BIENNALE ART: VENETIAN WOES

              VENICE, June 16, 2013 - Built on tree trunks rammed into
lagoon waters this city, known as La Serenissima, has never
been short of eccentricities, some chronicled in its past
though modern additions are just as peculiar.
                  
There is nothing ‘serene’ these days about
a volume of recorded Polish church bells peeling every
hour. Their loud ringing from tapes is followed by the
recorded electronic reverberations of the bells, a sound
pumped across parts of the city by mega loudspeakers.
The noise is something like a jumbo jet flying across
the city at about 10000 feet or overhead thunder rolling
on and on and on - for some seven minutes.
                   This is art, Poland’s chosen exhibition at the
2013 Venice Arts Biennale. The sounds will flagellate
Venetian ears – and minds - for the next five months, the
duration of the Biennale. The bells will ring and the
electronic boom will hang in the air every hour for ten
minutes during daytime. Complaints by irate residents
to police have been ignored. The official excuse: ‘The
bells are an official Polish entry at the current Arts
Biennale. And art is art and cannot be touched.”
                
If this infernal racket is driving many citizens out of their mind others were rebelling last weekend with
attempts to stop cruise ship passengers boarding their vessels. The ‘Stop the Big Ships’ campaign has
become militant since local and national authorities decided to allow mega-cruise ships - ten floors tall
and carrying 3,000 passengers and more - to sail into the fragile lagoon city, right along St Mark’s Square
and down the Guidecca Canal to the port.
                    The water displacement of these ocean-going monsters is playing havoc with Venice’s delicate
foundations with some alleyways buckling already. Worse, the tiniest navigational error or technical mishap could
spell disaster for the city.
                    The money from the cruises is padding relatively few wallets in Venice even though the maritime workers
union has upped their original estimate of 1,500 workers involved in servicing the cruise ships to an astonishing
6,000 workers just this week. But no protest or expert opinion has managed so far to terminate the perilous
navigation.
                      
 Another money spinner and closely related to the cruise ship scourge is the MOSE, a 14
billion Euro project to built hydraulic barriers on the entrance to the lagoon. These are supposed to
prevent king tides from flooding the city.
                         The dubious project (defined as harebrained by experts) was initiated by former Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi (he of the Bunga-Bunga parties) five years ago and handed over to a consortium of companies
all with close ties to his government. The project now resembles more and more a money laundering scheme. It
should have been completed in 2010 but its cranes and rusty bulldozers stationed on ferries keep digging bigger
holes into the lagoon, enlarging the existing navigational channels. This, of course, will allow even bigger cruise
ships to sail through Venice.                                     
                          Mud from the MOSE excavations are creating artificial islands in the lagoon close to the city, islands
perfect for residential development, perhaps by the same consortium which was also awarded a monopoly for new
infrastructures in the lagoon.
                           During the Middle-Ages, Venice was a city well disposed towards dissent, especially against
the power of the Church in Rome or the tyrannies of dictators. Rebels often found a welcome here (for a price) so
did the Jews fleeing persecution in Europe who found a home in the Venetian ‘ghetto.’
                              
No surprise therefore Venice opened a closed church to exhibit the six containers by
Chinese dissident-artist Ai Weiwei this month. Visitors peer into the containers through a small window
and see a graphic reconstruction of life inside the prison cell where the artist was held for 81 days by
Chinese authorities.
                               The scenes, depicting the lifelike figures of Ai and his two permanent military wardens,
expose the cruelty of the ‘high proximity surveillance’ to which the artist was subjected around the clock.  The
wardens, rotated after a few hours, stand by his bed at night, stand next to him when he sits on the toilet, on
either side when he eats and while he is shackled to a chair during interrogation.
                               Banned from leaving the country to attend the Biennale Ai has managed to strike a telling
blow against the horror of the Chinese penal system – and his own inhuman treatment.
                               His container-art is exhibited at Sant Antonin church in the district of Castello, a jewel of a
little church shut down for decades because it was falling apart. Yet the church is famous in Venetian legend. In
1819 an elephant killed his handler and escaped from a circus tent near St Mark’s Square. The beast sought
refuge inside the church. Unable to coax him out or scare him out with buckshot (that apparently made no impact
on him) the city called on the occupying Austrian army to help them out.
                               The Austrians, efficient Teutonic’s that they are, pulled up two small canons and shot the
elephant dead.
                                
 Today few visitors to Ai’s expose of subtle Chinese torture have heard the
elephant story or are likely to take a peep at the brilliant frescoes of Palma the Younger or realize the
Venetians stole the relic corpse of Saint Saba from Istanbul a thousand years ago and kept it under
the altar at San Antonin - until a rueful cardinal in recent times sent Saint Saba back to his birthplace,
in Syria.
                                  There is always the chance of the unexpected in Venice: Perhaps one day soon the sound
system of the Polish Biennale exhibition will break down – for good.

Uli Schmetzer was a foreign correspondent for 40 years. He is the author of four books all available in print and digital on www.amazon.com