Today the focus was on the main area of the Venice Bien­nale, the Gia­r­dini that is the home to about 30 pavil­ions that are per­ma­nently owned by each of the coun­tries, includ­ing the Ital­ian pavil­ion, which is by far the largest. It is included as part of the curated por­tion of the bien­nale by Robert Storr titled “Think with the Senses/Feel with the Mind.” Each of the other pavil­ions chooses one or more artists from its coun­try to exhibit dur­ing the bien­nale. The range of qual­ity usu­ally varies, and this year is no dif­fer­ent, as this is not a par­tic­u­larly excit­ing group of exhi­bi­tions. Still, cer­tain exhi­bi­tions and artists do stand out.

Each Venice Bien­nale, the best work is awarded the Golden Lion, although the choos­ing occurs as a mat­ter of art pol­i­tics. As of this moment, the award has not been announced, but my Golden Lion award, with­out a doubt, goes to David Alt­mejd, rep­re­sent­ing Canada. Alt­mejd came to the art world’s atten­tion sev­eral years ago at the Whit­ney Bien­nial. His work has always been in the nature of an instal­la­tion tableau for­mat and his sub­ject mat­ter has been quite mys­te­ri­ous and dark, often con­jur­ing the fig­ure of the were­wolf, a para­dox­i­cal fig­ure of good and evil. His roman­tic forms stem from leg­ends or from mon­sters based on comics or sci­ence fic­tion. His work typ­i­cally con­tains polit­i­cal ref­er­ences or charged sym­bols like the Star of David, and he cer­tainly draws atten­tion to cur­rent issues like cloning or genetic manip­u­la­tion. His mate­ri­als are often crys­tal, mir­rors and jew­els that glis­ten. With Altmejd’s instal­la­tions, the Cana­dian pavil­ion, rather awk­wardly shaped, has never looked so good.

A close run­ner up would be the Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive Felix Gonzalez-Torres. With his work dis­cretely posi­tioned through­out the space, the Amer­i­can Pavil­ion looks mar­velously aus­tere. At the entrance to the Pavil­ion is a light bulb piece that makes the entry room come alive with a shin­ing aura. Through­out the pavil­ion are var­i­ous “stacks” that Gonzalez-Torres inge­niously made to bring his phi­los­o­phy that con­tem­po­rary art should be avail­able to every­one to fruition. Any­one is encour­aged to take a print off of the stack, thus mak­ing a valu­able piece of con­tem­po­rary art avail­able for free.
In a cor­ner of the Nordic Pavil­ion, Adel Abidin, an Iraqi expa­tri­ate, has cre­ated the Abidin Travel Agency, which pro­motes vaca­tions in Bagh­dad. Com­plete with brochures and a pro­mo­tional video in the front room with a happy and opti­mistic voiceover, Abidin presents the piece with a bit­ing humor. In the sec­ond room is another video screen, this time with footage of the hor­rors of the war, as they actu­ally exist.

Also of note was the French rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sophie Calle, who filed the pavil­ion with her brand of con­cep­tual art, a steady stream of var­ied doc­u­men­ta­tion about her life as it pro­gresses. But the best piece of Calle’s is not in the French pavil­ion, but rather in the Ital­ian Pavil­ion. Pas Pu Saisir La Mort doc­u­ments the death of her mother. It begins after her mother finds out that she had a month to live and con­tin­ues up to her death. The video of her mother on her deathbed falls in line with a whole tra­di­tion in the his­tory of art of artists ren­der­ing deathbed scenes of fam­ily mem­bers, but this one is all the more poignant because of its record on video. The piece seemed to draw the viewer much closer to the expe­ri­ence than a draw­ing or paint­ing could. I could not help but pon­der about how we all wit­ness these scenes in our life­time, and after­ward live them out our­selves at the end.

That is a fit­ting segue into the Ital­ian pavil­ion part of the Storr curated exhi­bi­tion. Although there were some works, like Calle’s, that focused on life and death, the focus of the pavil­ion was not nearly as clear as at the Arse­nale. Rather, Storr, I felt, here showed off his per­sonal taste and aes­thetic. Unlike the Arse­nale and most of the other pavil­ions, there are paint­ings in the Ital­ian pavil­ion. The works here by Sig­mar Polke were among the best of his paint­ings I have ever seen, and Ger­hard Richter was well rep­re­sented also. The pavil­ion mixes young and old, more and less estab­lished artists, giv­ing the pavil­ion a museum-like atmos­phere. Among the best paint­ings are those by the Amer­i­can, Susan Rothen­berg. Her vibrant col­ors and fluid brush­work breathe life into her work.

Finally, although tech­ni­cally a part of the Ital­ian pavil­ion but located at the end of the Arse­nale, is an exhi­bi­tion by two promi­nent Ital­ian artists, Giuseppe Penone and Francesco Vez­zoli, which should not be missed. The Penone Scul­ture di Linfa is in two large rooms, and the Vez­zoli Democrazy is a short video on two screens with a hus­band and wife run­ning against each other for pres­i­dent of the United States. The videos are mar­velously funny 30-second sound bites.