Politics and Culture at the Venice Biennale. The General Four-year Plan of Activities and Events (1974-1977) - Politics, State Power and the Making of Art History in Europe after 1945 - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - June 2015 (original) (raw)

Making Art History in Europe after 1945 (the ‘Work’) edited by Noemi de Haro-García, Patricia Mayayo-Bost and Jesús Carrillo-Castillo (‘the Editor’), Routledge

The events that unfolded around the Venice Biennale of 1968, forced the Italian Parliament to draft a new statute to replace the one in force, which dated from 1938. Between 1974 and 1977, the new rules led to a model of cultural production and consumption that revolved around the political roleof art, marking a departure in the traditional art historical framework characterising the institution since the Post-war years. In that period the politicization of the Biennale is evident not only in the contents of the initiatives and in its approach to the arts, but also in the ‘lotting’ practice, in which the ruling parties negotiated for the most important positions. The Presidency of the reformed Biennale was granted to the Partito Socialista Italiano’s Carlo Ripa di Meana. During the mandate of Ripa di Meana, between 1974 and 1977, two main issues were developed, not unlike leimotivs. The first is the ‘decentralization’ and the search for a new audience, which was also, at the same time, the search for a new relationship with Venice, its inhabitants and territory, by focusing on the preservation of the city, but also on the deep change in the traditional mercantilistic relationship between art objects and the exhibition itself. This issue is evident in the general spreading around the city of 1975’s activities of the institution. The second main issue I would like to address in this talk is the main leitmotiv of this four-year period, i.e. the anti-fascist stance coupled with a declaration of cultural-institutional independence. This leitmotiv emerges clearly in the 1974 edition, Libertà al Cile, in the homage to post-Franco Spain organized in 1976, and in the 1977 edition dedicated to the “cultural dissent in the Eastern European countries”. The debates in the press and the initiatives organized in this period reveal how the Venetian institution mirrored the changes in Italian politics. The Biennale testified to the declining popularity of the two mass parties (DC and PCI) and provided a test-bed for the new course of the PSI’s leader Bettino Craxi, who was determined to exploit the “anthropological mutation” of Italian society which Pier Paolo Pasolini was exposing in the same period. By analysing the multidisciplinary initiatives of the Visual Arts sector of the Biennale, I would like to understand the interplay between art and politics following the 1968 protests, the ‘Years of Lead’ and the 1977 new wave of student protests; the impact on the art historical debate within both national and international context; the reactions among Italian art historians and the legacy of those experimental years within the history of the Biennial. This paper intends to respond to the Session 1, by analysing the influence on a state-run institution such as the Venice Biennale of a series of political decisions and tensions by looking at the impact on both the Italian society and the local and international art historical debate of the time.