In Search of Surprises

Which you certainly couldn't say about the French pavilion. The 54-year-old Parisian artist Sophie Calle has filled it with a multiroom installation, called Take Care of Yourself, which is an insanely energetic takedown of a ratty ex-boyfriend who walked out of her life with a pious, high-minded e-mail. Or did he? Halfway through this pavilion it occurred to me that the boyfriend, and the e-mail, might be fictitious. Which makes no difference to the deliciously over-the-top mechanisms of the piece.

In wall texts — most in French, some in English — videos and paintings, Calle subjects the e-mail to a tidal wave of abuse and cunning deconstruction. She recruits 107 women, including a few celebrated ones like Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson and Miranda Richardson, to read the letter, act it out, set it to music or coolly dissect it. Many of them turn up on a video wall on which they perform and deform the text more than 30 ways, including as a Bunraku puppet show, an aria, a rap song and a clown routine. On another screen a white cockatoo grabs a paper copy in one claw and eats it. Calle does everything but attach the letter to the back of a chariot and drag it three times around the Colosseum. She may have been dumped, but she's not one to be victimized, and her installation is a revenger's comedy of a high order.

Nearby is the British pavilion, which occupies what you might call a high ground of the Old World — France on its left, Germany on its right. But its brick and white marble neoclassicism, all those columns and balustrades, provides a framework too imposing for "Borrowed Light," a negligible show by Tracey Emin. Actually, "Borrowed Light" is several negligible shows, collected under a single umbrella. One consists of watercolors on lined notebook paper that Emin made in the early '90s, which grew out of her memories of an abortion. Those were produced not long after she graduated from art school, but before she became abruptly famous as one of the YBAs: Young British Artists with shock appeal. Another is a series of middling monoprints with debts to Paul Klee and Egon Schiele. There are also some larger paintings and embroidered canvases. The best work is four wooden sculptures made from sticks attached to form makeshift towers, totems of ramshackle desire. The worst? That's easy — the wall that displays a maudlin text in scrawled neon handwriting:
You put your hand across my mouth
But still the noise continues
Every part of my body is screaming
Smashed into a thousand million pieces
Each part
For ever
Belonging to you.

You can't even use art as an excuse for something like that. People like to complain that irony is the bane of 21st century culture, but don't forget sincerity. Emin's admirers say that her critics fail to understand that she's requiring us to confront and discard our fastidious disdain for sentimentality. After seeing this mawkish work, you'll want to hold on to that disdain.

In short, the Venice Biennale can be like any massive art fair — at times a cabinet of wonders, at other times an emporium of the second-rate and the inscrutable, with the significant difference that it takes place in Venice, that most magnificent of stage sets. And if you don't find the epiphany you were hoping for here, coming up next is Art 38 Basel, Switzerland's art trade fair, a citywide aesthetic shop floor. Then there's Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, and then the Sculpture Project in Münster. Dealers, curators, critics and other determined members of the migratory art herd will be turning up at all four. There's a line from an old Stephen Sondheim song that could be their anthem. Do you know it? It goes, "Art isn't easy."