Visual Fest(Part Three)

By the end of the day, the best thing about the biennale is the films and videos, where a person could sit and rest his muddy feet (the biennale opened to rainy weather this year).

Especially good is the 20-minute-long, three-screen computer animation in the Russian pavilion by AES+F (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes). Dubbed Last Riot, it shows youthful models in slo-mo combat, battering and cutting each other but never drawing blood or making contact, intercut with scenes of a tanker truck spiraling up an alpine peak, from which a formation of nuclear missiles is launched. Trucks and trains drive off roads and bridges and break into pieces below. The soundtrack is most effective -- Wagner mixed with Japanese drums and some contemporary electronica.

"Machines can suicide, but people have to fight for eternity," said Svyatsky, who noted that their work is inspired by Baroque artists like Caravaggio and the "contemporary trash culture" of computer games. AES+F is currently having a retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, which has permanently installed their huge sculpture of a girl riding a T-Rex out front. Expect big things from this group, which has allied with Russia’s new Triumph Gallery, whose mysterious and deep pockets fund shows of Old Masters as well as the recent Moscow debut of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull.

The star of the 2005 biennale, Francesco Vezzoli, is back in 2007 in the new Italian pavilion (carved out of the far end of the Arsenale) with a pair of parody campaign commercials, dubbed Democrazy (2007), one starring the real Sharon Stone as the fictional Patricia Hill, who is running for president. "We are not the world’s greatest country for nothing," she proclaims. The bogus candidate, who has her own website at www.PatriciaHill.us, is facing off against another politician, this one supposedly named Patrick Hill, a wan joke to be sure, as is the entire installation.

Also in the pavilion is a major installation by the Arte Povera stalwart Giuseppe Penone, which doesn’t disappoint. Dubbed Sculture de Linfa (2007), it includes two massive tree trunks whose rough surfaces have been methodically covered with leather, which is attached by tacks. "All were living organisms before becoming producers of form," notes pavilion commissioner Ida Gianelli.
Other good places to rest the dogs are the Swiss pavilion, where you can actually lie down and watch one of Yves Netzhammer’s engaging animations, and the Chinese pavilion, where an inflatable igloo out on the lawn -- there’s hardly any grass in Venice, did you know? -- houses a film made in Second Life, the computer community, by the artist Cao Fei, whose avatar is named China Tracy.

Elsewhere in the Arsenale are new films by Steve McQueen (the British artist, not the dead actor), a five-part film by Yang Fudong called Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, and a film of aphasiacs reading the Futurist Manifesto, with some difficulty, by Luca Buvoli. "Except. . . in. . . struggle. . . there is. . . no. . . beauty."