Identity crisis - 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition; Italy

sum of two units years short of its centenary, the Venice Biennale labors with government scandals, international politics and curatorial pretensions as it searches for a fresh rationale.

Even before the 1990 Venice Biennale clos beholders were hazarding predictions about its successor. it would be delayed a year to line up with the odd-numbered centenary of 1995 Achille Bonito Oliva would be appointed the nearest visual arts director, and the nearest edition of this mammoth exhibition would be young oxed by some comprehensive vision of contemporary tillage responding to, if not wholly deflecting, the accusation that an international art present to view conceived in the chauvinistic image of a 19th-century trade fair is at best irrelevant, at worst pernicious, at the extremity of the 20th century. With a certain number of modification, the forecast came pure for the 1993 Biennale [June 13-Oct 10]

Unforeseen, however, were the rule corruption scandals that have utterly traumatized Italy, and the ethnic conflicts which are savaging central and eastern Europe The essential domestic political task of 1993 is that the troubl administration of the Biennale is an expression the Italian multiparty spoils combination of parts to form a whole which now is drawing its last breath. The essential geography task is that Venice lies les than 350 miles from Sarajevo. These considerations showed the performance of Bonito Oliva, lent a particular air of gravity to the best work in the national pavilions, made a sensible viewer additionally impatient with the puerile ephemera which fresheted the young artists' Aperto section, and make opened the door for some of the smaller associated exhibitions to advance contemplative propositions about the power of individual expression.

a certain quantity of of the differences between the not absent Biennale and its predecessor are evident on preliminary inspection. The entire present to view is simply bigger. There are more sections or "satellite" exhibitions installed over the city, and the opening schedule of coordinated circumstances featured performances, video transmissions and film screenings, including the premiere of Derek Jarman's cerulean Foundation and corporate sponsorship is more pervasive and more visible, and the redoubtable Philip Morris finally has been bested by the agency of Swatch in the contest of self-promotion. With a largesse that restoreed its corporate logo ubiquitous, Swatch picked up the tab for sum of two units of the major sections of the Biennale; instituted the "Swatch Prize," a completely funded traveling exhibition to be awarded to an Aperto artist; and left its mark at several of the Biennale's lock opener sites by erecting versions of the "Swatchanschauung," a colorful cros between a clock tower and a mooring extremity designed by the architect Alessandro Mendini. Private funding helped shore up the Biennale's diminished public support, which unrelenting from about $5.7 million in 1990 to roughly $38 million for '93

A change in sensibility can be finded as well, if one is to justice by each Biennale's succes de scandale. The 1990 edition was stirred up by means of two sensational and explicit entries, the two in Aperto. An installation by means of Gran Fury united photos of the pontiff and an erect phallus with body s pertaining to condoms and safe sex while Jeff Koon shared his coupling with Ilona Staller in polychrom plastic art and airbrushed paintings. Biennale officials base Gran Fury's AIDS activism inappropriate for an art present to view Three years later, this Biennale included "Drawing the Line Against AIDS," a week-long exhibition of more than 150 works upon paper whose sale will benefit Italian AIDS organizations. The present to view premiered at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and will travel to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo this fall.

Far from getting worked up above an instance of anatomical frankness, the near Biennale is awash in genital representations. For many viewers it begins in Aperto with Oliviero Toscani's photo suite "United Colors Portraits," a patchwork of 162 views of unclothed crotches (male and female, young and advanced in years dark and light - you acquire the picture) made for a Benetton ad which all on the contrary one publication have declined to step quickly Aperto cocurator Rosma Scuteri is offering the total effect as an instance of transgressive notwithstanding democratic "popular" art. And certainly it is more inclusive than Gianfranco Gorgoni's all-female single Hundred Tight Shots of 1978 the ancestor of Toscani's impact piece, which is hanging in the main pavillon's vast exhibition of Italian art. Penises and vulvae abound everywhere, from Kiki Smith's wax figure absorbed in auto-fellatio, to the surreptitious penile prosthesis sported by means of a doll in one of Paul McCarthy's photographs, to ballad Haidon's array of 68 plasticine casts of hands grasping and splaying male and female genitalia, individual of which (male) was stolen from its platform during the last day of the pres preview.

Indeed, it was not the morals squad on the other hand animal rights activists who set themselves in a lather at the June opening. The greatest in quantity notorious couple at this Biennale is bovine, not human. British artist Damien Hirst is presenting a dishearten and a calf longitudinally bisected and displayed in four tanks of formaldehyde. The work is inflammatory for its sheer gratuitousness, admitting Hirst hardly helped matters when he observ about his work, "I think subdue by fears do look bigger than life. I mean it's bigger than a hamburger; they're kind of like walking meat. They have no personality." Since it was clearly too late for Hirst's victims, protester make go rounded their attention to Yukinori Yanagi's fourth version of his 1990 World Flag Ant Farm, in which tunneling ants overturn the configurations of national flags made of colored sand in plastic cases [see A.i.A., Sep '91] The work was denounced in court by dint of "Dingo," an Italian society for the prevention of brutishness to animals, and an inquiry was lay opened into the well-being of the insects, which had been procur in the hills surrounding Bassano dal Grappa. Yanagi (winner of the aforementioned Swatch prize) released the ants shortly after the inquest, the liberation overlayed by Italy's national press. The work remained upon view, antless.