My Biennale Favorites

Anthony Haden-Guest surveys the best art from the world’s pavilions, the Pinault collection, and a naughty guerrilla art exhibit.

Cities are very differently affected by the major art events that take place within them. New Yorkers with no particular interest in the arts are likely to be as little aware of the Armory Show as are Londoners—except those who live near Regents Park—of Frieze. Art Basel Miami certainly makes its presence known in that town, but the events are mostly for rich folk, and largely held out of sight.

The Venice Biennale is different. Venice has been art-saturated for centuries and during the Biennale the whole place explodes with visual information. Gondolas and commercial craft tote artworks and banners—like the one reading "I WILL NOT MAKE ANYMORE BORING ART—JOHN BALDESSARI" alongside the Hotel Monaco—are strung on buildings and bridges.

Charlier had planned to exhibit 100 “portraits” of artists, made by re-imagining their sexual organs. I looked over the images. The Jeff Koons was a pink balloon phallus, the Damien Hirst was salami-sliced and in a vitrine.

The motoscafos are plastered with placards, postcards litter floors and sidewalks, café tables are creaky with art books, prim-faced people are wearing “art” T-shirts covered with f-words and there’s sheaves of art documentation in the most futbol-mad sports bars. The current L’Uomo Vogue comes with alternative covers, one featuring an unsmiling Cindy Sherman while on the other a positively glowering Richard Prince tugs at a paint-spattered T-shirt and the pilot of a water taxi complained he was up to there with installations and wished there was more plain, honest painting.

It is also impossible to be unaware that during the Biennale, Venice is a party town. People were leaning out of windows of the Grand Canal with flutes of Champagne as I arrived, but the designated kickoff was the party for Steve McQueen, who was carrying the flag for the U.K. This was held in the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, which was impossible to locate, in true Venetian style, being down an alleyway so narrow as to allow only one assassin at a time. Also in true Venetian style, the affair was held in the sort of rich, dimly lit rooms that make the Biennale the one such event where the most radical of post-modernist stuff becomes conjoined with the art of the everywhere overwhelming past.

The Arsenale, meanwhile, was largely underwhelming. There was languid work by formerly inventive artists—Michelangelo Pistoletto’s smashed mirrors—and the five stacks of cardboard crates of commercial Venetian postcards by Aleksandra Mir is the sort of piece that gets appreciative nods from gratification-starved hall-trudgers but struck me as conceptualism at its most academic.

I liked The Eternal Present, the piece in which the Norwegian artist, Jan Hastrom, investigated his own life using refrigerator-magnet-like cutouts in a style vaguely reminiscent of Tintin. And further along, Pascale Marthine Tayou had managed to suggest the multifarious life of a Cameroon village, using colored bags spilling cement, heaps of earth and woodshavings, planks, kitchen utensils, with fetish-like figures to suggest the inhabitants, and streaming video which documents village scenes but also scenes from an intrusive outside world, including Western soft porn, while the whole shebang is accompanied by a medley of competitive soundtracks. This is Maximalism at its maxiest, and tremendously effective.

The hot zone that evening was an afterparty for Distortion, a group show at the Gervasuti Foundation on the Fondamenta S. Anna. Gavin Turk, the London-based artist, was inviting anybody to improve a wet-clay head. Also in the show were two other Brits, John Isaacs and Jamie Shevlin, and there were performances. Now one of the great things about Venice is the ubiquity of the young but their presence at contemporary-art events can be, um, complicating. Last season, I saw a girl of, I don’t know 15, 16, thereabouts, at a day sale in Christie’s, New York, when the object on sale was a Mike Kelley which depicted … well, let’s just say two men being explicit with a donkey.

The girl affected indifference, none too well.