Fresh Controversies Spice Art Exhibit International Show In Venice Draws Political And Artistic Disputes
If art indeed imitates life, then the Biennale International Art exhibit showed Saturday just how complicated life in today’s world is.
The exhibit, the oldest contemporary art festival, celebrated its 100th birthday Saturday with provocative works on the human body - and controversy both artistic and political.
More than 70 countries sent hundreds of artists to exhibit contemporary art’s cutting edge in 27 pavilions and locations around the city’s shimmering lagoon and St. Mark’s Square.
The overall theme is “Imprints of the Body and Mind,” and most artists allowed their imaginations to roam freely. A prime example: American Bill Viola’s “Buried Secrets” video and sound installation, a tunnel of film clips and strobe lights.
Other countries have fielded provocative displays of phallic symbols and erotic themes on traditional banners and glass-and-steel sculptures.
Americans took two of the top Golden Lion prizes awarded Saturday: Ronald B. Kitaj for painting and Gary Hill for sculpture.
The Italian government tried to keep the exhibit austere and impartial by appointing a foreign overall commissioner for the first time - Picasso Museum curator Jean Clair from France.
But political disputes erupted immediately when critics discovered that the old permanent Yugoslavia pavilion was turned over to Serbia, while Slovenia and Croatia found exhibit halls outside the main grounds.
Bosnia, whose capital, Sarajevo, has a twin-city tie with Venice and whose mayor is a frequent visitor and friend of Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari, is absent altogether. Bosnia is embroiled in the fourth year of a civil war with rebellious Bosnian Serbs.
Clair said international law guided the choice of Serbia, since the other former states of Yugoslavia had seceded and Bosnia hadn’t applied.
On the cultural front, charges of animal cruelty against Japanese artists who used more than 200 ants in an installation of sand dunes and tunnels in 1993 gave way to other shockers.
Artists from both Taiwan and China exhibited works of biting satire against sexual repression, and Taiwan artist Wu Mali shredded Western and Asian literary masterpieces inside plastic videocassettes as a symbol of the smothering of print by video.
Cacciari, the mayor, says controversy is good for tourism. He spent the eve of the exhibit’s opening at the launch of a real estate project expected to revitalize Venice’s economy.
The 19th-century Stucky Mill, once Europe’s largest flour mill and abandoned since 1955, is being restored into a convention center and complex for a hotel, apartments, a shopping mall and a health center.
At the event were American poet Allen Ginsberg, who leads a multimedia retrospective on the Beat Generation of writers, and Hiro Yamagata, who painted seven 1950s convertible Mercedes in garish tropical colors for Japan’s entry at the Biennale.