That chaotic, sprawling monster of an art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, opens this week. This year there will be over 77 nations participating in this 104-year-old institution, originally founded in 1895 to display decorative arts.
Seeing the Biennale properly requires the military tactics of a Caesar: exhibitions, performances and installations cover over 90,000 square meters. There will be exhibitions that outrage and provoke, art that is breathtaking and much that will be forgettable. But perhaps most thrilling is the sense at the Biennale that besides all the glitz and glamour, the yacht parties and “in-store events,” the city is teeming with the real thing. (Miuccia Prada’s party at the Prada Foundation, despite its very transactional nature, usually manages to promote some very serious art.)
This year’s commissioner is the curator and academic Daniel Birnbaum, and the theme is “Fare Mondi//Making Worlds.” Mr. Birnbaum’s curatorial work will be presented in the Giardini, which houses the 30 permanent national pavilions. The United States will display “Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens,” a survey of four decades of the artist’s work, including video installation, performance and his iconic neon pieces. Japan’s got “Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe,” which will show the work of Miwa Yanagi in a black, membrane-like tent. The official description includes reference to the fluidity and mobility of death.
The British pavilion is being curated by artist Steve McQueen, whose much-lauded film Hunger chronicles the hunger strike of I.R.A. member Bobby Sands. What he has planned for Venice, nobody appears to know.
For a little more edge and youth, one goes to the Arsenale, where the ropes and hawsers for the Venetian fleets were once produced. Further afield still, one finds work from some of the smaller countries: The Wales Pavilion will be located in an old brewery on the island of Giudecca.
French billionaire Francois Pinault feels the tug of noblesse oblige at a time like this: The owner of Christie’s will display some of his vast art collection at the Palazzo Grassi and is opening yet another art showcase at the Dogana, which is in the old Customs House.
That few worry over whether such magnanimity is only self-flattery or civic-mindedness (doesn’t each normally imply the other?) is a clue as to why this art fair is so different from the more commercial ones.
Indeed, its very exclusivity is one of the reasons it can appear so artistically fresh: Sales are usually to the Pinaults and Bernard Arnaults of the world, and generally are conducted in secrecy, with the happy result that one can really, actually, go for the art, and not the scene.
The Venice Biennale is open to the public starting June 7 and runs through Nov. 22.
