If You Can’t Beat ’Em ...
The Venice Biennale is not the first place you would expect to see street artist Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obey Giant sticker and Obama poster and current subject of a midcareer retrospective at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and yet there he was, bounding around creating a project for SMS Venice, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to preserving historic sites in the sinking city. He wasn’t part of the “official” Biennale, of course, but you could see his work dangling from buildings along the Grand Canal and from scaffolding in St. Mark's Square. The pieces will eventually be auctioned off to benefit SMS Venice. Catching up with him at the Gallerie dell’ Accademia, where he had just completed a performance, I asked him whether he’d seen any official Biennale art, to which he wryly replied that he’d been by the Ukrainian Pavilion’s party the night before. “There were supermodels on roller skates,” he said. “I’m glad there was so much scenery. It distracts from the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of art around.” He had seen some actual art, though, and met some actual artists, including James Rosenquist, of whose work he’s a big fan, and Robert Rauschenberg’s printer. So it all worked out.

Art(o, and others), in Real Time
Performance plays a large part in this Biennale. There’s Ragnar Kjartansson playing a painter for six months straight in the Iceland Pavilion, and Michelangelo Pistoletto smashing mirrors in the Arsenale (I raced to the second of two performances only to find Pistoletto’s dealer, Lorenzo Fiaschi of San Gimignano and Beijing’s Continua, sweeping up stray shards), and Arto Lindsay’s black-clad performers jauntily parading along the bustling Riva dei Sette Martiri between the Giardini and the Arsenale, despite the ominous weather. There’s also Pae White’s chandelier-like sculptures made from bird food juxtaposed with bird callers doing what used to be called tweeting before Twitter appropriated the word.

There are also works in which viewers are asked to perform, such as Miranda July’s empty-plinths-as-sculptures in the Vergini gardens. Inscribed with messages in the artist’s chicken-scratch script, like “We don’t know each other, we’re just hugging for the picture. When we’re done, I’ll walk away quickly. It’s almost over,” the pedestals prompted visitors to climb atop and thereby complete them. Or William Forsythe’s array of gymnastic rings that give visitors the opportunity to traverse a room rather like a monkey would.

But the standout among all of these performative things was, in this writer’s opinion, also the quietest. Indian artist Nikhil Chopra, holed up in a tower at the edge of the Vergini gardens, kept himself busy creating a landscape using charcoal on a large sheet of fabric that covered the walls of his lair, all the while impersonating a sort of Indian colonial type called Yog Raj Chitrakar. His victuals were laid out on a rough-hewn wooden table; on the floor were various silver pots. In an adjacent room was a dressing table. The landscape he was creating indoors was projected in from a video camera simulcasting a view of the canal outside. To be in there with him while he was at work was to experience a serenity absent elsewhere at the Biennale.