On the last full day of our trip, Wednesday, we saw more of the Biennale. We started the day by visiting the Ireland – all videos – and Northern Ireland – much more interesting – pavilions. In the Northern Ireland pavilion one artist had taken a short text in English and translated it to every language on google translator in alphabetical order until it got back to English. By the time it was back in English, the text had changed quite a bit. The piece was meant to represent what is “lost in translation.” Around the corner we went into the Moroccan pavilion. There was a giant, two-sided sculpture of a mouth with teeth and a tongue. There were also really large bugs. This exhibit was housed in a church on a quay where all the tourist boats docked which meant it was crowded with people who didn’t really know what the Venice Biennale was all about.
Next we headed to the Danger Museum exhibition. Located in an old palazzo, it was a collection of well-known paintings, redone in a humorous manner with cameras in the center of each piece to record the viewers’ reactions. Unfortunately the screening room was not turned on and we couldn’t watch the videos because I’m sure they would have been hilarious. One painting showed Obama on a horse while another depicted the Mona Lisa as the doctor in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. After this good exhibition, we saw a not-so-great one. We had begun to draw a connection between small, rich countries and decent exhibits. Monaco did not fit the pattern. Their show was a solo artist’s three “paintings” which were actually done with colored mud.
We continued down the quay, stopping to see the inside of Macedonia b (they had two parts of pavilions) which was about the sun. Further down the quay, we finally arrived at the Giardini. Once inside we went to the Swiss pavilion which was somewhat of a let down. All the money Switzerland has and they were showing an artist who had done loose, watercolor-like black lines on white paper. Venezuela was showing several artists – too many for the space. One took maps, cut them into strips and then glued them on top of each other so you could see two maps at once. Another collected the dust from his room, put it in a frame with the time and date labeled and hung them in a row. Next door, the Russian pavilion was much better. One room had a series of landscapes of what the world will look like in the future. There was a bridge, shaped like a star, in Perú and all sorts of houses and events from the year 4092, etc. The dark room was lit with black light. Upstairs, another artist used black light with special paint. He did a mural of people in a crowd setting. The accompanying audio increased in volume until, at its loudest, the lights in the room came on and suddenly the painting vanished. Then it repeated.
Across the walkway, the Scandinavian countries had a two-pavilion show, which we saw backwards. One part was a house for sale. Parts of the house, like some stairs in the library, were falling apart, while the dining room table had been split down the middle. A bunch of signs hung in frames on the wall in the dining room. They were cardboard signs homeless people hold on city streets. Each was appropriately labeled. The exhibit was entitled “The Collectionists.” Part two was another “house.” The first one, where Family A used to live, was for sale. Next door, Mr. B’s house was furnished for a bachelor and decorated with homoerotic art.
Up the path, we went to the Japanese pavilion which contained five black and white, full body portraits of primitively dressed women with fake breasts (attached by bras) that sagged limply about 12 inches lower than normal breasts. The portraits were probably 12 feet tall and each was framed in a free-standing picture frame. In one corner a black tent housed a screen which showed video of the women dancing in the desert.
Next door, a Korean artist had done an installation using window blinds which moved when fans went off. The German pavilion housed an installation by Liam Gillick whose work we had seen in Barcelona. Here, Gillick built his kitchen counter into the five rooms of the gallery. A cat sat on top of a cabinet and “talked” to visitors. The cabinets ran right through the doorways without stopping. The Canadian pavilion contained four videos, none of which we paid too much attention to. In the French pavilion, we were inside jail bars. On the other side, the walls were painted a bright, shimmery silver and there were three black flags in the dark rooms at the sides and back of the cross-shaped exhibition space. The Czechoslovakian pavilion was basically a garden. I’m not sure if it was done by a Czech artist, a Slovak artist, or Mother Nature. Australia’s exhibit was about road travel. A video showed trucks moving cross-country. Downstairs a three part exhibit showed a man making spray paintings on the side of the road. One part was the actual paintings, done on 12x12” squares. Another part was a video showing him at work, while the third area displayed the objects he used in his paintings (different sized circles he spray painted). Here, the American pavilion was the best air-conditioned. It housed more of Nauman’s work, including a series of 16 pairs of sculpted hands and a piece which shot water all over the place. One thing about Nauman: his work is fun to look at. The Israeli pavilion was also showing a retrospective, this time of an artist who had passed away in 2007.
Part of the Giardini continued across a canal. Brazil showed a photographer, Luiz Braga, whose work I had seen before, and an artist, Delson Uchoa, who made brightly colored two-dimensional works using resin and acrylic. The Austrian exhibit contained a video along with graffiti-inspired paintings all over the walls. Next to it, the Serbian pavilion had a video of an amature chorus trying to learn a song in English. Another video showed a woman trying to say the Serbian artist’s name (it had a dz in it, which is one of the hardest letter combinations in Serbo-Croat). In another part of the exhibit, an artist made felt out of human hair, showing how humans can provide their own warmth. Stacks of felt were all around the exhibit and people were touching it. Egypt’s exhibit wasn’t that interesting. It was sculptures made out of what appeared to be palm. There was one pavilion for Venice (Italy had a pavilion in the Arsenale, but this one was just for Venetian artists). Its them was glass. All the pieces had some glass element to them: glass animals, bowls, multicolored glass flowers, a dark room with glass sculptures and lights. Poland’s pavilion was about the experience of the newly arrived immigrant. “Windows,” video screens around the room, showed silhouettes of people. Headphones provided the audio which talked about coming to a new land. Romania had a series of videos shown in a wooden structure. You had to walk through it from room to room. It was hot inside, and none of the videos was worth watching. Part of Greece’s exhibit was having technical difficulties. The parts we could see seemed fragmented: one was a mirrored sculpture, another was a head made of beads, and a third area showed photographs of New York City streets.
Crossing back to the main space, we went to Hungary’s pavilion which was all about portraits. Some of the portraits were of war prisoners and others were variations on what a typical portrait photograph could look like. The Finland pavilion contained a “mini-museum” on firefighting and firemen. The Netherlands pavilion showed three videos. One was actually a series of still life paintings and portraits which looked like paintings, but were actually movies. Belgium had an exhibit about nature in the city. In the center room, the artist had arranged photographs of plants found in New York, Moscow, Brussels and a city in France. Each photo of the plant matter had an accompanying photo of a street sign to show where the plant was found. In the side rooms, the artist placed a text about plants in the city. Each side room had the text in a different language. The final country pavilion we visited inside the Giardini was that of Spain. They were doing a retrospective of Catalan artist Miquel Barcelló, who took clay and used it to paint large-scale works.
Inside the exhibition space, I really enjoyed the colorful sticks by Andre Cadere. They were in the corners of many of the galleries and each time it was like “Where’s Waldo.” We had to look all around the room to spot the stick. Other highlights include a series of black bungee cords which were arranged like a mini-galaxy. We could climb trough them and people were crawling around taking pictures. There was also a dark room with a clay garden. The sculptures were large and there were erotic clay-mation videos on display. There was also a humorous video of an American artist who painted himself into a room (a different color each day). Some Japanese artists had taken huge plastic tubes, filled them with colored liquid and strung them across the room in the air. They also put light bulbs in a sand box and had a wooden crate people were suppose to try to listen to (I couldn’t hear anything). We also saw an exhibit by an artist we had seen in Istanbul; he suspends books from the ceiling. In Istanbul, the books were about the bridging of East and West. At the Biennale, the books were dictionaries: some monolingual and some bilingual. The bookstore and café were works by artists as well. The bookstore had an attached reading room and more Alexandra Mir postcards. The café was a mix of bright colors and striped walls.
After the leaving the exhibition space, we went to the Great Britain pavilion where a Steve McQueen movie was being screened. He used two screens to show what the Giardini looks like in the winter. He put greyhounds inside the grounds and filmed them, church bells and the rain. During the screening, many people actually go up and walked out of the pavilion, muttering about how bad it was.
On our way towards the Scotland show, we stuck our head into Montenegro, which didn’t even merit a picture. Their pavilion, however, was actually held in the same palazzo where the UNESCO office is housed. Scotland’s pavilion was on the top floor of an old palazzo. Jessica and I had both seen work done by the artist, Martin Boyce. His metal sculptures included what looked like slanted garbage pails and a series of stepping-stones through a sea of paper leaves.
Thursday morning we did some last-minute food shopping before heading towards the train station. We bought tickets for the cheaper train to Verona and had to wait about 45 minutes. The train was sitting there, so we got on and read while we waited for it to depart. When we got to Verona, we took a bus to the airport. The flight to Malta was just over two hours, but they fed us a snack (ham and cheese sandwich). It was strange to be flying a proper airline with an in-flight movie (a documentary) and free food! In Malta, we failed to book a shuttle bus to the Gozo ferry terminal which we were supposed to have done inside baggage claim. Once outside our only options were to take two city buses for 1.10 euro each or a taxi for 34 euro total. We chose the buses. We took one into Valetta where we were brought to a traffic circle/plaza with dozens of yellow and orange buses from the 70s. We had some trouble finding ours, so we asked a bus driver for help. He pointed us in the right direction and told us the bus might be leaving soon, so we should run. We jogged through the sea of yellow and orange only to wait 20 minutes. The bus ride took an hour and we had to wait 30 minutes for the 20-minute ferry ride. Even though our flight had arrived at 5:30, we didn’t reach Gozo, and Jess’s family, until 9:30.
