Trading travel plans and tips is a regular topic of lobby chatter in my Manhattan coop apartment house, and the Venice Biennale seems to be the destination du jour. Yes, that’s the bi-annual art show that opened six months ago and closes on November 20th. But its moment is now. My neighbors just left, and gallery owner Sundaram Tagore is just back from La Serenissima, the Giardini and the Arsenale. Why so late?
Maybe because in travel now, later is just better and more, well, serene. Is off-season travel a new normal? Clearly, a certain segment of the smart money wants to avoid ever-larger summer crowds, ever-more-brutal European summer heat, and opening week art fair swarms. It wants to see Venice and its art more than each other. Take Art Basel. I’ll take the ability to reserve last-minute at good restaurants and stroll along canals on quiet (or at least quieter) calli, which is why I went to Venice at the end of May, a month after it opened but before the summer rush.
Pietro Ruffo’s paper rolls and massive globe at the Venice pavilion.
Opinions differ on the success of this year’s theme, Foreigners Everywhere, at the 60th International Art Exposition (aka the Biennale) and its focus on the indigenous, refugees, the displaced and the misplaced. After a couple of hours at the big show at the Arsenale, one could as easily feel bludgeoned as enlightened by the relentless messaging. Ignoring didactic wall texts in favor of looking at the art itself helps.
My only regret is missing Planète Lalanne, 150+ works by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne at the Palazzo Rota Ivancich (which runs through November 3) because the doors closed early the day I tried. Early birds like me got tastes of Jim Dine, Jean Cocteau, Armando Testa, Willem De Kooning and Marco Polo, all big Biennale-adjacent exhibitions that have already closed. But the Robert Indiana retrospective at the Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco runs through November 24.
The Chanakaya Foundation’s “Cosmic Garden.”
In the Giardini, Jeffrey Gibson’s work at the American pavilion is cheerful but repetitive. Yuko Mohri’s complex installation at the Japan pavilion—inspired by dripping water in Tokyo’s subways—is a fun park Rube Goldberg update. Eva Koťátková’s “The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity is Twelve Kilos Lighter” is an interactive exploration of the relationship between man and the natural world, Aleksandar Denić’s recreation of an Eastern European border town in the Serbian pavilion is immersive and thought-provoking, Pietro Ruffo’s work with paper rolls and massive globes at the Venice pavilion inspires a kind of bliss, and the Claire Fontaine collective’s outdoor neon installation, playing off the Foreigners Everywhere theme, was an Instagram-ready favorite.
Claire Fontaine collective’s outdoor neon installation.
But the best part of the Biennale is serendipity, wandering the twisty alleys of Venice and stumbling on collateral events: unexpected art in extraordinary places. Near the Rialto, the Chanakaya Foundation’s “Cosmic Garden,” paintings and sculptures by Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh brings Indian traditions into the present. Heumin’s Dream Cathedral in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, mixes interactivity, artificial intelligence and its dramatic setting, allowing visitors to imagine images, speak them into a microphone and then see them realized on screens erected on the church altar.
Heumin’s Dream Cathedral in the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista.
Other highlights: a show of 33 female artists at Palazzo Teipolo Passi, Ewa Juszkiewicz at the Palazzo Canavis, 20 Ukrainian artists at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Martha Jungwirth’s “Heart of Darkness” at Palazzo Cini, Yu Hong at the Chiesetta della Misericordia, Rick Lowe at the Palazzo Grimaldi, and my favorite, a provocative retrospective of work by the late Boris Lurie called “Life with the Dead” at the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezi. I’ll spare you a didactic description. Though the art is old, it retains the shock of the utterly unexpected.
Stuffed with visuals, Venice also feeds other hungers, and restaurants I had never visited before like Nevodi and L’Osteria Santa Martina, off-the-beaten track favorites like Oniga and Puppa, and old reliables like Patatina, Al Giglio and Bancogiro, were alternately as familiar as the Accademia and Peggy Guggenheim Collection and as surprising as the work on display all around the magical city. And at least in this magical shoulder season for travel, savoring it all with just a few others is an experience far between.