Travelers Welcome

Travelers Welcome

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Venice Biennale

by Bryan Murphy

Saturday at the Arsenal, art not soccer.
The new explodes on every visual front:
minimalist videos sputter under walls
coated with jokes against cyber-pretension.
Rain has drenched our poems into silence,
whereas sculpture is renewed in the perfect
mis-shapen toes of Ron Mueck’s “Boy”.

The evening’s train draws us homeward
from the palaces of the powerful
toward parking fines, headaches,
bulletins of war and terror
striking ever closer.

1 comment:

  1. I wrote this after a visit to the big contemporary art show held in Venice every two years. Part of it was installed in a former military weapons store, in a courtyard of which the organisers had set up a “poetry bunker”, displaying poems on the theme of peace. However, it can rain in Venice even in summer, and, by September, rain had left most of the poems illegible. It’s always hard to come back to the real world after experiencing the Biennale: “post-culture shock”, you might call it.

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