ART REVIEW : Awash in the Venice Biennale : The 98-year-old art carnival is, as usual, a ripping good time; too bad the works on display fail to measure up

Every two years, contemporary art stages a suicide mission in the most beautiful city on Earth. If the Bellinis and Tintorettos in Venice’s dizzying architecture are surprised by the sudden pipsqueak competition, they don’t let on. The spell of the place keeps going and going, powered by a race of geniuses centuries in the grave. At any rate, the masses of new stuff that invaded this month will be routed in September like so many masses of new stuff before them in the 98-year history of art’s strangest, clashiest, at times liveliest international carnival, the Biennale of this queen of the sea.

The Biennale, whose latest edition just opened, is often controversial too, when the juried prizes--those Golden Lions--are handed out. The prize for painting indicates that medium’s sad state this year, being split between the only two conceivable candidates, Britain’s Richard Hamilton and Spain’s Antoni Tapies, who together generate a level of excitement on the shadow side of zero. The Golden Lion for sculpture, meanwhile, is weird.

Going to theater artist Robert Wilson, the award pointedly insults the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois of the United States (the form-sheet favorite) and great installational works by Germany’s Hans Haacke (the runaway people’s choice) and Russia’s Ilya Kabakov. Haacke is backhandedly recognized in a prize to Germany for the “transnational spirit” of its pavilion, which he shares with the video gimcrackery of Korean-born American Nam June Paik, (whose work emerged in Germany in the 1960s).

But it would take conspiracy nuts with a full pot of coffee to get much exercised over awards that, as always, will be forgotten in 10 minutes. Let’s go to the show.

Impresarioed by Italian art promoter Achille Bonita Oliva, the thing is huge this year. As usual, it centers in the 28 national pavilions amid the honeysuckle and jasmine of the Giardini (gardens), where appear artists of more than 50 officially participating or specially invited countries, and at the juried show of presumably up-and-coming talent, the Aperto (open), in a narrow old rope factory about a quarter of a mile long.

In addition, the event is festooned with a couple of dozen collateral exhibitions alert to current concerns, at least in principle: for instance, a survey of “Eastern cultural tendencies” (China these days is wowed by Pop art, evidently), a strong selection of Western-influenced new black African art, a lavish AIDS-benefit drawing exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum and a show in the city’s winter casino of art about the erotic, right in line with this Biennale’s widespread sex obsession.

There is much to see around town for genitalia fanciers, culminating at the Aperto in a Benneton-sponsored display of multicultural privates in looming close-up by photographer Oliviero Toscani. Some people hated this. I decided to like it, if only because now nobody has to do it anymore--well, except for photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, whose smaller version of the identical idea is at the Giardini. What is happening? Maybe a great big “desublimation,” in Freudian lingo a splurging of sex as if it were going, or being made to go, out of style.

In the outdoor cafes during opening week, at the hour when the Adriatic atmosphere swoons from golden to deep, deep blue, thousands of journalists and art folk sat and told each other they found the Biennale lousy. It is always this way at such dauntingly overstuffed shows, for which nature has yet to evolve a viewer with stamina enough to maintain a generous attitude. Adding to routine exhaustion is a grinding malaise of the international art set beleaguered by collapsing markets, multiple political upheavals and an overall crisis of confidence. Even on an occasion suggesting its grandeur, the art world feels dwarfed and battered by present history.

The two artists who most electrify the occasion, Haacke and Kabakov, do so by taking historical malaise head-on with environments of dark humor and stunning excellence.

Designed by Hitler’s pet architect Albert Speer, the German pavilion is that oxymoron, a masterpiece of Nazi architecture, with an exalting and intimidating air somewhere between a temple and a power plant. Haacke has hung its august entrance with a blown-up photo of Hitler attending the 1934 Biennale. (The show kept occurring under fascism through 1942.) If the pavilion is well attended, approaching viewers hear from within a bizarre din of clanks, clacks and clunks.

Inside, the floor of marble tiles has been torn up, forming an uneven litter that, trod upon, emits the resonant racket against the concrete subfloor. Some young men as I watched joined in Haacke’s spirit of destruction by trying with no great success to stomp tiles to pieces under the monumentally lettered Italian for Germany,”GERMANIA.” A fine dust rose. One way or another, the piece is cathartic. It thrilled everyone I talked with.

Kabakov has even more drastically disrupted his pavilion, which is a czarist wedding cake of a building bearing the ill-fated year of its completion, 1914, and the subsequent monogram of the USSR. Kabakov has turned it into an anti-monument, an abandoned work in progress surrounded by a crude wooden fence and containing in its darkened interior a preposterous half-completed remodeling featuring grandiose staircases to nowhere in particular. Out back, a tacky wooden structure painted with Soviet insignia blares martial music from Soviet radio archives.

To say that Kabakov poetically conveys a terrible waste of tremendous energy--the 70-year wild ride of Revolutionary mania--puts it mildly. One comes away with a bone-deep sense of inexplicable catastrophe.

Also at the Giardini, Israel scores a hit with a spectacular water-spraying eco-environment (a fish farm that somehow irrigates cucumbers) that its designer, Avital Geva, stoutly insists is not art. (Foolish man. The only way not to make art in this context of overstimulated aestheticism is to stay home.) Poland presents its 35-year-old phenom Miroslaw Balka with more of his Minimalist-looking deployments of humble materials dense with childhood memory and obsession.

Hungary has made a surprise opening to the West by inviting American conceptualist Joseph Kosuth to fill its pavilion, which he has done with the best so far of his walk-through palimpsests of political or philosophical photo-and-text quotations: words and pictures directly on the wall with an import tantalizing though elusive.

If Kosuth provides fine intellectual entertainment, Bourgeois delivers a kick in the head. Her fiercely sexual, passionately anxious sculptures are a startling complement to the prissy Georgian candy box of the U.S. pavilion. But the French-born Bourgeois is less than widely esteemed on her natal Continent.

A couple of European curatorial mucky-mucks, lately under fire for slighting women artists, testily challenged an American I know to say why Americans like Bourgeois. He backed off the subject. He probably should have said, “Because she irritates you guys so much, that’s why.” In fact, the kinds of permission Bourgeois gives herself to express female sexual aggression combine with her great gifts to explain what is great about her.

Good old American audacity, impressive also in the Aperto, may be our sole remaining edge in an international art world we used to dominate. It pertains to a savvy grasp of what shows like this require: big-bang installational strategies, with tactics tightly focused to engage viewers simply and utterly. If that sounds like a Hollywood formula, it is pretty much what the entertainment-intensive condition of contemporary art has come to. It may also help to explain why so many of the hot young American artists got their bearings in Hollywood’s Southern California vicinity.

Los Angeles types Paul McCarthy and Nancy Rubins seem automatic choices as the only two artists, of about 120, displayed in the central runway of Aperto: McCarthy with a gigantic plastic totem of a Felix-the-Cat-like critter, “Chocolate Blood Boy,” at one end, and way over there Rubins’ hanging, quarter-moon-shaped, sleepy-time bundle of mattresses. These artists do the job.

So, far less brazenly, does Charles Ray. His radically unobtrusive contribution, a three-foot cube painted modest white, sits innocently keeping its little apocalyptic secret. Its wall label tersely shocks: “7 1/2 Tons.” Solid steel, the cube outweighs most of the rest of the show--and inspires awed surmise about how it got there. (I picture one of the city’s ubiquitous utility craft dragged straight to the lagoon bottom.) Ray establishes a new standard for passive aggression.

American Matthew Barney (speaking of audacity) has very defensibly won the Biennale prize for best artist in the Aperto under 35 years old. He shows delicately lovely color photos and sculptural apparatus from a videotape of himself and a male collaborator disporting themselves as literally and figuratively horny satyrs.

But for these and a handful of other artists, the Aperto stinks. The general reason is a presumption of willing participation by viewers in puzzling out a work’s meanings. The last thing anyone can get away with in a show like this is any sort of self-absorbed complexity.

Speaking of stinks, British bad boy Damien Hirst makes one. It is the whiff of formaldehyde from four plexiglass cases in which are suspended the bodies of a cow and a calf that have been sawed in half lengthwise. These deceased bovines (their bleached innards rather less intriguing visually than your average supermarket meat counter) comment on recent aesthetic issues that I am too tired to go into at the moment. Mostly I wonder how morticians stand that smell.

I must wind down my report with most of the Biennale’s offerings still unmentioned. Some things, besides scarcely mentionable, will likely have decamped since opening week, such as a plague of funny-dressing performance artists--most conspicuously James Lee Byars, king of the funny dressers, who greeted visitors in his golden tuxedo and black eye mask. Very popular in Europe, Byars is an American gift to that Continent on the order of Jerry Lewis. You are welcome, Europe.

There is much good photography. There are hordes of busy, racy, not terribly interesting Italian artists. There are precious few decent paintings, making all the grander some wonderful abstractions by Dane Per Kirkeby and German Sigmar Polke--two of a dozen or so big names snuck in by Oliva, probably to shore up the Biennale’s saggy quality quotient. There is a concurrent Marcel Duchamp retrospective.

Taken together and moved to Boise, all of this would be well worth a trip. Trips to Venice do not need special reasons. Venice is a full-court-press seduction of all the senses, a peremptory invitation to lose your mind in aesthetic delirium. I prowled palazzi and reeled amid canals. I recharged my spiritual batteries in the church of San Zaccaria with Giovanni Bellini’s painting “Holy Conversation,” the best thing anybody ever made. For four days, I did not see a functioning automobile. I did not want to leave ever, ever, ever.