Word: aperto
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...liked the Whitney Biennial, you may like "Aperto 93." Some of its 13 curators, like the American Jeffrey Deitch, are in fact dealers -- a further development of Postmodernist art ethics. Its title, "Emergency," signals that, like the Whitney fiasco, it will "address the issues" of sexism, racism, environmental decay, the drainage of psychosocial space from modern life, the hegemony of mass media and so forth...
...most noticeable work of art in "Aperto 93" greets you before you go in; it is a huge mural composed of hundreds of color photographs of human genitalia, he, she, he, she, ranging widely in age and size. It scored a palpable hit on the G-spot of the Italian press, partly because its author, Oliviero Toscani, does the advertising photos for Benetton. Despite Toscani's stance as a fearless realist, this Don Giovanni's catalog in Cibachrome is aesthetically inert, and after five minutes about as shocking as a mural of human elbows might be. Nevertheless, it wins (hairs...
There are a few worthwhile things in "Aperto 93." One is The World Flag Ant Farm, by the Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi. Yanagi's conceit, a pretty good one, was to make scores of replicas of national flags in colored sand, behind Perspex. These are linked by tubes and populated by a colony of ants, which scurry to and fro between the flags bearing grains of sand in their mandibles. Over time the flags become illegible through migration and mixture; Yanagi's piece has the same concision and elegance as Haacke's in the German pavilion...
Otherwise, the "Aperto" is apocalyptic trivia, devoid of aesthetic impulse. Everything is on much the same dull, hectoring, narcissistic and politically simpleminded level; all complexity of artistic response has been ironed down into puerile rhetoric, one-liners that have no further resonance once you've got their meager point. Some have no point: How about a nice big wall covered in monochrome orange carpet, or a giant mound of Plasticine? The mix of witless conceptualism, pseudo documentary and weakly recycled minimalism is stifling...
...video monitor shows a tape of the artist + dropping his pants and going through the motions of masturbation. Behind it, on the wall, are sheets of yellow lined legal paper covered with the artist's ruminations: he set out to write 250 pages during the installation period of "Aperto." "So today I've still got to press on to page 250. I just feel so corny here writing like an idiot. Anyway it's hard to get my head out of the bummer this place is giving me. Dam it I can't write. I'm too bummed...