By lunch-time on the second day of the Venice Biennale’s preview (read about the first here), the quiet neighborhood of Castello, where both the Giardini and the Arsenale are located, is so overrun with art tourists that the osterias have run out of food. One can see elegantly dressed men and women roaming the streets for hours in search of a table for four. In the Giardini, the situation is only more dire.

Given the length of the queues and the two-hour wait outside the British pavilion, it would appear as if some sort of miraculous transubstantiation (or a table for four) awaited visitors inside. In a sense, yes - for Mike Nelson’s work, it's just fine to believe the hype. Perhaps the simplest way to describe his work is to call it a sophisticated haunted house.

As with his other site-specific installations, with I, Impostor, Nelson recreates an environment of degradation and discomfort so convincing enough that you can be assured at least a low-grade nausea. Though it may be attributable to a certain knee-jerk loquaciousness that the British popular press has for art coverage, Nelson’s has been the most-talked about pavilion this year.

Though the pavilions (a neighborhood of small architectural follies in the garden) were originally conceived of in 1907 to showcase the art of each nation, ever since art’s theoretical turn toward institutional critique, rare is it that a pavilion expresses bald-faced nationalism. If these issues are addressed at all, they are of course deconstructed, and at the United States pavilion, called Gloria!, artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla turn nationalism into the most straight-faced of parodies. Expectedly, they have a go at our nation’s worship of cash; making a sacral organ (with the help of composer Jonathan Bailey) of an ATM machine**. Upon presenting her card, the viewer will be drowned in a din of tense minor notes, which will only resolve themselves into a major chord of relief when the machine relinquishes her cash. In other rooms, Olympic-trained gymnasts do rigorous beam and pommel routines on perfectly imitative wooden models of American Airlines and Delta business class seats. Mixing elements of military parade formation and traditional gymnastics, these choreographies are dead-pan performances that make our nation’s preoccupations with marshal, athletic, and even artistic competition seem, ultimately, like nothing more than pomp. Though Allora and Guillermo’s critique of our vanity is well-wrought, their jibe feels surprisingly hurtful, when all we really need right now is a compliment.

Also deconstructing national identity issues, (but not only her own) Fia Backstrom, representing Sweden, has produced a series of audio-recordings, each compiling casual conversations between herself and other artists about various national stereotypes. Elsewhere, this self-reflexive impulse was borne to its logical conclusions in “The State of Things,” the Norweigan representation, which showed not a room of art but a series of critical lectures taking place in various locations throughout the city. Inaugurating the series, the French Marxist historian and philosopher Jacques Rancière presented a talk called “In What Time Do We Live?” speaking of art as a radical realm for political action, where multiple chronologies can exist simultaneously (he argues for the same in his book “Aesthetics and its Discontents”) .

Though Rancière failed to answer his own question, back in the Giardini at the Swiss pavilion, the artist Thomas Hirschorn tackled it enthusiastically, with his exuberant, disturbing and sometimes enlightened installation, “The Crystal of Resistance”. Though some might dismiss this as another punky trash art installation of excess (every square foot of the pavilion is filled with a scrappy sculptural vernacular of que-tips, diamonds, and chairs filled with glass-shards) the brutal banners, constructed from masking tape and festooned with digital print-outs of extreme political violence; protesters being beaten, Abu Ghraib prisoners, and faces mutilated by shrapnel show that Hirschorn is on to something a bit bigger than the consumer critique usually implied in these sorts of “over-kill” installations. The key is in the the stacks of books by Alain Badiou, JG Ballard, and the French Marxist collective Tiqqun, which formulate new utopias or advocate transformational regime change. One comment by the artist that is worth considering if you visit:

“There will be many elements to see, there will be “too much”. It has to be ‘too much’...so that the things do not lie. I want to give form to the thought, that truth can be shaped out of facets and that truth can be touched only in a non-unified scale.”

Hirschorn’s caveat can just as easily apply to the Biennale, where there is truly “too much” (and not all of it good of course). However, the search can be rewarding. Tucked away in a quiet church square in the Castello, artist Darius Mikšys, representing Lithuania, provided the public a view of a country whose art receives perhaps too little international exposure. For his project, called “Behind the White Curtain,” he asked 173 artists whom had received governmental artist grants since 1993 to each submit one work of art to bring to the Biennale. But rather than keep them all on display, Mikšys and his collaborators have stacked them all behind a large white curtain and instead produced a well-illustrated catalogue from which, with the help of an attendant, visitors can ‘order’ works they would like to see a la carte.

Uncrowded and unpretentious, the exhibit was the elegant execution of a novel concept, which if taken advantage of, will provide viewers with a good introduction to Lithuanian art of the past two decades.