Word: pavilion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...usually gives rise to plenty of speech and complaint -- the Venice Biennale is always fun to visit. It also has an edge on all other festivals of contemporary art, like the more didactic Documenta at Kassel, West Germany. For when you have done the central show in the Italian pavilion in the public gardens, and sampled all the national pavilions from the U.S.'s to Yugoslavia's, and sated whatever appetite you may have for the installation pieces of Aperto 88, the section for artists under 40 that stretches like a deconstructionist via crucis through the long Piranesian gloom...
...Belli Arti, in protest against the commodification of culture (how many of them, one wonders, are art dealers today?). In panic, the Biennale decided in 1972 to jettison the prize system and turn itself into a noncompetitive symposium built around a historical or theme show in the Italian pavilion. Racked by ideological discord and enfeebled by the organizational skills of Italian intellectuals, the Biennale went into a tailspin for a number of years...
...there is every sign that the Biennale is recovering its equilibrium. The prizes were put back in 1986. This year's Leone d'Oro was won, amid general acclamation and to no one's surprise, by Jasper Johns for his show in the U.S. pavilion. One long-overdue new pavilion has been added: Australia's, showing a group of enormous paintings by the veteran expressionist Arthur Boyd, an artist of exceptional if uneven power whose work is hardly known...
...artists most heavily featured in the Italian pavilion are Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia -- together with Mimmo Paladino, 40, who has turned the main gallery into a continuous "environment" of stone figures, bronze emblems and copper sheet. Paladino's masks, wheels, cauldrons, skulls and traceries of rose stems, cast in bronze, have a wild unsettled air, a mix of couture sophistication and peasant witchcraft, that is quite striking; one only wishes that when he carves a figure in stone, it came out looking more like sculpture and less like a shop-window dummy. Also not to be missed...
...pretext to kill them all, in a repeat of the massacres that occurred when authorities put down Sendero uprisings in three penitentiaries in 1986. More than 250 rebels died in the incidents. Those fears were fanned last Easter, when, according to prisoners, paramilitary troops attacked the men's pavilion at Canto Grande with fire bombs and heavy weapons, wounding eight...