Gliding over a Dying Reef

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Venice Biennale: two good shows, but much tired mannerism

The Venice Biennale is the longest-running festival-cum-survey in modern art. The first one was held in 1895, and the 41st opened this month in its three dozen national pavilions, set in the public gardens a few minutes by vaporetto from Piazza San Marco. It is, as always, a hotchpotch with some loose thematic strands. The ostensible subject for 1984 is "Art and the Arts"--painting, sculpture and their connections to other media, to their own history, to architecture, and so on. Almost anything can be gathered under such an umbrella, and nearly everything has been, from plaster Apollos to graffiti, from marble to flickering television sets. The prevailing tone is of fatigue and mannerism. Everyone complains that the Biennale, like art itself, is in decline; such complaints are a necessary part of the ritual of visiting it. But this year in particular the visitor feels like a tourist in a glass-bottomed boat, gliding over a dying reef: here a brilliant polyp, there a parrot fish or sea fan, but acres of dead whitishgray coral to tell the real story.

There are two outstanding exhibitions this year. One is historical: "The Arts in Vienna from the Founding of the Secession to the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire," a stupendous collocation of more than a thousand objects that fills the Palazzo Grassi: paintings by Klimt and Schiele, furniture by Hoffman and Moser, posters, stage designs, textiles, jewelry, ceramics by dozens of artists both famous and obscure. Apart from Venice itself, this is the main reason for going to Venice. The other is a one-man show by Howard Hodgkin at the English pavilion. Not since Robert Rauschenberg's appearance at the Biennale 20 years ago has a show by a single painter so hogged the attention of visitors or looked so effortlessly superior to everything else on view by living artists. One enters it with a sense of relief: here the wearisome traits of much contemporary art, its honking rhetoric, its unconvincing urgency, its arid "appropriations" of motifs, are left at the door, and the slow-surfacing complexities of mature, articulate painting greet the eye.

Hodgkin paints small, and his work combines the intimate with the declamatory. Every image seems to be based either on a room with figures or a peep into a garden from a window, and is regulated by layered memories of conversation, sexual tension and private jokes. But this is conveyed by an extraordinary blooming, spotting, bumbling and streaking of color, an irradiation of the mildly anecdotal by the aggressively visual. The small size of Hodgkin's canvases puts a high premium on their quality of touch (which rarely falters), but the color counts most.

When Rauschenberg won the painting grand prize (long since abolished) at the 1964 Biennale, European critics bitterly complained about American influence in the art world. Today, of course, such transatlantic rivalries are ancient history. They have been canceled by a market system based on multinational trading, where conglomerates of dealers sell their menus of American, Italian, German artists to German, Italian, American clients. There is not one American artist under 50 whose work creates the anxiety among discriminating Europeans that Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, or their pop successors, did in the '60s.

The main emotion provoked by the American pavilion this year is embarrassment. Organized by Marcia Tucker, director of the New Museum in New York City, it shows only that journalistic ideas cannot always be shaped into exhibitions the way poor novels can be made into films. Its title, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained," as Tucker's catalogue essay usefully reminds the transatlantic audience, "is taken from the two great epic poems of John Milton, published in the mid-17th century, which tell the story of the fall of man and his redemption." Grasping this arcane key with one hand and clutching the forehead with the other, one stumbles into a little Disney work of apocalyptic kitsch and feeble nostalgia. Most of the artists involved are fairly typical products of American art schools: ambitious battery chickens who draw badly, mistake spasmodic quirks for deep feeling and use "irony"--that inflated currency of the '80s--like wallpaper when they are not waving their pictorial cliches as though, they were inventions.

And there are cliches to spare. "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained" seeks to address what happened when the American dream of Eden, the transcendentalism whose master image was sublime wilderness, went sour from aggression, pollution, tract homes, nuclear waste. From toppling seas to garish motel interiors, from Huck Finn fishermen to Piranesian renderings of ruined superbowls, all the rodomontade of fallen America is there. The ideal visitor to this show, with its decent pieties and visual banalities, might be a blind member of the Sierra Club with Baptist leanings. Of course, some items are better than others. Charles Garabedian, a veteran from California, works a klutzy but amusing variation on Aegean idyls and myths in Island N. 2, 1982. There are a few inferior things by talented artists like Eric Fischl. As for the rest, ship it back home to Dubuque.

But are other contemporary sections of the Biennale much better? Hardly. The French pavilion presents secondhand work like Louis Cane's pastiche of Picasso, Le Deluge, 1982, and is headed up by the voluble and tedious recent paintings of Jean Dubuffet. The star of the German pavilion is A.R. Penck, whose hamfisted graphorrhea, expressed in mock-primitive stick figures, is unrelieved by any qualities of design. Apart from him, neoexpressionism does not feature much at this Biennale. What predominates--especially in the main theme show, "Art in the Mirror," which sets out to trace the influence of "classic" art on late modernism--is a hothouse tendency called La Pittura Colta (Cultivated Painting). This is a mode of cold classical allegory, tightly done with an air of academic erudition. Its most vigorous antecedents are a pair of French sculptors, Anne and Patrick Poirier, represented here by The Death of Encelade, 1983, an imposing pile of broken marble with a bronze spear driven into the top and two huge blind stone eyes apparently broken from a colossus. This jolting piece of theater is bound to appeal to the Ozymandias watcher in everyone.

This is not the only new work in Venice this year to extract some poetry from the archaic or mythic past. There are, for instance, the canvases of Christopher Lebrun, a young Englishman whose thickly mortared landscapes featuring cypresses, caverns and the winged horse Pegasus have a Boecklin-like drama that is not wholly the result of judicious quotation. But quotation does rule. This Biennale has more plaster casts in it than the cellar of a Viennese art academy: the abused relics of antiquity dragged back as conceptual decor for a dying art tradition.

Thus La Pittura Colta: the revenge of late De Chirico on modernism. A decade ago, nobody wanted the historicist kitsch that Giorgio de Chirico, the master of metaphysical painting who became the laureate of Fascist taste, produced after 1925. Today his work goes for big prices and is assiduously promoted. It is therefore not surprising that the Biennale should devote several rooms to him. However, the qualities of La Pittura Colta go far beyond, or below, De Chirico's fussy homages to Rubens, Titian or Fragonard. Its exponents, such as Carlo Maria Mariani, Stefano di Stasio or Omar Galliani, never use such "warm" sources. As shown by Mariani's Ercole che Riposa, they prefer the cold touch of marble and the frigid contortions of mannerism. Their dream of beauty is a simpering Apollo or a Big Daddy Hercules surrounded by Ganymedes with pearlescent teeth, all in a Roman campagna done from slides--the love among the ruins that dares not speak its name.

The classicism of La Pittura Colta is a mere shell, and its vaunted erudition is as thin as a museum postcard. All it retains from the beaux-arts tradition is the desire to get the highlight on the Spartan's backside right--not that it always does so. It has the calm not of classical elevation but of exhausted decadence. The Venetian setting is unfair to it, for anyone can take the water-bus back to the Scuola di San Rocco and see what Tintoretto could do with the human figure. The right place for it is Las Vegas, among the fountains of Caesars Palace and La Scultura Sinatra. --By Robert Hughes