Venice Biennale Part 2

Our second day visiting the Biennale proved to be far more rewarding, starting in the morning with the Bruce Nauman’s “off-site” exhibition, especially his new sound piece “Giorni” which despite its austere simplicity did make us reflect on the passage of time in a deeply affecting way. After a jagged scramble through the Venetian labyrinth and two vaporettos later, we made it just in the nick of time for Peter Greenaway’s multi-media extravaganzic interpretation of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” – part of his series of digital interactions with various masterpieces of Western art. His use of digital media was stunning and clever, but the result is not really an artwork, more of a didactic deconstruction of the painting as a reflection of Venetian aristocratic and religious values in the XVI century. Still, the audiovisual impact is so spectacular that we stayed and watched it a second time.

The afternoon was spent at the Arsenale, where we found several very compelling pieces. The overall concept of the “Making Worlds” exhibition is very weak with no convincing curatorial point of view, almost as if the artists where arbitrarily chosen and thrown together at the last minute. Still, this doesn’t take away the sheer pleasure of walking through the magnificent space of the Arsenale, where everything was impeccably installed. Highlights there included a video by Keren Cyter (whose work was also liked very much at the “Younger than Jesus” show at the New Museum in NY), a movie by Ulla Von Brandenburg which was beautifully shot inside Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye; a Paul Chan projection piece based on de Sade; and clever paper constructions by Carlos Garaicoa from Cuba.

The highest marks, however, go to “The Feast of Trimalchio” an over-the-top 9 channel video installation by the Russian collective AES+F presented in an adjacent group show organized by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The piece makes reference to the famous feast of Roman decadence depicted in the Satyricon and updates it to the realities of today’s consumer culture via Russian extravagance, the hyper-real aesthetics of advertising in glossy fashion magazines, and 3-D animated landscapes. Mesmerizing and so vulgar we couldn’t stop watching because of its extraordinary production values and innate integrity as a cultural critique of our material desires.