Pop Goes the Biennale

This was a Venice Biennale where the critics booed, the cardinal banned, the Americans beamed, and nearly everyone boozed. Apparently incensed by some rubbishy but relatively innocuous nudes, Giovanni Cardinal Urbani, the Roman Catholic Patriarch of Venice, declared the international art show off limits to all priests and nuns. President Antonio Segni thereupon absented himself as official host and prize giver. But this scarcely dimmed the carnival spirits of the cocktail set. Greek-born Iris Clert won the unofficial party-thrower prize by hiring a yacht, tying it up in the Grand Canal, and calling it the Biennale Flottante; inevitably, one of her guests was soon flottante too.

The real show was almost as predictable. With 3,000 paintings, 500 artists and 34 countries represented, the Biennale promised, as usual, to be an embarrassment of riches, and proved, as it often has, to be a mass preview of oblivion. Endless arid abstractions vied with the fossil art of mere representation. Into this esthetic drab land came some young Americans whose vision was fresh even if their art was not fine. The Biennale judges succumbed, and for the third time in the 69-year history of the show awarded the prize to an American, Robert Rauschenberg, 38, "the old master of pop art."*

Melting Typewriter. The canonization of pop art had been rumored for weeks, and Pop Art Dealer Leo Castelli had campaigned assiduously for the winner. Nevertheless, the European critics fumed. Paris' Combat said the prize to Rauschenberg was "an offense to the dignity of artistic creation." Rome's pro-Communist Paese Sera called it "a grotesque Biennale," and the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano editorialized on "the total and general defeat of culture."

The pop artists, a cool and casual lot, could not have cared less about their critics, or even about the rest of the Biennale, which few of them bothered to attend. John Chamberlain, a sculptor of automobile parts, slept on the Lido beach, declared the marble-patterned Piazza San Marco to be the "world's greatest hopscotch arena" and hopscotched around it like a great shambling bear. Claes Oldenburg, as softly pudgy as his sculptures of melting typewriters made of vinyl plastic, politely ate his way through the festival. Rauschenberg himself was busy at Venice's elegant Teatro La Fenice, working with Merce Cunningham's avant-garde ballet troupe, for which he designs props and occasionally does choreography. Since his suitcase had gone astray between Paris and Venice, he was using a safety pin to hold up his pants.

Jarring Juxtaposition. His pants are just about the only thing Robert Rauschenberg has not worked into his paintings, collages, and what he calls "combines." Crumpled newspapers, photographs, street signs, clocks, radios, buckets, neckties, stuffed birds and electric fans have all found their way into his works. Rauschenberg insists that he intends no shock effect, satire or even comment. "I get jarred by the juxtaposition of certain objects. Once you isolate something, you can really see it. I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." To the charge of ugliness, he retorts: "I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable."

The task of art is to match sight with insight, to illuminate, intensify and transmute the raw materials of existence into a higher order of reality and truth, and in that sense most pop art does less with a Campbell's Soup can than Campbell's does. The best pop art, such as Robert Rauschenberg's, is an Art of the Absurd full of the jarring juxtapositions, mechanized tempi, free-floating reveries and strange discontinuities of modern life, as if someone had spliced together unrelated strips of film and run them off on an erratic projector. But too many pop artists seem not to know whether chaos is their subject or their object.

*Previous U.S. winners: James McNeill Whistler (1895) and Mark Tobey (1958).

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