Visual arts review: Much of it's like the Wizard of Oz – the insignificant with a megaphone masquerading as the mighty…

Published on Monday 8 June 2009 19:08

THE Venice Biennale is the world's biggest art event. It used to be confined to the national pavilions in the main Giardini. Then a big curated show was added in what was the Italian Pavilion, the biggest building on the site and now a permanent gallery. There is now a second major curated show in the Arsenale, the wonderful former dockyard of the Venetian navy that stretches for almost a mile behind the Giardini.

The Italian Pavilion itself along with several other national pavilions are now in the Arsenale too.

When you add to all this the other national events and the innumerable exhibitions, official and unofficial, that are spread across Venice and the islands of the lagoon, the whole thing is on a scale to match the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe combined. I had just 48 hours to take in as much as I could.

In the Giardini, Bruce Naumann is America's choice. There are neon signs alternating the virtues and the deadly sins on the outside. Inside is sculpture: disembodied heads and hands. They are unexciting, but are treated reverentially.

In the French Pavilion, Claude Lvque has created a brightly lit prison, but beyond the bars black flags blow in a captured wind, in darkness and in a roaring din. The Spanish are presenting Miquel Barcel, a distinguished abstract painter. Liam Gillick has filled the German pavilion with unfinished kitchen units and a single stuffed cat. The point seems to be that it is a Nazi building and the Nazis introduced the fitted kitchen to the world.

Like so much in the Biennale, though, it is like the ending of the Wizard of Oz: the insignificant with a megaphone masquerading as the mighty. By far the best national pavilion is actually two, the Nordic (Norway, Sweden and Finland) and Danish Pavilions joined together.

Some 30 artists led by Elmgreen and Dragset have collaborated to create a collective vision of domestic dystopia rotting from within. The pavilions have become the fully furnished and inhabited houses of two art collectors. One of them appears drowned in his swimming pool outside.

Both "houses" are for sale, a wry comment on the commercialism always just beneath the surface of the Biennale. Full of wonderful subversive detail this is a brilliantly sustained piece of social satire.

The curated exhibition in the former Italian Pavilion is unmemorable, except perhaps for a huge spider's web by Tomas Saraceno that entirely fills the biggest space in the building. You have to find your way through its ramifying elastic mesh to get in.

In the Arsenale, at the entry to the 1000 ft long Corderie, the rope works, there is a singularly beautiful installation of light and wires by Brazilian Lygia Pape, though as she died five years ago, it is not exactly contemporary. Further on, Italian veteran Michelangelo Pistoletto has lined the walls with mirrors. These were all intact the first day. Next day half of them were smashed. I missed a happening.

Richard Wentworth suspends walking sticks against a huge white wall, the shadow of Magritte. Sade for Sade's sake by Paul Chan begins as a decorous abstract projection then suddenly turns into a shadow puppet display of figures doing rude things – a blue movie from the prehistory of film. In a series of rooms, Cildo Meireles walks us through the spectrum to give an experience of pure colour. The second part of the Arsenale is now dedicated to additional national pavilions. In the Chilean Pavilion Ivan Navarro's Bed is a vertiginous nightmare, the word Bed in neon disappearing into a bottomless well in an infinite recession of mirrors. The Arabs have come for the first time. The United Arab Emirates has a massive display – money talks – but with very little art and a lot of self-advertisement.

Bizarrely, Abu Dhabi has taken a separate space for an even vaster piece of self-publicity, including images of smiling Arab families in shiny shopping malls, free of all irony and quite weird.

This is the centenary of the Futurist Manifesto and the Italian Pavilion is dedicated to a Homage to Marinetti. This includes paintings by Sandro Chia, Luca Pignatelli, David Nido and others, sculpture by Araon Demetz, reversed film to create a vision of collapsing fireworks called the Party's Over by Elisa Sighicelli and, contradicting her message, a spectacular neon dance by Marco Lodola. None of it has any obvious bearing on Marinetti or Futurism, but it does testify impressively to the vitality of Italian contemporary art.

So what about the British Pavilion? Steve McQueen is in residence this year. As his contribution McQueen has made a film of the Biennale Gardens, the Giardini, in winter when they are deserted.

Projected on a split screen, the camera is mostly still, all the movement comes from the rain, a group of lanky dogs (hired-in canine actors) who wander through the picture, the occasional bug or spider, an old lady with a shopping basket on wheels who wanders past and two gay men who circle circumspectly in the dark before finally embracing. It is nice enough, but really very ordinary. Yet, like the Wizard of Oz again, its feeble message is projected with deafening pomp and ceremony. You have to go at a set time and sit on banked seats through the full tedious half hour as though it was actually cinema. It is not. It is an overrated artist's film.

How did we end up with this tame, even slightly naive art work as representing the very best of British art, of Great Britain indeed as that is the title they use? The problem is nobody would dare question the artist's autonomy or the suitabilty of what he has done. Whatever he produces, we are supposed to sit back in awe and wonder, not because of what it is, but because he has produced it. We see the artist, not the art. It is the wrong way around and licensed self-indulgence: a demonstration of the symbiotic collusion of artistic self-importance and the art world deference that feeds it, that needs it perhaps, though don't confuse deference with humility.

The powers claimed by priests are simply a projection of the powers they attribute to the gods they claim to serve. The whole self-referential power structure and economy of contemporary art has been built up around this collusion. As well as the Scottish show that I wrote about on Friday, the other British shows are Northern Ireland and Wales. Northern Ireland is represented by Susan McWilliams. She makes films about telepathy, extrasensory perception and parapsychology. They might be mildly interesting as documentaries if she were less determined to make them into art.

The Welsh have fielded John Cale. He is not an artist, but as he is a veteran of the legendary Sixties group, the Velvet Underground, I made the trek out to the Welsh Pavilion with some curiosity.

More film, this time there were five screens at odd angles, but instead of McQueen's pseudo-cinema, just four chairs and a concrete floor. By halfway through the hour-long performance, the four chairs were enough to accommodate the dwindling audience.

The screens alternated randomly: rain, slate, coal and snow and then Cale himself, close-up in a woolly hat, peching up a hill. Then darkness while very gradually music evolved from a few initial random sounds.

When pictures returned, they were mostly concerned with the interior of a derelict house – his former home?

An open window suggested the merest hint of opportunity, but any thought of relief and that it might all open up was dispelled by the final images of Cale strapped to a board undergoing some kind of water torture. Glum stuff. The only message seemed to be, "I was born Welsh. Thank God I escaped!"