Venice Biennial

While the local art world is slowing down for summer, the best tip for lovers of contemporary art is an overnight train to Venice where the 53rd Venice Biennial offers plenty of eye-opening experiences. The art marathon could start at the Arsenale show entitled ‘Making Worlds’ and continue in the Giardini where most of the national pavilions are to be found, and then vaporetto-hop around the dozens of venues scattered across Venice, before ending up at the competing show at the newly opened Punta della Dogana.

The major exhibition at the Venice Biennial is curated by Daniel Birnbaum, an art world celebrity famous for his hard-edged philosophical approach to contemporary art, who on this occasion went for safe choices in an elegantly installed exhibition that offers few surprises. Making Worlds aims for gravity with the inclusion of the best known artists from the Sixties, here turned into the great predecessors of the younger generation of art superstars. Yoko Ono shared a life-time achievement award with John Baldassari, the American conceptual artist, whose huge banner reading ‘I will not make any more boring art’ confuses tourists on the Grand Canal.

Among the more spectacular installations by younger artists, Tomas Saraceno fills a gallery with black threads resembling spiders’ webs that suggest possibilities for the architecture of the future. Equally delicate but on a smaller scale are Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso’s works which combine Buddhist imagery with punch lines from consumerist society.

The national representations are as colourful as ever, many though focused on the history of the Giardini and the biennial itself. The British pavilion, for example, has Steve McQueen’s film Giardini, while the Slovak artist Roman Ondak went one step further and instead of filming, decided to reflect the park itself, with trees and bushes growing in the pavilion and gravel paths leading through it. A peculiar decision to invite a British artist to represent Germany resulted in Liam Gillick’s installation of pinewood kitchen units with a talking Cheshire cheese cat in the ideologically-loaded building of the German pavilion. The show was stolen by the Danish and Nordic pavilions, which for the first time combined forces under the authorship of Elmgreen & Dragset, an artist duo who recreated two collector’s homes on a spectacular scale. One is the home of a separated straight couple, with a more conservative taste, collecting china and framed artworks, which an estate agent guides you through as the pavilion is for sale, while the other is an ultra modern gay crib, with designer sofas, beds, bathrooms and explicit gay imagery, with living manikins posing in the space, while the collector floats face down in the swimming pool outside – another death in Venice.

The Hungarian pavilion, overgrown with ivy, hides a complicated message by filmmaker Peter Forgacs which through framed paintings and projections reworks visual material from a historical archive, inviting viewers to encounter the face of the Other. On a more grotesque note, the Serbian pavilion displays piles of carpets made from hair from the heads of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, while the Mexican representative, instead of a studio, works in a morgue. Apart from national representations there are dozens of collateral exhibitions, such as several Russian shows organised for oligarchs and featuring the work of local superstars such as AES+F, which eclipse the official Russian pavilion in the Giardini.

Competing with the whole Venice Biennial and opening at the same time is the new space of the French billionaire Francois Pinault (yes, the husband of Hollywood actress Salma Hayek), who now owns along with Palazzo Grassi, the amazing Dogana, the former customs building opposite St.Marks Square. His art collection compliments very well his ‘business’ collection, of Gucci, Samsonite, Converse and Christies, while the priceless works that fill his newly renovated museum are miles away from the real contemporary art thriving in the Arsenale and Giardini.