Venice Bienniale 3-Douglas Maxwel

The most fun thing to do in Venice dur­ing the bien­nale is to visit the many off-sights that are spread through­out the city. These include about 20 coun­try pavil­ions, var­i­ous other exhi­bi­tions and sev­eral museum shows. This year, though, not many of the off-sight pavil­ions stood out. One excep­tion is the Sin­ga­pore pavil­ion, in which a group exhi­bi­tion was fea­tured. Even though all of the artists were inter­est­ing, the one who stood out was Jason Lim. His piece, Just Dharma, was a metaphor for the fragility we expe­ri­ence in each of our choices through­out life. Over the course of one year, he care­fully built a chan­de­lier out of 2000 pieces of ceramic. At the open­ing of the pavil­ion, he hoisted it to the ceil­ing in the mid­dle of the room and then released it. The orig­i­nal piece must have been beau­ti­ful, based on its remains. Visu­ally, it became an inter­est­ing foil to the Gonzalez-Torres light bulb piece I men­tioned yes­ter­day. Both pieces are emo­tion­ally compelling.

Although not tech­ni­cally a pavil­ion, and spon­sored by Japan and Korea, the Palazzo Palumbo Fos­sati housed Res­o­nance, a work by Lee Ufan. The site-specific instal­la­tion has a quiet and con­tem­pla­tive nature and affords the viewer a respite from the crowds that per­me­ate all of Venice these days. Both the paint­ings and the sculp­tures dis­play Ufan’s pref­er­ence for the reduc­tive. The sculp­tures fur­ther pay trib­ute to Isamu Noguchi in the way they com­bine mate­ri­als such as stone and steel. The paint­ings con­sist of sin­gle grey rec­tan­gles within large off-white mono­chro­matic fields.

One sur­prise while walk­ing around was dis­cov­er­ing a show of Patrick Mimran’s pho­tographs. All reg­u­lar Chelsea-goers know Mim­ran as the per­son who places bill­boards through­out Chelsea, and in fact, has them leased for years to come. His show, “Some­where in New York,” dis­plays the images of entrances to New York pub­lic park­ing garages. I was pre­pared to thor­oughly dis­miss them, but they are actu­ally quite good. His painterly sense of color and his no-nonsense, straight­for­ward pre­sen­ta­tion gives the work a real stature.

Also worth a men­tion is the exhi­bi­tion at the New For­est Pavil­ion, show­ing five artists. Most notable is the Video Shave by Melanie Man­chot in which a pro­fes­sional bar­ber com­pletely shaves the cura­tor, Stu­art Horod­ner, from the waist up. The uncut video becomes uncom­fort­able to watch, as the bar­ber can­not help cut­ting and nick­ing Horodner’s body. In addi­tion, “Ter­ri­to­ries,” a group exhi­bi­tion of Latin Amer­i­can artists, and Wille Doherty’s video, Ghost Sto­ries, as part of Scotland’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion at the bien­ni­ale, are worth find­ing and visiting.