Patience paid off most notably at the humble Canadian Pavilion, a spiral, tree-house-like wood-and-steel hut tucked in the corner of the gardens, just beyond the pompous stairs and columns of the G-8 temples to Germany, Great Britain and France. In groups of 17, we were escorted inside the tiny pavilion, then told to enter the wider, taller end of a large wooden box. In the semi-darkness, we took our seats in the two back rows of what appeared to be an empty, old-fashioned movie theater, complete with balconies, red velvet seats, and a movie screen framed by wooden molding. As part of their experiential installation "The Paradise Institute," (www.theparadiseinstitute.com) collaborative artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller constructed this miniature theater in perspective so as to trick the audience into believing themselves inside a life-size cinema. Sound played similar tricks on our ears once we put on the headphones attached to the seats. Muffled voices whispered "excuse me" and "thank you," as bodies shuffled by and took their last-minute seats. A cell phone beeped a tune, a purse was unzipped behind my head, and a woman’s voice responded in Italian, saying she couldn’t talk because she was in a movie theater. Another woman (the voice of Cardiff) chatted with her date as she munched on popcorn next to me. But I couldn’t smell any popcorn or melted butter, and when I looked around, I saw only people, like me, wearing headphones, staring at the screen, listening, watching, trying to distinguish between reality and Memorex. Filling the theater with phantom spectators, these convincing surround sounds, which were recorded binaurally (i.e., by using miniature-microphones placed in the ears of a human head or dummy) for that extra dose of hyper-reality, mingled with those of the character in the 12-minute digital film playing simultaneously on the tiny screen. With its minimalist story line, this black-and-white WWII film noir, complete with Marlene Dietrich cabaret songs, allusions to torture, footsteps, and ominous shadows in dark alleys, was just enough to suggest the experience, both intimate and shared, of watching a movie, without turning us into passive spectators.

With a subtlety and sophistication that is all too rare at this Biennale (where sound and video are as omnipresent as pigeon turd), Cardiff and Miller guide participants on a multi-layered perceptive journey during which we are invited to question our collective experiences of the cinema while simultaneously creating our own personal theaters of illusion, inspired by what we hear, see, and remember. If the line in front of the Canadian pavilion hadn’t been so long, I would have gone back to "The Paradise Institute" again and again. Though considering the vivid imprint it left on my memory, once was enough. (Could repeats be partly responsible for the dulling (dumbing)-down of perception and, subsequently, of memory?) Instead, I took my free drink ticket out to the garden in back, sat, and watched as the blues and pinks of the setting sun on the lagoon worked their own seductive magic. Soon another voice began whispering insistently in my ear, something about all the art I had yet to see, hear, and do in Venice. Against the counsel of my weary feet and legs, I grabbed my catalogue-laden tote bag and set off for exhibition space number two: the Arsenale.

A 15-minute stroll through the Venetian side streets (the only sign of actual Venetians was to be found in their clothes blowing dry in the breezy sunshine above) brought me from the pavilions to the massive, cavernous spaces of the Arsenale, a recently renovated cluster of brick warehouses and shipyards that were christened the new basilicas of the Biennale at the last exhibition in 1999. Together with the sheer size of the buildings, the variety of works inside do more than hint at how the tiny word "art" has been stretched into an all-encompassing big top. Unlike the garden pavilions, which show off the work of one or two artists from each country, the Arsenale is more like a global group show, one which curator Harold Szeemann has labeled—for the sheer impossibility of finding a more unifying theme in this circus of feathers, steel, photographs, plastic, poetry and virtual reels of video—the Plateau of Humankind.




Only a few works successfully filled the massive emptiness of the Arsenale architecture while simultaneously appealing to media-weary eyes and imaginations. Australian Ron Mueck’s 30-foot-tall, incredibly life-like sculpture of a young boy with eyes of cautious innocence, crouching in the enormous atrium, could be the David of the new Millennium. Established and highly-funded in contrast to most of the artists here, Richard Serra proves himself once again as the master of mass with his twin spirals of steel, whose interior curves and angles make you giddy with weightlessness. And the Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto simply delights the senses with his enormous hanging udder sewn out of white netting, teats rubbed with the same exotic Indian spices that were once traded on the docks outside. Though huge and suggestive, these sculptures are paradoxically too one-dimensional (and uniquely personal) to fit in with the multi-media trend pulsating through the exhibition as a whole.

It may take a month to really see and understand all the artwork on exhibit here. But a few minutes on the Biennale’s plateau are enough to see that despite the consciousness-raising motives of today’s "social-impact art," the museum has been transformed into a multiplex sound-and-image show, a glittery amusement park for the cultured masses.