pads between their wings seemed better than art until I discovered they
were
art. Title:
Global Warming
. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla created a beautiful hippopotamus in heroic scale, but they sculpted it from that noble material, that enduring element, mud. Crumpled newspaper was scattered around, I guess so you could wipe the hippo off your feet before going on to the next exhibit. Pascale Marthine Tayou tangled hundreds of plastic shopping bags into a net to create a scene identical to roadside fences all over the third world. In fairness, Tayou is from Cameroon. And the sophomoric smart-ass mouth-breathing medal goes to Daniel Knorr of Romania, who left the Romanian pavilion empty and called it
European Influenza
.
Still, I departed the Venice Biennale with joy in my heartâpartly because I was glad to leave, but more so from learning that all the awful people whose oeuvres I had just endured have something to keep them busy. In another era such crackpots would have been excluded by sheer lack of skill and knowledge from any involvement with the fine arts, the way Hitler was. He retreated to grubby beer halls, compensating for his thwarted ambitions by concocting insane demagoguery. It wouldnât happen today. Hitlerâs complete artistic incompetence would find a welcome home at the Biennale.
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artistsâMao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
Stupid art saps stupid ideology. You could see it in the Chinese pavilion. One installation was a scrap metal and tin-foil contraption that a Chinese farmer built believing it could fly him to the moon. The farmer was included in the installation. Then there was a BVD of a crowded city street. Every now and then somebody the crowd couldnât see shouted loudly. Members of the crowd would look around as though a crazy person was loose, then go about their business. And Chinaâs supposedly most talented young architect, Yung Ho Chang, made a big, long tangle of bamboo poles. This was in no way as impressive, or for that matter as intimidating, as the bamboo scaffolding surrounding each construction site for the topless towers of Shanghai. If national pavilions are anything to go by, the fearsome Communist juggernaut of Asia is headed toward being an Iceland of ideological power.
And what of the
demos
who fall for demagoguery? Venice is certainly full of these this time of year. Hosts and swarms of them come in a state of idiocy evident in their dress and bodily formâso much so that a certain well-known span to the ducal palace should be renamed the Bridge of Thighs. But the masses were giving the Biennale a good leaving-alone. The few visitors to the pavilions and exhibition halls were people who looked like they make what it looked like they liked, or will make some when the drugs wear off. It is a hopeful sign for worldwide democracy that even the dull, vapid summer tourists of Venice are too smart for art.
8
M Y W IFE â S G OT A G UN
Brays Island Plantation, South Carolina, February 2006
M rs. O. is afraid of birdsânot terrified, not âchicken,â as it were, and not exactly phobic. She just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. The Galápagos trip with George and Laura would have been a misery for her. When we were looking at the Lindblad Expeditions brochure, Mrs. O.âs reaction was, âThe blue-footed boobies waddle
right up to you
? Ugh!â Iâm not saying she got pregnant with our youngest child, Buster, just to avoid the Galápagos cruise, but . . .
I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through
were
art. Title:
Global Warming
. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla created a beautiful hippopotamus in heroic scale, but they sculpted it from that noble material, that enduring element, mud. Crumpled newspaper was scattered around, I guess so you could wipe the hippo off your feet before going on to the next exhibit. Pascale Marthine Tayou tangled hundreds of plastic shopping bags into a net to create a scene identical to roadside fences all over the third world. In fairness, Tayou is from Cameroon. And the sophomoric smart-ass mouth-breathing medal goes to Daniel Knorr of Romania, who left the Romanian pavilion empty and called it
European Influenza
.
Still, I departed the Venice Biennale with joy in my heartâpartly because I was glad to leave, but more so from learning that all the awful people whose oeuvres I had just endured have something to keep them busy. In another era such crackpots would have been excluded by sheer lack of skill and knowledge from any involvement with the fine arts, the way Hitler was. He retreated to grubby beer halls, compensating for his thwarted ambitions by concocting insane demagoguery. It wouldnât happen today. Hitlerâs complete artistic incompetence would find a welcome home at the Biennale.
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artistsâMao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
Stupid art saps stupid ideology. You could see it in the Chinese pavilion. One installation was a scrap metal and tin-foil contraption that a Chinese farmer built believing it could fly him to the moon. The farmer was included in the installation. Then there was a BVD of a crowded city street. Every now and then somebody the crowd couldnât see shouted loudly. Members of the crowd would look around as though a crazy person was loose, then go about their business. And Chinaâs supposedly most talented young architect, Yung Ho Chang, made a big, long tangle of bamboo poles. This was in no way as impressive, or for that matter as intimidating, as the bamboo scaffolding surrounding each construction site for the topless towers of Shanghai. If national pavilions are anything to go by, the fearsome Communist juggernaut of Asia is headed toward being an Iceland of ideological power.
And what of the
demos
who fall for demagoguery? Venice is certainly full of these this time of year. Hosts and swarms of them come in a state of idiocy evident in their dress and bodily formâso much so that a certain well-known span to the ducal palace should be renamed the Bridge of Thighs. But the masses were giving the Biennale a good leaving-alone. The few visitors to the pavilions and exhibition halls were people who looked like they make what it looked like they liked, or will make some when the drugs wear off. It is a hopeful sign for worldwide democracy that even the dull, vapid summer tourists of Venice are too smart for art.
8
M Y W IFE â S G OT A G UN
Brays Island Plantation, South Carolina, February 2006
M rs. O. is afraid of birdsânot terrified, not âchicken,â as it were, and not exactly phobic. She just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. The Galápagos trip with George and Laura would have been a misery for her. When we were looking at the Lindblad Expeditions brochure, Mrs. O.âs reaction was, âThe blue-footed boobies waddle
right up to you
? Ugh!â Iâm not saying she got pregnant with our youngest child, Buster, just to avoid the Galápagos cruise, but . . .
I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through
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