Postcard from Venice Biennale

Venice is like a giant pop-up card of incredibly ornate churches, palazzos and cafes where, on any given day, people are having a lovely time. Of course its main industry is tourism, but most of the year is also taken up with one or another strand of the Venice Biennale. The Art Biennale kicks off every other summer, and with Scotland participating again I just had to head over there. As well as elbowing my way through hoards of sightseers and drinking my own weight in prosecco (they pretty much force it on you), I saw a heck of a lot of art.

There’s a big curated show, this year called The Encyclopedic Palace, which is just as wide-ranging and extensive as that sounds. And then there are the national pavilions, where each of the participating countries shows work by an artist at the peak of their career. Most of the pavilions are in a park called the Giardini, including Great Britain, represented this year by Jeremy Deller. You can read an interview with Deller in this month's edition of The Skinny, but here are some highlights from the rest of the Giardini.

Denmark
Jesper Just’s show in the Danish Pavilion is one of the best in the Biennale. Entering the five-screen video installation we find ourselves in a kind of underground lair, with plants and purple lighting. The first video shows a man striding purposefully through rural wasteland until a city comes into view. Crawling under a fence, he enters and finds signs of devastation. It seems uninhabited. The architecture suggests Paris, but the shop signs are in Chinese. Totally compelled, we feel robbed when we realise it’s on a loop and we’re none the wiser. The other videos add to the narrative but it remains far from the well-trodden apocalypses of mainstream cinema.

Germany
Much hyped for featuring Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, Germany’s group show is surprisingly un-showy and serious-minded. In a bid to examine the significance of traditional forms of national representation at the Biennale, it is showing four non-German artists. Weiwei’s work is a sprawling stack of 886 three-legged stools – items which, once found in every household in China, were superseded with the Cultural Revolution and are now antiques. Typically symbolic, the sculpture is one you can absorb quickly and file away to think about later. Not so for the films by Romauld Karmarkar and Dayanita Singh, which are fascinating but require you to set up camp and watch them in full.

Russia
The Russians have had more fun. Vadim Zakharov has enacted the Greek myth of Danaë, whose seduction is an allegory for human desire and greed, and the corrupting influence of money. The pavilion is occupied by two men, tall, with severe Russian jawlines. They could almost be waxworks, so sleek are their suits. One is feeding a pulley with gold coins, which then rain onto the floor below. Male visitors can kneel on church benches to watch, while women must stay downstairs, sheltering from the coins with umbrellas. With a mischievous humour and slick execution à la Maurizio Cattelan, the illusion is broken only by the custodian of the coins telling visitors, ‘Don’t touch!’

Romania
At an event where some shows were installed over two days in April, it’s an unexpected treat to see live performance. Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus’ work will be performed every day of the six-month run. Taking as its subject the entire history of the Venice Biennale, it reflects on various national pavilions in choreographed re-enactments. For instance, one is a 2007 installation which featured a PlayStation ‘so beautiful teenagers could crush each other to death.’ The performers enact this in slow motion, the blows becoming dance moves. Another scenario is political, featuring the penis and the Pope and damning Papal propaganda against condoms. ‘Religion reared its ugly head,’ says a young man, rearing his own while lying on the ground. Key to its impact is the youth of the performers, whose trainers and hoodies and confident, economic movements make it seem as fresh as improv.

Japan
Japan’s show by Koki Tanaka is a pure headache to look at, with videos and text on every available surface. But it doesn’t really lose anything for this, as the videos document activities Kanaka has instigated rather than being works in themselves. Perceiving a need to rebuild community spirit in Japan post-tsunami, Kanaka asked groups of strangers to collaborate on ‘collective acts’ such as giving a haircut, composing a tune to play together on the piano, and throwing a clay pot. With the boundaries of the work set by the participants rather than the artist, many of the videos are quite moving.