The Blurred Borders Of a State of Crisis

VENICE -- Every day this week, The Post looks at some of the most notable art at the Venice Biennale.

One measure of an artwork's success might be the time you give to it, especially when there are lots of other things you could do. Surrounded by another thousand or so works of current art, and with the older glories of Venice just a bit farther off, the Dutch pavilion of the Venice Biennale kept me captive for hours over several visits. Aernout Mik, who's filling it this year, makes art that is too complex to take in all at once and too compelling to pass by.

Mik works at the border between politics and play, reality and drama. His Venice project, called "Citizens and Subjects," includes a series of video projections of disasters and crises that raises the stakes for what theater means.

One pair of screens shows footage from the news, of such things as illegal immigrants being rescued from the ocean or a wrecked train being hoisted by a crane. Those same screens also present images of emergency personnel pretending to deal with such events, in rehearsal for the real thing. The crux of the work is that it's not easy to tell when you're seeing truth and when you're watching fiction -- or rather, real documentation of a staged event. Is that workman pulling out the ceiling of a train dealing with real damage, or creating damage to be dealt with in a crisis exercise?

Other screens ramp up the fiction quotient. Mik got access to a fake village built by the Dutch military on the largest disaster training ground in Europe. He then produced his own bizarre pseudo-emergency. He brought in a range of amateur actors and extras, from schoolkids to scruffy adults to people dressed as firefighters, and got them to improvise the evacuation of a fake detention center that he built on site.

Since Mik's instructions to his actors were of the very vaguest kind -- the video is silent, so you don't know what, if anything, he's telling them to do -- their actions are often inscrutable. At one moment you're watching uniformed emergency workers responsibly spraying firefighting foam into the building and wheeling out wounded mannequins on gurneys. At another, the kids are putting on their elders' uniforms, playing in the foam, heaving mannequins headfirst into it.

The real training ground, with its fake village, already sets truth against fiction; what Mik makes happen in it pushes the confusion further. And it perhaps suggests that such confusion has been a standard feature of the politics and history of real police emergencies. It's as if the line between good guy and bad guy, savior and oppressor, citizen and subject have often gotten blurred. (Think back to Selma, Ala., or to what happens in police stations in Iraq now.)

Finally, in another corner of Mik's installation, a pair of screens are almost all about fiction. The video projected onto them presents an obscure scenario in which a bunch of down-at-heels immigrants, bearing obviously wooden guns, seems to capture a troop of German border guards. Yet even this fiction is built on a scaffolding of fact, sort of: It's inspired by a real documentary, shot by French ethnographer Jean Rouch in 1954, about one cult's strange ceremonies in colonial Africa.

Those are the ingredients that go into the Dutchman's works, and I know some of their effects: disorientation and bemusement, coupled with interest and attraction. As for meaning, this art is clearly about politics and the perennially screwed-up state of things. Its title tells us that it's also about power in a democratic state: What does it mean for citizens to be subject to the state they constitute? And what subjection happens to those who aren't citizens? (Think Guantanamo.)

But even after all that viewing, I can't say I've been given settled answers, to these or any other questions. Mik's art demands I watch some more.