Barenaked bell ringers, banned opera singers and mind-boggling dog-owner relationships … the art at this year’s biennale has people calling the cops
She’s famous for her extreme performances and Florentina Holzinger upped the ante yet again in Venice with a postapocalyptic pavilion that opened with her suspended upside down from the clappers of a large bell. Inside, there was a woman riding a speedboat in circles, two others suspended at the top of a pole and another sitting entirely submerged in a tank. Oh, and no one was wearing any clothes. Viewers were invited to use two toilets so that their urine could be purified and pumped into the tank – but what looked like a sewage disaster in another section of the pavilion suggested that this project threatened to go dangerously awry. The whole thing was so transgressive that four cops turned up when I was watching to ask what the hell was going on. It was immediately the talk of the town. AN
Austrian pavilion, Giardini della Biennale
One of the great things about the Venice Biennale is that it allows you to see contemporary art in incredible historical spaces. Kantarovsky, 44, is a brilliant painter who was born in Moscow and whose family emigrated to the US when he was 10. His paintings are like stills from very intense films – just what is going on in the one where a naked man is crouching in seeming despair at the foot of a bed while a dog cheerfully sits on the pillow? They’re displayed in book-lined rooms with incredible Murano glass chandeliers, and the show culminates with an incredibly detailed sculpture of the head of a boy, also in Murano glass. The atmosphere is like a weird seance between the centuries. AN
