At ten in the morning on the first press day of the Venice Biennale, the gates of the Arsenale, the former industrial ship-building facility for this coastal city and now the main venue for its international art fair, are opened to a stampede of press corps, who race each other through a labyrinth of brick for press passes, which, secured tightly to the lapel, mean a week of unfettered access and shwag. Once lapelled up, these journos pack into a dim old theater (though everything is old in Venice*) to hear diplomatic niceties first, and then this burner by Paolo Baratta, president of the Biennale:

“We are great friends with the Chinese. [a pause that implies 'but'] I have written a letter to the ambassador of China in Italy saying how wonderful it would be if we could have happy news about Ai Weiwei.”

Following tepid applause, Baratta thanks his sponsors, notably Swatch**. Bice Curringer, editor of Parkett magazine and curator of this year’s international group show, ILLUMInations, gives a well-informed and professional talk about her show. In true art-talk style, she's chosen a theme malleable enough to “work” the same theory over any one piece in this ambitious show, and with multiple reference-points, to boot: medieval illuminated manuscripts, the Venetian painter Tintoretto’s light-filled palate, a branch of Persian philosophy called Illuminationism, and Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.

The conference ends, and, joined by more reporters who are fresh out of bed, having just arrived by water-taxi through the “back door” of the fortress, the mass of tier II invitees, of which I am a part (tier I saw the Biennale yesterday), step into the 10,000-square-meter show to try and make sense of the perfectly exhaustive overview of what global contemporary art has been up to for this past two years.

Putting on an exhibition this ambitious can only displease critics, and to her credit, Curringer has damage-controlled the show with a balanced roster. She's chosen artists from all around the globe, kept the M:F ratio in check, and has included young artists, a great many of them still without a big museum show under their belts.

But while the curator of the group exhibition each year can only aspire, at best, to achieve a conscientious survey of what’s “hot” in the global art world of late (since many of the artists here have made recent, repeated appearances in group shows globally, e.g., Carol Bove, Elad Lassry, Rashid Johnson), seeing them again in the Arsenale so soon makes ILLUMInations feel like a “greatest hits” record, at least to those who keep even the laziest of eyes on the art world***.

Just like the other survey shows it seems to draw direct inspiration from, ILLUMInations over-priveledges fun-house, immersive sculptural installations (there are a handful of these) as well as works with a retro-conceptualist aesthetic (a friend of mine’s phrase) that fetishizes microfiche and the archive for its own sake. All this at the expense of perhaps more performative or unstructured works that don’t, as another friend of mine says, “smell” like art. Deja-vu this strong can only compel a visitor to barrel through, head in her shell, until she literally bumps into something that might give her pause. For this turtle, the moment came while dumping 10kg of public relations into a trash can at the end of the show, on a gravel “in-between” space that didn’t even seem to be part of the exhibition, when she looked up and recognized that the beat-up disposal unit she was hovering over was from New York City, had a plaque above it, and was one of ten other municipal trash cans (each from a different city) installed by the Swedish conceptual artist Klara Liden. Klara Liden, "Untitled, (Trashcan)” 2011.

Some other great works included in Illuminations:

“The Caged Law of the Bird the Hand of the Land” (2011) by Ida Ekblad. Hand-made ceramic plaques posed on a generic tombstone with a poem about the sea inscribed, three small wrought iron cages, a large white wrought iron gate, and a beautiful boat, made from tattered flotsam, stuck in an aquarium, synthesize a ready-made aesthetic with handicraft, to create a sensible composition that is literary and romantic, but in its humble hand-made aesthetic, reminiscent of Franz West, also endearingly funny.

“Your Present Time Orientation,” (2011) Ryan Gander Combining material and conceptual methodology in one, the artist can squeeze the description of this work into the panel that usually lists the materials: “The compression of several Mondrian (and other modernist composition paintings) paintings separated into their solid colours and re-represented by painting a vast amount of differing shaped and sized cheap commercial available coloured glass, clip frames, exhibited casually leaned against the wall as a random abstraction.”

Roman Ondak’s “Time Capsule” (shown above) and “Stampede” (both 2011) “Time Capsule” is a reconstruction of a recent event in history that we have all too soon forgotten by now: a scaled model of the Fénix 2, the vessel built by NASA engineers to rescue the coal-miners trapped in the San Jose gold and copper mine in Chile of last year. After being herded down a dark walkway, viewers looking for the next work of art will encounter “Stampede” a 14-minute black and white video, shot from above, of what appear to be gallery goers, stuck in a white box, looking for something to look at.

Song Dong’s Para-pavillion “Intelligence from Poor People” (2011) For Song Dong’s “para-pavillion” (conceived by Dong to include other artists), a vernacular of wooden screens, some with brightly dyed cotton curtains, form a labyrinth within the labyrinth of the Biennale. While most of these rooms are empty, and one tends to walk through them quickly to get on to the rest of the show, those thorough enough to explore each room will be moved when they happen upon a low white plinth with a ceramic sculpture of the artist Ryan Gander on it, fallen from his wheelchair, perhaps in a coma, with a mysterious blue dice next to his right hand. Dong has also built a pavilion within this para-pavilion, a two-story Chinese home whose upper levels can only be accessed via a split staircase, each side of the step contra-posed to the other, causing an awkward step literally forces the art-dazed viewer to slow down.

* For example, construction of the original Arsenale began in 1104. **The representative of Swatch (their own ambassador, I guess) gave a speech at the end of the press conference that nobody listened to, though I did hear her crack a joke about making Swatch working to develop an “invisible” (aka conceptual) watch one of these days. *** The reason for this might be logistical: galleries and smaller institutions can move at a pace faster than that of a administratively-heavy Biennial.

Photography by Michael Shick

Top photo: Ryan Gander "Untitled"

Tomorrow, check in for Mimi’s coverage of the National Pavillions in the Giardini