Snapshots from the Biennale

VENICE, Italy—Maybe you haven’t heard of la Biennale di Venezia—until this summer, I hadn’t. But when the biannual modern art exhibition opened at the beginning of June, mega-yachts filled the Giudecca Canal near our dorms. When we asked why the Jewish Ghetto was crawling with security, we learned that the Israeli President was in town for the opening of his country’s exhibit.

The first Biennale was held in 1895, and this June art from seventy-plus countries flooded pavilions all over the city. Thirty permanent pavilions in the Giardini, one of Venice’s few large parks, are each allocated to a particular nation to showcase its art.

I should confess that I’m not much of a modern art person. And I’m certainly no art critic. It’s not that I don’t like it—I just don’t get most of it. Even the graffiti in the bathroom stall at the Giardini (“architecture is dying”) confused me. Yet I appreciated the exhibits in the gardens—their creativity, their insight.

Yes, I did think some of the exhibits were awful. Sweden’s pavilion consisted of a tall tree surrounded by a few paintings of more trees, some rocks, and—to encapsulate my opinion of the exhibit—animal dung. Australia tried too hard: One of its pieces was a canvas painted white, adorned with a small piece of duct tape. In a similar vein, Spain’s minimalist exhibit was accurately named “The Inadequate.”

But most of the Biennale exhibits I saw provoked more awe, or appreciation. An exhibit in the main hall, “Ex-Offenders at the Scene of the Crime,” showcased a photographer’s poignant shots of South African criminals in the locations that they had committed heinous acts. Despite the anguished expressions on the subjects’ faces, the exhibit was uplifting: each picture’s description relayed how the South African had turned his or her life around.

While some exhibits followed the art gallery model, placing discrete works in more conventional spaces, others treated their entire allotted space as art. Great Britain turned its pavilion into a bunker-like maze filled with mysterious dark rooms. Japan followed suit, creating a space that employed curved mirrors to portray a vast city scene in a confined space.

The United States’ pavilion was lackluster except for one clever contraption: an ATM inside of an organ. Each time a debit card was inserted into the machine, the organ belted some new melody.

I’ll admit that I’m still figuring out the meaning of that one. But I’m not trying too hard—architecture is dying, anyway.

Robert S. Samuels ’14 is a sports writer in Leverett House.