We woke up this morning to the sound of the siren alert for the acqua alta, which is the high tide which floods parts of the city. Here's how St Marco Square looked around 11 am.
These are the disposable booties you can buy to slip over your shoes if you need to walk through the flood waters. 10EU at most stores, but of course Rod found some for 7.99EU.
You can see the tide water lapping over the edge of the embankment. In most places there are temporary elevated walkways to keep your feet from getting wet, so i made it to several of the offsite Biennale pavilions to see what was up.
This was an installation at the Taiwan Pavilion. Medical booties recalling once again the tidal floods.
There were some nice things at the New Zealand Offsite, including this house made of florescent lights by Bill Culbert
Also by Bill Culbert this humble installation of water filled bottles reflecting the small enclosed world of the Venice canal.
The big surprise of the Biennale so far has been how much crap there is. Take this entry from the offsite Scottish pavilion. Some photographs on the floor beside some pans of evaporated liquid. Maybe it was an interesting idea but totally fell down materially and was not even very interesting visually.
Or how about this piece by Yoko Ono which included a soundtrack of her singing, which may be what killed these 'people'.
I like foxes even when they have human bodies.
This was at the Azerbaijan Pavilion which was actually mostly pretty good.
In a similar vein but not part of the Biennale was this installation at the Palazzo Grassi, which houses the Venice Contemporary art Museum. It was a show by Rudolf Stingel, which also included some abstract paintings and small b&w paintings of religious sculptures, which hung somewhat awkwardly on all this carpet.
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