Biennale tank treads a fine line

The Venice Biennale - aside from being the most significant international gathering for the visual arts - is a theatrical event. With 89 national exhibitions competing for attention, spectacle is part of the point.

This year, the spectacle that is wowing the crowds is the huge up-turned tank outside the American pavilion in the Giardini di Castello, which has been repurposed into a treadmill. At regular intervals, a runner, affiliated to the national athletics body USA Track and Field, ascends the tank and runs on the treadmill, causing the tank's wheels to turn - noisily and impotently.

This is the work of partners - in life and work - Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Allora was born in Pennsylvania, Calzadilla in Havana.

Whereas previous biennales have seen the US fielding titanic artistic figures - Ed Ruscha, Bruce Naumann - Allora and Calzadilla are far from household names.

Nor is the tank American. Allora explains it is a Centurion, a British tank bought from a collector in Bury, north-west England, ''because US tanks aren't declassified''.

Inside the pavilion the spectacle continues. ''There is a replica of the Statue of Freedom that sits on the US Capitol Building, lying horizontally in a tanning bed,'' Calzadilla says. ''Then there are wooden replicas of business-class seats from Delta and American Airlines.''

These wooden seats are also a stage: they become the apparatus for displays by athletes from USA Gymnastics, the sport's national governing body. Using the American Airlines seat replicas as a pommel horse, a male gymnast leapt and vaulted elegantly over what had become his apparatus, executing handstands on the armrest and cartwheeling over the reclining seat.

To Allora's ''shock and surprise'', the athletes and gymnasts have been enthusiastic about the project. ''The gymnasts have been in training for six months and have been talking about it as if it is their new event.''

She says: ''We are playing with simple associations: the relation between air travel and the way nations project themselves; the way air travel is bound up in notions of class, comfort, leisure, business. Airlines say a lot about culture and nations. With the airline seats and the gymnasts, we are representing two different expressions of what 'air travel' can be.''

Calzadilla adds: ''We are asking, what is a treadmill, a tank, a tanning bed, business-class travel. We are trying to make them strange - and make people see them in a new way.''

Guardian News & Media