Venice Biennale

Everyone should go to the Biennale once. This is the world's great contemporary art festival. So you should go to see all the world's most pretentious wankers come together in one spot for bit of intellectual masturbation. There is just so much Emperor's new clothes stuff its just not true.

Now there are essentially two sites for this little jamboree. One is in Giardini Publici and this contains the various national pavilions. Imagine an artistic equivalent of the Eurovision song contest. Each country has its own pavilion to showcase the "best" of its contemporary artists. The Park contains most of these, but there isn't enough space for every country to have its own pavilion (they are permanent structures which have been added to over the years,) so there are also quite a few "pavilions" scattered in empty buildings throughout the city.

The second is an International Exhibition with one curator picking stuff from around the world. This is held in the old dockyards, the Arsenale. More of that later. First up the pavilions in the park. I should add this is not a representative view of the exhibits as a lot of the are short films. Video seems very popular. They are however, uniformly tedious to watch. Imagine the world's worst imaginable film-makers. If they can call it a video installation it is suddenly ok to be badly shot and stultifyingly boring.

So, first up, I think this was the Swiss Pavilion. An artist who basically creates squashed musical instruments. Not seen anyone try this before. Probably because as a concept it isn't a good or interesting one.

 The Venezuelan pavilion was mostly given over to graffiti murals. Ok

The Russian Pavilion is one of the grandest structures. But the contents were disappointing in the extreme. Felt like some art students who were too clever for their own good. Basically there were two "exhibits". One was golden shower (no, not that sort of golden shower) - a shower by which coins were showered through a hole into a spot where you were given umbrellas in case they fell on your head.

The second was just a young bloke sitting under the roof cracking nuts and dropping the shells into a neat heap below. Yep, that was it.

The shower-head

 Korean Pavilion

German pavilion. Very imposing, classical, severe. Crap inside.

 Now sadly I cannot recall which pavilion this was, perhaps Canadian. Sad, as it was one of the most interesting and watchable

 Above and below were the same physical tableaux, but with alternative lighting.

 The British Pavilion. Almost made me proud to be British, just because it was a bit more interesting than the competition, particularly the huge murals

The French Pavion - attractive building, but while the construction made of bar stools was ingenious, interesting it was not.

 

 This I think was the Australian pavilion. Above almost any other, was difficult to tell whether one was looking at exhibits or it was the detritus left after something had been on. But no, what you see were exhibits. Underwhelmed

 This might be the Czech Pavilion.

 This was one of the Scandinavian Pavilions. the mirrored surface outside was more entertaining than the contents, although these photos make the interior look better than it was.

 The Hungarian Pavilion - probably top building

 Art out of telephone books. Quirky

Now onto the Venetian pavilion, and ok heer for the first time I was seriously impressed. Skillful, attractive, intriguing

Egyptian Pavilion

 Yes, this really is just a wall of plastic mickey mouse dolls

 Back to the other side of the Hungarian Pavilion. Very well crafted. Sadly the exhibits was just a collection of unexploded bombs, either real or pictures on a series of TV sets.

 This is sort of what Henry Moore would have produced if he had a sausage fixation.

 You stare at these ones and think of well-crafted, but why?

 

 And finally, the Spanish Pavilion. Spain, which gave the world Velasquez, Dali, Picasso, Murillo...and now its come to this. It's supposed to be the deconstruction of a building. The less discerning might just see neat piles of rubble. On account of there just being piles of rubble. Trouble with an "idea" is there just isn't anything to look at. What are you supposed to do? Wander around and admire the broken bricks from the side as opposed to the front?

 Back outside into the park and the views...