Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke Page A

water falling in front of the video screen (get it?); and an imaginary trailer for an imaginary remake of Bob Guccione’s all-too-real 1979 smut-flop
Caligula
featuring—in a successful attempt to capture the alpha of boring and the omega of thoughtlessness—guest appearances by Gore Vidal and Courtney Love. John Stuart Mill said that the purpose of art is “the employment of the powers of nature for an end.” Specifically, the huge, flabby hind end of a transvestite named Leigh Bowery in a video showing spring-loaded clothespins being attached to tender parts of his body. He deserved it. Nearby was Regina José Galindo’s video of herself having her hymen surgically restored in extreme close-up. I will forgo description of the luncheon fare available at the Biennale. Fabulous Italian food may be of interest to readers, but not on the way back up. (Memo to video auteurs: There already is a method of turning moving pictures into art. It’s been in use since
The Birth of a Nation
.)
    Among the many uninteresting things about the Biennale was the dearth of artworks that you’d like to have or to hold or to look at again as long as you live even if they were done by a beloved (if psychiatrically disturbed) son or daughter. The aptly named Louise Bourgeois had some aluminum sculptures that were blobby and intestinal in a nice kind of way and would look great on my mantel if my mantel were three feet wide. And I was enthralled by Subhoda Gupta’s rows and rows of stainless steel shelving carefully stacked with pristine cooking utensils. Gupta, who is Indian, went straight to the point with his title:
Curry
. My guess is that he’s not an artist at all but is bucking for a green card as a kitchen designer.
    In the entire Biennale there was exactly one good new artist, Ricky Swallow, lone exhibitor at the unprepossessing, not to say prefab, Australian pavilion. Swallow created a full-size tableau of a seafood catch spread ready for the cook with the tablecloth pushed to one side of the table and including lobster, mullet, a bucket of oysters, and a half-peeled lemon all seemingly carved from a single block of maple. Among Swallow’s other brilliant whittlings was a medallion of hanging game in the manner of the eighteenth-century master British woodworker Grinling Gibbons, but with a couple of wild-card Aussie lizards thrown in. And there was a perfectly rendered bike helmet with serpents entwined among the straps and ventilation slots. That’s my opinion of the Tour de France, too. The docent at the pavilion, instead of busily looking aloof like his counterparts, said “G’day, mate.”
    The Czech pavilion had a lot of ball bearings on the floor. In the German pavilion people had been hired to yell at you. The Icelandic pavilion was made from twigs and branches.Icelanders respect nature so much they’ve given their beavers MFAs. The Hungarian pavilion was full of deep-sea-diving suits dressed in pajamas and wellie boots. The Swiss pavilion had an enormous digital clock ticking off the “5 Billion Year Countdown Until the Explosion of the Sun.” Cuckoo. The Austrian pavilion was entirely built over in a shapeless jumble that looked like someone had taken Frank Gehry’s titanium away and made him work in two-by-fours and tar paper. It was improvement on Gehry Partners’ Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
    The U.S. pavilion featured talentless airbrush artist Ed Ruscha’s airbrush renderings of industrial buildings of no note. But the air-conditioning was excellent. An Argentinean artist built a room from Sheetrock and punched a lot of holes through the walls. Who can blame him? The air-conditioning wasn’t functioning at all in there. I saw an impressive constructivist work of bolted steel and wire mesh, but it turned out to be the Arsenale’s freight elevator. Phone kiosks in the shape of giant fiberglass parrots with receivers and dial