Biennale

Art 2007

Yesterday to the second Moscow Biennale, held for some reason that seemingly has more to do with the mayor's interests in the construction trade than any notion of artistic context, in a series of building sites.

We began at the Winzavod, or wine factory now disused. But don't for a moment suspect that “disused” implies peaceful dereliction: every hall required a struggle past piles of fresh rubble and gangs of central Asian working men cursing under their hard hats about the random collection of confused looking foreigners tripping over the concrete filled buckets in order to view “we are your future” a video installation by some Chinese or possibly Latvian artists.

Then rickety staircases and climbing over a barrel of oily water took me into this room where a security guard dressed in jungle camouflage sneered and smoked and proved incapable of explaining who the artist was, or where he was from or, indeed, why the hell he, the guard, had been asked to sit in a disused factory with 40 golden Chinese heads.

A further exhibition in a sinister cellar was haunted by a cleaner who inquired of visitors if they were Jewish and seemed troubled by the meaninglessness of the exhibits which had clearly been created by New York Jews as part of a plan for war starting and world domination. The friend I was with was a New York Jewish woman.

Putin was mocked beside a table laid with Latvian football scarves.

Then to the State Tretyakov Gallery where the organisers of the Biennale were opening a room full of contemporary works in the heart of the temple of Russian artistic classicism. Speeches were made, interminably, cameras flashed and then the 30 or so works were open for view, most were ironic commentaries on the great pieces in the surrounding halls, as was doubtlessly explained in the speeches. I would have paid more attention but for the breathtakingly beautiful girl who sat beside me at the presentation with the sinister intention of distracting art lovers such as myself from the higher meanings of the sketches in the next room.

The days viewing ended with a half hour in the shell of an extension to the TSUM department store, natural haunt of the wives of the new rich. An entire floor had been filled with a jumble of video installations anyone one of which might well have been worth viewing but which together created an obscure clash of light and sound.

The finest part of it all was the walks between the various spaces and the beauty of the sun filled city, red square and the river.