America tangle with me, hybrid with me

and what bored surveillance footage,

stored in decades of black and white?



The roar is a wound.

Top 40 songs grow from it. Grow through

each finned speaker like a bad crop.



Someone taps me on the shoulder,

mistaking. Was I the good lover,

given over to the motions of goodness?



Screams: a blur of upside faces.

O from the cramp that many people

in a line is at last we are here



at last, America, climbing shakes

the wooden ties, up to where sweat makes

Rorschachs of the girl in front’s shirt



and desire does horrible things to our body

pushed and held back into the seat.

Plastered there as we summit.



Look: the skytower, the parking lot’s rows

of palms and chrome. We fall for

minutes into loveliness. And the



downward sky is endless. just a shade

of yellow on my brain where America

is nervously pressing its finger.

My father’s earliest memory was when he was five years old, looking outside into the darkness at the madwoman who lived a few yards down the dirt road, on the other side of the street. Every night she was there, he said. Every night she would sit outside in front of her house, a faceless silhouette sometimes backlit by the moon, slowly rocking back and forth. Every night for hours she would sit alone in the dark. She was crying out the name of her dead son, trying to call him home. “*Gou Er!*” she howled into the night. Her sorrowful voice rang out in the summer silence of the Chinese countryside. It echoed in the mountains. “*Hui lai!*”



My father remembers what his mother told him, when he asked what the woman was doing. “She is calling the spirit of her son,” my grandmother said. “If you call out the names of the deceased, their spirit will come back and sleep in the house.”



She added, very sternly: “Don’t go near her. She has a demon air.”



 



My father doesn’t believe in ghosts. He is a rational man, a scientist and soft-spoken atheist, thoughtful and patient in abstract discussions, patient with his daughter. We have talked about this story many times, though he hesitates to tell it. He doesn’t think of himself as a storyteller, and he doesn’t like ghost stories. For him, there is no use for the supernatural or perverse aesthetics in a real world already filled with grief and horror, and there is no time for self-indulgence when there is work to be done.



For years he has been trying to get me to write his stories, about growing up during the Cultural Revolution, about his and my mother’s lucky love story, about his experiences in the Red Guards denouncing his teachers and singing the Chinese national anthem in the midst of crowds of students in Tiananmen Square, waving the Red Book in the air and cheering for Chairman Mao. My father has been trying all my life to get me to understand and appreciate my background, his background, and the complicated, difficult chain of events that led him from farming communes in rural China to graduate school in Wisconsin. My father thinks his story of survival — China’s story of survival — will put my life into context and give me perspective on my troubles and grief.



He wants me to write about China, but not in this way. Not through the lens of Oriental superstition that no one believes in anymore. This story is self-indulgent, he would tell me. And I would not argue.



 



They only lived in that village for several months, in the summer and early fall of 1964. The army had moved into that remote mountainous region between Hubei and Sichuan to build a bridge across the Chang Jiang, and the military families were all housed in villages in the surrounding area. My grandfather was only a low-ranking officer at the time, but he was lucky enough to get a house that his family did not have to share.



They only got the house because no one else wanted to live there. The house was small and shabby, on the outskirts of the village, but that was not why it was empty. It was empty because the villagers said it was haunted. They said in the village that it was often visited by the spirits of the dead landlord and his young son who used to live there, and by the demons that plagued his crazy widow, mad with grief, who still lived in another of their houses, a smaller one, across the road. They said the air itself was contaminated by the devils that possessed the woman and caused her madness. This was the “demon air” of which my grandmother spoke.



No one from the village would live so close to the madwoman. They believed that her demon air was contagious. My grandmother believed it too. She was from the countryside, poorly educated, her heart full of traditional fears and superstitions. She did not want to live in that house with her young son, so close to a crazy woman and surrounded by the spirits of the restless dead. She was afraid of the invisible demons in the very air she breathed. But my grandfather insisted — he had traveled, gone to medical school in the city, and prided himself on being a modern-minded man — so she relented. It would not stop her from trembling with insomnia in the middle of the night, as she listened to the silence between the madwoman’s howls for hints of a ghostly visitor, but my grandmother knew her duty as an obedient wife. Nevertheless, she would warn my father, her five-year-old boy, to stay away from that woman.



My father never told me exactly what my grandmother said in that first, fierce warning, but I can imagine her younger voice — if not her younger self — filling her words with an ominous fear that goes back through generations of Chinese country folk; a still-remembered childhood fear of black-faced, wild-eyed, fire-tongued demons that live high up in the mountains and kidnap children to be slaughtered for dinner and slowly roasted over hellfire. I can hear her voice through the ears of my five-year-old father, confused and a little scared and vibrating with a strange excitement in the transmission of such a primordial fear:



*Don’t talk to her. Don’t even go near her. If you get too close to her, if you speak to her and breathe in her foul, demon breath, you too could be possessed by her devils. They will swim around you, slip in and whisper, damp and cold, in the nervous sweaty spaces between cloth and skin. They will pull at each hair on your arms and your legs with tiny teeth, glide needle-prick claws over every inch of your skin. They will enter your body through your nose, mouth, ears, or slither into your brain through the liquid space between your eyelids and the whites of your eyes, snipping thread-thin vessels to turn your vision red with blood, reaching a clawed hand deep down into your throat and retching out a sudden, anguished scream. *



*You too could lose your mind, *she would have told him. *You too could be possessed, exiled, despised, and shamed.*



 



“How did they die, the madwoman’s husband and her son?” I asked my father. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea after my Saturday piano lesson. I was fifteen, and it had been ten years since I first heard this story. “Why were their spirits not at rest? Was there a murder, a suicide?”



My father doesn’t remember, or maybe he never knew. He was five years old in 1964, and his parents never fully explained the woman’s history, if they even knew it at all. It was a long time ago, anyhow, and his early years were very confused because they were constantly moving around with the army, and sometimes he mixed up people and places in his memory from that time because they seemed to be everywhere all at once. After he started middle school things began to calm down — or at least his family stopped moving around so often, so that he finished middle school in one place and high school in another, and his memories from then are more distinct. Not that anything actually calmed down — in those later years everything became, if anything, more confused — but least he remembered his adolescence. His early childhood is not as clear.



But, if I really wanted to know, this was two years before the Cultural Revolution, and almost a decade after the Elimination of the Counterrevolutionaries campaign, which not only targeted intellectuals and capitalists, but also continued the Communist attack on landlords — on all wealthy families who held both economic and political power under the Kuomintang. He had the impression that the madwoman’s family had once been very rich — at least compared to the others in the village. Probably she was a victim of that wave of persecution in the mid-1950s. Her husband was probably taken away by the Communists, who either executed or tortured him, or sent him to a prison labor camp, where many were worked until they died of hunger and exhaustion. Or maybe he and his family were so persecuted and humiliated by the Communists, with their land and wealth gone, confiscated by the new government, that he could not take it anymore and committed suicide. It was common enough at the time for that to happen. Several members of my own family — some distant, some close — committed suicide after political persecution and public humiliation.



“But what about the son?” I asked. “They wouldn’t persecute a little boy.”



Maybe it was an accident, my father said. In the mountains many things can happen to small children if they’re not watched carefully, and though the children of former landlords may not have suffered direct harm from the Communists, they were often very cruelly bullied by other children. In any case, accidents happen. He may have gotten lost in the woods, or was eaten by a tiger, or he could have fallen into a river and drowned.



“Maybe his father killed him,” I said, “before he killed himself. Maybe he didn’t want his son to suffer as he had, so he decided to kill them both. So they could be together.”



Maybe, my father said. That happened sometimes too, whole families committing suicide together when they see no other choice.



“But then why didn’t the mother join them?” I asked. “Why didn’t she kill herself as soon as her husband and child died?”



My father put down his steaming cup on the kitchen table. The sun was in the process of setting and cast a rosy-pink glow on the cheap blue and white ceramic of our tea set, bought in a Chinese supermarket downtown by my mother long before she died, years before I was even born. The lid and spout of the teapot were chipped, and out of the four original cups that went with it, only two of them — currently used by my father and me — remained unbroken. I was about to suggest that we buy a new set when I looked up and saw my father’s crinkled brown eyes. They were looking at me, troubled and concerned.



“You think too much about death,” he said.



 



Perhaps I do. Perhaps, in the scheme of things, I focus too much on the macabre, indulge too much my morbid streak, my fascination with superstition, with demons and death.



But for years I have imagined a kind of circular retelling, a family mythology of signs and spirits. I imagine our family haunted by ghosts, or haunted, at least, but the uncanny motif of haunting. The broken teacups, the first one shattered the day my mother first told me my father’s ghost story, the second one smashed on the morning of her death. The day of my first period, two weeks after the funeral, and the unexpected rush of blood that soaked through my jeans and into the upholstery of the passenger’s seat of the new car that replaced the one totaled in the accident. Those months afterwards, when I stayed in my room for days on end, listening in the silences between my tears for the sounds of my father, vague and absentminded, moving around in the kitchen downstairs. Guidance counselors and therapists and family friends, their dry eyes and hands that pressed my hands and shoulders and touched with mild reproach my tangled, uncombed hair. Sleepless moonlit nights, the madness of sorrow, and whispers in the dark, hoping for the return of something lost. And my father, growing grey, tired, quiet, more distant than ever, his outlines fading as his shoulders gently stoop, his eyes creased and uncomprehending his daughter at thirteen, at fifteen, at twenty and never a moment beyond the first telling of a ghost story.



Could it be that she has haunted him, this madwoman from that village in the mountains? Could it be that it is because of her that my father is wary of sad women, first of my mother’s tearful rages, and then of his strange, unhappy daughter, remote and reserved, quivering with a vague and aimless anger?



No — that’s not true. Not quite. In the line between fiction and nonfiction I sometimes miss my mark, veer towards a clumsier angle of understanding and alter facts that need not be changed. My father the scientist is not haunted by ghosts. But she has haunted me. All these years later, I am still thinking of this ghost story. I am still thinking of this memory, and this madwoman, of my father’s.



 



I can see her in my mind to this day, as clearly as if I had actually seen her — her head bent, hunched over, her hair unwashed and disheveled and covering her face. It is daytime, and she is stumbling through the village, murmuring under her breath, talking to herself or to someone no one else can see. Sometimes she very softly wails. She lifts her dirty hands to her face when her voice begins to crack; she looks like she is crying, but her hair is in her face and I cannot see.



My father told me that all of the adults in the village ignored her when she staggered by and pretended she was not there when she tried to speak to them or beg for money or food. If she became too much of a nuisance they would shoo her away, sometimes violently, threatening her with sticks. No one would touch her with his or her hands. No one in the village even spoke to her except my grandfather, who had a different view. He believed that the cause of her madness was not demons or sickness but merely sorrow, for the loss of her husband and particularly her son. My grandfather would try to be kind to her and give her something to eat, if the family had any extra food. But times were hard, and charity was a luxury they could not usually afford.



Even my grandfather had his limits. He also would not touch her, nor was his charity seen by anyone except my father. In fact, no one gave her food in public. No one seemed to give her anything. No one knew what she ate, if she ever ate; no one had been inside her house for years. Maybe she stole food from the farms, but if she did, no one complained. From what they knew, she had next to nothing left, yet still she survived.



I imagine some people in the village probably said that it was witchcraft keeping her alive, that the demons that persecuted her also kept her from passing away. I can imagine the stories, especially the ones that the children would tell to scare each other: that the madwoman wandered the streets in search of sources of sweet human flesh, for which her demons gave her an insatiable craving; that she had killed her own son after the death of her husband in a sudden and inexplicable fit of madness; that she had carved the meat off his little skeleton and roasted it in strips over her cooking fire, then made a soup from the bones. You’d better behave, parents would tell their kids, in order to scare them into obedience, or the madwoman will come and get you.



The stories made the children cruel in their fear, especially the little boys. My father was among them as they threw rocks at her and laughed when they could make her flinch. They ran after her through the streets to make fun of her, shouting rude things and shrieking with laughter. But the madwoman, if she noticed them at all, never seemed angry. In her soft, wailing voice, she would coax them with promises of money and candy, if they would only come and give her a kiss. Her breath would gently lift her hair with each syllable, but they still would never see her face. She would tell them to come to her house, where she had good things for them to eat. Her coaxes, promises, and soft wails would continue, increase, with each thrown stone and shouted insult.



I can imagine my five-year-old father’s fearful face as she sharply turned to face him and singled him out. I can imagine the outline of her lips behind the stringy, fringed curtain of black hair as they formed the sounds of my father’s name. I can imagine her voice, soft, insidious, with a hysterical lilt that gradually turned her whisper into a wail, and then a howl, and then a scream. I can imagine my father, frozen in place, as she stumbled towards him with arms outstretched, and how he finally gathered his wits with a sudden shock and scattered with the other children before it was too late.



Then they would laugh, these village children, as they looked behind them over their skinny shoulders from a safe distance. But this time, my father did not laugh. She had singled him out of the crowd of children. She had known his name.



“And then what happened?” I ask my father. At home from college, I sit with him at the kitchen table, the fading autumn light warm for a moment through the steam rising from our teacups.



But there is a lot my father doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember ever speaking to her, or trying to help her or comfort her, or interacting with her at all beyond those cruel boyish taunts. He doesn’t remember even that she had picked him out of the crowd, that she had known his name, though it’s possible that it happened. He doesn’t think about it much. The only thing he remembers with any real certainty is that first image, the madwoman in the moonlight. All the rest is speculation.



“But mom told me you did try to comfort her, that one time, when you saw her crying alone in the fields,” I say. “You went outside to play one day and you saw her there, not acting crazy but just looking sad. You wanted to help her, but you hesitated. Your mother had told you not to go near her because of her demon air. But she was crying, and you could not bear the sight of her sadness. You wanted to help. So you went over and put your hand on your shoulder, to show that you were there to comfort her.”



Maybe, my father says. But then, maybe my mother was just trying to tell a story. What else did my mother say about it?



“That the woman grabbed you,” I say. “She grabbed your wrist and her grip was like iron. You struggled with her, but she wouldn’t let go. After a long time you were able to push her down on the ground, so that her hand loosened for a moment and you could pull your arm away. Then you ran back to your house and never tried to do anything like that again. That is, you never disobeyed your parents again.”



Maybe, my father says. But my mother was probably just trying to teach me a lesson about obedience. It is a good story, but she probably made the whole thing up.



“I think she died soon after that,” I say. “That’s what I remember mom saying. That she killed herself days later.”



My father exhales heavily and shakes his head. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t think it matters. She was one of many who had lost someone, and she was not strong enough to recover. The story doesn’t make much sense anyway. How could the woman have known his name? Why would she pick him out, of all people? Why would a five-year-old boy think to comfort a madwoman? And why would any of this be related to anything at all?



*Because she chose you, I* want to tell him.* Because of a haunting. Because a dead son was summoned and you answered her call. Because you touched her, wanting to help, and she held onto you. Because madness and sorrow and spirits are contagious, and you breathed in her demon air.*



*And now you hesitate to comfort, to put a hand on a female shoulder shaking with sobs, to smooth the hair of a bent head that trembles in her tears like a black silk curtain. You are afraid that when you put your hand on my shoulder, when my bent head lifts to look at you and the black curtain of my hair parts for you to see my tears, it will be her face.*



*Yours may be story of survival, *I want to say*, but maybe mine is not.*



 



But maybe, again, I have missed my mark. It is too easy — my father would say, if this story were about anyone but him — to tell it as a ghost story. It is too easy to imagine a haunting like this. The psychology is simplistic and based on aesthetics. It is, perhaps, self-indulgent.



But I remember those summer nights and the bright moon that cast eerie shadows in my room. I remember softly calling my mother’s name in the dark and wondering if her spirit will come back to the house. I remember the sleeplessness, looking outside my window at night, watching my father kneel in the driveway beside the open car door. There is a bucket of soapy water beside him; he is washing out my bloody stain. His arm moves stiffly in and out of the car as he scrubs, hard, at the fabric of the passenger’s seat. His body, seen in pale moonlight, rocks slowly back and forth.    



 



 

I.



The writer arrives at the Venice Biennale at about 10:15am. This seems quite good by her recent personal standards—these are somewhat loose after three weeks of mojitos in Rome. But it is not good enough for a hard-hitting journalist. She imagines the Arsenale, one of two venues for the Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, swarming with reporters. Probably they have all been up since six. Probably they have fancy voice recorders and notebooks with expensive French paper. Probably they are being paid.



Everything about this undertaking seems very glamorous. But by the time an efficient Apparatchik at the press office has fixed the *Advocate* up with a press badge—she is now *The Harvard Advocate*’s official envoy to the Biennale, to Venice, to all of Europe!—a packet of promotional materials from the sponsors—Enel, Nivea, Illy—and the *Advocate*’s first tote bag of the day, it is 11am. This is horrifying. But even more horrifying is the crowd of journalists. There is none.



The *Advocate* begins to worry. Perhaps this is the wrong place. Perhaps they have squirreled the press office away next to some adjunct show or collateral event that nobody goes to. However, twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the galleries reveals that the giant warehouse is indeed the Arsenale. The Italian Pavilion, largest of the national shows, is here. So are the Chinese and Turkish and Chilean pavilions. So are individual installations by big-name artists like Pae White and William Forsythe. So is a good chunk of the main international show—Fare Mondi, “Making Worlds.”



Slowly, it dawns: nobody is here yet. Probably all the journalists are hobnobbing at elaborate breakfast meetings. Probably they are sleeping off hangovers so colossal and expensive that the Advocate’s morning troubles seem juvenile by comparison.



Finally, around 11:45am, the Beautiful People start to filter in. The *Advocate* recognizes art critics, academics, some curators. The center of press activity appears to be a temporary outdoor café wedged between the Arsenale and a canal. The *Advocate* stands in line for ten minutes to buy a four-euro can of Pepsi—official soda of the Biennale—finds a seat at one of the tasteful molded-polyurethane tables, and surveys the scene. As one might expect, she sees a lot of black. As one might not, she sees many tote bags of varying size, shape, color, strap length, and fabric quality. Glasses are common. So are blazers. So are the dropped-crotch 80s-style bottoms that the Spanish call pantalones cagados, or “shit-pants.”



The Apparatchiks, who at 11am were huddled in purposeless clumps around the building, have swung into action. They are answering questions, giving directions, requesting contact information. If the Beautiful People dress like upscale vacationers, the Apparatchiks make an effort to look like professionals. Many are wearing (black) suits. They are young. They are bright. They are well turned-out. They cannot afford to be otherwise. The Biennale pays them to be pleasant, and they need the work.



Months from now, in late September, the international art press will circulate a report that 110 Apparatchiks have gone on strike to protest poor working conditions at the Biennale. The strikers will claim that the Biennale manages them badly, offering them only three-day employment contracts and withholding overtime pay. Furthermore, they will allege, they have been laboring under these conditions since the show began.



But there is not a glimmer of conflict, present or future, on anyone’s bright face right now. These three preview days are more important than all the rest of the Biennale, because the visitors are the pillars of the art world. Curators, journalists, academics, dealers, and collectors have assembled, and the valiant Apparatchiks stand ready to shepherd them along. “Making Worlds” stretches before them all. It will dictate tastes and change reputations.



 



II.



 



This Biennale is the art world’s crown jewel, an event so spectacularly large, so tremendously expensive, so irrationally important that Venice employs a permanent squadron of bureaucrats whose sole job is to plan it; that participating nations bankrupt their arts endowments in order to stage their contributions; that a full-priced admission to the two main venues—forget the dozens of peripheral shows that dot the city—costs 18 euro per person; that the royalty of the art world brave the heights of the mosquito and tourist seasons just to pay it a visit.



What makes the show such a huge draw? Simply put, it’s very old and very well established. When the first Biennale opened in 1895, it was the only semiannual art show in Europe. Imagined as an event to honor the silver anniversary of Italy’s King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy, it wound up attracting over 200,000 people to Venice’s public gardens for a mostly tame selection—barring one “scandalous” painting of female nudes—of mostly Italian art.



Other nations began building pavilions in the garden starting in 1907. In the 1930s came the first special exhibitions to promote Italian art abroad. And, of course, the Apparatus of the Biennale was differentiating, acquiring layers of bureaucracy—Boards, Secretaries, Presidents, Special Commissions and Groups—tasked with testing the waters and currents of the European art world, keeping the show inoffensive, middlebrow, and a good couple of decades behind the artistic vanguard. Most of the art came from the 19th century until well into the 20th.



Thus was the good name of the city was preserved until 1948, when a tiny revolution, a youthful rebellion, took place within the Apparatus. A new General Secretary, Roberto Pallucchini, was in charge. The dust from the Second World War was settling. Suddenly, the organization realized it had just about missed a crucial half-century of developments in Western art. Pallucchini spent the next five shows scrambling to compile the Greatest Hits of the modernist splinter groups whose influence the Apparatus had been battling. And, just like that, the work of Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Piet Mondrian went up.



By the start of the 60s, the Apparatus had caught its audience up to where the rest of the art world was. Somewhere around this time, things shifted. The Biennale didn’t just show art anymore, some prestigious, some not; it became itself a thing of prestige. It became a tastemaker. This development has made the show much sexier, and more social, and more fashionable. But it has also overshadowed the show’s original purpose, which was to give a platform to artists.



A number of unattractive intellectual tendencies have accompanied this shift in focus. The Biennale’s curators have gained power. Supplementary critical texts have become as important to the exhibition as the art. Show concepts are abstract but not illuminating, and depend more and more on art theory. A layperson may enjoy individual works of art at every Biennale, but he or she is unlikely to find the International Show as a whole an edifying experience.



1964: Robert Rauschenberg, a central figure in the development of Pop Art, wins the Foreign Artist prize, earning the Biennale a new reputation as a pioneering show. 1968: Demonstrators protest the commercialization of art; many Biennale artists join the protestors, upending or covering their works in solidarity. 1972: The era of overarching thematics begins with the “Work and Behavior” Biennale. 1980: An entire hall is dedicated to “Postmodernism: la via novissima.” 1982: The big theme is “Art as Art.” 1984: “Art and the Arts.” 1988: “The Place of the Artist.” 1990: The controversial “Aperto” section of the Biennale is closed temporarily after the formaldehyde suspension leaks from one of Damien Hirst’s Plexiglas-enclosed cow carcasses. 1995: “Identity and Alterity.” 1999: “dAPERTutto.” 2001: The critic Harald Szeemann builds an entire show around a single work by Joseph Beuys. 2003: The critic Francesco Bonami breaks up his exhibition into a bunch of little sub-exhibitions with titles like “Clandestine” and “The Zone.” Reviews are mostly negative. 2007: The critic and academic Robert Storr’s Biennale is overtly political, offering a critique of American foreign and domestic policy. Reviews are mostly negative. 2009: Critic and academic Daniel Birnbaum (more on him later) gives us “Making Worlds.” Reviews are mostly negative.



Theme. Thematics. Thematicization.



Art as Art. Art and the Artist. The Place of the Artist. Where is the Artist? Art without Artists.



Text, context, subtext, pretext.



The Zone. The Zone. The Zone.



 



III.



 



There is an apocryphal story that, when someone asked Rodin whether he worked from his heart or his head, the sculptor replied, “I work from my balls.” There is a type of curator who also works from his (her?) balls.



But this sort of curator seems to have fallen out of favor recently, at least at the Biennale. Here, the critic-academics have been in charge for quite a while. Biennale curators emeriti Szeeman and Bonami both neatly fit the mold. Daniel Birnbaum—who has a rectorship at the Staedelschule at Frankfurt-am-Main, plus a regular gig writing scholarly essays for Artforum—does, too.



Birnbaum is not the type of curator who works from his balls. Birnbaum is the exact opposite of this type. He and the other critic-academic-curators seem to care very little about instincts, or about pleasure, whether aesthetic or otherwise. (Though Birnbaum does have an awfully cute smile, a smile the publicity people have plastered all over the Biennale’s promotional materials.) The critic-academics do appear to care about theory—a lot—and about curating an argument. Like past Biennale curators, Birnbaum has built “Making Worlds” around a theme that is both complex and vague. He has slotted into this theme some art by midcareer artists, and has padded out the show with abstruse critical statements.



The critical texts that accompany an exhibition like the Biennale lay everything out for the viewer (more or less) explicitly. And so they become the show’s default reading, the one critics use to judge its success or failure. As a consequence, the artist says less—or is forced to say less, or gets away with saying less—than he did in the days when curators had a lighter touch.



In the catalog essay, Birnbaum gives his personal vision for the show at length:





The innumerable translations of the phrase ‘making worlds’ is [sic] simply a conceptual starting point […] the impulse to move away from the understanding of this show [the Biennale] as a museum-like presentation of ready-made objects. This is hardly a revolutionary conceit for a biennale today, but we can still place particular emphasis on its character as a site for production and experimentation, and it is my hope that this exhibition will create new spaces for art to unfold beyond the expectations of the dominant institutions and the mechanisms of the art market.





This is all highly ironic. The Biennale is one of “the dominant institutions.” It drives and is driven by values and fluctuations in the art market. Nobody whose work is commercially undesirable shows at the Biennale, and nobody who shows at the Biennale is commercially undesirable.



To read the forgoing statement charitably, Birnbaum wants to show artwork that is in process, or self-constructing, or aware of its own construction. If this is the standard, then many of the works in the show meet it. If the viewer applies other, timeless standards, then only some works make the cut. In the long, thin Corderie that connects the two parts of the Arsenale, the first pieces are strong—and strongly beautiful. First, a Lygia Pape sculpture, a web of golden filaments, lit to a soft radiance; then a roomful of massive, baroque, gilt-frame mirrors, each smashed with a mallet by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Both works are striking; each echoes  Birnbaum’s theme. Pape’s work is constantly being realized by the shining light; Pistoletto’s very visibly bears the marks of its own creation.



But then comes a pile-up. There’s a trite, visually unimpressive lightbox show by Paul Chan; Aleksandra Mir’s “viewer-activated” postcards of Venice; free candy and amateurish anti-imperialist protest from Anawana Haloba; a silly, tree-sized projection of a Bonsai by Ceal Floyer.



“Such rich work! It just keeps on giving!” says a woman with an Adam’s apple.



Among other things, Birnbaum’s promises Biennale-goers “points of visual intensity” and “beautiful objects” in his catalog essay. But these are lacking in the show itself. Few of the works “pop.” And rarely does the viewer experience that vertigo one feels in the presence of truly gorgeous, or joyful, or thought-provoking art. The latter are Romantic standards, perhaps, and hopelessly time-bound; but does this make them any less desirable?



Pleasure-seekers must find what they’re looking for elsewhere at the Biennale.



 



IV.



 



If you’d like to understand the Biennale, you’d do well to read the social pages. A lot of major art glossies have them now.



The Biennale’s authority is at least as much social as it is cultural. If you are a prominent (or resourceful) critic or dealer or curator or hanger-on, you attend the Biennale’s preview. It’s like a high-end trade convention. You catch up with friends, spy on competitors, party, chat, fuck, drink.



Of course, if you really have pull, you show up before the preview, while the art is still going up. The editors of *Artforum*, the really wealthy collectors, and the major museum heads all pull this trick. Once you’ve reached the highest class-echelons of the art world, the real sign of status is the ability to skip the preview entirely while the lumpen-elite scrap for tote bags at the United Arab Emirates Pavilion.



You can’t take two steps in the Giardini without running into a bespectacled, be-shit-panted Beautiful Person holding a tote bag. After a couple of hours of careful observation, the *Advocate* develops a Theory of Swag to explain the bags’ appearance. Let’s say that, around 3:00, the Dutch pavilion has a lull. Not too many visitors are coming in. So some enterprising staffer decides to crack into the tote bags. He hauls a couple of cardboard boxes’ worth out of storage and begins to distribute them—maybe to press, along with copies of the promotional materials; maybe to all comers. Within half an hour, the bags—emblazoned with the name of the pavilion—start appearing on the shoulders of the first Beautifuls.



Suddenly, there is a rush on the pavilion. By 4:30, half the guests and a handful of Apparatchiks are clutching at Dutch swag, and the staff is getting ready to pack it in for the day, having drawn most of the preview attendees to their show.



As art has commoditized, anything associated with art has done the same. The reception at the Nordic pavilion is, unusually, selling the swag they have on offer. The most popular item—and the most intriguing, and repulsive—is a canvas bag emblazoned with quotes from Sarah Thornton’s recent, totally uncritical pop-sociological study *Seven Days in the Art World*. The bag’s designer has apparently culled from the book all references to sex acts—plus quotes that have the word “fuck” in them—and screen-printed them on the canvas.



The Nordic and Danish joint exhibition is a crowd favorite, at times so packed that it’s difficult to get into one or the other building. The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have transformed the pavilions into the homes of two fictional collectors. The Nordic Pavilion “belongs” to the mysterious Mr. B, an ethusiast of (often homoerotic) contemporary art. Handsome young actors playing hustlers lounge around on couches and sip cocktails while the Beautifuls view Mr. B’s collection. The show is quite witty, if gimmicky. It pokes fun at collector culture: at mixed motives for buying art, at the eccentricities of personal taste, at the signification of social status in the art world. Elmgreen and Dragset clearly have mixed feelings towards their buyers, with whom they are locked in a symbiotic relationship.



You could look at how popular these two pavilions are and say that the Beautifuls, as a group, have a good sense of humor. And maybe this is true. But isn’t it funny, after all, that their favorite show at the Biennale is all about them?



 



V.



 



The *Advocate* is squeezed into line at the Biennale store with a shrink-wrapped copy of the show’s two-volume catalogue when she feels something brush the back of her neck. She ignores it. The something brushes her again. She turns around. Behind her is a toddler with corkscrew curls. The *Advocate* smiles at him as he thwacks her repeatedly and vigorously on the shoulder with his little fist.



“I’m sorry,” says the man holding the toddler. He is a portly Italian with a long, dark ponytail and crinkly eyes. He is not wearing a blazer, round glasses, or shit-pants. In the crook of his other arm, he too is holding a shrink-wrapped catalog.



The *Advocate* likes toddlers. “Don’t worry about it.” The toddler delivers a left hook to the side of her neck.



“Sorry, sorry.” The man smiles apologetically at the *Advocate* and then coos something at the toddler in Italian.



“Sorry!” says his wife, who is big and soft just like he is. All three of them are wearing bright clothes, felts and velvets, newsboy caps and colorful, rubberized tennis shoes. They look like characters from a children’s book.



“It’s okay!” chirps the *Advocate*. The toddler swings wildly at the air.



The sorries and the cooing and the apologetic smiles continue until the *Advocate* and her new friends make it to the front of the line. The Italian-speaking clerk finishes with her last customer and waves the family over.



They begin an involved conversation. The *Advocate*, who knows only rudimentary Italian, makes out the following:



   * **Is there any way to get one without paying?* asks the man.



   *   **I’m sorry*, says the clerk. *We can only offer a discount.*



  *    **But I have work in the show.*



* We’re selling the catalogs here, not giving them away.*



The *Advocate* loses the train of the conversation for several seconds. Then the Apparatchik trots off. The artist stands at the counter, waiting. He waits for two, three, four minutes. All around him, the dealers and journalists and curators and academics are shopping. They contemplate books, and pencils, and CDs, and t-shirts that say “Art Loves You,” and posters, and magnets, and tote bags—really nice ones—and toys for their kids, and pins, and housewares, and limited edition collectible trinkets—and they do it with the same look of half-glazed sobriety that they use when looking at the art in the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It’s all the same.



The first Apparatchik returns with a second Apparatchik.



  *   **You might be able to get one through the national pavilion, but here we’re selling them.*



* You can contact the office directly and see if there’s any way to get one. Sorry.*



*T**hat’s all right*, says the artist, and pulls out his wallet. All parties smile apologetically. The artist pays for his catalog and then signals his wife that they ought to go.



 



VI.



 



There is something in the world that allows the Beautiful People to press out weaker but more honest voices. Often these voices are the voices of the artists.



She leaves the Biennale, has dinner, and goes to bed.



But, later that night, something causes her to put her day clothes back on, to slip back out of her hotel and into the quiet dark. She is tired, and her calves ache, but she takes a vaporetto to the main island of Venice. She has not done enough, or seen enough, to justify going to bed.



She gets off at the Arsenale—it’s the force of the day’s habits—and starts walking, after a moment’s hesitation, toward St. Mark’s Square. Bands of tourists pass her in both directions. They seem unusually light and graceful, as people on vacation sometimes do: all talking and laughing gracefully, all clutching each other’s arms lightly, all escorts and charges, all dignified.



Seawater washes onto the promenade at points, and the *Advocate* has to pick her way to St. Mark’s more and more carefully. Little puddles become great sloshing mouths of canal water. They get wider and wider until the *Advocate* can barely jump them.



And she comes to St. Mark’s—where the Beautiful People stay; where they drink their Bellinis, at Harry’s Bar and at the bar in the Cipriani Hotel; where, after-hours, they promenade their expensive linen suits and asymmetrical gowns and round horn-rimmed professor glasses and their shit-pants, and their attitude; where they sip espresso and settle deals and laugh clubbily at each other’s jokes—and the entire place is flooded knee-deep.



The water doesn’t seem to be flowing in or flowing out, but standing, standing deep enough to ruin silk Louboutin pumps and Lanvin suits and Wolford tights. Deep enough to strand all the Beautifuls in their expensive St. Mark’s hotel rooms, while the tourists—and the *Advocate*, and the artist from the shop, and his wife and kid, and all the less fortunate—wheel free in the night air.



The stars in the sky shine down on the water to create a second, inverted sky. The *Advocate* catches the next vaporetto back to her hotel and goes to sleep.