Free Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer Page A

Russian whose widowed mother had saved every ruble to get him into a tennis academy in Florida. The work may have been puerile, but the hunger to succeed of which it was the product and symbol was ravenous. In different historical circumstances any number of these artists could have seized control of the Reichstag or ruled Cambodia with unprecedented ruthlessness.
    Within a very short time the pavilions all started blurring together: it became impossible to recall, with any certainty, which art was to be found in which pavilion. The big, bright, psychedelic druggy paintings were in the Swiss pavilion. The video shower, tiled with monitors so that you were surrounded, on three sides, by a torrent of images – tennis, porn, news, Formula 1, cheetahs, football, more porn, breaking news, wildlife porn, deserts, bushfires, boxing – was Russian. But the red plastic castle – you stepped inside and it was like being in a red world – which nation's world was that? Not the same nation, obviously, that had come up with the completely blue room. Nothing but blue in there. No corners, no angles, no shadows, just blue nothingness. It was a highly abstract environment, a space of light, even though there was no obvious source of light except for the blueness that was everywhere, all around. Atman had entered this installation at a time when it was completely empty. The only corporeal thing in the room was him, but that was enough – he was enough – not to
ruin
the experience but at least to severely qualify it. The fact that he was here, in the midst of it, meant that it was not the non-corporeal experience it came tantalisingly close to being. He sat on the floor so that he would be less conscious of the body he was dragging round, nearer to dissolving into directionless, sourceless blueness. Still, it was pretty cool and came closer than anything he'd seen to what people – or Atman, at any rate – wanted from art, a space where you could trip out, lose yourself: installations raised to the level of complete immersion. Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it
Nightclub
, and if you kept it going twenty-four hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.
    As Jeff made his way from pavilion to pavilion, he keptrunning into people he knew, some of them from last night, some of whom he was encountering here for the first time. Most had hangovers. After Haig's had stopped serving, at two, some diehards had gone on to the Bauer, which had been so packed the terrace was in danger of collapsing into the Grand Canal. Everyone had their favourite pieces, their recommendations and aversions, and everyone had an assortment of free bags. No one else had seen the rainy Finnish boat in its sea of shattered glass. It was as if Jeff had hallucinated it. The more he told people about it, the more that boat meant to him. Scott Thomson was adamant that the art here lagged a million miles behind the art at Burning Man. Bottles of water and fans were being handed out. Some people suffered from the heat more than others, but everyone agreed that the heat was unbelievable. They stood in the warm shade of trees, fanning themselves, drinking water, clutching their free bags and catalogues, comparing plans for the evening, feeling relieved and vindicated when it turned out they were going to the same parties. They said goodbye and then ran into each other half an hour later, on the way to the Spanish pavilion, enthusiastic about Serbia, delayed by the airport-level security checks for Israel. Jeff bumped into still more people he knew and recognized lots that he didn't – Nick Serota chatting with Sam Taylor-Wood, Peter Blake talking to himself (nothing unusual about that, half the people here were glued to their mobiles), and someone who may or may not have been the actress Natascha McElhone – but he never saw the person he most