Nearby in the international pavilion is the work of Keith Tyson, a British artist who set himself the task of “understanding the unintelligible.” Tyson set a metal column in the center of the room, with a small sign explaining that computers rested inside the column. The exclusion of the viewer from the source of understanding—the computers —was supplemented by a series of 52 poster-sized drawings, representing a deck of tarot cards, suggesting the infinite combinations of understanding that are possible with a shuffled deck. Tyson’s engagement with the concept of understanding managed to be both whimsical and thoughtful, a balance that is increasingly hard to find.

Political statements are not rare at the Biennale, but one of the most powerful statements of this years’ Biennale is easily walked past. Do-Ho Suh, a Korean artists who splits his time between Seoul and New York, placed hundred of tiny plastic human figurines underneath a glass floor. Viewers enter his exhibition space and see only white walls and a rusty pipe; it’s often a few minutes before they see the struggling figurines that they are walking over. Such a delayed reaction calls into question the perceptions of passive violence in our society, and the gender-less figurines provided a clever comment on the status of the glass ceiling in the new century.

Other notables in the International Pavilion—which had the best percentage of interesting art per square foot by far—included a room full of 12 huge Cy Twombly paintings (Twombly, along with Richard Serra, won the Leone d’oro this year), Mimmo Rotella’s decollages of circus posters and Lucinda Devlin’s chilling photographs of American execution cells. Less impressive offerings included Paul Graham’s photographs of bathroom graffiti, Nedko Solakov’s repeated painting of walls white and black, repeatedly layering the hues over each other, and Tanja Ostojic’s “reinterpretation” of Malevich’s black square using her pubic hairs.

The most popular single-country pavilions remained the German pavilion, a house reconstructed by Gregor Schneider that caused either great claustrophobia or great praise, and the Canadian pavilion (George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff), which took science fiction film making to the next level by using all five senses to play with the viewer’s sense of perception. The Polish pavilion (Leon Tarasewicz) won the cheap thrill award, by creating an easy optical illusion with their floor. (Ridges cut into the floor and painted orange on one side and blue on the other caused the floor to miraculously change colors depending on your position.) The Switzerland pavilion showed the work of Urs Luthi, Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang, providing inspirational messages on coffee mugs and mannequins on exercise equipment.

The exhibits at this year’s Biennale are not universially strong, but if you are willing to spend an afternoon among steamrollers and manequins, you just might find a gem. And who knows, maybe it’ll show up at the Whitney in a few years.

La Biennale di Venezia