Back to Venice for the Biennale. Same apartment - albeit redecorated (who'd have thought that things like a table and shelves would be deemed optional in a kitchen...)
Jake's older, so no pushchair, but still more interested in chasing pigeons and eating ice cream than anything else in Venice.
So, the Biennale itself. After Tracey Emin's disappointing British Pavilion I had high hopes for Steve McQueen's film (I thought Hunger was one of the best British films of recent years and one of the best films last year). But it wasn't to be and I left the 30min film disappointed and argumentative - my mother in law (an art historian) disagreed with me and gave me a dozen reasons why it was wonderful. I still disagree...
The Danish and Nordic Pavilions though were something else - their first collaboration and the talk of the Biennale. The first was a house with a "For Sale" sign outside and the signs of foul play inside with a dining table cut in half, a staircase lying in pieces and a message scrawled on a mirror in the hall...
The 2nd part was the house of a gay author - possibly the body floating in the pool outside. What did it all mean? It was there with the "intention of dismantling the national representative model..." etc etc It was also something fun and provocative...
I was warned to be careful taking Jake (my son and pigeon chaser) across to the far side of the author's house by one of the curators - those "Tom of Finland" drawings on the wall (!) but Jake was more interested in sitting in a rather cool swivel chair.
Jake was fascinated by a lot of the work - the trashed kitchen and staircase kept him occupied for ages as he tried to work it out and the body in the pool didn't bother him either - and his toy Pinocchio even made an appearance in a couple of the Pavilions... oops. Then tragedy struck. He got left in the loo and, when Bekah went back, someone had nicked him - which is pretty poor. That left it up to dad to leg it across Venice - harder than it sounds - to find the stall that was selling them and then "find Pinocchio" by the time we get back to the apartment. Skin of the teeth but did the deed and "found" the lost toy.
The last images of Pinocchio before his tragic disappearance
The Polish Pavilion was a real surprise and really cool too - a video installation with the screens appearing to be windows behind which ghostly figures appeared in silhouette...
Slight mishap when Jake spotted a ball which was part of an installation and gave it a kick ("when is a toy not a toy? - when it's a piece of an installation" doesn't really register for a four year old) and then later another small ball that was part of an installation made up of toys, balls and wool - kind of a kitten's wet dream - got a little nudge before we could stop him. Got away with it and moved swiftly on.
The Arsenale part of the Biennale (held in the old dock buildings) opened with a stunning piece - you walked into a dark room and there were beams of light coming down from the ceiling in A Matter of Life and Death style which, when you get close, are actually pieces of wire stretching down... it's quite beautiful
A video work by two Barcelona-based artists - David Bestue and Marc Vives - which is part of their Actions at Home piece was brilliant. A slapstick film with gags paying homage to the likes of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy it drew a huge crowd and was one of the highlights. I found a clip youtube but unfortunately it's not subtitled in English - but you can get the drift...
Stumbled across a real treat when we turned the corner and found some Chihuly glass sculptures which were amazing especially when seen against such a dull backdrop as the concrete pavilion buildings
What else sticks in the mind? The nightmarish cafe - firstly a bureaucratic nightmare along the lines of Terry Gilliam's Brazil where you have to select from a dot matrix scrolling menu before you get to the counter and then pay and then collect the food (which you've only just seen although you've already had to order it). But best of all was the decor - garish highlighter-pen style fluorescent colours and angled mirrors giving it a mildly emetic quality.
What else? The Peggy Guggenheim museum is one of the best galleries in the world with a stunning permanent collection including works by Kandinsky, Pollock, Ernst, Magritte, Kapoor, Calder and Klee. It also had a brilliant exhibition called Gluts featuring Robert Rauschenberg's sculptures from his Oil Gluts series made from car parts, garage signs etc. One of the US interns told Jake that one of the pieces looked like Wall-E which is one way of getting kids into art and Jake spent the rest of our time in this wing telling other visitors about Wall-E.
Less impressive was the Franois Pinault Collection which is an amazing building but hardly inviting as, on seeing Jake, we were effectively followed from room to room by a black suit-clad guard with an earpiece. Some reading this will think "fair enough" given Jake's "interaction" with the balls in the Biennale but we certainly kept them on edge as we walked from room to room. There's some amazing pieces here - a great Jeff Koons and a really beautiful Murakami but it's like someone with a lot of money has worked through a checklist of modern artists and picked up a piece by all of them regardless of the quality.
I leave you with two things
First, a chair that looks like an arse (well, it amused me) and secondly a weird idea for a kids toy...
Posts
