Def in Venice

Art, parties, pollution, tourists and the ghost of mercantilism.

Every odd-numbered year, the elitist denizens of Ye Olde Arte Faggotrye leave behind their minimally furnished Soho lofts to infest Venice's narrow streets and mosquito-infested canals. In Italy's most magical and touristed city, everyone who's anyone will spend three days preceding the Biennale's public opening. Cameras will flash, Gucci sunglasses will be worn, cell phone numbers will be exchanged, invites to parties will be desperately sought out, and maybe, just maybe, some art will be looked at. It's enough to make a normal person vomit-or maybe that just comes from the salmonella-infested pigeon who just shat on your shoulder as wifey snapped a photo in San Marco Square.

Of course, these pathetic tourists would never be admitted into press week at the Venice Biennale. Just look at their shoes! Allowed are the Glamtabulous, the Excessively Rich, and the Hacks-or some combination thereof, which we may generally refer to as the Art World Professional. The only way to avoid the social antics of this morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt pseudo-society is to throw yourself into the stinking Grand Canal. The other option is to soak up as much free booze as possible and drown yourself in art. At the U.S. pavilion is the indomitable Ed Ruscha. Ruscha has always been considered an outsider simply because he's never lived in New York. While excluded from all the major pop art exhibitions early on owing to his L.A. zip code, Ruscha's response has been punk in an iconographic, James Dean sort of way. This year's project, "Course of Empire," was named after the famous series by 19th-century painter Thomas Cole; while Cole depicted the growth and ultimate demise of Anglo-American empire through the offices of the Industrial Revolution, Ruscha's take on "progress" is in keeping with his trademark deadpan style and decidedly anti-Romantic approach.

The project is simple: Ruscha has taken the five black-and-white paintings composing his Blue Collar series, originally shown in 1992 and portraying various banal roadside buildings one might glimpse riding down any American highway, and created new, colorized renderings of how the original sites appear today. The TECH-CHEM sign has been painted over to house a new FAT BOY shop; TOOL & DIE has been covered in Japanese script with gang graffiti etched on the side of the building; the old Trade School has been boarded up and abandoned, rotting behind a foreboding barbed-wire fence.

While subjected to a barrage of lame questions at the press conference, Ruscha adamantly denied that the paintings masked a veiled commentary.

"I'm not attempting to be instructional or lead people into believing that everything is hopeless."

Another question took the form of a thinly veiled provocation: If Ruscha could remove something from his country and put something else in its place, what would he do? "I'd remove politics from everything and add more color."

Kuang-Yu Tsui's video installation is also a major stand out. All of the works feature the artist either subjecting himself to some inane punishment or else attempting to control what's happening in the immediate vicinity. In The Perceptive, he's hit in the back of the head with a variety of small and large objects, ranging from a wine bottle to a television set, after which he must guess the object; in The Penetrative, he runs head-first into street signs, telephone poles, a statue of Ronald McDonald, a cow, a pony, and a widescreen tv; while "The Simultaneous" features the artist puking through a number of outdoor scenes. Probably the only other video work that didn't bore me into considerations of self-effacement was Francesco Vezzoli's hilarious trailer for a celebrity-studded remake of "Gore Vidal's Caligula" at the Italian Pavilion.

Some nations made the pavilions themselves into art projects. Albania is represented by Sislej Xhafa's Ceremonial Crying System, a weeping KKK mask towering over the Giardini; Daniel Knorr's project, European Influenza, leaves the Romanian pavilion completely empty in response to the planned Eastern expansion of the European Union (in case you don't get it, the emptiness is supplemented by a free 900-something-page reader); while over at the German pavilion, some asshole has hired a bunch of performers to shout, "This is so contemporary!" whenever anyone enters the building.

If you manage to see everything the art event of the year has to offer, you can venture out to the village of Passariano, where the grand Villa Manin has been transformed into a center for contemporary art. The current exhibition features a gratuitous selection of 20th-century masterpieces from the Museum of Cologne's permanent collection, while out in the garden, 2003's Biennale director Francesco Bonami has cocurated an adventurous show of interactive sculptural installations. Get jacked up on espresso inside Rikrit Tiravanija's cubic teahouse before embarking on a relaxing round of target practice aiming at the head of a teenage Michael Jackson. Exhausted? Take a nap on A12's tree hammock. Rest assured there's a lot more to hunt for out there. And if you feel like you've seen it all, don't bother waking up till 2007.

The Venice Biennale runs through November 6. More official info at labiennale.org. Villa Manin can be found at villamanincontemporanea.it.