Life in Venice.

This year's Venice Biennale is not the architecture sort (those are now in even years - see for instance AR November 1996, p14) but, like its 46 predecessors, it is devoted to all the other visual arts. As usual, the big set-piece exhibitions in the main galleries are heavy with established names, and eloquent of the struggle of international critics to ensure that each has a favourite in prominent position. The theme Future, Past, Present was chosen by the undoubtedly much-harrassed curator Germano Celant: the event has to be called something, after all, and the title can be made to mean what anyone chooses how unlike the Presence of the Past exhibition, one of the first architectural Biennale, which was curated by Paolo Portoghesi in the Corderie of the Arsenale, when PoMo first laid claim to respectable international attention (AR September 1980, p 132).

Pride of place in the central rotunda this year is given over to a massive gesture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen; is it just to an architect's prejudiced eye that they seem rather more solemn and pompous when they are not working with Frank Gehry? Round the corner Roy Lichtenstein provides a reminder that he is still alive with cartoon houses set on angled planes so that they seem to change in perspective as you move round them - an old fairground trick performed here with such pretension that it loses all excitement. The Saatchiesque consumerist fatuities of people like Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, and the necrophiliac enjoyments of human violence and distortion by Dinos and Jake Chapman are celebrated. Even so, the main pavilion contains fine things for instance Agnes Martin's delicate striated abstracts, Anselm Keifer's old-fashioned struggles with the nature of paint and the landscape of the Auvergne, and Marina Abramovic's moving and strange slow videos of performance art commentaries on Bosnia.

But, as usual, much of the more interesting work (and, of course, even more pretentious rubbish) is to be found in the national pavilions, where artists who are relatively unknown are often brought to international attention for the first time. Rachel Whiteread is not one of these, but her casts of everyday objects arranged in the British pavilion make one of the most potent places in the whole exhibition: her white room of books, cast from numerous paperbacks on standard shelves, was made specially for the building and is luminous, evocative of literacy and domesticity alike; her use of warm, slightly soft resin in pieces like 'Bath' adds a more tender note to her usually ascetic and abstract repertoire.

Ivan Kafka's 'From Nowhere to Nowhere/903 Arrows' was, for me, the most powerful installation in the whole Biennale. When you go into the Czech pavilion, the air is full of arrows. In the past, Kafka has apparently made something of a fetish of violence and medieval weapons, but closer examination shows that the arrows (all of which are suspended horizontally on transparent fishing line) are modern: beautiful balanced examples of traditional craft, with brightly coloured leathered flights, varnished wooden shafts and silvery lead tips. The arrows, with their random spacing both horizontally and vertically, their flecks of colour and occasional flashing reflections, generate continuously altering perceptions of space, underlined by their perfect horizontality. First you focus on a nearby one, admiring its craftsmanship, then you see right across the space, or part-way: depth continuously changes according to your mood or position: a truly post-modern experience. On the other axis, the experience is more archaic, the arrows whizz in your direction, and you get some notion of what it must have been like to be the French at Agincourt.

Half Kafka's arrows point in one direction, half in the other, some say symbolising the sundering of Czechoslovakia. The division of the nation is more obviously illustrated in the pavilion itself, for while the Czech Republic exhibits at the front of the building, the back gallery is Slovakia's. Here, Ondrej Rudavsky, who has previously investigated light and space mostly in film and video, has made a multi-media event, in part of which marvellously delicate stainless-steel wire curtain-like hangings (made from fishing traces with their connections sparely honed to elegance by ancient use) explore space against each other and a black void.

Another remarkable use of wire is in the Korean pavilion, where two young artists, sculptor Hyung-Woo Lee, and painter Ik-Joong Kang, exhibit together in the newest national pavilion (completed in 1995 by Seok Chul Kim). While most of us may have affectionate feelings about some materials (wood, stone and so on), very few of them actually inspire revulsion and deep dislike. Barbed wire is one, but Lee has made it into something that seems to approach nobility. A hollow sphere of the stuff greets you before the entrance to the building, and suddenly it seems almost welcoming with its constantly changing presence, which fluctuates according to your position between being almost transparent to entirely opaque. He uses similar effects elsewhere, but his principal contributions to the interior are floors laid out in fine grids with small, simple, evocative, mostly Euclidean solids arranged with perfect precision. These are complemented by Kang's images on the walls: 11 484 of them, each 3in (75mm) square, colourful, endlessly varied from words and letters to people and plants, diagrams and the occasional third dimension. There are some themes, but these remain mostly concealed by the artist: it is the visitor who must make up personal stories from floor and walls. Whether there is enough content in the individual elements for you to generate narratives is a test of your stamina and post-modernity.

The significance of content is nowhere in doubt in the Nordic pavilion, where exhibits grapple in several ways with relationships between nature and culture, technology and humanity. I particularly liked Henrik Hakansson's strange systems for displaying and encouraging the life cycle of butterflies. He will, I am sure, be dismissed by fashionable art critics and commercially successful artists as a biology master gone arty. But his work celebrates life unlike Damien Hirst (not represented here), whose sawn-through animals only make picturesque spectacles of dreary reductive nineteenth-century approaches to the wonderful complexities of being, like specimens in formaldehyde at school. Hakansson's work shows death, but without relishing it with the disgusting chic-violence of Dinos and Jake Chapman. Hakansson is so fond of his fellow creatures that he once arranged a rave party for frogs in southern Sweden - much less profitable than sawing up versions of shop-window mannequins and covering them with red paint.

It is appropriate that Hakansson's funny, tender, modest celebration of life should be found in Sverre Fehn's serene Nordic pavilion, which, having been excellently restored as a calmly shaded promenade and elegant exhibition area, puts most others to shame. P.D.