My Biennale Favorites

One performance in the Gervasuti garden featured a male playing a guitar while a woman with flaxen hair and heightened makeup picked up a Barbie doll, wrapped it in silver foil and squished it with a hot iron.

Sitting near the front were a boy of perhaps 8 and a girl a few years older.

The artist repeated the process with another Barbie, then another, another. Sometimes she squished two into a Barbieburger.The kids’ expressions were something to behold, but included utter bafflement and what struck me as a kind of anger. Oh, well. It’ll be water off a duck’s back, I dare say, but children and cutting-edge contemporary art? I would welcome some feedback on this.

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For cities, topography is destiny and most especially this is true of Venice. It is at once confining and infinitely sinuous, so at Biennale-time it abounds with situations I call Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! (This being the title churlish critics gave to the canvas Courbet painted in 1864 to commemorate his first meeting with his stalwart patron Alfred Bruyas.)

Thus on my first morning, I bumped into two New York artists, Bill Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw, in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. They were off to Modena where Anastasi has a show.

And the Biennale?

“We’re getting out before it starts,” Anastasi said, crisply.

Then I ran into Richard Phillips, another New York artist, having a coffee outside the Gritti. I walked to the Palazzo Grassi, which houses some of the collection of the French billionaire, and owner of Christie’s, Francois Pinault.

From the Grassi, I got a boat to the Dogana, the former customs house which Pinault turned into an art space by the Japanese starchitect, Tadao Ando, to house another tranche of his collection.

It was officially opening that day and it looks remarkable, with venerable wooden beams, distressed brick walls and cement panels polished to marmoreal perfection. And, like such other recent and extraordinary re-makes as Charles Saatchi’s space on the Kings Road and the Garage in Moscow, it looks ready for whatever it might contain, which in the case of the Dogana includes such of Pinault’s faves as Rachel Whiteread, Mike Kelley, Cy Twombly, Charles Ray, and numerous Bush-like figures riotously humping each other by Paul McCarthy.

Downstairs for a coffee. Pinault, gray-flannelled and black-shoed, was conferring at the next-door table with an adviser, Philippe Segalot. And in walked Tadao Ando with an entourage. It was Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet! time again.

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