文章来自artforum.com





左: 策展人 Alison Gingeras和艺术家Rob Pruitt 及 Jonathan Horowitz. 右: Miuccia Prada.



ANYONE VISITING VENICE will tell you that La Serenissima is a hypnotic place. That ANYONE访问威尼斯将会告诉你La Serenissima是个令人催眠的地方，那可能是因为那儿当地人的平均年龄在50左右，并且只有在被迫的情况下才愿意尝试改变。别介意开游艇的司机向你炫耀他的肌肉，这儿的生活的节奏是如此缓慢以至于没有什么利益驱使你变得焦急。无休止的如沙丁鱼般的小艇会把你带到那里。

当地的风俗没有向你解释为何第53届威尼斯双年展让当代艺术给人带来如昏睡的体验。排在美国馆、法国馆、罗马尼亚馆、丹麦馆和北欧馆门口的长队在上周预览会的时候就已经很长。许多带老狗在街上巡逻的人不得不像在Giardini 为Steve McQueen在英国馆的电影限制访问的人数做的一样清除为附属项目做的签名邀请。我自己的访问始于上周二，参与了佩吉古根海姆美术馆在其露台上举办的150人的午宴。







左: 经销商Andrew Freiser, 艺术家 John Wesley, 经销商Jessica Fredericks. 右: 艺术家 Cerith Wyn Evans.



Tables here were like islands in the lagoon, only divided by affiliation instead of water––half Korean, half American. As Joo shepherded Yang through a sunny crowd, New Museum–identified guests like Richard Flood, Lisa Phillips, and Stephanie French sat near one another while Studio Museum chief Thelma Golden shared a table with her London-based fashion-designer husband, Duro Olowu, artists Glenn Ligon and Isaac Julien, and dealer Shaun Caley Regen.

When this started feeling too much like home, I hopped a boat to Daniel Birnbaum’s “Making Worlds” and was still outside the cavernous Arsenale section when I spotted Robert Storr, director of the 52nd Biennale, sitting at a café beside artist Joan Jonas, with whom he was about to give a talk. Massimiliano Gioni picked the same spot to meet Nathalie Djurberg for their talk a bit later. It was tempting to stay and keep trading views on the art, but not five minutes into the exhibition hall I found a Stetson-topped Jeffrey Deitch promoting Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things, an installation on a distant lawn.





左：艺术家 Joan Jonas 和策展人Rob Storr. 右: 编辑 Tina Brown.



Whitney curator Shamim Momin was lounging among friends on a hillock watching Kunsthalle Zurich director Beatrix Ruf pose for photographs at each of July’s sculptures, white cast-fiberglass adaptations of the sort of carnival cutouts where people put their heads on painted outsize bodies and have their pictures taken. July’s versions have captions like THIS IS NOT THE FIRST HOLE MY FINGER HAS BEEN IN.

“I make films and write stories,” July said, “but this way people can come and take their pictures with my work and send it around the world on the Internet. Isn’t that great?” Possibly, but mostly because it was less full of itself than the “private” reception for several hundred inaugurating the seventeenth-century customs house known as the Punta della Dogana, one of two semiprivate museums showing off François Pinault’s empire of trophy art in Venice. 







左： 新当代艺术馆馆长Massimiliano Gioni和艺术家Nathalie Djurberg及汉斯伯格. 右: 策展人 Francesco Bonami.



The building, ingeniously renovated as an art space by architect Tadao Ando, sits on the point of an island facing the Bay of San Marco, opposite the celebrity-burdened hotel, Il Palazzo. The sunset event was really just a name-dropping opportunity that attracted everyone of importance in Pinault’s several companies, which include Louis Vuitton and Christie’s. So Naomi Campbell was probably required to be there, as was Marc Jacobs, a few Fendis, Amy Cappellazzo, and other high-ranking employees who sipped prosecco and took hits of a scrumptious seafood risotto before swanning into the building to see “Mapping the Studio,” a two-part exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami. (The better half is in Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi, a few sweaty vaporetto stops up the Grand Canal.)

“This is like an evening sale at Christie’s,” observed Gavin Brown, gazing at a crowd that included the former empress of Iran Farah Diba, Stella McCartney, Lord and Lady Linley, and playwright John Guare with American Academy in Rome president Adele Chatfield-Taylor. American collectors joined Italian, French, and the odd Russian and every dealer Pinault had ever overpaid for an artwork: Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, Lorcan O’Neill, Monika Spruth, Massimo De Carlo, Eva Presenhuber, Anton Kern, and Carol Greene, among others.





左：经销商 Larry Gagosian和 Shala Monroque. 右: 策展人Germano Celant.



Filling out the mostly Euro business crowd were several artists whose works were on view: Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Rachel Harrison, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Matthew Day Jackson, and Rudolf Stingel, all gussied up and loving it. The exception was Gingeras, who looked great but had to make sweet small talk to all the better-heeled guests. “I am not having a good time!” she exclaimed. “And you can quote me.”

Inside, under the original wooden beams of cathedral-height ceilings, and between new marblelike concrete walls, big works by big-name artists awaited guests who kept praising the building. The piece that attracted the most admirers, especially among the male museum guards, was the ten-foot-tall nude boy by Charles Ray that is now the Dogana’s figurehead, facing the harbor while holding aloft, between two fingers, not a beacon but a white frog, by the tail. The symbolism was lost on no one.






左: 经销商 Lisa Spellman. 右: Palazzo Grassi现场.


Hopping a friend’s water taxi across the canal, I skipped up the gold steps of the Hotel Monaco lobby to a ballroom where the PaceWildenstein Glimchers, Arne and Marc, were hosting a party for Lucas Samaras with the Benetton Group’s Alessandro Benetton and the Daily Beast’s Tina Brown, but I could stay only long enough to pick up a custom tote bag, the first of at least a dozen I collected on this trip––this was really the tote-bag biennial––before I had to hightail it to the Teatro Goldoni to catch the gala premiere of No Night No Day, an “abstract opera” by Cerith Wyn Evans and Florian Hecker.

Opera is a misnomer. There were no performers, and the music was mostly of the Cagean whoopee-cushion variety, but by the end of the fifty-minute work, which featured slowly moving dark blobs projected on a large white screen, it became quite tranquilizing. “This was about banishing perfume commercials from our lives,” the tuxedoed Wyn Evans told me when the afterparty spilled into the street. One patron, standing on the theater steps, proclaimed the piece “the most god-awful rubbish,” while another asked whether it wasn’t “the best thing you ever saw.” As commissioning sponsor Francesca von Habsburg led guests like Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramovic, Alanna Heiss, and Angela Bulloch off to dinner, I headed for the Rialto bridge, where a water taxi was waiting to take my second pair of eyes and me to the Island of Certosa, a glorious nature preserve twenty minutes away, where Irish artist John Gerrard was giving a dinner within the ruined walls of a twelfth-century cloister.





左：艺术家Tony Conrad. 右： 艺术家 Miranda July 和 Performa创始人RoseLee Goldberg.


Today, Certosa is where Venetians build yachts and store them in winter. But this time of year, wild goats and rabbits roam through its woodlands and over its beaches––an astonishing sight in this archipelago of sinking islands unable to grow a single tree. It was easy to forget where we were, even among 120 multinational guests who came to see Gerrard’s work for the Biennale, Animated Scene, installed on three screens in a warehouse by the dock. In each animation, which takes Gerrard two years to build from archival photographs, a camera orbits a different preindustrial landscape; the work will run in real time for the duration of the Biennale, passing from day to night and season to season.

But why stop for the night when you can beg for a drink on the terrace of the Bauer Hotel, scene of nightly art-world revelries? This is where Paula Cooper can safely hold down a bottle-strewn table with Sophie Calle, Sadie Coles, and Stefan Kalmar, where artist-friendly London restaurateurs Fergus and Margot Henderson can talk about the Leicester Square Hotel they will open next year, and where Aurel Scheibler can grab the ear of Beatrix Ruf. This is the sort of open party where art-world alliances really form or divide in a nocturnal dance of power that no animation can equal.




左： 希腊馆策展人Matthew Higgs 和艺术家Tomma Abts. 右: 艺术家 Peter Fischli.


I went to bed wondering what the next day could bring. I needn’t have worried. It started with a song, literally––German lieder performed by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, whom Luhring Augustine was feting with a lunch in a soaring dining room at the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel. For his exhibition in the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa, Kjartansson is making paintings of his collaborator, performance artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson, accompanied by live and recorded music (the DJs that night were Sigur Ros). You can always tell whether an artist is on the rise by the collectors at his or her lunch in Venice. This one included Maja Hoffman, Alan Hergott, and Beth Rudin DeWoody––an impressive crew of primary-market connoisseurs who buy what they like and like what they buy. When dessert came around, you could see Kjartansson’s prices going up.

That occasioned a trip to the Giardini, but there was no time to relax, not with the opening of the Prada Foundation’s John Wesley retrospective beckoning from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. There the maverick octogenarian artist held court with his stalwart New York dealers Jessica Fredericks and Andrew Freiser. Frankly, Wesley’s deadpan-naughty, pink-and-blue, Blondie-style cartoon paintings never made more sense than they do here, the last place anyone would ever expect to find such two-cents-plain American art. In fact, Venice was beginning to feel like an American colony until I got back to my hotel in the Dursoduro and discovered that Toby Webster’s Modern Institute was hosting a dinner there for Glaswegian artist Martin Boyce, with dealers Tanya Bonakdar, Eva Presenhuber, and Jorg Johnen.





左： 策展人Eungie Joo 和艺术家Haegue Yang. 右: 艺术家John Gerrard.


Johnen was ailing, which left a couple seats free at his table, beside Afterall’s Dieter Roelstraete and his wife, Monika Szewczyk, publications chief at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Contemporary Art Center. Venice is like that. A chance encounter with T Magazine’s Stefano Tonchi, walking arm in arm with Francesco Vezzoli and L’Uomo Vogue cover girl Cindy Sherman, helped me crash Gucci’s disco party at Palazzo Grassi, where McQueen had lost his mother in the enormous crush and Rob Pruitt handed out tote bags with Barbara Kruger’s I SHOP THEREFORE I AM image amended to read I SHOPLIFT THEREFORE I AM. He hoped she wouldn’t mind. “It’s an homage,” he said. “I’m not trying to rip her off.” I looked up at the frieze of Piotr Uklanski’s Hollywood Nazi headshots, at his Saturday Night Fever dance floor lighting up the palazzo atrium, and thought: Of course you’re not ripping her off. It’s Venice, and this is the life. Who ever really owns it?


— Linda Yablonsky







左: 艺术家Marina Abramovic 和经销商Lawrence Luhring. 右: 艺术家Cindy Sherman.






左：艺术家 Matthew Day Jackson. 右: 经销商Tanya Bonakdar和Richard Edwards.






左： 艺术家Francesco Vezzoli和Frieze 创始人 Matthew Slotover. 右：经销商 Jeffrey Deitch.





 

左：艺术家 Rudolf Stingel. 右: 经销商 Roland Augustine和艺术家Ragnar Kjartansson.





 

左：艺术家Doug Aitken和303 Gallery总监Mari Spirito. 右: 收藏家Doug Cramer和Adam Lindemann





 

左： 沃克艺术中心馆长Peter Eleey和卡内基博物馆馆长 Lynn Zelevansky. 右: 策展人 Beatrix Ruf.




 

左: Paula Cooper总监Steven Henry 和经销商Paula Cooper. 右: 经销商 Anton Kern.