Allora & Calzadilla's show for the Venice Biennale's United States pavilion has generated a near-deafening amount of buzz since previews began at the international exhibition earlier this week, with its overturned tank-turned-treadmill sculpture outside its entrance emitting a clarion clackety-clack to draw in hundreds of people to wait in line to see what the fuss is all about. This morning, the show — featuring eight professional gymnasts doing routines on replicas of business-class airline seats, an organ/ATM hybrid, and a video filmed on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques — opened to the public with a bang worthy of the buildup: a performance on the tank's treadmill by Dan O'Brien, the 1996 Summer Olympics decathlon gold medalist once heralded on the cover of Newsweek as "Mr. Olympics."

It was an exquisitely multifaceted debut for the show, titled "Gloria," that has become the conversation piece of the Biennale for its at once complex and bombastic take on range of subjects at the heart of contemporary America, from militarism and capitalism to athletics and celebrity. In all, the feat has been pulled off with aplomb. "I feel a little bit tired," artist Guillermo Calzadilla told ARTINFO at the launch, "But I am completely satisfied."

The works' implied criticism of the war machine, especially, has given the pavilion an alluringly daring profile. "It addresses these issues in a veiled and elegant way — though it's hard for an upside-down tank to be veiled, flipped on its back like a turtle," joked Indianapolis Museum of Art director Maxwell Anderson, whose museum was selected to produce the show when senior curator Lisa Freiman's proposal was selected by the State Department. "I think people are drawn in to the premise that the United States government tolerated and even embraced a critique that Allora & Calzadila brought forth that's a convergence of how artists tell the truth and how our country seems willing to enable it. That's part of the surprise." He added that, the State Department has been fully behind the show — "everybody in Foggy Bottom down the line to the secretary herself."

For his part, Calzadilla was playing down any overtly political sentiments: "I would say that it is critical about American militarism. But there's a difference between a critique and being critical." He added that the works in the pavilion "don't have a specific meaning, they don't have a specific agenda. They're not trying to convince anyone of anything. It's art. We are artists, we are not politicians. The objects can have many readings."

The cost of the project has been a matter of some conjecture, and the price-tag is believed to be possibly $2 million or more. "We're not going to say anything until everything is done and dusted," Anderson said when asked about the price, most of which was raised privately. "We're trying to keep the focus on the art. There are expenses involved with bringing together so many people and elements in Venice. We have athletes living in Italy for several months, and that has costs, as you can imagine." David Mees, the U.S. embassy in Rome's cultural attaché, meanwhile, said that the state department footed "maybe a fifth" of the bill.

Cost was only one obstacle to overcome in pulling together the ambitious pavilion, which also required the participation of the Puerto Rican government and involved creating the 2010 film "Half Mast/Full Mast" on the demilitarized island of Viequas. The pavilion has been dedicated to the memory of Ramon Luis Lugo, a Puerto Rican lobbyist who "was central in explaining to the government what we were hoping to accomplish here," Anderson said. Lugo died three weeks ago from a heart attack.

Lisa Freiman, the pavilion's curator, worked closely with Allora & Calzadilla — artists she has collaborated with for several years — in producing the show. "I asked them specifically to create works that focused on the notion of American identity, freedom, democracy, an international competition, and so they came up with these ideas — some of which they had been playing around with in the past, some of which are new — and they developed a series of projects that deal with different forms of glory and call it into question and problematizes it," she said.

Already the reception for "Gloria" has been tremendously positive. RoseLee Goldberg, the founder and director of the Performa performance art festival, said she was impressed by "the boldness of the gesture, and that the powers that be agreed to put this it on." As might be expected, she particularly appreciated that it brought the dimension of performance to the center of the Biennale, a relatively novel thing. "This is very adventurous, avant-garde performance," she said, "and the fact that it is here in Venice and has such rich references for everybody is important and it puts performance its rightful place in contemporary art."

But one of the central attractions of the show is that you don't need to be a connoisseur to be drawn to its energetic vision and vitality. That goes for its participants as well, like U.S. Olympic silver-medalist Chellsie Memmel, brought in to perform for "Gloria." "It's been a very cool learning experience for me," Memmel enthused, "something I've never done before."

To view pictures of the athletes performing during the debut of "Gloria," click on the slide show at the left. To see the IMA's video about the creation of the piece, see the video below.