LETTERS

VENETIAN BINDS

To the Editor:

When Katy Siegel asks, "Where was photography?" and "Where was painting?" [September 1999] in this year's Venice Biennale, she means, "Where were the Americans and Europeans?" The conceit of the Biennale, as I understand it, was to exhibit artists from around the world, not to replicate MOMA's art-historical viewpoint: focusing primarily on European and American painting, then looking tangentially at other artists and media.

It's a matter of debate whether the artworks presented in this year's Biennale reflect ideas of '6os "nontraditional" media. Are painting and photography "traditional" art media to the non-Western artists exhibited in the Biennale? I'm not surprised that Harald Szeeman found commonalities among international artists through what Ms. Siegel might call "dated" avant-garde approaches to making art, since it was during this period that contemporary art practice gained a more international perspective.

It is also interesting to consider the unique role that the Biennale, presenting video, installation, and performance-based art, has in the commercial art world. Due to their commercial viability and limited spatial requirements, paintings and photographs can be more easily presented in galleries. The Biennale and other art festivals allow artwork to be presented that does not fit into this system.

Much of the multimedia and performance art in the Biennale has been described as art that attempts to entertain. However, it is also art that attempts to involve audiences in new ways, and therefore thrives in a setting such as the Biennale, which brings so many live bodies into contact with the art. I agree with Ms. Siegel that the same work does often seem forced in a more tame environment; not just because the artwork needs the spectacle of the Biennale to seem interesting, but also because the works actually require the presence of a dynamic audience to complete them.

Like the sprawling and indeterminate nature of the Biennale as a whole, this is not necessarily a weakness or strength of contemporary art, but part and parcel of its existence. Certainly, the Biennale is a partial picture of the contemporary art world. I would like to know what Ms. Siegel would define as a complete picture. I guess she can find some satisfaction in her assertion that a more painting- and photography-centered picture of late-'90s art will ultimately prevail in the museums and history books. She's probably right.

Rebecca Herman

Long Island City, NY

Katy Siegel responds:

Don't cry for the "nontraditional" media artists--just go to Chelsea or any number of international museum shows where they fill the halls. Good and bad practitioners alike benefit from their resonance with contemporary sensibility. Entertainment--not religion, not politics, not even the commodity culture--is the dominant mode of the moment. The juggernaut of television, movies, music, magazines, theme parks, bookstores, sports, etc. exerts a magnetic pull on other forms of social and cultural practice.

Even the most austere art institutions have recently flashed a little leg, and museums are crowded in a time when people care no more about art than they ever did. Biennials and art fairs are still more experience-oriented, and not necessarily in a liberating or "dynamic" way, subsuming even the most avant-garde art. It's not the fault of the artists or even the curator, but that's why most of the reviewers in various publications paid little attention to the actual content of the Biennale, and why Robert Storr used his analogy of the county fair.

As for my own wishes, I'm all for partial curating, in the sense of "partisan" or particular points of view--a tough trick in the current museum climate. But by excluding on principle those media with a history of serious critical attention--the "MOMA viewpoint"-- the Biennale encouraged us to take it lightly, as a busman's holiday. This dichotomy of art-world leisure vs. work does no favors to the artists included.

The non-Western artists are equally disserviced by the perception that their particular nationality is fashionable--always a temporary condition. Why China and not Brazil? And, not to be churlish, hut multinational capitalism, not goodwill, was the driving force behind '6os internationalism. Or we can look back still further for an it's-new-to-you precedent. In 1855 (at the Exposition Universelle), Baudelaire exhorted the blase art lover to seek out Chinese art for fresh aesthetic thrills, not for true cultural understanding. The perspective then, as now, is inevitably Western, whatever the object of its gaze.

That said, I liked a lot of the art and I had a really good time.

SCIENCE FICTION

To the Editor:

Maybe there's some physicist our there somewhere longing for an artistic "celebration of quantum graininess," as Rachel Withers hints in your September 1999 issue ["International Shorts"]. But "the physicist Richard Dawkins isn't one of them, since, as most broadly literate people know, he is an evolutionary biologist. I guess we can also rule out the physicist Alan Sokal, who (I suppose, given the nature of the mistake) Withers thought Richard Dawkins might be. Sokal, after all, never suggested that he felt ignored by the art world--rather, he just wanted critics of science who don't know any science either to learn some or shut up. I can't help getting a big kick out of Withers's confusing Dawkins for Sokal (or one of Sokal's colleagues, or something). She shows herself to be exactly that sort of critic so effectively lampooned by Sokal three years ago. Of course, I suppose Withers could have been engaged in a deliberate problematization of the artificial distinctions between evolutionary and physical theor y. On second thought, though, I kind of doubt it.