Blessing, in Disguise
Since the things one misses at the Venice Biennale can be as valid a measure as the things one sees, let’s start with an official Maori blessing of the New Zealand Pavilion, complete with prayers and songs and whatnot. This had a lot going for it. Such as, when else is one going to see such a thing? Also, what better way to kick things off than to witness a blessing ceremony, and maybe even be blessed by proxy, thereby perhaps eschewing some of those inconvenient things that happen in Venice, like getting lost and not finding off-site pavilions. And yet, the decision to dash over to the Maoris’ thing was complicated by the fact that the U.S. Pavilion had arranged for a couple of water taxis to shuttle journalists from one off-site Bruce Nauman exhibition to another — plus the U.S. Pavilion was in fact a tripartite affair including two off-site locations in addition to the standard pavilion in the Giardini — and so there was some Venice-specific calculus to be done. On the one hand, without the boats, one might get lost. On the other, the Maoris would do their thing just the one time; Nauman’s pavilions would be open for another six months. But still.

“Get Out of My Mind! Get Out of This Room!”
It would have been insulting and masochistic to watch the Maoris with a guilt-induced medley of grating Nauman sound pieces rattling around in one’s head, from the crazy-making “Think! Think!” to that low voice seething with anger and a tremolo of schizophrenia that says, “Get out of my mind! Get out of this room!”

It was a good idea to go with the Nauman pavilions, in part because so many people don’t make it to these off-site things, and that’s where Nauman’s two new sound pieces, Days and Giorni, were, in addition to those classics. And there were few people there that day, the better to experience them, and — flash-forward — Nauman won the Golden Lion for best pavilion!

Nauman is arguably the towering art figure of the past, say, 40 years. And the installations of his pieces were brilliant, despite complaints that the “official” Giardini pavilion had only older work. While one must take an artist’s dealer’s comments with a grain of salt, it was tough not to be right there with Angela Westwater of Sperone Westwater Gallery when, speaking about seeing the exhibitions for the first time, she admitted, “I cried! I don’t cry easily.”

Day Tripping
So, Days/Giorni. Having the days of the week incanted out of order was particularly poignant during the Biennale’s opening days when, by a certain point, something uniquely Venicey takes hold. The hypnotically lapping waves? The incantatory manner in which the vaporetto drivers announce “San Marco, Lido”? The labyrinths of alleyways? All those glasses of prosecco? Suddenly, you’re no longer sure what day of the week it is, what order they’re even supposed to be in, or whether any of that matters.

All Art Aspires to the Condition of François Pinault
It was a passel of press at Pinault’s new Punta della Dogana digs — camera crews, multilingual translators, the spectacle of Pinault lui-même, making his way through the crowd, flanked by bodyguards, to a press conference where the mayor of Venice speechified to the effect that the collector is an honorary citizen of the city. It’s questionable whether one has to add to the gallons of ink already spilled in high praise of the new Punta della Dogana. Succinctly, it’s stupendous, and that’s one part architect Tadao Ando; one part the collection itself, which goes from strength to strength to strength; and one part clever curating by Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami. Check out smart pairings of Robert Gober and Lee Lozano, and Paul McCarthy and Piotr Uklanski; the placement of one of Jeff Koons’s Cicciolina-era busts in front of a stupendous view of the Grand Canal; and the — and it’s not a stretch to say it — magisterial first room, where a monumental Richard Prince joke painting is positioned directly across from Maurizio Cattelan’s decidedly jokey taxidermic horse plunged neck-deep in the wall. But perhaps the greatest praise for Pinault came from a giant banner suspended from a palazzo across the canal, which read, in tall red letters, “PLEASE, FRANÇOIS PINAULT, BUY MY WORK.”

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.

All Art Aspires to the Condition of Arne Glimcher
Art dealers are invariably to be found hanging around their artists’ work in the opening Biennale days, and perhaps doing a bit of peddling if the opportunity arises. But one dealer will be on hand for all six months. PaceWildenstein honcho Arne Glimcher, who represents Lucas Samaras, the Greek-born master of the hallucinatory self-portrait, is one of the faces that appear in Samaras’s video piece in the Greek Pavilion, which Pace showed in New York a couple of years ago. (The exhibition is called “Paraxena” and is commissioned by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, but its curator is Matthew Higgs, head honcho at New York alternative space White Columns.) The work resulted from Samaras asking a bunch of art world folks like Artforum Editor Tim Griffin and fellow Pace artist Chuck Close to watch a video of him stripping and prancing around in front of a sort of distorting lens. While some of the viewers, Griffin and Close among them, strive for composure, the good-natured Glimcher laughs through the whole thing. It’s a refreshing pavilion — excellently produced, humorous, the work of a modern master.

From Beast to Beastly (“No night, No day,” No Thanks)
I can’t say I wasn’t warned about “No night No day,” the “abstract opera” commissioned from Welsh visual artist Cerith Wyn Evans and German sound artist Florian Hecker for the Biennale by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, a foundation founded by collector Francesca von Habsburg, who let Evans and his collaborator “absolutely … do whatever [they] want[ed].”

Before heading over to the world premiere at the Teatro Goldoni, I’d run into a pair of journalists who, upon learning I was about to experience one of Hecker’s compositions, expressed concern for my hearing. But who can resist a world premiere, and one with such pomp and circumstance attending it? And no sooner had the art world’s great and good streamed into the Teatro than Sir Norman Rosenthal, director of exhibitions at London’s Royal Academy, sprouted from a stage-side balcony seat and announced in basso profondo that the assembled would soon bear witness to the world premiere of the opera and that he’d known the “incredible talent” (Evans) since the artist was 6.

Such dramatic buildup. But what was this abstract opera? There was a screen, upon which the “players,” a group of amoeba-like shapes, floated about (that would be Evans’s single-channel film projection), accompanied by a series of mostly feedbackish noises in surround sound (that would be Hecker’s impressively produced electro-acoustic sound with computer-controlled spatialization system).

About halfway through the 40-minute event, folks in the upper seats began to discreetly depart. Others dozed, only to be roused by the occasional piercing screech. The man seated next to me yawned, snorted, and blurted out the words “boring, eh?” Judging by the viewers’ slightly pained expressions, and the fingers plunged protectively into ears, more than a few silently commiserated with that critic’s summary judgment.

All of this was, of course, belied by rousing applause when the thing ended. A more extended critique could be heard after the performance from one curator, who wondered aloud why the artists hadn’t created anything more than “a screen saver with Pro Tools.”

Flora vs. Fauna
Roman Ondák has filled the Czech Pavilion with plants left growing there for months. It’s an aggressively “green” offering, but not irritatingly so. It’s a big hit. Everyone seems to like it. It’s more ruminative, really, than it is anything else. Meanwhile, next door at the Australian Pavilion, Shaun Gladwell has a suite of videos, MADDESTMAXIMVS, in which a Mad Max–esque, black-leather-clad dude zooms up on a motorcycle and picks up from a dusty, presumably Outback road a roadkill kangaroo, then paces about for a bit, cradling the carrion in his arms. Call it "Pietà, Beyond Thunderdome." To like Gladwell’s video because you like kangaroos — as well as the idea that a tough-guy type also likes them enough to be sad and hold them when they die — seems wrong. But to like Ondák’s plants because they’re eco-friendly seems acceptable.

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.

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.