Venice, November

[imomus]

My second visit to the Venice Biennale didn't change my opinion that the best piece (well, the most suggestive for my current interests) is Sergio Vega's room about Latin Amerian utopias. Vega's exuberant neologisms (Modernismo Tropical, Burlesque Marxist Wave and Dionysian Stretch) are exactly the sort of cut-and-paste genres I find so suggestive (tonight I'm playing a show of "vaudeville concrete", for instance). Vega's interest in bringing out the shamanistic and voodoo elements of Modernism (and the "crocodile brain") takes us to unexpected places (a giant blue crocodile emerging from a Modernist villa, for instance, or parrot phone boxes). But there's other fun stuff; I liked Korea and Germany's pavilions, and enjoyed climbing to the top of Austria's artificial mountain, or imagining Iceland's bizarre folk rites were the new Bjork-Barney movie.

If you're hungry for stuff to read, my new piece for AIGA Voice, "Conceptual Design: building a social conscience", has just gone up on the AIGA Voice site. The article mentions Åbäke, whom I first met in the presene of one Neil Scott. Neil has just published the amusing interview he conducted with me in a restaurant somewhere in South London on that occasion, How To Live Like Nick Currie.