The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
The Age, 3 July, 1993
Achille Bonito Oliva, director of the 1993 Venice Biennale of contemporary
art, resembles nothing more than a Mafia don. Thinly veiled by expensive cigar
smoke, he could easily be mistaken for Frank Sinatra. He leaned across his
vast table towards me, speaking passionately about his twin themes of ‘Cultural
Nomadism and the Four Cardinal Points of Art’, and I felt that not only
was he ‘doing it his way’ but that I was in the magic realist world
of Borges where a map of the empire was being built before me in 1:1 scale.
How shall I describe its scale and complexity? It resemble other biennales
in that it is divided into three main sections. There are national pavilions
spread across tree-shaded parklands where up to 40 nations as varied as Iceland,
Spain, Australia and the United States exhibit the work of an artist, usually
selected through the cultural wing of that country’s civil service. This
uncurated patchwork of nations usually comes across as very uneven, and part
form points one in the direction of the German, French, American, Spanish and
British pavilions for well-organised shows. Newcomers like Australia,
whose pavilion is set among the main players of the art world, are gaining
an increasing international reputation for varied and exciting shows – loathed
by some and feted by others.
The Italian pavilion, where Hitler and Mussolini met in 1934, is a triumph
of early Fascist architecture and, in its size, a category unto itself. It
is about the size of an Australian state gallery and shows a selection of artists
from around the globe, in addition to the many Italians.
The highlights this year include the new latex canvases of Sigmar Polke, the
Joseph Beuys installation, works by Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel, and African
art from the Museum of African Art in New York, which commented upon violence
in the black townships of South Africa.
The third regular section is ‘Aperto’ (Open), first introduced
(as he never tires of telling you) by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1980. This
features the work of young (under 40) artists from around the world. Bonito
Oliva put Helena Kontova of ‘Flash Art’ in charge of this section
and she called in 13 critics and curators from around the world to help with
the selection.
Hany Armanious was the sole Australian representative in this section of 160
artists. There should have been more, and perhaps the Australia Council’s
lack of enthusiasm for hosting an “assistant”, albeit on with international
clout, rather than Bonito Oliva himself, had something to do with it.
Armanious was previously exposed to large audiences through his interventions
and installations at the Perspecta and the last Sydney Biennale. He uses
materials of such dystopic aesthetics that even an art povera practitioner
would cringe from touching them and leave them at the bottom of the bin.
“Grunge” is the name, and shocking bourgeois audiences still appears
to be the game. Their hypnotic fascination forces you to question your
own stance to the evaluation of art. Why? Because double negatives are set
up in such a positive way.
Melbourne-based Jenny Watson is the official choice for the Australian pavilions
with her solo exhibition, ‘Paintings with Veil and False Tails’,
and accompanying full-page advertisements in ‘Flash Art’. This
work continues her autobiographical obsession with “self” and all
the psychodramas that are the baggage of contemporary life. She uses
red velvet to equate the artist with an outmoded aristocracy; the taffeta covered
with veils represent the highs of parties and weddings from her youth, and
the horses’ tails speak both of the woman and the horse – evoking
freedom, fertility and savagery.
The first piece of work I ever say by Jenny Watson was in an Australian survey
show in Paris in 1983. Its rather over-eager-to-be-up-to-the-minute title
was ‘Trans Avant-garde Horse Pissing’.
The term ‘trans avant-garde’ was, in fact, coined by our man Achille
Bonito Oliva to describe the global art movement of quotation, which spread
like a virus from the centres of the art world to its most distant edges. First
it described new figurative painting, then new abstraction, and it was constantly
fuelled by new ‘80s money.
Bonito Oliva has a Napoleonic ability to command and to delegate, to imagine
the grand picture and to attend to the minutiae of detail. While one
of his commanders-in-chief had a nervous breakdown outside the office where
we talked and was presumably hauled off in water taxi to a place of quiet and
restraint, I tried to grasp the enormousness of this project and how it extended
the Biennale concept from previous years. For a start there was the Art
Against AIDS auction hosted by Elizabeth Taylor and Angelica Houston down at
the Peggy Guggenheim Museum on the Grand Canal. More than 100 artists
had donated work. They were all stars and the brightest among them included
Frank Auerbach, John Baldessari, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Julian
Schnabel, Alice Neel, Jeff Koons and Martin Kippenberger.
Across the canal at San Marco there was the best-ever showing of the work of
Francis Bacon in the ballroom and ante-chambers of the Museo Correr. Seen
in the natural daylight of Venice, the works in oil, including 32 of his largest
canvases and eight of his triptychs, glowed with a rich subtlety. A second
monographic tribute exhibition was given to the work of John Cage and organised
by Alanna Heiss from New York’s PSI. Meanwhile, down at the Palazzo
Ducale and the Italian pavilion, a vast, mixed exhibition called ‘Winds
of Art’ examines “bipolarism”, as in the north-to-south and
east-to-west. Bonito Oliva puts forward Delacroix, Rousseau, Gaudi, van
Gogh and Seurat as the emblematic figures that allow him to unite Europe, the
Fart East and Africa. Here we see Julian Schnabel, Joseph Beuys and Francesco
Clemente, there young Chinese artists or works relating to politics in Northern
Ireland or Soweto.
For me, Bonito Oliva’s most imaginative act was to encourage national
pavilions to show the work of foreign artists, especially from countries with
no pavilions, alongside their own. Thus we have the French-born Louise
Bourgeoise in the American pavilion, and Joseph Kosuth, the father of conceptual
art, in the Hungarian one. Sadly, Australia and the UK were tow of the
countries that declined to take part in this project. The most successful
twinning, and everyone’s favourite for the main prize at Venice, was
Hans Haacke and Nam June Paik in the German pavilion.
At the entrance to the pavilion, Hans Haake hung a giant black and white image
of Hitler next to a replica of a newly minted 1990 Deutschmark. The pavilion
itself is a fine example of Nazi architecture and Hitler strode around inside
it during the 1934 Venice Biennale before meeting up with his old mate Mussolini
down at the Italian pavilion. Hans Haake then went on to smash up the
marble floor inside so that visitors wobbling about on the chunks of marble
caused a noise not unlike marching jackboots to emanate from the hall and out
into the gardens. At the far end he had printed a single word: GERMANIA.
Other presentations that deserve to be written about at length would include
at least a third of the works in the ‘Aperto’ section, especially
the pregnant cow cut in half and suspended in formaldehyde by the wunderkind
of British art, Damien Hirst; the large cibachrome photographs of Andres Serrano
taken in a New York morgue and given titles such as ‘The Morgue: AIDS
Related Death’, and the ‘World Flag Ant Farm’ by Yukinori
Yanagi of Japan, which sends ambivalent signals about the future of nationalism
in a post-industrial world. Perspex boxes containing all the flags of
the world fashioned from collared grains of sand hang next to each other joined
by feeder tubes along which thousands of ants pass, eating the flags and turning
the multicolored artwork into a bland homogenised monochrome.
And if all that is not enough for you, quite separate from the Biennale the
biggest-ever exhibition of the work of Marcel Duchamp is installed in the Palazzo
Grassi before transferring to the US.
