In Search of Surprises

Is it true what Henry James said about Venice? "There is nothing left to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is utterly impossible." Certainly there's no point in trying to think of something new to say about the canals, the gilded palaces or the fat pigeons in San Marco. But every two years — this is one of them — Venice itself comes up with something new, the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and now the world's oldest international art fair.

The current edition, which opened on June 10, is more international than ever, with 76 participant nations, 34 of them at the Arsenale and the Giardini, the Biennale's main venues, and the rest scattered around the city. For each Biennale a "Commissioner" is chosen who organizes the big international group show that is a centerpiece of the fair. This is the first Biennale ever headed by an American, Robert Storr, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and dean of the School of Art at Yale University. "Biennales are a crash course in contemporary art," he says. "They're a place where the general public at a relatively low cost can come and find out what's going on in the world."

And he means the world. Storr's Biennale puts a heavy emphasis on artists from non-Western nations. At the Arsenale he devotes one large exhibition space to Turkey, which had never before taken part in the Biennale, and another to work from all across Africa. It was also on Storr's recommendation that the Biennale's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was presented on opening day to Malick Sidibé, a photographer from Mali whose wonderful studio portraits and pictures of people getting ready for a night on the town combine a fine eye with a very at-ease sense of the people he looks at and lives among.

The group show that Storr has organized at the Arsenale and the Giardini, with nearly 100 artists from around the world, is called "Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind." Storr has described it as an attempt to demonstrate that the line separating conceptually based work from art that emphasizes material and pleasures — otherwise known as beauty — is no barrier at all. Each kind of art draws from the other. But what most people will be struck by, at least in the exhibition's first half, is the heavy presence of art, a great deal of it photography, that's politically engaged. This is a show in good measure about a world in a state of emergency — in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans, along the Korean Demilitarized Zone and countless borders — an emergency that is in some ways a consequence of modernity, and in other ways a consequence of our failure to be modern enough.

And what about the Western nations? Their pavilions luxuriate out at the Giardini, the wooded park that is the Biennale's second main site. The U.S. is represented this year by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who was just 38 when he died of aids-related illnesses in 1996. By that time he had already become widely known for work that gently undermined notions of how art operates. He made piles of posters that gallery visitors could take away, and spread fields of wrapped candy on the floors for them to pocket. His art could be as perishable as life, and as persistent.

It's unusual but not unprecedented for a nation to be represented at the Biennale by an artist who's no longer living. Robert Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, was the U.S. representative nine years later. All the same, the choice of a dead artist denies the important Biennale spotlight to a living one. Before and after his death, but especially after, Gonzalez-Torres' work was widely circulated around the museum world. But it was a brief life, a relatively small output, and it's been seen quite a bit. So there's no sense of surprise or discovery in this show, a big part of what makes any other pavilion exciting. (Assuming it's exciting at all.) Inevitably, the Gonzalez-Torres show feels sealed off and commemorative.