There’s an terrible lot of fretting about the state of the world in the Biennale’s 88 national pavilions,but little power, wit or bravadoThere is a Rolls-Royce pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale – a gorgeous palazzo on the Grand Canal with a garden full of scented roses. Inside, or British artist Isaac Julien is showing his equally fetching views of sparkling glacier caves in outermost Iceland. Visions of diamond-lustrous ice and cascading blue water flow across five film screens to the brimming-point of saturation,with the figure of the Spirit of Ecstasy cunningly worked into the swirl. These works could double as promos for the country as well as the luxury brand.
Down the canal, however, and Julien is putting on a different front altogether in the official Giardini,staging a live reading of Das Kapital in its entirety in the Biennale’s new spoken-word venue, Arena. No doubt he can live with the preposterous contradictions involved. But the double act is emblematic of this 56th edition of the world’s grandest art event, and which is nothing whether not explicitly critical of capitalism,consumerism and filthy lucre while relying upon them all for its very lifeblood.
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Source: theguardian.com