News

The Venice Biennale is an event that always galvanizes the art world. From the four corners of the globe, critics, artists, collectors and curators converge to chew on the new. Our mandate? To look. To receive a fresh avalanche of information on art. To swap opinions. To drink cheap Prosecco under the shade trees of the Giardini della Biennale and wonder, secretly, how we got lucky enough to be able to call this work.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Your feet will be sore. In fact, your ankles will feel like they are made out of lead pipe. You'll be subjected to near-asphyxiating body odour wafting from the armpits of overheated German art tourists wedged onto the vaporetto boats, which convey sightseers up and down the Grand Canal in great migrating herds. You may discover, as I did, that your rented apartment is located above an all-night bar frequented by Italian sailors. You may even find (me again) that something in the back of your closet makes an unmistakably rat-like scratching noise, deep in the wee, lonely hours of the night. What of it? You're in Venice. Rats, unsavoury though they may be, are simply not to be acknowledged under such circumstances.

And so you rise every morning, and -- your brain freshly infused with extra-strength cappuccino -- you prowl the Giardini della Biennale and the antique byways of Venice, dog-eared map in hand, in search of epiphany.

This year there was plenty of it. In fact, most of us who attended the Biennale's three press days last week agreed that this is the best Biennale we had seen in years.

There are several reasons for this. First, many of the leading nations have made their best curatorial picks in a long time. The national pavilions of England, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Canada were all particularly fine, and the new section of the exhibition devoted to Africa was groundbreaking.

Second, the artistic director of this year's Biennale was Robert Storr, the former senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Now dean of the Yale University School of Art, he is indisputably one of the great curators working today, making exhibitions that display both a high degree of aesthetic discrimination, a depth of historical understanding and an impeccable sense of timing.

Each country picks the artist who will represent them in the national pavilions, but it is Storr, as artistic director, who has assembled the key two-part international group show that forms the backbone of the event. Titled Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind, his exhibition is staged in the large Italian Pavilion in the Giardini and also in the nearby Arsenale, the historic shipbuilding facility and armoury of the former Venetian Republic that has long served as the site of the Biennale's exhibition of emerging artists.

Usually, these shows feel like sprawling and somewhat ad hoc affairs, cheaply and hastily installed and peppered with works that made you wonder: How did this happen? (One of the most odious examples, from the late Swiss curator Harald Szeemann's most recent efforts at Venice, involved a kind of menstrual hut upholstered in maxi pads, which Szeemann installed prominently in the Arsenale. The artist was reputed to be his girlfriend.) North American curators, happily, tend to be a little more disciplined in their approach.

The Italian Pavilion show looks better than ever, an elegant, tightly crafted exhibition that brings together new works by many senior international artists, almost all of whom are at the top of their game. True to form, Storr is giving pride of place to painting.

The German artist Sigmar Polke has been granted the most prestigious spot in the exhibition - the large, sunlit central gallery of the pavilion, in which he is showing enormous semi-transparent bronze-coloured canvases that look like glazed or oiled skins. These are encrusted here and there with imagery drawn from historical illustrations or the history of art. (The figures looked to my eye like explorers or philosophers, some like angels.) Standing back to enjoy these works, you can sometimes see through to the wooden struts that support the canvas from behind. Artifice and the means by which it is made are interpolated, and you find your mind shuttling between the courtly art of the grand European tradition and the primitive imperatives of nomadic cultures. Polke's vision is encyclopedic.

Around the corner, Storr has installed a killer lineup: Ellsworth Kelly from the U.S. (showing crisp, split-level abstractions), Germany's Gerhard Richter (a suite of massive multicolored pictures made by scraping pigment sideways on the canvas surface, often suggesting corrupted digital or photographic imagery) and Robert Ryman, the American master of the white-on-white canvas, who is showing new works subtly edged in blue. Taken as a whole, this lineup of senior statesmen seems to demonstrate the vast psychological and aesthetic terrain that painting can cover with the simplest of means - just paint and canvas. Engaging our senses with colour, texture and composition, Storr's battalion of master painters lays siege to the mind.

Storr never seems to tire of defending painting, but sometimes this enthusiasm leads to uncharacteristic lapses in discrimination. The only weak moments in his show, in fact, occur in the painting department, where he included his long-time American favourites Elizabeth Murray (garish extravaganzas that are to me inexplicable) and Susan Rothenberg (rough-hewn horse paintings that likewise seem a bit dim), and a number of lesser known painters who fail to pass muster (such as Izumi Kato from Japan and Thomas Nozkowski from the United States).

The balance of the show, however - the sculpture, photography and projection works - more than make up for this. A theme emerges: Storr versus CNN. Taken as a whole, this exhibition presents a kind of sustained resistance to the smarmy platitudes and easy generalizations of the media, which so effectively gloss over the jagged edges of confusion, human tragedy and loss. Truth is to be found, Storr seems to suggest, not in grand and sweeping rhetoric. Rather, it is lodged in the nitty-gritty of lived experience, which art can make us witness to.

Many of the most powerful works in his show bear this out. In the Italian Pavilion, Afro-British artist Steve McQueen is showing a two-part projection installation that traces the process of bomb manufacturing from the crude surface mining done by hand in the blistering heat by black labourers in Congo (where Coltan (columbite-tantalite), an ore used in making heat-resistant metals, is gathered) to a sterile munitions factory in Nottingham, England, where these toxic substances are handled in eerie silence by robotic clamps. Into the mix, McQueen inserts an image of the port city Gravesend at sunset, and the wall label informs us that this industrial landscape, on the banks of the Thames, was the place written about by Joseph Conrad in the opening lines of Heart of Darkness, who saw the great river as a "mighty waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth" ("uttermost" from whose perspective, one wonders?). This is a work full of sorrow for the way things are, quietly directing us to consider the injustices in how the West and developing world intersect.

So, too, Jenny Holzer's graphic gallery full of evidence regarding the U.S. military's human-rights violations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her installation here includes the censored testimony of FBI officers investigating these violations and the autopsy reports on Muslim detainees in U.S.-controlled detention facilities. (An abundance of head wounds are recorded, and other assorted physical trauma.) One wall bears the enlarged handprints of an Iraqi prisoner. The work is a defiant refutation of the mainstream U.S. media's account of conflict, with its theme music and snappy graphics. Wars are won and lost one vulnerable, suffering human body at a time. Holzer makes us look at the shameful human cost.

One entertains similar thoughts watching Australian artist Shaun Gladwell's mesmerizing projection of a young man skateboarding by the seaside, also on view in the Italian Pavilion. At first, I saw this figure as perhaps a British youth on vacation in England. (The concrete jetty looked too old to be in America.) But as I watched him performing his balletic stunts, I noticed he seemed to be dressed in U.S. army fatigues, which led me to wonder if he wasn't possibly a soldier stationed in some Middle Eastern seaside town, a very long way from home. The image becomes all the more haunting for its ambiguity.

Who is this unknown soldier?

In fact, it is Gladwell himself at Bondi Beach in New South Wales, but you don't know that looking at it. All you see is his extraordinary athleticism and grace. In the context of this show, Gladwell conjures an urgent pacifism more powerful than any placard-carrying protest could ever be. This human life seems miraculously beautiful and precious.

Emily Jacir, who divides her time between Ramallah and New York, is presenting another piece that roots us in the particulars of a life, in this case that of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian activist and thinker who was assassinated in Rome by Mossad agents in 1972. Through news clippings, personal material (such as the photographed covers of his favourite books - from Dante's Divine Comedy to Sophocles's Electra to A Thousand and One Nights), a sampling of a favourite piece of classical music, a clip from his walk-on role as a waiter in The Pink Panther and a suite of photographs of his Rome apartment, Jacir fleshes out a portrait of a rare and very specific human being. We come to mourn along with her.

In the Arsenale, this theme continues, with a raft of mostly younger artists exhibiting works of similar political urgency and emotional resonance, among them Italian artist Paolo Canevari, who is showing an unsettling projection of a scruffy youth kicking a rubber skull like a soccer ball around the rubble of the bombed-out ruins of Belgrade. (It takes a few moments to register that this is not the real thing, but the brutality of the image never subsides.)

Malick Sidibé, a photographer from Mali, is this year's winner of the Biennale's Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement. At the Arsenale, he is showing a series of portraits of African musicians involved in AIDS activism (titled L'Afrique chante contre le SIDA). Oscar Munoz of Colombia is exhibiting projections that record his ephemeral paintings made by brushing water onto stone, poignant portraits of the missing that evaporate before our eyes. And Japanese photographer Tomoko Yoneda records historic sites that one could walk right past and not notice. A minefield beside a bus stop in Paju City, South Korea, is entirely unexceptional, unless you were to make a misstep, and her view of the Serbian front lines during the siege of Sarajevo looks like any European mountain pass. For those unfortunate to be caught in the crossfire of destiny, history can happen in the parking lot next door.

At times, however, the lens shifts to the private realm. Some of the most powerful work here is by British filmmaker Margaret Salmon, subtle and revealing films that examine private life. In one, titled Ninna Nanna, we see mothers with their babies, engrossed in each other and oblivious to the world beyond their little realm of daily routine. These scenes are beautiful, rapturous even, but they are also profoundly lonely; their isolation seems absolute. In another, she shows us what seems like a compilation of home movies: A sullen man with a slightly menacing look in his eyes prowls the edges of a Fourth of July picnic, sitting at the family table with the disposition of a caged animal. The muffled voice-over records a bitter dispute between a man and woman.

Is Salmon exploring the complexities of her own lived experience? If so, one can only marvel at her ability to wring a terse poetry from human misery, all the while keeping her wits about her. It's a skill she shares with many of the artists here.

One of the ironies of the Biennale is that you walk from inside these galleries, where political and emotional trauma are so often the subject of art, into the blaze of the Venetian afternoon, with its pigeons, its fruit stands, its gondolieri singing Volare and its delirious tourists spooning up their hot-pink gelato di fragola in great melting spoonfuls. The contrast can be corrosive.

Storr has managed to select artists whose handling of dark themes is untainted by sensationalism and glibness, and that's no mean feat in today's art world. The works hold up, even against all this supreme silliness. Considering the show in retrospect, you feel chastened and inspired to expect more from art, and to think a little more rigorously about how we live. This show's intelligence leaves a taste in your mouth that not even ice-cold Prosecco can wash away.

The Venice Biennale continues until Nov. 21. For more information, see http://www.labiennale.org.

Coming Monday

At the Venice Biennale, there

are always a small handful of

pavilions that generate buzz.

This year, the Canadian pavilion, which houses the work of

32-year-old Montreal-born

David Altmejd, is among the

star attractions.

Read Sarah Milroy's review

of Canada's contribution and some of the other successful

national pavilions.

In Monday's Globe Review.

ONLINE GALLERY

See a photo gallery of some

of the artistic highlights of

the Venice Biennale.

Go to globeandmail.com