The Venice Biennale is the longest-running art festival in the world. It has too many shows, too many egos clogging the Grand Canal and not enough people on the switchboard. Even when it is bad it is still good because it is held in Venice--an advantage that few other cultural shindigs can claim. The 42nd Biennale, which opened last week, is the largest ever, featuring work from an unprecedented 41 nations. It divides into two main sections: the national pavilions and a set of shows arranged around a given theme. This year the theme is relations between art and science.
The centerpiece of the 1986 Biennale is called "Art and Alchemy." It was curated (if that is the word) by Arturo Schwarz, an Italian art dealer whose purplish prose has long been one of the hazards of Marcel Duchamp scholarship. Alchemy sought to change base metals into gold and silver. More broadly, it embraced astrology and occult religion, being founded on the picture of a fourelement universe (air, water, fire and earth) proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century B.C. There was an early link between alchemy, technology and art, since ancient glassblowers and metalworkers were always trying to make base stuff look like gold and silver. Over the centuries, alchemy gave painters, notably Hieronymus Bosch, a rich vein of fantasy to tap, partly because its metaphors of change, duality and syncretism lay close to their own creative processes.
All this, handled right, might have provoked a passable show. But Schwarz seems to think that alchemy is a major secret text of modern art as well, though all he can find to prove it is a mass of postsurrealist kitsch. A few good things come up in the net, but the show is a tendentious mishmash.
Two better shows in the central pavilion also take up the theme of technology, science and art. "The Representation of Space" has some painstaking reconstructions of spatial illusion in Renaissance and baroque art; its best moment (which will be the envy of all red-blooded interior decorators) is a full-size wooden replica of Borromini's false-perspective colonnade, made in the 17th century for the Palazzo Spada in Rome. The second exhibition, "Wunderkammer," is a delight. Wunderkammern--literally, chambers of astonishment--were an embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making--or outright fakes, like a dead mermaid fashioned from dried fish and monkey skin. Their cabinets were stuffed with baroque pearls, narwhal tusks, mandrake roots and fossils. The cult of the Wunderkammer rose where the demonic or angelic world view of the Middle Ages shifted into the classifying rationalism of the Enlightenment. "Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange." Ariel's song in The Tempest imagines the sea itself as the Wunderkammer of the drowned King of Naples.
The link between such things and the surrealist delight in dream images is the theme of this show, which contrasts old curiosities with a range of modern work that runs from Joseph Cornell boxes to a weirdly beautiful reflection on nature and culture by the contemporary Italian sculptor Mario Merz, involving a motorbike with buffalo horns for handlebars, a zebra's head and a string of neon numbers.