Fucking Hell
Tucked away in its own room on the second floor of Pinault’s extravaganza are the nine large glass vitrines packed with army action figures that constitute Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Boschian exercise Fucking Hell.” The way they’re installed in chez Pinault, with only a narrow aisle between the vitrines so that one is fully forced into their gruesome world, is brilliant. With the upcoming G.I. Joe movie about to grossly romanticize the horrors of war (to paraphrase Goya, a favored source for the Chapmans’ antics), now seems a good time to return to the grotesque that is Jake and Dinos’s hell, where G.I. Joe–types have gone scarily awry, sprouting second, third, and fourth heads and extra limbs, cannibalizing one another, mounting one another’s heads on sticks, and floating belly-up in rivers of blood.

The Future
If the Chapmans’ piece envisions something grisly for the future — armies of zombies, general apocalypse — the far more whimsical Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein has something slightly different in mind. The future is the subject of Pepperstein’s room-size installation in the Russian Pavilion, aptly titled “Victory over the Future,” where drawings are displayed around the room, each accompanied by a neon number beneath it — rather in the style of Mario Merz — and each depicting an idiosyncratic vision of a future project, done somewhat in the style of children’s book illustrations (the onetime day job of Ilya Kabakov and other Russian artists of the Soviet years). The one jarring element in the installation is the soundtrack, which features Pepperstein rapping in English about the future. One would rather have viewed the drawings in silence.

The Past
Pepperstein’s rapping was supererogatory and distracted from his exquisite drawings, and yet it wasn’t the last bit of spoken word at the Biennale that day. Mere hours later, at the very crowded party that New York dealer Marian Goodman and London dealer Thomas Dane threw for British Pavilion artist Steve McQueen in the opulent Palazzo Pisani Moretta, writer Anthony Haden Guest, when asked what he’d been up to, offered some verse on the subject of not returning to the years of the YBAs ...

I don’t want to be the Chapman twins
They’re loony bins, the Chapman twins
Francisco Goya, call your lawyer
A lot of your art died for their sins.
I don’t want to be the Chapman twins.

Someone needs to tell Guest to go to Fucking Hell!

Cat’s Got Gillick’s Tongue
Liam Gillick, the British artist controversially chosen to fill the German Pavilion, was on hand at an 11 a.m. press conference to explain his bewildering installation, a series of IKEA-esque kitchen cabinets accompanied by a taxidermic cat with the project’s explanatory pamphlet stuck in its mouth and a voice-over in which Gillick narrates an episode involving a talking cat and two children. (Somehow it was all about dealing with the legacy of the German Pavilion, built in 1938.) But when he arrived at the podium, wearing dark sunglasses and looking a little worse for wear, it quickly became clear he wouldn’t be explaining much of anything. (I later heard a rumor to the effect that Gillick’s party the night before had boasted one man mooning and flashing the other partygoers, and another two intent on fistfighting.) Before leisurely striding into the pavilion, an entourage of journos and fans quick at his heels, Gillick managed an utterance so sublimely cryptic as to further obscure the meaning and purpose of his artwork: He said he wanted to create “something that would compete [with the pavilion architecture] but in a soft way … conjunction without reflection.”

Beyond the Future
The Russians were out in force during the Biennale’s opening days. Stella Kesaeva and her Stella Art Foundation were showing some of her collection; the ubiquitous curator Josef Backstein, in addition to dashing around the Giardini, was giving a press doodah for his upcoming Moscow Biennale in September; and Dasha Zhukova was talking up her Garage and putting up an inflated zeppelin by Hector Zammora alongside the Arsenale, while her Chelsea-owning boyfriend Roman Abramovich hosted such Russian art world elites as Nic Iljin on his yacht. At the party for British Pavilion artist Steve McQueen, Samir Sabet d’Acre, the über-enthusiastic collector of contemporary Russian art, breathlessly ticked off the Russian rounds he’d made that day: Stella, an off-site video by AES+F, the pavilion, what have you. And of course the Russian experience wouldn’t be complete without a sighting of the grand poobah himself, the luxury god of luxury goods, the proud owner of Phillips de Pury & Co., Leonid Friedland, who was spotted zipping away on a water taxi emblazoned, ever so discreetly, with the Phillips logo.