Seeing and Being Seen
Venice is about seeing and being seen. The people on the sidewalk are looking at the people on the yachts. The people on the yachts, draining flutes of prosecco, are looking at each other. One group of power lunchers at Harry’s Bar is stealing glances at another group of power lunchers at Harry’s Bar. The ordinary folks in the blocks-long line for the Nordic Pavilion are looking at the nattily dressed super-VIPs being whisked in ahead of them. The nattily dressed super-VIPs are looking ahead, at the art inside.

But there is only one room — the Biennale’s most brilliantly curated room, in this writer’s opinion — in which two artworks seem to see one another. In what used to be called the Italian Pavilion but is now a permanent exhibition hosting part of Daniel Birnbaum’s show, there’s a room that contains just two artworks. One is a 1970 Gilbert & George that features a photograph of the two artists along with an explanatory text to the effect that “The Sculptors are Only Human Sculptors.” At one point it asks the viewer to look at the image of Gilbert & George and “see the walking stick” that one of them holds. Behind this photograph, in a corner of the room, is one of the walking sticks that the late artist André Cadere used to place throughout shows on the sly. It’s a superlative room. Succinct. Whimsical. Whip-smart. Just perfect.

The Long Shadow of Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman’s influence is wide-ranging, and it is to be found throughout the Biennale. Let’s start with the obvious, the filching of part of the title of his video installation Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage), on view at one of the U.S. Pavilion’s off-site venues, for the title of the Punta della Dogana’s inaugural exhibition, “Mapping the Studio.” But look farther afield and there are also shades of “Mapping” in Steve McQueen’s British Pavilion contribution, a meditative, 30-minute film that, just as Nauman’s film records the insect and animal high jinks that go on in his studio when he’s not around, documents what goes on in the Giardini when the Biennale is not in full swing (i.e., worms crawling, dogs scrounging around piles of rubbish, an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart, a tiny red beetle negotiating the inner petals of a yellow flower, guys cruising each other (well, that last bit was staged, but still). Then there’s Claude Leveque’s French Pavilion: Dominated by a series of linked stainless-steel cages that seem to trap visitors inside, it harks back to Nauman’s Double Steel Cage Piece, also on view at one of the off-site venues. And finally, there is The End, Ragnar Kjartansson’s contribution to the Iceland Pavilion, which consists of the artist taking on the persona of a painter who paints endless portraits of the same bikini-clad model for all six months of the Biennale. The title comes from Kjartansson’s envisioning Venice as a “lighthouse at the end of the world,” echoing — verily quoting, if unconsciously — Nauman’s video-projection piece The End of the World, also on view in an off-site bit of the U.S. Pavilion.

Buy Chinese
The title of the Chinese Pavilion, which is curated by artist Lu Hao and curator Zhao Li, echoes that of the Russian one insofar as it, too, looks to the future, though perhaps more tentatively, by asking “What Is To Come?” There are seven artists in the pavilion, but one, Liu Ding, stands out, with his unwieldy named project Liu Ding’s Store: The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality, The Weight of a History Book, which consists of a group of glass cabinets — Wunderkammern, really — packed with banal objects accompanied by laminated price lists for those objects, which instruct viewers on how to purchase them from the artist’s Web site. Wares range from a toaster oven to a scholar’s rock to some inventive “art pieces” like “Concrete Shits” made by artist Li Jinghu, which, a quick consulting of the list reveals, go for RMB 19,728 ($2,900) apiece. The whole thing seems like a smart, sardonic take on the recent market mania for contemporary Chinese art.