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

The Far Pavilions

It's been years since countries began seeking out spaces beyond the Giardini to mount Biennale exhibitions, but the off-site pavilions' stock soared when Luxemburg was singled out as the best national presentation. A visual artist and a cellist by training,

Su-Mei Tse was born in Luxemburg of Chinese-British descent. Her sequential presentation of six pieces in a show caned "[e:r] conditionne" (Air-conditioned) is about music and silence, forbearance and marking time. There is a cream-colored soundproofed room, one dedicated to Penelope--the patient wife of Odysseus--with a sitting area and ball of yarn, and another room with a digital projection of 20 or so Paris sanitation workers sweeping the desert, literally a herculean task that evokes the Augean Stables in its mythic impossibility. Three wall-mounted hour-glasses mechanically invert when the sand is exhausted, their respective durations established by the pulses and breathing rhythms of the artist's friends. A second projection has the artist playing a mournful cello in an electronically enhanced Alpine landscape.

The cool, cumulative progression of Tse's installation is countered by the full-tilt delight of Falling Garden, a lacy cascade of plants, seeds and crystals created by Gerda Steiner & Jorg Lenzlinger in the church of San Stae, which is again serving as an auxiliary Swiss pavilion. More earthbound, though just as suited to its site, Pedro Cabrita Reis's Longer Journeys angles down one of the brick-walled former granaries on the Giudecca where Portugal has its pavilion this year. The two-level, open-sided, modular-seeming structure with fluorescent tubes initially suggests a Judd/Flavin hybrid, but the gestural paint brushed over wood and lights alike, the hinged doom that aren't flush with the threshhold level and the holes drilled for absent hardware together add up to a disturbingly unsuitable attempt at shelter. Reis is also the author of an "Interlude" in the Giardini, an unwelcoming, fluorescent-lined little structure that vibrates with the hum of air-conditioning.

"Welcome" is precisely the message of Katie Holten's Laboratorio della Vigna in the Scuola di San Pasquale near the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Working closely with neighborhood groups in the months leading up to the Biennale, she has turned the Irish pavilion into a place for community gatherings, with a first-floor reading room stocked with pamphlets and refreshments, and an upstairs space for meetings and performances, which will continue throughout the summer.

Among the nations and not-quite-nations sponsoring pavilions under the umbrella of "Extra 50," the strongest are debutante Scotland and five-time veteran Taiwan. Besides preview performances and Internet

art, Scotland's "Zenomap" project houses three artists in the Palazzo Giustinian-Lolin near the Accademia Bridge. Claire Barclay and Jim Lambie responded to the brocade walls and architectural detailing of the 17th-century interiors, Barclay with sensitively placed abstract objects and fabric stretched on a wooden frame, Lambie with fragments of beveled mirror and glossily painted molding-like elements that sit on snazzy fields of zigzagging tape. Simon Starling's Island for Weeds (Prototype), ostensibly a project for Loch Lomond, is an irrigated model of a proposed environment for confining the Rhododendron ponticum, which was introduced into Britain in 1756 only to "escape" from gardens and overrun the native landscape.