Art: It's Biennale Time Again

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In Venice, a profusion of flora, fauna and visual metaphors

The theme of this year's Biennale—that vast, sprawling international conspectus of current art that opens at irregular intervals in the public gardens of Venice and is one of the city's main tourist attractions—is "Dalla Natura All'Arte, Dall'Arte Alla Natura" (from nature to art, from art to nature). Appropriately, then, the star of the 1978 press week was not an artist but an animal.

Borrowed from a Lombard farm by an Italian artist named Antonio Paradiso, the beast, a massive bull named Pinco, stood ruminating in a corral in front of the Italian pavilion. The other half of Paradiso's artwork was a mucca finta, a fake cow, a four-wheeled chassis draped in a cowskin. It was to be wheeled into the pen, the deceived bull would mount it, and the results—as the Biennale catalogue noted, with the usual clarity of Italian art criticism—would touch "the central core of the present evolutionary-involutionary crisis." Finding the proposed event "degrading" (degrading, that is, to Pinco rather than art), one radical Italian journalist shot off a wire to the Italian equivalent of the A.S.P.C.A., demanding that the spectacle be stopped. It was, he said, "an exploitive example of coerced masturbation." The police came, and a compromise was finally reached. The mucca finta was trundled in, and Pinco would be allowed to mount it, but only once.

Since nothing in Venice goes down as well as a scandal, especially a sexual scandal, the corral soon drew a throng of artists, reporters, dealers, critics, museum folk and art groupies. As the massed cameras clicked and whirred, and the crowd of connoisseurs looked breathlessly on, the bull glared at his mechanical bride and abruptly scrambled up on her. Then, with the weary expression of Porn Star Harry Reems working off his debts, Pinco ejaculated on the ground. So ended Paradiso's work of art, which was, in its way, emblematic of the Biennale: a captive beast (Natura) struggling to inseminate a fictive one (Arte) under the gaze of an impervious public.

Pinco was not the only animal at the '78 Biennale. The place was a barnyard, rich with the odors of dung and urine-soaked straw. The Israeli pavilion was converted into a fold, with 17 ewes and one ram, their backs smeared with blue by the artist, Menashe Kadishman, a former kibbutz shepherd. The azure blots, "drifting apart or coming together according to the sheeps' movement," make up a painting, so the catalogue declared. One conceptual artist, Jannis Kounellis, exhibited a macaw on a perch—an old work, possibly touched up with a new macaw. Another, Vettor Pisani, had a rhesus monkey tied on a short leather strap to the top of a sinister-looking mirror table.