Death In Venice
A rapid compendium of observations out of the Venice Biennale
Let’s keep it brief, as I am OOO.
I attended the preview week for the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Biennale in Venice as a tangential participant of the Danish Pavilion where artist Maja Malou Lyse presented Things To Come, an interrogation of how images and fertility can potentially intersect in a rapidly advancing, artificially intelligent, virtual reality atomization of erotic lonerism. I had written a loose script for a film by Lyse and DIS, featuring Brazzers porn stars working in sperm labs and engaging in verbal humiliation toward the, presumably, beta male participants. I loved the exhibition staging by Common Accounts, which included an adjacent installation of cryogenic sperm containers and a new fertility ritual of “sperm races,” designed to foment rivalries between men online over their own virility. Apparently declining birth rates are on everyone’s minds? The Japanese Pavilion also featured a show on the subject, Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies, in which 200 lifelike babydolls cried through amplifiers, hung from scaffolding, lounged in chaises, slid down ropes, and basically exploded from every angle of the pavilion’s surfaces. They all wore printed onesies and reflective sunglasses, giving the proceedings a taunting lunacy. Both exhibitions were favorites (I’m biased), not because I share their alarmism but because they both made supposedly catastrophic global concerns seem ludicrously funny—such is life.
