HOW TO EARN SOME FORGIVENESS FOR BEING A CAPITALIST PIG

François Pinault may be the first plutocrat billionaire übercollector from the top of Art Review’s most powerful art world figures list who also appears to have some taste and discernment. Or at least a taste that somewhat coincides with mine… which amounts to the same thing, obviously, because we’re on the internet where opinion is daily defended to the death as if it has a factual basis in some kind of Universal Law of the Universe.

NON SEQUITUR VENICE OBSERVATION

In the evening, a band plays at the famous Florian café on the edge of Piazza San Marco. The efforts of these musicians are entirely for the benefit of the most clueless tourists nowadays since nobody right of mind or slim of wallet would actually eat in such a tourist trap. These tourists seem perversely thrilled that instead of playing anything that might lay down memories of a distinctively Italian or Venetian experience, or something that might evoke the Renaissance surroundings, the band instead plays from a cognitively and geographically dissonant, pandering repertoire.

New Yorkers in the audience got New York, New York. The Germans- with more than a hint of Basil Fawltyish “don’t mention the war” passive aggression, I thought- got a medley from ‘The Sound of Music’ which might have Julie Andrews, nuns and kiddies in it but is still best remembered for being about Nazis and is therefore probably not a cultural artefact that’s looked upon with great fondness by modern Germans, if they’ve even seen it.

Of course all the other tourist traps in the area compete to mop up the excess money of naïve and undiscerning visitors by hosting their own bands. The best thing (indeed, the only tolerable thing) to do is stand in the middle of the square when they’re all playing at once so you get a free atonal Schoenberg concert. Then move on swiftly before some hawker tries to make you buy a copy of a Vuitton handbag.

OFF PISTE AND PISSED OFF II: THE CLOUD OF GALLERY ASSISTANT ATTITUDE

The Singapore Pavilion’s ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ will probably remain “unknown” forever because the woman was refusing everybody entry on the grounds that there was too much of a cloud in there. Seriously, she said the smoke machine was making excessive smoke. This seems a bit like saying the sun makes excessive heat: true sometimes, but there are ways around such a problem if one applies a little bit of lateral thinking and common sense. All I can conclude based upon the available information is that the cloud, at least, is an actual physical one. I don’t think nobody being allowed in to “know” it was a conceptual act, though. I may be wrong.

I was sitting outside and gathering my hate I mean thoughts for a few minutes; she refused a steady stream of people who had stupidly made the effort to find the place and dared to assume they could actually visit the art work. I wonder if she ever let anybody in at all.

In short, Singapore Pavilion people, you might want to think about capitalising on being at the Biennale in Venice and hundreds or thousands of people being interested in your artist’s work instead of actively wasting their time and throwing it back in their faces. Five minutes more and she closed up entirely, then went flouncing off.

Basically she didn’t want to do any work that day and having visitors come in was annoying her. Gallery people, you’re not doing visitors a favour by deigning to let them see art. They’re supporting you.

OFF PISTE AND PISSED OFF I: MELANIE KLEIN’S QUANTUM SOAP

To be completely frank, although some of my best friends are Welsh and they have such lovely teeth and a natural sense of rhythm and excel at running and everything, their culture is so vibrant etc., Wales’ pavilion is in an out-of-the way and nigh impossible to find cluster consisting of itself, Bangladesh and Iraq. Therefore I couldn’t be bothered to waste my time in tracking it down. Is some big cheese at the Biennale sending a passive-aggressive message by exiling these strife-torn and dysfunctional countries to the Venetian equivalent of Siberia? Only joking, of course: Bangladesh is hardly dysfunctional at all.

I’ll also be honest and say that I walked past Karla Black’s effort for the Scottish pavilion by chance. I went in with an unseemly glee, almost wringing my hands and swishing my cape like a melodrama villain. I fully intended to hate it and knew I would write a load of nasty shit about it because I already know that I loathe her work vehemently. You won’t catch anybody admitting to that in Art Monthly or The Guardian… even though every reviewer, writer or critic does precisely the same thing sometimes. She’s yet another repeat offender from the British Art Show and clearly another flavour of the month, or more accurately “oppressive soapy stink of the month”.

Did you think I was going to announce a dramatic change of heart when confronted with the shattering beauty of Karla Black’s sculptures “rooted in Kleinian analysis”? Sorry, Nimrod. This exhibition was shit and it made me angry.

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.

ARSENALE VII: APPENDICES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN REMOVED

Your reward at the arse end of the Arsenale is Christian Marclay’s grossly overrated Youtube Supercut/massive copyright violation ‘The Clock’: another repeat offender from the British Art Show at the Hayward gallery. As in London, the room is populated with sheep doing their duty and spending the minimum amount of time that seems decent with this mandatory important piece of art before they move on gratefully, wondering what the hell all the fuss was about because it’s just like something off of Youtube.

Beyond this point countries like the United Arab Emirates, Croatia, Chile and the like are tacked on in a fairly perfunctory way like the appendices in an academic book that nobody ever reads. The insignificance of the work presented invites a swift exit and doesn’t speak well of whoever chose the artists. I’m fairly confident that all of these countries have better and more deserving artists than the ones shown at Venice, but that seems fairly irrelevant since at the moment curators seem to be selecting artists by blindfolding themselves and picking their names randomly out of hats.

Saudi Arabia’s effort by Shadia and Raja Alem is the only effort worth even commenting on, and then only because it’s so completely out of whack with everything else on show at the Biennale.