The Venice Biennale |
| News created: 22. september 2007 08:48 |
by Barbara A. MacAdam
The Venice Biennale
Through November 21
Like the ubiquitous fairs that clog New York’s streets every summer, each proffering the same goods, the world’s proliferating art fairs and biennales tend to dole out similar fare to an apparently insatiable audience.
The 52nd Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, is, for the most part, an exception to that trend. Certainly the show he conceived, “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense,” set in the Arsenale and the Italian pavilion at the Giardini, is a barometer of the moment. But this exhibition within the larger biennale is more interested in ideas than in giving the public what it demands. It reflects the esthetic, conceptual, and political concerns of artists today—and the view is rather melancholic.
What this biennale lacks in excitement it makes up for in thoughtfulness. Storr sets the stage for his investigation of the senses in the Arsenale, with Luca Buvoli’s funky installation A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (2007). Its title is based on the words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. The carnivalesque atmosphere, with cutouts of planes and abstract shapes, along with documentary footage and a video of aphasia victims reading haltingly from the manifesto, riffs on the Futurist movement’s optimism, political naiveté, and faith in early Fascism.
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