Visual Fest(Part Two)

The Arsenale has tons of work, including some things that I liked. The new installation by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, titled Manas (2007), consists of intricate scale models of a series of mountain observatories, ostensibly designed to collect cosmic energy, special dreams, views of alien civilizations, etc. Like most of the Kabakovs’ sculptural tableaux, the work has the pleasing tone of Russian absurdist literature. Aren’t they always in theses international shows, though?

Philippe Parreno (b. 1964), who turns out to be Algerian, has filled a gallery with black balloons shaped like cartoon speech bubbles. They cluster on the ceiling above, and seem like a dark comment on Andy Warhol’s famous installation of silver, pillow-shaped ones.

We like art that uses the ransom-note style of letters cut out of newpapers, and Ignasi Aballi (b. 1958), who is from Barcelona, has compiled dozens of lists made up of newspaper, typically involving numbers of the same subject -- money, books, music, the missing, the dead. They’re very neat.

A whole section of the Arsenale is given over to musings on death. Two vast walls feature rows of individual video portraits of people around the world, saying "I will die" in their native tongues. The work is by Yang Zhenzhong (b. 1968), who lives in Shanghai.

Still another gallery is filled with color photographs by Jan Christian Braun of graves in New York cemeteries that have been decorated for the holidays -- Halloween, for instance, or Father’s Day, in what is surely a new, schlock-culture version of a hallowed practice. None of this has anything remotely to do with the true human feelings or meanings of death, so it all feels opportunistic and adolescent.

Perhaps a work by the Japanese artist Hiroharu Mori (b. 1969) says it best -- a large question mark on a floating white balloon. A video shows people flying the balloon in a field like a kite, and a wooden bin nearby contains small balloons with question marks on them, free for the taking. This would be "Institutional Critique" of the inadvertent sort.

The national pavilions this year are pretty good. In the little White House that is the U.S. pavilion, Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector has installed a collection of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS ten years ago. Several strings of 40-watt light bulbs hang in the entryway, giving off as much heat as light.

People were helping themselves to the free licorice candies and the free posters of flying birds and the like, though I wanted to shout out, "Don’t take those, they’re bad luck." In the end I gave in and ate a candy, and wondered if I had been infected. It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious.

At the top of a little hill, the British pavilion presented a show of works by Tracey Emin, largely self-portrait etchings and drawings of the artist in the nude, reclining with legs splayed gynecology-style or standing there naked, naked, naked. Amazingly, her inept and callow public persona seems to have translated into a notably expressive line, vulnerable and abject. She’s hot.
The French pavilion contains a sprawling photo-and-text installation by France’s own Miss Lonely Hearts, Sophie Calle. Some recent lover ostensibly broke up with the artist via email, and she submits his long and reflective missive for analysis to 138 French women experts, from psychologist and journalist to proofreader and clown.

I liked it, though I need to learn French. On the other hand, a French-speaking publicist I know didn’t like it. He said it made her sound like an old woman, collecting all the complaints of her sex against men. I said that the nature of the letter didn’t matter, as long as you ended the romance.

Poland has finally begun to come into its own in the international art scene, which is reflected in the Polish pavilion at Venice. The Warsaw artist Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972) has filled the space with a black-painted metal armature that apparently represents the architecture of the pavilion itself, a building from the 1930s. But Sosnowska’s rational architectonic structure is crumpled as if it were a tin can, just as the force of Capitalism is altering Polish society.

And out in front of the Nordic pavilion is a set of three modern pay toilets, done in the colors of the French flag and playing an audiotape of the Marseillaise. I don’t know who made the thing, but plenty of countries arrest artists for this kind of satire -- back in Greece, where I was last week, the director of Art Athina was thrown in the clink for including in his show a videotape that played the Greek anthem over a pornographic scene of a woman masturbating. Seems that elections are coming.

More serious is the exhibition devoted to the Italian Abstract Expressionist painter Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) in the newly initiated Venice pavilion, a curved space in the Giardini "ghetto" housing pavilions for several South American and former Iron Curtain countries. The great German artist Georg Baselitz has made a series of new black-and-white paintings to accompany a single late sculpture by Vedova, a Cyclops-sized wooden wheel slathered with paint.

In a text written only a few months ago, Baselitz notes that we are comfortable with misunderstandings. "Emilio loved ambushes, he was a partisan, he loved the revolution, powerful gestures, expressionism and me. But I am not an expressionist, I despise the revolution, at best we are able to produce paintings, maybe even some good ones. I used to make fun of him back then and he would look at me questioningly."