Photos by Ashley "Holiday" Eaton

June 7, 2009

by Bryson Strauss

VENEZIA – Waiting for entrance to Bruce Nauman’s installation “Topological Gardens” at the American Pavilion, I was sideswiped by not one but three camera people breaking through the lines in pursuit of a shot or sound bite of Yoko Ono, who had just received a Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement from the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano.   It was a real paparazzi moment, Hollywood style!

Holiday and I had just viewed Ono’s minimalist text installation at the main Giardini building and had left nonplussed at best, bored senseless at worst.  So even though we hold a warm place in our hearts for Yoko, we decided to stick with Nauman, rather than join the foray.  We were waiting for ANGER and TEMPTATION.   At least until we saw big, sasquatch-looking John Baldessari towering on by.  Then I said, “Go get him, Holiday.” 

Dropping everything, she dodged through the crowd, and being only 5-feet tall, easily ducked under the cameras and through the press to get right up on Baldessari.  She smiled, he looked down (way down) and she got this shot.  And he too had just won the Lion’s Award for Lifetime Achievement. 

With all the excitement in the air, and still sweating profusely in the summer heat and humidity of Venice, we still anxiously awaited entry to the American Pavilion.  After an hour, we crossed the threshold with very high expectations; being that 1) it was supposed to be Bruce Nauman’s opus/retrospective, and 2) the American Pavilion had just won the Golden Lion Award for best pavilion.  Whoa! They were blowing out Golden Lion Awards this year.

We entered and—this comment could be due to over familiarity with the work—the Nauman installations were for the most part anti-climactic, save the center piece, Nauman's 1967 "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)” and his cast hand installation.  But as respected and creative as Nauman is, the American Pavilion was far from the best exhibit by any stretch of the imagination. It included work from several eras including the “Three Heads Fountain,” I believe from the Tate, some video art, and other neon pieces.  The neon work was by far the most compelling.  But up against the contemporary competition, it was a tough sell.

Nathalie Djurberg’s claymation projection and fantastical flora sculptures in the main Biennale building of Giardini, for example, was on its own a display of massive creation.   And the Italian Pavilion, featuring Aron Demetz’s haunting life-size, roughcut, wooden figures and Giacomo Costa’s miraculous and enormously complex digital drawings, was brilliant, environmental, dramatic, and complex. (even if the overall curation of the Italian pavilion was somewhat confused).

Most poigant (or perhaps just humorous) exhibit for the day, I suppose, was across from the Russian pavilion, where the Berlin-based team of Elmgreen & Dragset installed a drowned man face-down in a swimming pool still wearing his evening clothes; shoes and socks at water’s edge, cigarettes and watch settled on the bottom.  The title, “Death of the Collector.”

Time for some wine…