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By custom, the national pavilions are the core of the Biennale. This year the Spanish pavilion goes all-out for young artists, the best of whom are the painter Jose Maria Sicilia and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. At the other end of the age scale, the U.S. is showing Isamu Noguchi, at 81 its greatest living sculptor. Alas, the pavilion does less than justice to the range and depth of Noguchi's art. Its centerpiece, near the entrance, is a spectacular but rather banal white marble slide; otherwise there are a number of exquisite basalt slabs and rocks, fairly brimming with wabi and sabi, some models for old garden projects and a plethora of Noguchi's akari, or paper lamps. There are too many of these, but even so, the seriousness and elegance of his work look outstanding.
The prize for best pavilion was won by France, with an environment by Daniel Buren. Buren's reputation is one of the real oddities of late modernism. For the past 20 years, his work has consisted mainly of green and white bands of equal width; of late, blue and yellow bands have also appeared. It is deadly boring and emptily chic, and it comes garnished with the kind of post-1968 social rhetoric favored by Jack Lang, Mitterrand's former Minister of Culture. Thanks to him, Buren is now the official minimalist of France. Thus the French pavilion resembles nothing so much as a Platonic Gucci concession in which the leather has vanished and only the stripes remain.
West Germany sent Sigmar Polke. Since the late '60s, Polke, 45, has been the Peck's bad boy of German painting--the possessor of a snappish, antic imagination that scavenges among kitsch, pop and high art, obliquely satirizing what it derides as the culture of Germany's "economic miracle." While neither his audacity nor the scope of his influence is in doubt, Polke's new work in Venice turns out to be a disappointment, filled with big, slack parodies of "sublime" abstraction that may or may not be meant as denunciations of corporate art. What they add up to is anyone's guess.
Poor and hasty as this effort is, Polke's reputation was bound to get an award. So he shared the Biennale's first prize with Frank Auerbach, whose work occupies the English pavilion. Auerbach's is the one genuinely memorable group of paintings Venice has to offer this year. His show trumps its rivals as firmly as the work of another Englishman, Howard Hodgkin, did at the 1984 Biennale.