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  Sex, Death and Oil: Bizzare Worlds at the Venice Biennale

Sex, Death and Oil Bizzare Worlds at the Venice Biennale

By Heiko Klaas and Nicole Büsing in Venice

Part 2: Club of the Dead Artists

Storr, a New York curator and art critic, is this year's artistic director and, as well as curating an exhibition at the Arsenale, he is also in charge of an international pavilion. The art here is wonderfully political, accusatory and global. The show begins with 81-year-old American artist Nancy Spero's 2007 work "Maypole/Take No Prisoners." Colorful ribbons of material hang from a white aluminum pole, on which bloody heads of screaming men and women dangle.

Jenny Holzer, 57, is known for her light projections and LED treadmills, with aphorisms and political and feminist phrases. For her Biennale work she managed to find the National Security Archive (NSA) autopsy reports and fingerprints of prisoners in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, who died in unclear circumstances.

Transformed into large oil paintings to make them more accessible to a wider public, this work is an obvious denunciation of the American actions in the war on terror. The print of one hand where the top finger joints are missing both disturbs and admonishes. The biggest critics of the US policies are perhaps the Americans themselves.

But Storr has contrasted the work of his fellow Americans with art from completely different worlds. The work by the man Storr describes as the "African Andy Warhol," Congolese painter Cheri Samba, combine popular, colorful painting with a striking, anti-Western message about Sept. 11 and the AIDS problem in Africa.

By passing through a glittering curtain of pearls by the American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996, one enters the Club of the Dead Artists. The chapel-like space includes the work of the German icon Martin Kippenberger, as well as the threads of wool stretched over a corner by the American conceptual artist Fred Sandback. Opposite are wall drawings in pencil by late minimal artist Sol LeWitt. In the next room, there are current works by the big living legends of post-war art: Gerhard Richter, Bruce Naumann, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Ryman.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a curators' favorite for years, is also being honored posthumously in the American Pavilion. His offset print series of posters with melancholy clouds or black borders can be viewed alongside over 360 liquorice sweets that are spread across a giant rectangle on the floor.

Even if many critics have called for the national character of the exhibition to be dumped, it is this national competition, with 31 entries this year, that has formed the core of the Biennale since its inauguration in 1895.

This is where there is the most pushing and shoving on opening day. And it is where the thickest catalogues are handed out and the most important purchasing decisions are made ahead of Art Basel, which starts next Tuesday. Nevertheless, outside of the competition there are now 76 national or transnational projects in the various palazzos, workshops or factory halls spread across Venice. A new record, and one that shows just how international the art business has become.

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