Venice Biennale: "every idea but one": the ur-biennial of contemporary art, currently under way in Italy's Most Serene City, is a gargantuan affair whose sheer bulk obscures the few strong works on view. The menu is huge, but there's not much nourishment - Critical Essay

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Jana Sterbak's mildly clever six-screen projection, From Here to There in Canada's pavilion doesn't really reward prolonged viewing once you realize that the camera's nervous aim and unusually low point of view is attributable to its having been positioned on the head of a small dog. It's better to trade multichannel for multipanel with the painters Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexsander Vinogradov in the Russian pavilion. The duo conflate the absurdly positive spirit of Socialist Realism with the kitschy commercial energy of the new capitalist Russia (James Rosenquist meets Maxfield Parrish) in a sugary underwater paean to fun, family, music, Christmas and cheesecake.

Representing France, Jean-Marc Bustamante conjures a "Pavilion of the Amazons," which centers on four large color photographs of solitary, unsmiling young women standing in resolutely unpicturesque landscapes. There are two sleek sculptures and some suave serigraphs on glass, but the only works with real staying power are throe green-tinted views of adolescents (club kids? mall rats?) derived from Internet images. With comparable polish, Germany is showing two dozen Candida Hofer interiors, a few dating back to 1997, the most recent shot this year in Rome and Venice. Always dignified if by now familiar, the monumental photographs seem to have been chosen for their ability to hug the wail and make way for the pavilion's little delight, Martin Kippenberger's METRO-Net World Connection, Ventilation Shaft. Part of an international subway-themed project lung planned by the artist, who died in 1997, the work consists of a grating inserted into the pavilion floor. Every few minutes, you hear the approach, arrival and departure of a train, accompanied by a draft which stages up through the vent. The construction of Kippenberger's piece is the subject of one of Hofer's latest prints.

In the Australian pavilion, Patricia Piccinini's diminutive "trans-species" figures deliver a gentle jolt. The sculptures and aquatic birth video of "We Are Family" (surely the title is meant to be said with the syncopation of the eponymous 1979 hit by Sister Sledge) suggest that a barrier no thicker than a strand of chromosomes separates the rubbery, shar-pei-hided beings from the human children they encounter. Family of another sort is portrayed in the video from Emanuelle Antille's four-season "Angel's Camp" project in the Swiss pavilion. The principal projection features a creekside summer idyll in which a motley crew of free spirits engage in affectionate roughhousing, napping, singing and bashing in the head of a kitten with a rock.

Issues of a more global community preoccupy the artists in the Dutch pavilion, only two of whom are native born. They've come together under the somewhat smirky title "We Are The World," invoking the Michael Jackson/Lionel Ritchie song which helped raise money to fight famine in Africa in the 1980s and now seems a remote and quaint gesture. With a mock-up of a low-wage workshop on the U.S.-Mexico border, Carlos Amorales invites visitors to make a pair of crimson "Flames" brand boots ("favored by the new generation of performance artists"). The less motivated can sample the spicy cocktails dispensed at Ginger Bar, the work of the Benin-born Meschac Gaba.