The Venice Biennale Bounces Back

By ROBERT HUGHES

Say what you will, complain as you wish -- and it usually gives rise to plenty of speech and complaint -- the Venice Biennale is always fun to visit. It also has an edge on all other festivals of contemporary art, like the more didactic Documenta at Kassel, West Germany. For when you have done the central show in the Italian pavilion in the public gardens, and sampled all the national pavilions from the U.S.'s to Yugoslavia's, and sated whatever appetite you may have for the installation pieces of Aperto 88, the section for artists under 40 that stretches like a deconstructionist via crucis through the long Piranesian gloom of the rope walk at the Arsenal, you can go back to the museums and immerse yourself in the Venetian past, an experience that tends to put some of the achievements of late or postmodernism in perspective. Moreover, it takes you away from the throng of dealers and neocollectors who descend on the Biennale like salesmen at a security-devices convention in Akron and would not lightly squander their quality time on something as old hat as a Veronese or a Tintoretto ceiling.

The Biennale, which began in 1895, is the oldest living, official new-art event. Through the '50s, it acquired an inimitable prestige, and its prizes were held to be enormously important in the marketing of an artist: nothing could have given Robert Rauschenberg's career a faster boost than winning the Gran Premio in 1964. This changed in the wake of '68, when art-student radicals occupied the Accademia di Belli Arti, in protest against the commodification of culture (how many of them, one wonders, are art dealers today?). In panic, the Biennale decided in 1972 to jettison the prize system and turn itself into a noncompetitive symposium built around a historical or theme show in the Italian pavilion. Racked by ideological discord and enfeebled by the organizational skills of Italian intellectuals, the Biennale went into a tailspin for a number of years.

Now there is every sign that the Biennale is recovering its equilibrium. The prizes were put back in 1986. This year's Leone d'Oro was won, amid general acclamation and to no one's surprise, by Jasper Johns for his show in the U.S. pavilion. One long-overdue new pavilion has been added: Australia's, showing a group of enormous paintings by the veteran expressionist Arthur Boyd, an artist of exceptional if uneven power whose work is hardly known in the U.S.

The artists most heavily featured in the Italian pavilion are Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia -- together with Mimmo Paladino, 40, who has turned the main gallery into a continuous "environment" of stone figures, bronze emblems and copper sheet. Paladino's masks, wheels, cauldrons, skulls and traceries of rose stems, cast in bronze, have a wild unsettled air, a mix of couture sophistication and peasant witchcraft, that is quite striking; one only wishes that when he carves a figure in stone, it came out looking more like sculpture and less like a shop-window dummy. Also not to be missed is a hypnotic and mysterious installation by the Roman artist Maurizio Mocchetti, in which an irregular circle of red laser light contracts and expands in the darkness on a bed of red oxide.

Spain has the Catalan sculptor Susana Solano, 42, whose constructions of sheet iron, mesh and rods are based on the image of baths and attain a weird intensity in balancing the plain, structurally explicit means of minimalism against an atmosphere of secrecy and menace: they could be prison cells or metaphorical labyrinths.

The West German pavilion is filled by a rambling installation, Unlessness, 1985-88, by Felix Droese, 38. To judge from his materials, which include wooden beams salvaged from warehouses and bridges, oxidized metal, tar paper, dusty broken glass and spindly watercolor drawings, Droese is under the spell of Joseph Beuys and, to some degree, Beuys' former student Anselm Kiefer. He draws with scissors, creating silhouette cutouts (a favorite form of German folk art) on an enormous scale. They make all manner of references to pacifism, to imprisonment and the gallows, to shadow puppetry and children's drawings, and aspire toward a vividly German kind of paranoid sublimity.

The most impressive sculpture at this Biennale, however, is in the English pavilion: a survey of work by Tony Cragg, 39. It issues from a strong and wide-darting imagination. Cragg's sculpture is richly polymorphous, refusing to be pinned down in any style and incorporating such materials as bits of blue plastic scrap, bronze, wood, lab glass, plaster, cogwheels, rubber and sandstone. At times the results look mysteriously vulnerable and reserved, like Silicate, 1988, an array of laboratory beakers and bottles, sandblasted until holes appear in their milky skins. Other pieces are farcical: Code Noah is Cragg's gloss on the perpetuation of genetic traits, a DNA helix made up of children's soft toys -- bunnies, horsies, teddy bears and heffalumps -- absurdly cast in bronze. Perhaps weirdest of all is Cragg's untitled sculpture of an enormously enlarged Paleozoic conch shell done in iron, the monster ancestor of all wind instruments, reposing on top of iron replicas of cases for a trumpet and a trombone -- eating its children or giving birth to them, whichever you prefer.

Inevitably, the centerpiece of the Biennale is the U.S. pavilion with its show of Jasper Johns' work since 1974, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and treated to a piercing catalog exegesis by its curator Mark Rosenthal. , Johns' presence at the Biennale seems to close the American parenthesis that Rauschenberg opened there 24 years ago, and one leaves it convinced he is the deepest of living American artists, a painter whose subtlety and richness of imagination stand beyond doubt even when, as sometimes happens, one cannot find a direct way among the hints, inversions, repetitions and false scents in which his art abounds.

Johns cites his own early paintings, those of his contemporaries (Barnett Newman, for instance) and those of past masters -- Durer, Grunewald, Picasso. His indirectness and liking for allusion coexist with something akin to physical rage: the body parts in his paintings speak of dismemberment, not mere anatomy. His diagonal cross-hatchings are both subtle and banal, for Johns' scrutiny flickers in a perplexing, teasing way between simple pattern recognition and active, probing attention -- so that something quite unremarkable as an image can swell up into a ravishing pictorial event. Sometimes one is excluded; it is like eavesdropping on a man who, half asleep at 4 in the morning, combines and recombines the obsessive contents of his semiconscious mind, muttering and sometimes cursing. But this is the play of a great artist.