Exhibition of the week Venice Biennale
Various venues across the city (www.labiennale.org). Until 26 November
The Venice Biennale has become known for “polished” and “grandiose” shows with a markedly “high-tech” flavour, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. This year, however, the world’s oldest and biggest art festival is all about “rainforest birdsong, folkloric chanting, simmering crickets and splashing waterfalls”. The emphasis is on “the natural, the local, the delicate; the reclaimed, or recycled”. The event’s centrepiece, an enormous official exhibition organised by French curator Christine Macel and entitled Viva Arte Viva, is a “fragile and muted” experience which aims to celebrate art itself. Textile-based art dominates: “images of leaves, rivers and flowers, drifting currents and feathery flapping are everywhere”. Forget the “boastful big-name shows” of recent years: of the 120 artists featured, about a third hail from developing countries, and most have never been selected to exhibit before. If there is a message to the 57th Venice Biennale, it seems to be that we should “tread lightly on the world”. Yet for all its aspirations to relevance in the current political climate – many exhibits address the refugee crisis – its themes sit rather uncomfortably alongside the crowds of collectors “dressed toe to crown by top designers”. “New age meets new money” – that’s the atmosphere here. And it is just as “awkward” as it sounds.
Still, there are “plenty of genuinely startling images and experiences”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. In addition to the main show, there are a “vast” number of fringe events taking place across the city, while no less than 86 different countries have put together exhibitions in individual pavilions. Among the most impressive is Austria’s offering, an “observation tower in the form of an upended truck”. The longest queues are outside the American pavilion, which Mark Bradford, “generally seen as one of the key artists of the moment”, has filled with “magnificently ravaged” sculptural installations made from torn fly posters. Best of all is Anne Imhof’s “epic performance” at the German pavilion, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, where dancers crouch in foetal positions beneath a plate glass floor, shooting “menacing stares” at the visitors above. You find yourself “looking down on your fellow beings as if in some Nazi experiment”. Altogether less compelling is the Scottish pavilion, featuring a “repugnant” film by Rachel Maclean, which reimagines Pinocchio as a thug whose “evergrowing phallic nose” commits a “savagely explicit rape”.
There is a lot of “awfully lightweight” work here, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard: there’s too much “discombobulated bric-a-brac with exotic meanings you need to be told about” via “instructive” wall labels. But there are exceptions, notably Phyllida Barlow’s “monumental, busy and thoughtful” cardboard and plaster sculptures at the British pavilion, and an “intense” and often “beautiful” show devoted to the US artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) at the city’s Gallerie dell’accademia. By and large, though, this Biennale is an “exhausting and tedious” experience.
Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1872 (Vintage £6.99). No list of mine like this would be complete without the greatest novel in the English language. The whole world is in there, and it’s a different book each time you reread it over the course of your life.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925 (Vintage £7.99). Another one of the greatest English-language novels, and the model for my new book, Release. Such utter intensity and focus, from its famous opening line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, to one of the greatest closing lines in all of
literature: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”
Illywhacker by Peter Carey, 1985 (Faber & Faber £8.99). Capacious, strange, bursting with life, this massive novel by the great Australian author, about a 139-year-old liar, infuriates, beguiles, shocks, dazzles and burns. After reading it, every other book will seem chokingly polite.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith, 2005 (Penguin £8.99). I’m cheating, because you should read this along with its direct inspiration, Howards End by E.M. Forster. Humane, funny, intelligent writing at its sharpest. It’s still an utter
crime that Smith didn’t win the Booker for this.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, 1978 (Puffin Classics £6.20). A marvellously clever Agatha Christie-type mystery for children: the sixteen potential heirs of Samuel Westing have to solve the clues in his will in order to inherit his $200m fortune. It’s not simply an awardwinning classic, it’s also the first book I ever read where I thought, “This is for me, not for anyone else.” Claiming ownership of a story is one of the most powerful things young people do, and this was where I started. I’ve never looked back.