AGNSW Reflections of Venice article in October issue of Look magazine : Anthony Bond

As we travelled through Europe we had plenty of time to discuss the themes that emerged in Venice, Basle, Lyon, Paris and London. The sheer scale and adrenalin of the Biennale (and an overdose of video) induced post exhibition malaise in many of the visitors we spoke to but sharing our memories and reviewing our video documentation confirms that it was a spectacular summer for art in Europe. We have organised these brief memories into the persistent themes of Water, Space, Passage, Heaven and Hell and Storytelling. Flowing water is always a metaphor for the passage of life, so these are not coincidental juxtapositions in this watery city.

Probably the very best experience of the whole trip was Bill Viola�s Five Angels for a New Millennium. Five projections, animated by slowly moving spots of light soon reveal themselves to be bubbles filmed below the surface of a deep lake. He has inverted the images and run the film backwards at a fraction of the original speed making everything dreamlike but as usual with Viola the clarity and intensity of the image is extraordinary.

One by one the images begin to change, apparently random bubbles seem to be gathering to form a trace while the subtle sound track grows in intensity (not volume). Viewers sense the immanence of a momentous event. Inexorably the accelerating organisation among the traces moves towards a climax as a ring of bubbles forms under the surface. Suddenly! A figure appears through the vortex and is gone. The sense of anticipation and ecstatic release is breathtaking. While Viola had several great works in Venice and Basle this installation was at Anthony d�Offay�s gallery in London.

In Venice Ana Laura Al�ez� elegant installation in the Spanish pavilion was dominated by a 6-meter sphere of glass teardrops surrounded by the amplified sound of water that is actually dripping to form a moving screen in the space. Circular doorways and video portraits of women in the shower are all integrated by cunning use of light and sound. Another bathroom installation by Alexandra Ranner seemed pretty ordinary until you looked in the mirror only to find yourself absent. It was a hologram of the same space - different time thereby revealing visitors as vampires.

In the Italian pavilion Carsten Nicolai (whose snow flake installation was recently on show as a level 2 project in Sydney) caused two great black pipes to resonate with a sub sonic note that produced standing waves in two water filled glass vessels. Alighiero Boetti presented a playful bronze sculpture of himself holding a hose that jetted water over his own be-suited and steaming figure. The Taiwanese installation in a palazzo near St Marco included a panelled floor in which the artist Shu-min Lin had installed holographic images of faces that appeared and dissolved beneath your feet evoking Dante�s crossing of the Styx. Nearby the full width of the square at St Marco the windows of Museo Correr were alternately animated by images of falling water or roaring flames in an apocalyptic video installation by Fabrizio Plessi

Space was another major theme, first outer space and close encounters, heavenly visions like the Viola five angels and then domestic space and memory. Pierre Huyghe�s light and video installation in the French Pavilion is in three rooms separated by semi opaque membranes that provided intriguing glimpses of the rooms beyond. In the central room the viewer was encouraged to manipulate levers that created shifting patterns in the light panels of the ceiling grid. In the left wing a video projection of tower blocks with their lights turning on and off made patterns similar to the grids on the ceiling this produced an atmosphere reminiscent of Close Encounters. In the room to the right visitors could sit in a formed plastic circular module that may or may not have been interactively linked to the changing lights that hung above it. On the wall there was a projection of a luminous cartoon figure walking through a shifting moonscape.

Mark Wallinger�s projection, Angel, in The British pavilion picks up on the theme of passage. A figure appears to walk (on the spot backwards) on an escalator while reciting St John�s Gospel (recorded spoken backwards) �In the beginning was the word� etc�His other �heavenly� piece is the video Threshold to the kingdom in which a stream of travellers appear through the doors of an airport arrivals lounge in slow motion accompanied by the sound of Alegri�s Miserere. It does not sound transcendental but somehow it made the transition to the pearly gates.

In Tate Modern�s great turbine hall Juan Munoz has created a grey mezzanine. At first this seems to be a normal part of the architecture but further on you discover grey resin figures working in this strange purgatory. There were three lifts moving slowly from the vast heights of the turbine hall passing through purgatory to our ground level (hell) but they are caged off, we just glimpsed empty steel cubes filled with light before they inexorably begin their ascent to the heights above. Meanwhile in Provence Kiefer is building heaven and hell on his hilltop. Underground tunnels lead to stairs that emerge into great light filled glasshouses re-enacting Persephone�s epic journey.

Five Nordic artists collaborated on their pavilion in Venice. One wall was strung with guitar wires so that the room became a resonator and office screens were lined up opposite. The scene was transformed when other viewers walking behind a transparent glass screen were suddenly snuffed out of existence. These panels are activated to change their transparency and opacity at random intervals suddenly and selectively occluding the space.

Eulalia Valldosera�s disorienting slide installation used slowly turning projectors to project images of furniture across the actual objects, the walls and the ceiling. In the Russian pavilion Leonid Sokov also made a shadow play but this time the objects where miniature replicas of the great icons on modern sculpture from Rodin�s thinker to Duchamp�s urinal.

There were many reconstructions of (mis)remembered domestic or public spaces. Gregor Schneider has constructed an utterly convincing replica of a Berlin house of the 1950s every detail is perfect except that as you progress up the stairs the memory begins to show flaws so that rooms and levels fail to match up creating strange spaces between. Mike Nelson built a maze of rooms in an old building in Giudecca where multiple doors lead the visitor through endless Kafkaesque offices or waiting rooms. In a small retrospective at the Serpentine in London, Rachel Whitread cast the inside of a stair well from a synagogue. This beautiful object acted like her great work House to unsettle the viewer�s bodily space.

In the Austrian pavilion the group, Gelatine flooded the gardens around the pavilion forcing visitors to walk over planks. In the resulting swamp they were growing tomatoes and herbs while alternative curators gathered to network. Atelier Van Leishout is a revolutionary artist group whose Women on waves project was an example of art crossing over into real politics with their floating mobile gynaecological unit. This was particularly challenging in the catholic context of Italy

There is no room to describe the many performances, special projects or major works by Richter, Twombly, Serra, Mueck, Neto or the great Rothko show at Beyeler�s museum or Grunewald�s altarpiece at Colmar and the rest but suffice it to say it was a great summer after all.