Stroll through the Giardini or the Arsenale during the Venice Biennale and the world is your oyster. The only question is which country you'll visit next. A quick look at Spain, perhaps, or maybe a spin around Slovakia? They're all there, spread out through the grounds, dotted among the trees, in the form of pavilion buildings like mini-embassies - and snapshots of national character. Well not all, actually. Ireland, for one. Like many others, we missed out on our chance to stake a claim to a site in the Giardini and this time round, as before, the Irish pavilion is a Venetian gallery, the Nuova Icona, on the group of islands known as Giudecca.
The Biennale is really an absolutely vast event, and the director of this year's end-ofmillennium extravaganza, curator Harald Szeemann, gave it the title Dapertutto to emphasise his policy of openness. And there is a certain generosity to his approach. Aiming to transcend cultural, temporal and geographical boundaries, he invited a mixture of long-established and much younger artists, including a particularly large contingent of Chinese artists. And he encouraged participating countries to choose younger artists as their national representatives. He also decided to enlist pre-existing work rather than commissioning new projects, however, which means that much of what you see has been doing the rounds on the international circuit, often in slightly different form, including, appropriately enough, Soo-Ja Kim's refugee truck, a small Hyundai flatbed heavily laden with brightly-coloured clothes and blankets.
Intriguingly, here and there throughout the various parts of the show, the idea of globalisation surfaces as a potential theme, but it never quite crystallises. The deliberate lack of a thematic focus - the obvious one would have been the impending Y2K - means the show has a sprawling, formless quality, but the fact is, the same would hold true of almost any conceivable survey of international contemporary art. A cynic might suggest that the situation is perfectly illustrated in the Biennale's widely acknowledged coup de theatre, German artist Katherina Fritsch's gigantic, black-painted sculpture Rat King. In this work, the viewer is confronted with an outward-facing circle of identical rats, each much taller and broader than a human. You soon realise that the animals are caught by their tails, which have become inextricably entangled: that is, in fact, the meaning of the title. Rat kings are a phenomenon in nature, though no-one is sure how they arise. They can each pull in a different direction, but they cannot escape their collective identity, just like the artists in the Biennale, or even the art world as a whole. Fritsch's work is certainly impressive, but it impresses through the sheer blunt force of its size and imagery.
Inevitably, video and installation loom large. Artists love video, but its abundance makes you pretty ruthless. If it does nothing for you, you move on, otherwise you would spend a week just getting around the exhibition. There are other drawbacks. Because of restrictions on audience numbers, I never got to see official German artist Rosemarie Trockel's video installation, for example. The queues were simply too long each time I tried. But those I met who waited, and watched, were perplexed and frankly discouraging. "Once again," the catalogue proclaims proudly, "the art on show in the German Pavilion is a paragon of the ???????non-totalizable," which I think means no-one understands what it's about.
No such problem with Iranian Shirin Neshat's projection, Turbulent, which juxtaposes a male and a female singer on opposite walls, and drew uniformly enthusiastic responses. Its subtext relates to the fact that women are banned from singing in public in Iran. And commentary is superfluous in the case of Bruce Nauman's Poke in the Eye which is just what it says it is, though there's a long, uncomfortable wait. Nauman, like the much older Louise Bourgeois, is being honoured for lifetime achievement. Both have been extremely influential and both continue to outshine their younger successors. Though among the younger exhibitors, Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Siden's multiple video installation, Who Told the Chambermaid?, about surveillance and voyeurism, is good.
Predictably, painting does not fare well. It's easy enough to see the problem. Painting is an old art form to which countless generations of artists have been applying their efforts. It's difficult to imagine anything new emerging at this stage of the game, and the Biennale sets great store on novelty. The most interesting painter in the open section of the exhibition is, tellingly, a student of Gerhard Richter, Swiss-born Pia Fries. Her work is intelligent but also has a defensive quality - like a cornered chess player who knows her moves are extremely limited but is determined not just to defend but to attack. She is a selected artist.
Scarcely any of the participating countries choose to rely on painting, and one major exception, Britain's Gary Hume, is a real disappointment. He is an interesting painter who has done engaging work, but here, with a big pavilion at his disposal, and in contrast to Howard Hodgkin's inspired showing some years back, he seems so afraid to make a mistake that he almost fails to register at all. His mostly pallid, repetitious work seems overstretched and hurried. Only two or three of his paintings have anything really going for them.
One of the most impressive pavilions is the Japanese, which cleverly combines impassive technology with touchy-feely sentimentality in a two-storey display. Tatsuo Miyajima's high-tech, high-spec installation marshals 2,450 blue light-emitting LED units in a darkened room - one of several end-of-millennium countdown pieces. His numerals randomly flicking off and on suggest death and statistics. It looks fantastic but many people found it optically disturbing and had to hurry through. Downstairs, there is a Blue Peter-ish exposition of his Kaki Tree Project, which propagates plants derived from the one kaki tree that survived the bombing of Nagasaki, a feel-good project, and probably a constructive alternative to art.
Ann Hamilton's installation in the US pavilion is also a superior piece of stage management, though it is not half as profound as it likes to think it is. All too ironically, in a week when the country was at the centre of a huge health scandal, Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens chose to highlight environmental issues in a very subtle installation, filling the pavilion with a thick, white mist. And using the sounds of crying children only compounds the discomfort.
With a large, transient audience looking for diversion, audience participation is obviously an attractive option. Accordingly, you can have any part of your body tattooed with one of a range of designs by Slovakian artists, for free, in the Slovak pavilion. You can grab a chair leg and bang the hide drums of the Chinese-born Chen Zhen - who, in spite of talk of Zen and Taoist principles, has managed to come up with an incredibly ugly and distinctly un-Zen construction to support his drums. In the Austrian Pavilion you can take part in a lottery, the proceeds of which go towards language lessons for those displaced by the war in Kosovo. Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt's interactive buildings made from plastic bottle crates are surprisingly good. Then there is the tiresome Russian duo, Komar and Melamid, who have chimpanzees take photographs and let elephants paint pictures.
Toys have a role to play as well. Wim Delvoye built (though not personally) a life-size, wooden Cement Truck in teak, densely embellished with carvings in the style of Flemish baroque, a remarkable, perplexing object. Chris Burden, who once, rashly, asked a friend to shoot him in the arm as a performance piece (the friend did, a little too enthusiastically) has turned to the safer occupation of playing with Meccano, building big model bridges. If you find them too static you can check out Max Dean's robotic photograph shredding machine.
While it's good to get a chance to see a generous sampling of Chinese art, it is a like a show within a show. And, while hysterical overstatement is perhaps too harsh a term to apply to much of it, it's not that wide of the mark. There is a sense of giddy intoxication with new possibilities in the way they engage with Western idioms, but also a tendency to belabour the obvious. Still, several artists, including Zhang Huan with his still photographs documenting events and performances, aroused much favourable comment.
Apart from poor or uninteresting work, there are big projects that fail to deliver. Thomas Hirschorn's sprawling World Air- port, with cardboard models of aircraft, masses of magazine cuttings and miles of adhesive tape, casts us as refugees filing through. It suggests an artist desperate to appear engaged but chronically unable to articulate an argument or define a position. The young English-born, US-based artist Jason Rhoades has become a hot property but his two collaborative projects (he specialises in being a fixer-collaborator) here, with Danish artist Peter Bonde and with John McCarthy, who makes a career out of trying to inspire disgust, are both full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In fact, even given that art, as every other area, must be allowed a certain leeway, the level of wanton waste in both his projects verges on the obscene and suggests his strategy is to create enough confusion to disguise the lack of any substance.
As a personal choice, two of the most rewarding exhibits are by photographers: Swiss Balthasar Burkhard's vast black-and-white city images and Frank Thiel's images of Berlin being rebuilt, again on a monumental scale. More modestly, and conventionally, Miriam Backstrom's photographs of deserted television or film sets, showing the limits of their artifice, are intriguing.
Ireland's artist, Ann Tallentire, shows a video installation, Instances, a modest, quietly-effective work. It is in two parts. In the first, on a monitor we see the artist engaged in a number of banal but oddly surreal actions that suggest a certain unease. The second part is a video projection recording daybreak over a nondescript urban landscape. The counterpoint of the strange, obsessive actions against the lonely dawn - a fairly bleak, Beckettian mise en scene - is quite promising, but it is to some extent thwarted by the fact that they are in separate rooms. There is a clear case for directly playing one against the other, but then that would have gone against the gallery lay-out. Time for Ireland to move on from Nuova Icona, perhaps?
That the Irish representation makes it on a budget that is minuscule by the standards of the vast majority of other participating countries is a testament to the grit, determination and resourcefulness of the team responsible. In the wider view, we're entitled to feel disappointed that no Irish artists were selected by Szeeman or his international jury for inclusion in the invited part of the exhibition for, though the Biennale is better in retrospect. When you have time to dwell on the pieces that did engage you, there is a lot of work there that is instantly forgettable.
The Venice Biennale is at the Giardini de Castello, the Arsenale di Venezia and other sites around Venice until November 7th
