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THE BIENNALE: HOW EVIL IS POP ART? Tullia Zevi
VENICE
If the Thirty-second Biennale International Art Exhibition in Venice is not "scandalous," why the heated debates, the veto by the highest Catholic authorities, the sudden cancellation of the Italian president's participation in the inauguration?
Every two years the Biennale touches off a chain reaction of moral and aesthetic indignation which its sponsors interpret as a sign of vitality. This year however the controversy is hotter than ever. The exhibition, in the words of its detractors, has turned into a collective "poisoning of the innocent."
What we see documented here is the resumption of the artist's dialogue with everyday reality. One can safely omit the works displayed by the East European socialist countries, and particularly the 46 artists in the USSR pavilion. The smiling smelters, the women carpenters with lilies-of-the-valleys pinned on their robust breasts, the mustachioed Uzbecks who could easily have been painted 40 years ago for the edification of the masses, are again on display. Even the critic of the Italian Communist newspaper Unita had to say that "there does not seem to be news worth underlining in the socialist pavilions."
The show has been derisively called "the Biennale of pop-art," and the fact that American pop-artists are shown prominently - and for the first time under the official patronage of the US government - rather justifies this generalization. However, in the pavilions hidden by the giant lime-trees of the Biennale Gardens, there are other equally interesting manifestations of the contemporary urge for visual objectivity.
Neo-dada, programmed art, group-art, kinetic art - they are all different yet equally valid responses to the call for a new realism, whatever the techniques and materials employed, whether metal, wood, torn posters, discarded objects, synthetic fibers, electricity, magnetism or light; or whoever the artist's guardian angel, whether Kafka or Dale Carnegie; wherever his habitat, whether Hyde Park or Montparnasse, the Village or Madison Avenue.
There is a common root in pop-art and a common motive that impels the converging attacks of cardinals and Communists on the American pavilion and its appendix at the American Consulate. To them it is pop-art vs. the soul. Even before the Biennale opened, the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Urbani, deplored the "moral disorder" revealed by the "disintegration of the human image" and banned the Exhibition for members and clerics of all religious orders. Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, endorsed the patriarch's verdict stressing that most of the works exhibited were "objects having no relationship with art ... they are grotesque relics, attic junk with the addition of ... indecent ostentations, offending the moral sensitivity."
Pravda has been equally severe. The critic N. Abalkin called the Biennale a "tragic carnival" and denounced pop art as a new and smuggled form of abstractionism, seeking survival under a false and distorted form of realism. "The public laughs and does not like abstractionism. This does not happen when visitors enter the Soviet pavilion, which displays the best production inspired by socialist realism. There they find light, quiet, clarity." Another Communist critic wrote, "the entire show is an amusing pastiche of Disneyland and surrealism, of popular art and dada, of comic strips and industrial design. The pop-artists are the eternally clumsy Martin Edens, the eternal American autodidacts."
The bourgeois press has joined the cardinals and Communists. "Who are they?" asked the critic of Turin's La Stampa: "Carpenters, blacksmiths, junk-dealers, technicians? Are they geniuses or idiots? Enlightened prophets or impudent crooks? The raw materials chosen among the rubbish of daily necessities is called upon to assume the value of a mystical offering, of a new theology." Pop-artists are "modern savages, psychically close to those redskins who a century ago celebrated their rites wearing crushed top-hats on their heads and sardine cans around their hips ... they obviously do not represent the intelligentsia of a great progressive country."
Added Milan's Corriere Della Sera: "We reject an American art which does not defend the values of the spirit, which does not believe in art, which contributes to the disintegration of the world, which continues to pick Lip all the European stupidities, the stale materialisms and nullisms." On Rauschenberg: "He probably amuses himself, but his literature is silly, old and boring." As for Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Frank Stella - "they exhibit contorted and compressed metal, enameled chalk, metal, wood, ghost type-writers and telephones with no poetic novelty, with a frightening mental squalor, but with the illusion and the satisfaction of saying something which will revolutionize the world. If this is America, then America is treason."
From beyond the Alps, after Robert Rauschenberg had been assigned the first prize for painting, came prophetic warnings from French critics: "The Rauschenbergs will proliferate and invade us, they will murder the pictorial idiom with their childish gadgets." And the magazine Arts added: "We Europeans are now in the eyes of the Americans nothing but poor backward Negroes, good only for being colonized."
Leading European painters showed no greater tenderness. "Pop-art cannot be judged," stated Giorgio De Chirico, "because it has nothing to do with art." "Every painter does pop-art," said Gianni Dova. "When I take a container, some brushes and place them in a certain order I am doing pop-art. But what counts is painting, not pasting and nailing."
Now for years these same voices had been advocating the burial of informal abstract art. Now that the Biennale has performed the funeral rites, they realize that what is emerging from the ashes is not what they had hoped: a return to the "naturalism" of the good old days, with its green meadows, little pink nudes, galloping horses, dripping sirloins of beef or perhaps fighting partisans and astronauts.
These however are not the only voices. Each day of this torrid summer new visitors come who earnestly try to understand what pop-artists, neo-realists, neo-dadaists, etc. are seeking to express. They hasten to see America's "four germinal" (Louis, Noland, Rauschenberg, Johns) and "four younger" (Chamberlain, Oldenburg, Dine, Stella) artists. The painter Renato Guttuso holds that "American pop-art is the biggest artistic phenomenon of the 20th Century after cubism." Many who find that view exaggerated nonetheless agree that pop-art offers a candid image of the gifts and curses of affluence.
Not the artists, but the glossy catalogue arouses suspicions and misgivings. The exhibition's commissioner, Alan R. Solomon, places a great emphasis on the fact "frequently misunderstood by Europeans and others" that "contemporary American art is based on an accommodation to the domestic environment."
"Rauschenberg," Mr. Solomon says, "operates from a positive and constructive view of the world. He has no interest in social comment, or satire, or in politics." Johns' purpose too is "neither destructive nor anti-human." Claes Oldenburg is "another of the artists who are evolving a new aesthetic not out of protest," and Dine's "commitment must not be regarded as destructive." All of them "evolve a new aesthetic not out of protest, irony or revolt, but out of an affirmative desire to search the truth of the present reality ... in response to the wonder and delight of the contemporary American environment."
Looking at Rauschenberg's "combines," with their black seas, their towns sunken in darkness, the vulture above Kennedy's image, his hand out-stretched in an eloquent and accusing gesture, the caged nightingales, the deflated airship, the pillows dangling like ballast, the blotches of blood-red paint, Europeans wonder.
