Codes And Whispers

By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

In the arsenal of curious things an artist can do with colored pigment, Ann Hamilton summoned up the equivalent of a cruise missile and fired a shot heard round Venice's Grand Canal. Hamilton, 43, is this year's star-power artist officially representing the U.S. at the 48th Venice Biennale, the oldest of the international art expositions. With 59 countries participating and more than 100 artists on view through Nov. 7, there is, as ever, notable work amid a great deal of minor junk. At the opening, Hamilton's minimalist installation--four rooms that appear empty but for a shower of madly pink dust collecting on their sun-drenched floors--drew crowds and the chatter of outrage, deflation and praise.

The U.S. pavilion is typically a lightning rod, a superpower's force reflected in high production values and heavy funding for an American artist whose work is internationally known. This year's display is no different, with backing of about $1 million from government and private sources, including a $100,000 grant from the glitzy fashion house Gucci (and the requisite glamour of Gucci's creative director, Tom Ford, posing on several occasions with Hamilton as his bodyguards stood stonily by). These are the trappings of America's high-end art culture at the end of the century: spectacle is required. You go to the U.S. pavilion expecting a little extra wattage and buzz.

Hamilton, selected from 15 nominees by an advisory committee to the government-sponsored Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, came as a superb choice. The recipient of many honors, including a 1993 MacArthur "genius" award, she's a maker of large-scale, sometimes frightening tableaux--unless you're at home with vitrines full of flesh-eating beetles crawling over butchered meat or a huge room carpeted in horsehair in which the artist sat mute at a table, burning words from a book.

What is surprising in Venice is Hamilton's shift, her outsize Surrealist style giving way to disarming quiet. Sitting in the hotel room where she stayed with her husband and five-year-old son during the six weeks that she and a crew of nearly 20 created the show, Hamilton explains the new approach. "When I started this project, I wanted to make something big and yet something almost humble and empty, to comment on American domination," she says. "There is so much in our history that we cannot look at, that we refuse to see."

Everything in Hamilton's show follows from that statement. Inside the pavilion, the high white walls are covered with Braille that translates tales of American violence from Charles Reznikoff's poetry book Testimony: the United States, 1885-1915: recitative. Down the walls, bright fuchsia powder, with its overtones of toxic waste, falls from tanks hidden in the ceilings. The artist's recorded voice whispers Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, with its moving call for healing during the savagery of the Civil War, but it too is interpreted, spelled out in the phonetic alphabet used by pilots (Alfa for a, Bravo for b), making it nearly impossible to fathom.

Outside the pavilion, Hamilton has erected a 90-ft. wall of glass and steel that blocks the prospect of the building from afar. Up close, looking through the glass, the building seems to wobble and melt, blurred and distorted.

That is fitting, considering the title Hamilton chose for her show, "myein," which she translates roughly from the Greek as an abnormal contraction of the pupil. Each of the exhibition's elements presses the point that we turn away blindly, deafly from the violence in our American house; we refuse to comprehend it. Yet her recondite Braille and phonetic whispers work too well perhaps: she leaves viewers with little to grasp easily. When a visual work rests so heavily on literary means, its impact is inevitably blunted.

In the hurly-burly of the Biennale, Hamilton's meditative rooms are like church pews amid the roar of Grand Central Terminal. The opening crowds jostled inside the pavilion, drowning the whispering voice, wrecking the peaceful atmosphere. How could divinity alight at rush hour?

For the prize judges, it did not. Hamilton didn't win a Golden Lion, the Biennale's version of an Oscar. Another young American, in another part of the exposition, did. Doug Aitken's Electric Earth, a slick, multiscreen video, earned him one of the three awards for best international artists. The video, about living "in the absolute present," as Aitken, 31, says, features the throbbing music and quick cuts more in tune with the MTV generation. But at least one visitor appreciated the languorous charms of Hamilton's show. There, in a mound of pink powder, an admirer had scrawled a single word: bellissimo.