The theme designed to hold together the variety of paintings and sculptures in this biennial show was both tenuous and ambivalent. Loosely paraphrased, the curator Graham Beal’s catalogue essay’s main argument ran like so: that where Modern art “on the whole” denied the past, a sign of the present rage for content is to be found in newer artists’ espousals of antique styles and/or subjects as “aids to meaning.” Ideally, a theme show should gather force and add to the effects of individual works. This one fizzled and subtracted and left one with a feeling of greater vacancy in the departments it