Venice Biennale

ILLUMInations

Began with a visit to San Michele, where mum would like to end up as flotsam. I was looking for Ezra Pound, just a name, but I had discussed his responsibility to his art and politics a month ago at an Irish lit festival; his poetics remains so stimulating. As we were searching, we found Brodsky hidden by a red rose with a red ribbon. A couple from Russia made a beeline for it. I took their photograph, then again with their camera.

She had spent 6 months in Brisbane, but they couldn't help, had never heard of EP. We eventually found it behind bushes, simple, just his name and his wife's.

Surely it needed a line or two – even Pound's confession:

I lost my centre / fighting the world. / The dreams clash / and are shattered-- / and that I tried to make a paradiso terrestre.

As we left, a funeral boat arrives – not the ceremonial gondalas dressed in black crepe, just a small boat, two elderly ladies and a younger man are helped onto the island, and then the weird sound and view of the coffin rising up, mechanically.

Confusion with Line 41 & 42, both of which advertise going to Guardino & Arsenale, but only one does, we end up doing a tour of Murano.

"ILLUMInations will focus on the 'light’ of the illuminating experience on the epiphanies that come with intercommunicative, intellectual comprehension." Bice Curiger, curator of the Zurich Kunsthaus, and this year's director. Comprehension was possible but play seemed to be the script.

The Russian pavilion showed 'Empty Zones': "It's just like anywhere else here – only the feeling is stronger and incomprehension deeper.”

The US pavilion showed 'Gloria' (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla) including Olympic athletes who run on a treadmill that powers a (British Chieftain) tank-track grinding away the tracks but the death machine upside down looked as helpless as a tortoise. I didn't understand the airline seats (until I heard that athletes worked over them) B used my Visa card to play a cash withdrawal machine that emitted vast organ sounds– the punters judging by expressions enjoyed this the most.

The Biennale had restored and borrowed three Tintoretto masterpieces: The Stealing of the Dead Body of St Mark and The Creation of the Animals, and the Last Supper, painted over a long career, well worth a long look.

The Australian Pavilion was very disappointing, but provided the funniest moment when I asked the young woman minding it what she recommended in the outside venues (paintings from Zimbabwe - we didn't get to) and then told her I had asked the guy selling me the tickets the same question and he replied, “I don't know. I come from the other side of Italy. I hate Venice.” She was gobsmacked, astonished. It reminds me of being in Rome during the last World Cup and surprised how uninterested they were, being parochial and obsessed with Roma.

Christian Boltanski in the French pavilion constructed a large and complex belt of images of Polish newborns (like a newspaper) that mix with dead Swiss, a siren brings the rushing images to a grinding halt.

The Golden Lion for a national pavilion went to Christoph Schlingensief and his dark German Gesamtkunstwerk, so over the top yet mesmerisng, objects, screens flickering across the whole church transformed – a weird crucifixion complete with bicycle hangs over the altar adorned with a hare referring to Durer or

(more likely) 'How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare', by Beuys (byUte Klophaus) – you do it by holding tight a dead hare. [Today I have been watching Manet's hare in Avignon - like his melon a great w-o-a.] Flickering images include his old films and X-rays of his black lungs that killed him last year.

An honourable mention should go to the cafe for their work of art – a crab sandwich (white bread with the crusts cut off) - art can be so decadent.

Outside the two main areas, The Iraqi Pavilion was all about water and a successful show through a coming together by five different artists. Nearby is the ‘Memory of Books’ a site-specific installation by Chiharu Shiota in collaboration with the Gervasuti Foundation using books she found there (part of the Foundation’s library) piled on a desk with a seat but impossible to reach being in the centre of a web of thousands of strands of black wool intersecting walls, floors and the ceiling of the space.

Padua

After the whirlwind of nearly 2 days in Venice, early Sunday in Padua was marvellous, after a gap of 21 years we visited the Giotto masterpiece again, “To stabilise the microclimate you are requested to remain in the room for a few minutes.” It was more like 15, but an informative film whiled away the time. We had 15 minutes precisely in the chapel, that is taking art seriously, esp. banning cameras.

Afterwards saw the Mantegna frescoes, incomplete after Allied bombing and relying on coins to illuminate the walls. then explored the city with the echo of footsteps.

The philosopher Richard Wollheim could easily spend an hour watching a painting (particularly Poussin), “it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I spent long hours. . . coaxing a picture to life.” Who has such time in the modern world?

Note: Wollheim, Richard (1987) Painting as an Art, Princeton University Press, p8. Art historian T. J. Clark became obsessed with a Poussin show at the Getty Museum spent much time studying and writing about two Poussin pictures while research fellow Getty Centre, Los Angeles 2000. He found that he "could not stop.". See ‘A serpent's tale: Arthur C. Danto on T. J. Clark’, ArtForum, Feb, 2007.