THE VENICE BIENNALE: CAN IT RISE AGAIN?
THE VENICE BIENNALE IS ONE of those exhibitions which refuses to die or simply go away. A visitor since 1960, I have announced its demise in print at least once. The principals complain, the critics growl, sympathizers speculate; basic lessons, quickly learned and quickly forgotten, are never applied where they should be. From a 1964 peak, when a younger generation took over and introduced art as freewheeling experiment, to a 1974 low, when a quarrel among politicians caused its cancellation, several solutions were suggested to cure the dowager’s ills. The prize system, attacked by Henry Geldzahler in 1966 and suspended in 1968 because of art-world pressures, no longer exists. The laissez-faire of an era that encouraged commercialism was replaced by organizational controls, in an attempt to structure the formerly chaotic displays around governing principles of a thematic or ideological nature. The age of information was over—international dealers and the media had taken care of that—and a new age of artistic leadership was hailed. The money changers left the temple and opened up shop in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Basel and Paris. Older artists who were given great retrospectives between 1948 and 1962 no longer lent the Biennale their prestige, preferring to be seen in special exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi. De Chirico and Guttuso, outraged by what they saw as the younger generation’s excesses, publicly called for the censorship and incarceration of the offenders and their sponsors in 1972.
So, where has this led us? To a situation where the symptoms have been given more serious attention than the illness, and the patient remains as afflicted as ever. You want another governing authority? Then you can have a Communist aristocrat, Carlo Ripa di Meana, who stood up to the Soviet bloc last year by zooming in on the art of oppressed nations, and who stood up, in turn, when Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the U.S.S.R., as well as Argentina and Uruguay, refused to open their pavilions this year. You want control by art historians? Then we can have young but proven professionals like Achille Bonito Oliva and Filiberto Menna curate a theme show, provided they fall in step with the President of the Ente Autonomo and join the Communist Party. You want to avoid the taint of commercialism? Then we will ban the advertisers, who used to help defray printing costs, settling for a catalogue no longer bilingual—as was its 1976 predecessor—but just as expensive.
Is it any wonder that the party atmosphere at the exhibition’s preview has paled, that fewer and fewer consider the Biennale worth their while, that as a regulating and reputation-bestowing mechanism the Venice Biennale no longer counts, or that for the official participants filling their pavilions has become a chore as well as a drain on resources needed elsewhere? First of all, let’s not make the mistake of blaming it all on a host country racked by political and economic uncertainties. We are all guilty of allowing an antiquated and impossible format to assert its dead weight year after year. Who would dare suggest that participation by nationality be abolished or that those quaint pavilions be razed (unless having the smell of fish or sheep linger into the 1980s forces certain countries to do just that)? A trend toward heightened nationalism and ethnic pride might even keep the Biennale’s cellular structure intact.
But then, as long as the format remains inviolate, and surrendering of pavilions to traders is repugnant, and governments continue to back their artists and if Venice cannot exist without tourism, then why not reinstitute prizes and take the heat off the Basel Art Fair by allowing dealers and collectors to return to the fold? Politics, a new morality and an art-historical veneer have failed to make Venice a better art show. While we all recognize that turning back the clock is an unsound idea, I would like to make a plea for the reintroduction of competition and reward as regulatory agents for insuring the viability of an enterprise that for ten years has been at the mercy of partisan politics and conflicting ideologies. Obviously, our Italian colleagues may feel that they are further advanced toward an ideal society of which art is an integral part; but then they must bite the bullet, call the bulldozers and return the Giardini to the people, much as Dan Flavin wanted to return the avant-garde to the French Army, whence it had come in the first place.
This, of course, brings us to the heart of our troubles. How, in the best of circumstances, and making allowance for all we rejected less than a generation ago, could we ever resuscitate what Lawrence Alloway astutely diagnosed as dead ten years ago?1 For this neither Italians nor other people can be blamed; no one sector of the art world is any guiltier than another for having killed the avant-garde through excessive expectations and demands. Nobody claims that the avant-garde can be killed through neglect; on the contrary, it positively thrives on it. By drawing the avant-garde to our bosoms like a kitten in need of warmth, we have effectively smothered it, drawn its breath away and caused it almost to disappear.
This is not the place for a discussion of the avant-garde’s disappearance or, more pertinently, of the precise nature of that elusive phenomenon. Yet, since the disappearance of the avant-garde is symptomatic of an ominously growing conservatism in the arts that is bound to determine the future of this and other art events, it makes sense to pause and situate it in that broader context. Ultimately, the spirit of the times—conditioned by economic, political and historic factors, expressed by our creative community and experienced by all consumers of art—is responsible for the ups and downs in the fate of the Venice Biennale. And one cannot address oneself to the specific ills of one of society’s institutions without, at the same time, seeking to understand what ails society at a deeper level.
The new conservatism is not that incidental nay-saying to difficult or untried art, mostly a reflection of the popular consensus, we have come to expect from the critics of the popular press. Consider Nelson Rockefeller marketing reproductions of paintings in his collection; Thomas Hoving exulting over the quality of Andrew Wyeth offset prints; Joseph Duffy, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, calling “interpretive” exhibitions such as the popular King Tut and Pompeii shows, “probably the most exciting things we do.” Are we not back to the point of Malraux cleaning the Louvre while the Paris art world slept, and, if so, is that not a lesson one country had to learn the hard way?
Choosing Diebenkorn as our star American performer—ten years after Norman Geske accorded him a supporting role in “The Figurative Tradition in Recent American Art,” playing the same pavilion in Venice—is conservative regardless of the quality of the artist’s work and the reasons that prompted its choice. The co-star was Harry Callahan, as impeccable a photographer as Diebenkorn is a painter, but an artist whose talent at individualizing the commonplace did not cut as wide a swath in Venice as Diebenkorn’s breezy abstractions of landscape with just the right mixture of Abstract Expressionist scale and bravura, with color field painting’s mellow intensity and with nods to Matisse and the European tradition to cap his eclectic style. Those Tiepoloesque blues and pinks, as Robert Hughes astutely observed, were bound to go over big in the Lagoon City; they surely would have pulled down a major prize for Diebenkorn under the old system of rewards. But did that make him the best our country could have come up with?
Granted, there are no “best choices,” and an art exhibition is not a horse race. Still, there are two reasons, neither touching on the issue of quality, why Diebenkorn seemed a less than appropriate entry. First of all, the chairman of the Program Sub-Committee of the International Exhibitions Committee of the American Federation of Arts, Dr. Joshua C. Taylor, Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution, with input from sub-committee members Walter Darby Bannard and Peter C. Bunnell, recommended to Thomas M. Messer, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and chairman of the International Exhibitors Committee of the American Federation of Arts that Diebenkorn and Callahan be “designated” despite a well-articulated, prescriptive theme, “Dalla natura all’arte e dall’arte alla natura,” set in 1977 by professionals from 26 countries. A late start and budgetary constraints may have militated against a more appropriate interpretation of the recommended theme, and getting additional mileage out of recent organizational efforts on the part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art may have been fiscally prudent; but why rationalize such transparent expediency in the catalogue preface: “For both, however, art and nature—the world of forms and images and their source in observed reality—are central pursuits. For this reason,. both are natural choices to implement a broadly conceived overall theme” (Thomas M. Messer). To quote Robert T. Buck, Jr., who was charged with the “responsibility for staging,” and trusted with the title of U.S. Commissioner, “The works of both men embody the dilemmas and delights of the artist’s use of nature as a compelling and centralizing force in artistic creativity of recent times”(?).
Rationalizations of this type ultimately become meaningless and hide, quite unsuccessfully, forced or deliberate noncompliance with the Biennale’s generally accepted theme. Not that our country was alone in bending the rule, or, as Carlo Ripa di Meana wrote scoldingly, “stretching the theme like a rubber band.” Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Sweden gave different but similarly ambiguous interpretations to “From nature to art and from art to nature.” Little compliance came from Canada, Greece, India, Norway, Switzerland and Venezuela. And an almost slavish following of the theme by France, instead of producing the desired results, made that country look worse than it had appeared in anybody’s recent memory. Italy construed a triad of interpretation—nature as image; nature in operation; topology and morphogenesis—alternatingly convenient and forbidding, that made it possible to accommodate almost any proposition, including some works by Fabio Mauri and Gianni-Emilio Simonetti that were well worth seeing.
My sympathies were, in varying degrees of acceptance, with Australia, for demonstrating the bearhug those Down-Under artists have given all manner of process art; with Brazil, for a serious investigation of aboriginal and primitive talent; with Israel, for plunging into the thick of the “nature as art” controversy with Menashe Kadishman’s corral of live sheep; with Germany, for introducing us to Ulrich Ruckriem. An autodidact and stonemason who teaches at the Hamburg Academy, he has successfully absorbed what appear to be influences of Andre and Heizer, and treats us to a quartered mass of granite or a “division-distribution piece” as he calls it that, with a minimum of transformation, hovers, quite literally, between the natural (nature) and virtual (art) states of being. Finally, the Netherlands deserved a bit more understanding than they generally received for a coherent presentation on the part of four artists steeped in their country’s art and nature. Their point of view, conceptual and process-oriented in almost equal parts, dealt with phenomena of growth, aspects of landscape, and the catching and preparation of fish.
If small or semideveloped countries complied with the Biennale’s theme—which may indeed have had a special appeal to people preoccupied with tilling the land, developing resources or fighting back the sea—then why couldn’t the United States, in the lead with “land art” and “process art” for more than a decade, respond more fittingly and in accordance with what younger Europeans had hoped for? Assuming that visitors to Venice expect to see advanced currents in contemporary art rather than certified examples of an art that has already entered the mainstream, then the United States could, and should, have exercised the following options, separate or in combination, any one more suitable than the one ultimately presented: (1) a survey of “land art” and related phenomena encompassing the original contributions of Andre, Smithson, Morris, Heizer, Oppenheim, Hutchinson, the Harrisons and Sonfist; (2) a retrospective of the work of Robert Smithson, that seminal figure; (3) a freewheeling commission awarded to an artist of the stature of Robert Morris to deal with the challenge of the available space in a manner he would have seen fit; (4) an invitation to the organizers of Artpark in Lewiston, New York, temporarily to move their theater of operations from Niagara Falls to the Laguna.
Not privy to whether any of these options was actually considered, discussed and then rejected, I am tempted to speculate why we showed up as conservatively as critics with a wide spectrum of personal preferences judged us. One likely reason is the natural tendency of bureaucracies to be cautious and conservative—certainly in times in which that attitude prevails and is publicly rewarded. Despite the organizers, good intentions, and their willingness to shoulder financial burdens that should more properly be our government’s concern, our exhibitions in Venice have been, more often than not, last-minute compromises governed by expediency and trade-off, and conceived, authorized and executed by different operatives.
Should subcommittees determine a choice of subject or artists, or should they entertain proposals from a select number of qualified professionals who would then be given a mandate and the freedom commensurate with that mandate? Should there not be a separation between funding and curatorial responsibilities with the former vested in the International Exhibitions Committee, to avoid having the commissioners chosen on the basis of (and subsequently rewarded for) their ability to “deliver”? Despite past examples of salaried staffers of the International Art Program easing into executive roles and becoming commissioners at the expense of professional consultants and guest directors, is the International Exhibitions Committee not well advised and best served by putting faith in its staff, employing it to the full and sharing executive responsibilities with it? Is the covenant with the American Federation of Arts, while convenient in terms of funding and profitable in terms of overhead, not just one more bureaucratic hindrance to an effective operation? To what degree is the International Exhibitions Committee selfperpetuating, and how closely can its interests be allied to those of the museum profession, without the appearance of pyramiding offices and professional collusion?
To leave any of these questions hanging has an ominous ring and may be tantamount to accusation. However, the International Exhibitions Committee is, admittedly, in a state of flux and reorganization, so that any amount of public questioning in these pages can only be a summary version of the self-examination going on if this body, dedicated to an enlightened promotion of American art, takes its mandate as seriously as one assumes by virtue of knowing who makes it up. It is thus reasonable to hope that after catching an exhibition that happened to be available in 1976, and after settling for a convenient and conservative choice in 1978, the International Exhibitions Committee will give itself more time, streamline its procedures, make use of available professional talent, strengthen its funding and respond with imagination to whatever theme will be set by the next Biennale if, indeed, there will be a Biennale in 1980 that invites us to participate.
—Jan van der Marck
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NOTES
1. Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale 1895–1968, New York, 1968, p. 149: “The term avant-garde, so potent to intellectuals as recently as the ’40s, is obsolete.” I wish to acknowledge facts and insights gleaned from Alloway’s informative account.
