YEAR 2009 TRIP REPORT - VENICE. HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE?

YEAR 2009 TRIP REPORT - VENICE.
HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE?

I spend all my money on travelling and buying records. One of my top destinations in the summer of 2009 was Venice. No, not the one in L.A. with Muscle Tendencies and Suicidal Beach, but the real thing in Italy. The trip I made together with my friends Jack and Jackie who are rich Americans. Jack is a famous professor in the field of gender studies, and he owns a fancy boat which took us around.


This was very helpful since as you might know you cannot go around Venice by car. Partly because of all the streets being made of water, but mainly because you would inevitably run over lots of tourists even if you drive very carefully. They are everywhere. One of the highlights of the trip was the Biennale. For some reasons several of the pavilions there full of animals this year. The German one had a speaking kitchen cat. The environment did not really look like a kitchen but apparently there is such thing as a kitchen cat. But most of them cannot speak.


You can check out this link http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/ and get a great description in very British English of what it was all about.

But also the Hungarians had little furry creatures in the house.


Instead of animals the Scandinavian pavilion had a great house with a pool which turned out to be a crime scene. The victim of the crime could be found in the pool.


As I am not into too complex art which I cannot understand my favourite part of the Biennale was the Finnish pavilion. The Finns do not consider themselves to be a part of the rest of Scandinavia, so they had their own thing going. It was a Finnish Fire & Rescue Museum which they had transplanted to Venice. Besides two gazillion little things and photos that had to do with firemen around the world (all compiled by just one guy), they had great exhibits of nuclear war emergency action paintings from the former Soviet Union. Educational paintings of nuclear bombs exploding over Russian cities, then firemen moving in to put out the fire and save the citizens from their bunkers. These paintings looked like nuclear war wasn't all that bad at all. Yet a little more grim that the old US "duck & cover" routines. I will not post pictures here as I intend to steal some of that stuff for label artwork in the future.

Other good exhibits included this record player which was the only installation in that room. As far as I remember this was not a country specific thing.


I also really loved the sign below. When you have your pavillions full of stuffed animals, record players with red vinyl LPs and other weird looking stuff, I guess it is necessary to stress such things. Also the word "touch" is quite hard to spell it seems.