CENTRAL PAVILION: ILLUMINATIONS AND PLASTICINE

The official gloss on Maurizio Cattelan’s contribution is worth quoting almost in full: “[He] has surprised Biennale organisers by re-creating ‘Turisti’, the work he produced for the 1997 show featuring 200 stuffed pigeons and fake pigeon shit on the floor.”

Either that or he’s twigged that the curator is a dimwit with no sense of quality control whatsoever, and Maurizio thought he could get away with just handing over some old thing that was only clogging up his studio anyway. So, thanks to him there are stuffed pigeons everywhere. These ‘turisti’ are certainly an apt dig at the actual turisti who perch in pestilential flocks all over the Giardini and whose presence seems hard to fathom given that they don’t seem the slightest bit interested in art. Most of them sound as if they couldn’t think about one thing at a time, let alone operate on any kind of complex intellectual level. Or maybe these people know exactly what they’re doing and they’ve found in the Biennale the perfect place in which they’ll go entirely unchallenged by art or ideas.

GIARDINI IV: VIDEODROME CHURCH AND HORROR FILM DOOR

Christoph Schlingensief turns the German pavilion into a convincing simulacrum of a church, albeit a David Cronenberg Videodrome church that shows endless timelapse video loops of decaying rabbits. Overwrought, Wagnerian choral music blasts out as people (including several Muslim women and this lifelong atheist) automatically and comfortably settle themselves into the candlelit pews for a quasi-Christian experience. Nobody dares approach the altar, even though there seem to be things up there that we should look at.

Just like his Giardini neighbour Mike Nelson, Schlesinger completely gets it: how to use the scale and scope afforded by having a whole building at one’s disposal, how to bring people into his world, how not to break that world once they’re in it by doing stupid shit like over-explaining or asking for anything except that people trust him a bit because he’ll look after them.

I’d like to note here a kind of iPhone or iPad/tabletisation phenomenon visible in the video presentations (whether good, bad or incomprehensible) across the entire Biennale, including Schlingensief’s bank of rabbit-rotting projections: portrait format (i.e. 3:4 or 9:16) video everywhere, as if it truly only just occurred to many people that a rectangular screen can be rotated 90˚ just like a canvas or a piece of paper.

Mike Nelson’s UK pavilion was one of the few places where I wasn’t furiously (sometimes in every sense of the word) writing notes, so absorbed and transported was I by the experience. Also, it’s bloody dark in there.

That word “transported” is relevant: Nelson actually does make you feel like you’ve woken up in a strange place, or popped out of the TARDIS doors and stepped foot almost casually in some mysterious past or future. To me that’s a very precious experience. I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a lot and have those kinds of experiences in places that are unequivocally real, but Nelson has the gift of manufacturing them from raw materials at will.

At Venice (or rather, no longer in Venice) you step into a low-key nightmare world, perhaps a complex of workshops somewhere in the Balkans or on the Bosporus. There are filthy work benches with unidentifiable machine parts strewn on them, a courtyard lined with doors and staircases, none of which seem to offer any meaningful egress or escape.

There’s the tiny, genius detail of a ridiculously creaky horror film door that swings shut of its own accord behind you, complaining all the while. There’s a grimy photographer’s dark room and nearby photos hang from the ceiling in what can only be described as a menacing manner: the photos are of the building we seem to be in, or of similar ones. It’s almost as if the building were documenting itself, or dreaming of itself. Nothing specific or particular can be demonstrated to have happened… but whatever that nothing was, it wasn’t good.

For once, a Brit has done us absolutely proud at the Biennale. Tracey who?

GIARDINI III: GALAPAGOS SYNDROME

For a change, the little précis about the Japanese pavilion nails it: “… Japanese media art, which has been refined as part of a phenomenon known as the Galapagos Syndrome in which Japan, isolated from world standards, has evolved in wholly peculiar manner.”

This is perhaps also a typically Japanese understatement with a slight hint of apology. The Japanese art scene and what they consider proper art are (to my mind, anyway) thrillingly open-minded and unconcerned about the overly serious and self-important stuff that holds sway elsewhere. Sometimes this means that the sense of accessible, jolly inclusiveness disguises content that’s not as interesting as the aesthetic: but that’s exactly my point. Japanese art- and to some extent all east Asian art outside of the mainland Chinese art industry’s brutalising, acquisitive influence- is about ideas and feelings but doesn’t always see the need to go automatically for the very biggest ideas and feelings.  Small ideas and feelings can be beautiful. Sometimes it’s fine for art to just be pretty or clever or fun, whereas Western artists seem to have it drilled into them that all three of these things are strictly verboten and that they always have to pretend they’re the most intelligent person in the room: most especially if they really aren’t very bright at all.

Japan’s mirrored animation installation plays games with optics, space and one’s sense of distance in a similar way to James Turrell’s installation over at the Arsenale, but since it’s Japanese it does so by giving the impression of having your head stuck in a pinball machine instead of Turrell’s puritan minimalism- which I also like in a different way. I got no sense that Tabaimo’s ideas or the experience was anywhere as deep or wide as Turrell’s, or that the content was anywhere near as interesting as the technically accomplished production and set design. I’ve mentioned this kind of failure a few times already, but I’m more forgiving of style over substance victories when people don’t come along afterwards and try to lay down an intellectual smokescreen to cover up the resulting void of intellectual merit.

Nearby, the work in Korea’s pavilion looks like the work of three different artists: enormous fibreglass mannequins and the moulds they were cast from obviously having relationship issues; heavily armed, florally-camouflaged soldiers creep through an equally flowery environment in photos and video works; mirrors shatter themselves when looked into by visitors. Actually it’s all the work of one artist, Lee Yongbaek, and I really liked it all. In my experience, Korean galleries and artists rarely disappoint. Lee obviously skips around and follows his ideas all over the intellectual, artistic and genre landscape (as I try to do and love doing, and often cause bewilderment to art world people by doing), so there’s obviously a personal connection here too. A nice discovery.

Navin Rawanchaikul’s Thai pavilion is a kitsch spew of quasi-communist and cult of personality parody and ridiculous camp, but enjoyable rather than irritating. I don’t know whether it’s strange or entirely fitting that half of the Thai pavilion is actually a cocktail bar.

GIARDINI II: COOL CONCEPTUAL CONCEIT, BRO

Oh USA pavilion, USA pavilion, USA pavilion. A man on a running machine on the treads of a capsized tank… I’ll admit that you don’t see this kind of thing every day, not in my neighbourhood anyway, but who gives a shit? It’s called ‘Track and Field.’ Hilarious. There’s a statue on its side in a tanning machine, a bodybag in a business class plane seat, an ATM set into the wood of a churchy-looking pipe organ. Cool joke, bro. What’s the opposite of LOL?

Like US culture and society in general, the USA’s exhibition is belligerently and defiantly banal. The only momentary interest comes courtesy of a little girl who takes it upon herself to cavort in front of a tedious video projection, thereby blocking it from everyone else’s view. She got a round of applause.

The pavilion’s explanatory handout mostly avoids artspeak silliness but swings instead to an opposite and equally absurd, unhelpful tone of constipated restraint. Fully one side of closely set type on an A5 sheet simply describes factually what visitors can see in front of them with their own eyes if they’re in the place from which they received said handout in the first place… and that’s exactly where they are, seeing these things with their own eyes. Such an “explanation” would only be a revelation to somebody who had no idea what tanks, statues, athletes, plane seats and other generic categories of objects are. As far as I know there aren’t many of those people outside of an Oliver Sacks book.

Perhaps somebody came to the wise conclusion that there’s nothing constructive or enlightening anybody can say about a thing so crass and beyond satire as a statue representing Freedom jammed sideways into a sun bed. It’s a mystery what connection there is, if any, between the artists being based in Puerto Rico and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Both of these facts are repeatedly and prominently flagged as if they’re particularly significant.

GIARDINI I: NATIONALISM’S GRAVEYARD

The other half of the Biennale/’Illuminations’ main presentation takes place in the idyllic-sounding but totally not idyllic Giardini. It’s where the first international (i.e. non Italian) pavilions were built to reflect the ongoing pissing contests for prestige between the great powers of the Industrial age. In reality they’re less a garden paradise of art and more like an indifferently maintained municipal cemetery, complete with hulking mausoleums dedicated to the colonial age.  They should spend some of their prodigious income on having the gardeners in, because for a place that’s called a garden it looks extremely tired and in need of somebody’s green thumb. It’s like a Chinese park in there, where they plant expensive greenery and then for some reason they just leave it all to fall apart and die. Anyway, I expect there’s a metaphor (not very) hidden in the fact that the whole place looks like a neglected graveyard.