ART REVIEW : A Biennale or a Bust? : This year, the Venice exposition axed the Aperto, which usually presents the latest work by emerging artists, in favor of a more conservative and academic agenda.

Every other year, in the most gorgeous city in the world, in between ( de rigueur ) bellinis at Harry’s Bar and Bellinis at the Accademia, the international art world gets together to chew the fat. This year, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Venice Biennale, things are both the same and different.

As usual, the crowd that gathered to see a record number of art exhibitions--and one another--was a motley one: the important and the self-important, fans and sycophants, boosters and gadabouts. Instead of the usual intrigues, failures and moments of incandescence, however, there was this . . . well, this kind of . . . well, yes, this rather boring flop.

At its best, the Biennale, which runs through October, is a decorous freak show, equal parts tradition and novelty, ceremony and mayhem.

The show is ostensibly centered on the Giardini di Castello, an Edenic garden dense with lush trees and pint-size canals. Here, the participating countries (this year there were 45) show off their best and brightest in a slew of national pavilions, which are themselves fascinating structures. Britain’s was built in 1887 as an upscale restaurant, Russia’s in 1914 as a last-gasp czarist confection. Korea’s was inaugurated this year. And Japan’s, wrapped in candy-colored strips of high-density plastic for the occasion, provided this Biennale’s most stunning visual effect.

But it isn’t the national pavilions that generate the real excitement (the wrap-around lines at the American pavilion for Long Beach-based artist Bill Viola’s triumph notwithstanding--but more on this later). Since its inception in 1980, the display that everyone has desperately loved to hate has been the Aperto exhibition. Unlike the pavilions that showcase established figures, the Aperto presents the latest work by emerging artists.

For Thomas Mann, Venice was the “coffer of the world”; for Proust, it was the symbolic site of desire. For the art world, the Aperto has been all this and more: the place to fuel one’s passions, stoke one’s hopes and vent one’s spleen.

This year, however, as per the decision of Jean Clair, head of the Picasso Museum in Paris and director of visual arts for this centenary Biennale, the Aperto has been axed, to universal chagrin. Clair, the first non-Italian director in the Biennale’s history, is an art historian . His academic bent seems to have dictated the decision to all but disregard contemporary art this year and to take a historical approach instead, as if the contemporary were somehow immune from history.

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The centerpiece of his rather naive and profoundly conservative Biennale is a sprawling behemoth of a show, staged in three separate venues, presenting more than 700 works dating from 1895 to 1995 by artists as familiar as Picasso and as obscure as Kuzma Sergeevic Petrov-Vodkin. Its ponderous title, “Identity and Otherness: A Brief History of the Human Body Over the Last Century,” betrays its agenda: to avenge figurative art (an unlikely underdog) by giving the boot to the non-representational image, the abstract mark, the conceptual move and the critical intervention.

At times, wandering through the seemingly endless rooms of the Palazzo Grassi, where the first part of “Identity and Otherness” is staged, one has the sense that storerooms of provincial museums all across Europe were emptied out so that Clair could put their contents on display. If Suprematism, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism (among a slew of other experimental isms ) are nowhere in sight, neither are those “others” to whom Clair makes gratuitous mention in the exhibition’s title. Non-Western, gay and feminist identities are not a part of the official history of 20th-Century art, and so they remain obscured.

Putting politics aside for the moment (and why not, following Clair’s lead?), there are many wonderful works of art here, in spite of whispered problems with time and funding. These don’t necessarily include the paintings of R. B. Kitaj, winner of this year’s Golden Lion, the Biennale’s version of the Academy Award (which, like the Oscar, rarely seems to go to the right person). These do include Etienne Jules Marey’s chrono-photographs; a dazzling series of self-portraits by Giorgio De Chirico; a wall full of Georg Baselitz’s upside-down portraits, and Otto Dix’s painting of a cool-eyed woman on a leopard-skin rug, whose breathtaking decadence promises that the world will go out in an ecstatic flame.

My personal hit-picks are two magically incongruous 1933 portraits by Kasimir Malevich, in which a man and a woman, posed against a black backdrop like a pair of Renaissance nobles, flaunt futuristic ensembles with exaggeratedly geometric epaulets. Very “Star Trek.”

These portraits are meant to make the point that even style renegades like Malevich inevitably return to the figure. So, too, is a room filled with examples of 1930s- and 1940s-era fascist art, whose classical iconography was meant to oppose supposedly degenerate abstraction. Yet there is something troubling about the way this latter body of work is lumped into the mix without comment. Why doesn’t Clair offer a critical framework through which to view this kind of reactionary realism?

The question is by no means rhetorical, especially in a Northern Italy that has recently seen a resurgence of fascist parties. Perhaps the answer is that Clair doesn’t want to deal with the way in which his Biennale plays out yet another reactionary politic.

And speaking of reaction, legions of younger artists reacted to the non-appearance of the Aperto, as younger artists will do. Satellite shows popped up all over Venice, and are probably still popping--some hastily arranged, others carefully plotted, a few sanctioned by the Biennale committee, more virtually impossible to find.

One was held aboard a boat docked opposite the Naval History Museum. Another took place in an abandoned school. I heard about a third, which consisted of a bunch of installations in rarely frequented corners of the city, from somebody who heard about it from somebody else who said that to know how to proceed, you had to pick up instructions from a woman who would be sitting at the Gran Caffe Quadri in Piazza San Marco each afternoon. I loved the cloak-and-dagger theatrics but only made it to Ann Hamilton’s installation, which featured a tiny video monitor playing a black-and-white image of a mouth catching water, and it really wasn’t worth the trouble.

Los Angeles-based upstart luminary Cathy Opie and upstart luminary-in-training Sharon Lockhart shone in “Campo 95.” Opie’s ceremonial portraits of members of the pierced, tattooed and trans-gendered generation were, as always, lushly beautiful; Lockhart’s large photographs of children, shown last year at LACE, were as unsettling as uncensored fairy tales.

Although “Campo 95” was the most Aperto-like of the surrogate Apertos, “General Release” was the best of the lot by far. It featured the work of a dozen British artists who have emerged in the last few years and suggested that all the hype about Britain’s “new wave” isn’t merely hype. Keep your eye on Douglas Gordon and collaborators Jane and Louise Wilson. These artists work in the still-undefined space where video art, photography and installation cross.

So, too, does our own Bill Viola, whose Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk , “Buried Secrets,” was a runaway favorite this year. Viola makes a very fitting, if somewhat unexpected, U.S. representative to the Biennale. Since he began producing single-monitor videotapes and room-size installations in 1972, he has been drawn to grand themes and poetic musings, most often to the good, though sometimes losing himself in a reverie more labored than ethereal.

The suite of five interconnected pieces on view in the American pavilion is meant as a kind of apotheosis. It’s about movement and stillness, past and present, the material and the immaterial. It begins weakly, with a corridor of black-and-white video projections of disembodied bound and gagged heads, “Hall of Whispers,” which owes perhaps too much to Gary Hill’s well-known video installation “Tall Ships.”

Things take off in the next room, however, with two huge projections that stand opposite one another. Controlled by a computer-programmed switcher, the images are never presented simultaneously--the eye is lulled by the sight of a man slowly washing his body on one wall, only to be uncomfortably startled by a series of fast cuts of something impossible to make out on the other.

The last piece, which likewise engages with questions of time and psychic space, is particularly eloquent. A single image of two women being greeted by a third is projected onto the wall, the colors as vivid and the poses as iconic as those in a Renaissance painting. (The scene is actually based on a painting by 16th-Century Italian Jacopo da Pontormo.) The 45-second event is rendered in extreme slow motion so that it unfolds over 10 minutes. Nothing is explained, every nuance is unbearably heightened, and the whole becomes a complex symbol of the seductions of speculation--a neat metaphor for Viola’s own obsessions.

Hitting the bright sunlight of the Giardini after spending time in this shadowy, techno-shamanic atmosphere, you couldn’t help but notice that text made a careful comeback this year, as if to announce that Post-Conceptual art hasn’t died.

Eva Schlegel’s mesmerizing, deliberately illegible words were printed on glass sheets, which covered the exterior of the Austrian pavilion. The Israeli pavilion was marvelous on this count: Joshua Neustein’s “The Possessed Library” consisted of thousands of books from the national library in Jerusalem that were infiltrated by the imagined rogue library of self-proclaimed messiah David Koresh. David Grossman’s equally dreamy piece was composed of neatly typed descriptions of fictional characters, whom the artist planned to “send out” into Venice at specific intervals during the Biennale.

Double exposures were also in this year. Germany’s normally sedate Thomas Ruff went in for some fancy stuff that didn’t quite work, but his photographs weren’t as disappointing as the oversize model museum constructed by his compatriot, the usually provocative Katharina Fritsch.

Most of the other pavilions were a bit snoozy, but even in an off year, you have to love an event that brings together the gruesome excess of Hiro Yamagata’s painted Mercedes-Benzes, which Angelenos endured last year at Barnsdall Art Park; Berlin’s Eva and Adele, a bald, perpetually roving art world couple prone to sartorial flights of fancy (they prowled the Giardini done up as a pair of pink satin angels complete with matching pearl chokers and wings); anything by Gary Hill, who won this year’s Golden Lion for sculpture for a video installation that wasn’t one of his best works but was dazzling nonetheless, and a “luminographic” boat piloted by an entrepreneurial Argentine artist, which navigated the Grand Canal by night, projecting electronic graffiti designed by Third World children.