American Evolution
Published: June 8 2007 16:51 | Last updated: June 8 2007 16:51

The Venice Biennale is not a competition but North America has won it anyway. In Félix Gonzalez-Torres: America, the US has the best, most seductive national pavilion. Canada has the most spectacular one and the most original reinvention of human figuration with The Index, David Altmejd’s painterly sculptures of bird-men and fantastical plants in a mirrored grotto. American artists also dominate the biennale’s international exhibitions and the city’s most distinguished off-site shows: the Guggenheim’s Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys and Museo Correr’s Sargent in Venice.

Yet all this has been achieved by being as un-American as possible, by underplaying those characteristics – macho, loud, brash, monumental – that we associate with American art. By talking in whispers and asides instead of screams and assertions. A century ago, Henry James mourned the Boston twang ringing across the Grand Canal . It is here again, but the revelation of this biennale is that American art is returning to the international forefront by, extraordinarily, listening to the rest of the world.

At the Guggenheim, a crystalline presentation posits American postmodernist Matthew Barney as a follower of European modernist Joseph Beuys: both self-dramatising narrators whose sculptures and performances recount romantic creation myths, one fetish-ising fat and fur, the other petroleum jelly and self-lubricating plastic. At the tiny 16th-century Chiesa di San Gallo behind St Mark’s, Bill Viola’s triple-screen video “Cycle of Life”, installed on three altars, dovetails poignantly with old Venice . And most surprisingly, the US is represented this year by an artist who is Cuban, gay and dead.

At the mini-White House pavilion, Gonzalez-Torres’s largest, final light bulb string “Untitled ( America )” graces the rotunda entrance and public courtyard, where two looped circular pools in white Carrara marble, erotically just touching, reflect the Venetian sky. Paper stacks, one black-edged like a funeral announcement, the other printed with brooding, dark photographs of an ocean surface, form a two-towered memorial. A carpet of black liquorice shaped like missiles invokes a slick oil spill and the Bush government’s militaristic stance. A billboard of a lone bird soaring through an open sky is illuminated by a single light string called “Untitled (Leaves of Grass)”, referencing Whitman’s ode to the individual spirit.

Gonzalez-Torres’s generous, inclusive art – help-yourself paper stacks, replenishable candy spills – uses minimalist rigour and romantic refinement to question myths of power and privilege. He looked, he said, “for cracks in the master narrative – those cracks where power can be exercised”. This delicate, almost decadently gorgeous installation, fresh and relevant a decade after the artist’s death, sets off chimes across Venice in favour of an art that speaks from the sidelines so eloquently that the margins become the centre.

Félix Gonzalez-Torres: America contains within itself the story that pulses across this entire biennale. In 1990s America , Gonzalez-Torres, HIV-positive Cuban, refused a fringe position and forged instead an art of the mainstream. A decade later, can any centre of stability hold in the rush towards culture by the emerging nations, and what will China, African countries, India, central Asia – many showing here for the first time – bring to the global feast?

In answer, Robert Storr, this year’s eminent director and the first American to hold the post, has constructed the biennale exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind around the work of 100 artists from seven continents. The two big pavilions, Africa and Turkey , that he co-opted as part of his Arsenale show, look thin and almost quaintly local. Other leading nations also disappoint – notably Russia , whose onion-domed pavilion’s exterior is vandalised with an LED display in 50 languages called “Click I Hope”, responding to visitors’ clicks on a touch screen, while inside a video of androgynous teenagers fighting in cyberspace looks fatigued already. But it doesn’t matter: overall, this is a strong, gripping biennale because Storr’s serious moral imprint is felt at every turn, taking the pulse of contemporary art, catching the beat of a global scene that is fraught, uneven, decentralising, shifting into myriad formations where fragility, excess, belonging and dislocation are urgent themes.

At his Giardini show, Storr opens with Nancy Spero’s maypole hung with prints of tortured heads, “Maypole/Take No Prisoners”, before giving over room after room to vast, sober, new canvases by Ellsworth Kelly, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Ryman. They look superb, masterly, but also a barely tenable holding operation. All these artists are elderly and their rooms are like pass-the-parcel layers to what for me is this exhibition’s core: a labyrinth of white cubes centred on Palestinian Emily Jacir’s exquisitely calibrated memento mori installation “Material for a Film”.

This tells the story of the night in Italy 30 years ago when the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter was shot dead. Twelve bullets entered his body but a 13th lodged itself in the spine of the book he always carried in his pocket, an Arabic version of 1,001 Nights. The mutilated text is encased here, surrounded by enlarged photographs of Zuaiter, a collage of paperbacks – Genet, Eliot, Dostoevsky – retrieved from his Roman apartment, videos of his homeland, and a double soundtrack merging his favourite version of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Bruno Walter, with the insistent buzz of recordings from his tapped phone.

At the Arsenale, Storr plays out the same multicultural humanist references, taking resonance from the rougher shipyard setting. Another giant American piece of festive deathliness, Jason Rhodes’ sprawling 50-chandelier “Tijuanatanjierchandelier”– the artist’s final work – holds court like a mesmerising jester here but it takes life from its multilingual neon signs and African fabrics.

There is plenty of tedious political proselytising around it but also dazzling individual expressions that cross all cultural boundaries. Yang Fudong’s “Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest ” references European 1920s cinema and impressionist painting. El Anatsui’s stitched fragments of gold and scintillating textiles in “Dusasa I” tumble down from the ceiling like a Klimt canvas. In his series of iconic portraits “Les Africains chantent contre le SIda”, Malian Malik Sidibe – first African winner of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement – recalls August Sander’s preservation of individual likenesses while recording social revolution, but also looks to Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre of dying beauty. The edges become the centre – contemporary art cannot breathe without them – and Venice , old meeting ground of Byzantium and the west, is the most exhilarating place in the world to watch that evolution.