Avant-gardens.

When Jean Clair hacked "Aperto" out of this year's Biennale, he unwittingly cleared the ground for a bumper crop of satellite exhibitions strewn throughout Venice's maze of campos, courtyards, and canals. These shows animated the jeweled city mainly during press-preview week - many of them existed for only a couple of days. Club Berlin, for example, a multimedia festival of sight and sound works organized, with the Biennale's imprimatur, by the Berlin alternative space Kunst-Werk, lasted 72 hours, day and night. Staged in the Teatro Malibran, this dance-club environment not only shook the rafters of that old opera house but broke the conventions regulating the display and reception of art. The guiding principle of Club Bertin - "The art should not appear as decoration but rather as an essential component of the space" - could have served as the satellite circuit's manifesto.

Routes to and from these typically small exhibitions, some of them produced independently of the Biennale, were adventures in themselves, leading us through backwater neighborhoods to settings rich in the exotic taste of antiquity. Doors ordinarily closed to tourists opened, vacant sites brimmed with life, and often art blended so smoothly with its environment that viewers had to be on the alert for signs of wonder that could be recognized as art. Marc Pottier, producer of "Avant-Garde Walk A Venezia," scouted locations for months to map a five-day art treasure-hunt that doubled as an intimate tour of Venice, meandering through magnificent private residences, hidden gardens, tiny side canals, and cloistered courtyards. The 20 artists in "Walk" make work Pottier sees as "poetic," "beautiful," and "expressive"; the picturesque surroundings he found for them amplified this romantic strain. The show included, among others, Jim Hodges' delicate wind-chime screen; Ann Hamilton's shrinelike LCD screen and video, set in a window of a private home; and, sequestered in a garden, Marina Abramovic's amethyst-encrusted Chair of Lovers.

"On Board," curated by Karin Schorm and Jerome Sans, was appealingly inspired by notions of privacy, fantasy, escape, and a very captivating 20-meter mahogany sailboat anchored in the Arsenale district. Il Nuovo Trionfo, the setting for this six-day event, is a trabaccolo, a style of vessel familiar in Venice for centuries. Artists were asked to "naturally insert themselves into the reality of the context, as if they had always been there." Kristin Oppenheim's siren's-song sound piece, Ines Lombardi's traveloguelike meditation on departure and arrival, Ken Lum's languorously pillowed dinghy, and pieces by some 20 others supported the romantic narrative insinuated by the creaking ship and the murmuring of the lagoon - all suggesting space itself as decoration's final frontier.

"Campo," a show of photo-based work by 26 young artists from 13 countries, epitomized the take-charge spirit of these independent shows. Housed hard by the old "Aperto" space, it was produced, by Francesco Bonami with the Fondazione Sandretto-Re Rebaudengo per I'Arte, inexpensively and in record time. Both "Among Others/Onder Anderen," a Dutch/Belgian coventure, and "General Release," sponsored by the British Council, emphasized young art stars. Dinos and Jake Chapman's sensationalistic sculpture Great Deeds against the Dead, 1994, a Goya-esque scenario of decapitation and castration, stole the British show; silhouetted in the doorway of the sedate Scuola di San Pasquale, this sardonic icon seemed to emblematize not only Clair's attack on new art, but the art's refusal to die a quiet death.