The Idea of an Artworld
Sifting through 75 years of its archive, Artreview looks back on its coverage of the Venice Biennale
The year of the Venice Biennale’s 60th edition – that’s 2024 – is also Artreview’s 75th anniversary. What was then titled Art News & Review was launched in 1949
– a year after the Venice Biennale was reinstituted following the Second World War, during which the Biennale had been hijacked to serve the politics of Benito Mussolini’s Fascists, its last edition held in 1942, before the events of the war overtook it. Emerging from the carnage of the conflict, European countries set to rebuilding, economically and culturally, and modern art became part of that effort. The Biennale, once a showcase for competing national identities, became a place where the more international culture of modern art could be celebrated.
Ever since, it has served as a platform on which art from around the world is presented (though distance, money, cultural attitudes and politics conspire to make this a partial representation of what’s going on). But more importantly, the Biennale could be said to have created the idea of an ‘artworld’ as such – binding together disparate nations and cultures to the idea that art is something shared by societies everywhere, and that there’s something worthwhile in everyone else seeing what the artists where you come from are doing. Whatever the criticisms often levelled at the Venice Biennale in particular (a relic of colonial history and nationalism; an assertion of European or Western cultural values; an accomplice in the global commodification of culture; a tool of gentrification…), it remains the model for the ‘largescale temporary exhibition’ of contemporary art, those mega-exhibitions that now exist everywhere, and whose continued occurrence confirms the global reality of the ‘artworld’.
Artreview has often, but not always, paid attention to the Venice Biennale. Searching Artreview’s archive reveals an ebb and flow of interest; an uneven and partial enthusiasm for this grand event, but one which is worth revisiting, to discover not only some of what went on at the Biennale, but also to see how art critics paid attention to it. Here Artreview presents a selection of Biennale coverage from 1964 to 1990. Some critics were regular visitors – the Czechoslovak émigré J.p.hodinandthe Telegraph’s art critic Michael Shepherd. The following articles record some of the shifts across three decades, during which the Biennale went from Modernism to postmodernism, and from a Eurocentric institution to a more global one, via the political and cultural crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. Artreview doesn’t always agree with itself after all these years – so has added notes to the documents; factual information, questions and criticisms. It may be time, right now, when the biennial exhibition needs a big rethink about where it is headed. A good time, then to look back on where it came from. Artreview
2 The realities of a bigger artworld out there aren’t going away; local values and provincialism, and the speed of change from style to style are becoming issues. The artworld is accelerating and expanding; the idea that there might be a common set of criteria – of forms and reasons for making art – is starting to seem uncertain. The work of Andrea Cascella, sculptor of interlocking carved forms that appear both organic and mechanical, seems to embody this ambivalence. 1 A ‘vanity fair’, but also a kind of competition, for J. P. Hodin the Biennale in 1964 is a mix of drowsy boredom and a vaguely annoyed sense that new things are happening, if not in Europe. Robert Rauschenberg has just won the Grand Prize, for his canvas Buffalo II (1964), with its depictions of recently assassinated John Kennedy, US Army helicopters and Coca-cola logos. But Rauschenberg’s win is a jolt – only the second time since the war that the Grand Prize is awarded to an American, it also signals the arrival of new ways of making a painting (silkscreen and photography) and the sense that art has to face up to the new world of technology and mass media. 3 There are developments that are ‘crazes’ (like American Pop art) and developments that should be taken seriously, such as kinetic art. 4 It’s all about national pride, though, as if it were a contest between countries, and as long as they aren’t at war with each other. The Eurovision Song Contest is now eight years old. It’s perhaps a coincidence that most of the other countries Hodin criticises are behind the Iron Curtain; it’s in the Russian Pavilion, with its ‘official art’, that ‘art stops dead’. 5 Some art scenes are ‘out of tune’ with the contemporary moment. Art is something with a leading edge, with developments that lead to a consensus. Coming together (those 400 critics meeting 400 artists in Venice – still a small world) is a way of transmitting new trends to other parts of the world, or risk being out of sync.
1 Unintentionally surreal opening images of protesting students demonstrating and fighting with police, alongside tourists and café orchestras, while plainclothes policemen masquerade as art critics during the Biennale’s press opening; vaguely hallucinatory, evoking the satirical nihilism of 1960s radical cinema; Jean-luc Godard’s Le Weekend, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorema, Lindsay Anderson’s If… (all 1968).
2 Venice’s art students, taking their cue from student protests across Europe, come up with slogans denouncing art as commodity, demanding the end of ‘bourgeois’ art. Noting that fellow critic Pierre Restany (a more dedicated follower of artistic novelty and radicalism) is echoing Chairman Mao by issuing his Little Red Book of Pictorial Revolution, Hodin sees youthful pretentiousness, but also echoes of an earlier ‘anti-art’ rebellion, that of the Dada artists, 50 years before.
3 Nevertheless, student radicalism may be the only exciting thing around, and while the critic wouldn’t want ‘novelty and shock and surprise’ at any cost, there is a growing sense that art won’t be able to come up with anything substantially new. Having dismissed Pop art as a ‘craze’ a few years earlier, Hodin, like many critics at the end of the 1960s, now sees a cacophony of empty art ‘trends’. What Hodin wants is an artist who reveals the ‘mysteries of existence’, though what those are isn’t too clear.
4 Hodin thinks that if art has ended up as mere novelty, and radicalism among the young is merely destructive, these are symptoms of something bigger – a culture giving up on the idea of the ‘human condition’, and anything that might make art bigger than just the price paid for them. The ‘culture of Europe’ here might be the old humanistic tradition that dates back to the Renaissance; but, Hodin glumly concludes, the ‘spiritual attitude of modern man is sick’.
1 The idea of a ‘moral shock’ to an institution by rebellious artists and students suggests something of the effect that the 1968 revolts had on cultural institutions. Even though old institutions like the Biennale wanted to compromise, Hodin notes that many artists stayed away; The New York Times reported that artists set to show at the American Pavilion (including Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol) withdrew their work in protest against the US wars in Vietnam and Cambodia.
2 Can a biennial really be a comprehensive or objective survey of all the ‘best achievements’ in art from around the world? Putting four ageing historians and critics in charge (these various professors were all born between 1909 and 1920) was probably not going to convince a younger generation of artists that the Biennale had its finger on the pulse of contemporary art.
3 The old notion of the artist as a maker of tangible things produced by age-old techniques is on the way out. The idea that the ‘creative act’ is located in forms of skill was being challenged by artists’ use of new media. Nevertheless it has remained a stubborn marker of value in art since.
4 Although the critic is lamenting the disappearance of a particular world and a view of art, Hodin can see that there is something oppressive about artworks that are fixated on using technology to produce sensory effects.
5 Here come artists and artworks that are ‘intellectual’, full of rationality and cerebral coldness. Computers, synthetic materials, science and technology are what artists are into. ‘Feeling’, for the old critic, should be a normal aspect of why artists make artworks.
6 Here is Luis Fernando Benedit, whose Biotrón was a Perspex and metal enclosure of flowers and live bees feeding on the flowers. Roberto Burle Marx’s plans for a park in São Paulo pointed outwards to the merger of painting, landscape and urban design. In both cases, art is something bigger than the art gallery can contain.
7 Did art become a thing of the past? Hodin’s attachment to art as feeling and human expression and the crafting of materials by hand would be quickly sidelined by the explosion of artists experimenting with other disciplines and methodologies. The old Modernism finally over.
1 Since the artworld has expanded globally since 1976, is the idea of having a single ‘bringing-together’ of the contemporary ‘art world’ even possible today? While, by 1976, the Biennale had begun to reorganise itself to accommodate both national presentations and a more international survey of contemporary activity, it remained a Western representation of what the ‘world itself ’ might look like.
2 The freewheeling approach to national presentations turned out to mean that, in practice, the commercial art scenes – of particular galleries and dealers – had come to have a major influence in what was presented at the Biennale.
3 Shepherd points to the emerging reality of the ‘temporary structures’ making their mark on the art system. In 1972, the now-legendary Harald Szeemann had curated his hugely influential edition of Kassel’s Documenta, while the Biennale de Paris had, from 1971 to 1975, turned to presenting many of the more radical artistic trends from Europe and North America.
4 Critics are becoming curators of parts of a bigger thematic proposition, a new development for the Biennale. Significantly, these thematic approaches also involve an art-historical purpose – reconnecting old avantgardes of the earlier twentieth century (especially from Soviet Russia) with contemporary activity.
5 Art history and political history becomes the subject-matter of exhibitions, staged as interventions in current politics. Although the critic doesn’t dwell on the issue, what follows indicates a similar activity of connecting the past to the present. Remembering alternative histories becomes the task of the largescale exhibition, in contrast to the histories maintained by museums.
1 The Venice Biennale becomes a matter of glamour, fashion and hedonism, something not to be taken too seriously, a beautiful backdrop to a kind of cultural tourism…
2 …nevertheless, the critic is keen to recount the big changes to the Biennale instituted by its leftwing director, Carlo Ripa di Meana – to summarise the scale of ambition that Ripa di Meana brought to the event, which is a more critically reflective form of exhibition-making.
3 The limits of confronting international politics, though, become clear as the USSR withdraws from the 1978 edition, following Ripa di Meana’s earlier ‘Biennale of Dissent’. The USSR, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia boycotted the 1978 edition; only the USSR persisted, eventually returning in 1982.
4 Shepherd notices the ‘exhibitions of two feminist groups’, but doesn’t record that the exhibition of concrete poetry was the exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio (Materialisation of Language), curated by artist and poet Mirella Bentivoglio, an all-woman show of work by over 90 artists, the first such to be staged at the Biennale.
5 ‘To offer public art or private’, here, points to how nongallery art is starting to take shape in the context of largescale exhibitions; experiments in Land art, performance and site-specific art start to become domesticated for biennial consumption…
6 £202 ‘economy’ return airfare from London, about £1,450 at current values!
1 Holzer’s ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’ would become the rallying call of the artworld’s#metoo movement some three decades later; which can either be read as Holzer retaining her radical power, or the reduction of political movements to pithy slogans.
2 The Iran–iraq War, which started after Saddam Hussein spearheaded the invasion of Iran, had ended two years earlier; that same year Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, resulting in a fatwa being placed on the author by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. To this day, Iraq does not have a permanent pavilion at the Biennale, but 2024’s edition features a record number of Iraqi artists in Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition.
3 One of Petry’s fellow critics did see the work in fact: Edward Ball would later discuss the Italian Pavilion with Edward Said in The New Statesman, praising a work in which Ukrufi sent packages to various Western capitals, ‘to evoke the experience of displacement’.
4 Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue. Then stars of Australian soap opera Neighbours, their characters’ wedding was marked with the release of the chart topping duet Especially For You (1989).
5 Cicciolina, also known as Ilona Staller, was a member of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. Her Partito dell’amore (Party of Love) was libertarian, countercultural and sex positive. Jeff Koons and Staller were married when he created Made in Heaven (1989–91), but they separated two years later.
6 The Pope and the Penis (1990), by the artist collective Gran Fury, consisted of a giant poster of Pope John Paul II with a corresponding text detailing the Church’s doctrine on sex and contraception, exhibited near a poster featuring an erect penis. At every step the work’s exhibition was threatened, first when Italian customs seized it; then the artists were visited by US diplomats worried about the brewing controversy; that visit was followed by one from the Italian police; the Biennale planned to remove it until other exhibiting artists threatened a boycott; magistrates visited following legal action proposed by the Italian parliament. Gran Fury’s Avram Finkelstein recalled that at one point they were forced to hide the work behind the bins of a pizzeria lest it be confiscated.