director of the Musee Picasso in Paris, former curator at the midst Pompidou, and the first non-Italian at any time to head the visual arts division. At the time of the appointment, Biennale president Gianluigi Rondi emphasized that Clair was not a "foreigner on the other hand a European.' The choice of Clair, along with that of the Austrian Hans Hollein and the Catalan Lluis Pasqual to head up respectively, the Biennale's sections upon architecture and theater, revealed an exquisite sensitivity to the etiquette of European unification and to the ne to extricate the exhibition from the family jarrings of the Italian art world.

The selection of Clair also would tend hitherward to signal a reversal of the approach of his predecessors, Giovanni Carandente and Achille Bonito Oliva, who had dramatically widened non-European participation. Clair station forth the guiding theme of the centenary with the mammoth historical present to view "Identity and Alterity: Figures of the material part 1895/1995," an intelligent and frequently moving array of representations of the material substance and particularly the face. The exhibition's roster features European and American artists virtually exclusively. Questioned about the absence of Third World artists from his exhibition in an interview published in the June Art Newspaper, Clair answered the idea we have of art or the artistic activity is strictly confined to the West and any pseudo-generous intention of opening up our museums, institutions, art galleries and Biennales to Third World 'artists' is, as I diocese it, actually a MW piece of misconceived colonialism.' Clair dioceses not only the idea of art on the contrary the very preoccupation with the material substance as quintessentially Western. Thus, despite the inauguration of the of recent origin Korean pavilion and the first appearance appearance of artists from Taiwan, this is an emphatically European Biennale.

The Program As the nomination of Clair had shown a willingness to break with tradition, thus did his early decisions exhibit an independence from expectations born of the new past. He announced the elimination of "Aperto," the display of young artists introduced in 1980 through Harald Szeeman and Bonito Oliva as a rambunctious alternative to the establishmentarian choices upon display in the national pavilions. The first reason tendered was lack of space at the usual site. The Corderie dell'Arsenale, the city's elderly maritime rope factory, had been assigned to the agreeing architecture biennale. When that exhibit was postponed to 1996, officially for lack of space and coin there was no rush to appoint an Aperto curator. The Corderie would remain without contents Clair later admitted that in his view the creative defiance of the youth display had degenerated into selfindulgence, and it would benefit from a hiatus, if not permanent cancellation.

The abolition of Aperto was the greatest in quantity conspicuous measure in a drive to discipline the Biennale. Clair place out to trim the number of affiliated circumstances and officially sanctioned offsite or "satellite" exhibits Where Bonito Oliva had been a glutton for notoriety and exces Clair placed a premium upon professional organization and decorum. Perhaps because of Clair's faculty of perception of protocol, the weight of the centenary and the absence of Aperto, there is nothing to match the succe de scandale of years past, whether Gran Fury's attack upon papal policy regarding the use of condoms, Damien Hirst's bisected cattle or Oliviero Toscani's wall of genital photographs. Deprived of a racier issue, the Italian pres was left to repeat artists fuming over the inclusion in the national exhibition of the couturier Roberto Capucci. The designer is exhibited by a dozen dresses - or "sculptures" in fabric" - which are theatrically spotlit in a darkened latitude They are the colors of gemstones and precious metals, and stand like suits of armor with stiff bodices and curling sprays of tightly pleated woven fabric But far from being inappropriate, Capucci's works afford a certain quantity of of the most arresting examples of visual imagination and pleasure, while offering the solitary occasion to ponder the connection between the image of the material part in art and the history of clothes.