Venice
2013: La Biennale - 55th International Art Exhibition: Giardini
Central Pavilion. The title
chosen by curator Massimiliano Gioni
for The Biennale, until November 24, is The
Encyclopedic Palace. Massimiliano Gioni introduced the choice of theme evoking the Italo-American
self-taught artist Marino Auriti in1955 filed a design with the US Patent
office depicting his Palazzo Enciclopedico, an imaginary museum that was
meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest
discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite. Auriti’s plan
was never carried out, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops
up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other
artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried, often in vain, to
fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and
richness. The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition is laid out in the Central
Pavilion in the Giardini and in the Arsenale forming a single itinerary, with
works spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions,
including over 150 artists from 38
countries.
Above: Carl
Gustav Jung – The Red Book, 1914-1930. The book was named for the color of its
leather cover; it occupied Jung intermittently for over sixteen years as he
labored to document his personal cosmology in a way that would convey the
tremendous import. The revelations within it had a profound influence on Jung’s
later career, particularly in his formulation of his theory of
individuation. “All of my works, all of
my creative activity,” he later recalled, “has come from those initial
fantasies and dreams.”
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Eva Kotatkova, Asylum, 2013, mixed media installation. The work of Eva
Kotatkova examines institutions and disciplinary systems, from primary schools
to prisons, considering the ways in which they can determine behavior. Using what she describes as an “archeological”
approach. She dissects the mechanism
underlying the everyday, often using her own experiences, memories and personal
history as a point of departure.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Shinro Ohtake, Scrapbooks #1-66, 1977-2012, mixed media artist books.
Shinro Ohtake is an influential presence in Japanese contemporary art. His Scrapbooks
have grown to a collection of over sixty individual books, some bulging with seven
hundred pages. Like keepsake albums
taken to a feverish extreme, these books hold mountainous collections of found
materials: pictures from magazines, ticket stubs, photographs, matchbooks etc.
He collages and paints these to create complex stratified compositions, so that
each book also becomes a sculptural object.
They function as crystallization points where the cast-off sweepings of
visual culture are transformed into heightened versions of themselves.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic Palace.
James Lee Byars, The Figure of the Interrogative Philosophy, 1987/95 and the
Figure of the Question of Death, 1987/95, gilded marble. A self-proclaimed
mystic and an inveterate showman, the late James Lee Byars fashioned his life
into a kind of artwork, shaping a persona through his richly variegated body of
work. He spend most of his life
wandering tirelessly, but his time in Japan from 1958 to 1968 was the most
formative. There, he enthusiastically undertook studies in Noh Theater,
calligraphy, and Zen Buddhism, which would have a profound impact on the rest
of his career.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Suddenly This Overview, (1981-), unfired
clay, approx. 180 sculpture. From the start of their collaboration practice in
1979, Fischli and Weiss’s work was marked by a playful disregard of all things
high-minded. Instead they valorized the childish, the banal, and the wondrous,
often hilarious and poignant effect. This their first large-scale collaboration,
continuous to expand. A collection of
over two hundred small, unfired clay sculptures that represent the world
through a seemingly arbitrary selection of events, objects, phases, and
concepts both historical and imaginary.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Domenico Gnoli, Winged Rhino at 15th Floor, and Snail on
Sofa, both from the series What is a Monster?, 1967, India ink, tempera and
acrylic on cardboard. Domenico Gnoli
was, by his own admission born into the world of art. “For me imagination and invention cannot
generate something more important, more beautiful and more terrifying than the
common object, amplified by the attention that we give it.” He stated. In his
series of drawings, What is a Monster? (1967), a whimsical bestiary first
published in Horizon magazine, alongside a text by poet and novelist Robert
Graves, rooted in the teeming dreams of Hieronymus Bosch and the Surrealists,
these works feature creatures of all stripes inhabiting interiors much like those
in Gnoli’s paintings.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Shaker Gift Drawings. Polly Jane Reed, Heart-shaped Cutout, 1844, ink
on blue paper. In the 1840s, Shakerism entered a period of spiritual
revitalization known as the “Era of Manifestations,” which saw a yearning for
“spiritual gifts’ such as spirit possession. The spiritual drawings produced by
sixteen Shakers, who referred to themselves as “instruments” tasked with
recording the visions given to them by heavenly beings. Though admired for
their beautiful patterning, the drawings are noteworthy for their very
existence, which contradicts the sect’s well-known prohibition on the making of
images. The Shakers allowed an exception
for these, as they were considered not superfluous decoration, but direct
portals to the world beyond, which could be used both to instruct, by way of
symbolic vignettes and pictorial compendia of significant figures, and to
provide a view of heaven itself, which, in their images bears a striking
resemblance to the communities that the Shakers had build for themselves.
Giardini:
Central Pavilion - The Encyclopedic
Palace. Andra Ursula, T. Vladimirescu Nr.5, Sleeping Room, 2013, wood, metal,
glass, fabric, paint. Darkly comic and often irreverent, much of Andra Ursula’s
work stems from a mining of her Romanian roots.
For The Biennale, she has used a series of dollhouse-like models based
on the interior of her childhood home in the small Transylvanian town in
Salonta. These models, which cast the
shabby interior of her house as a miniature stage, take their cue from an
earlier work, which Ursula originally conceived as and object through which she
could purge past psychic trauma, more a talisman than a sculpture.
Giardini: Central Pavilion - The
Encyclopedic Palace. Morton Bartlett, Untitled (doll), plaster, fiber hair,
paint, fabric. When he passed away in 1992, Morton Bartlett left behind a
collection of anatomically correct, handcrafted dolls packed carefully in
thirty-year-old newspaper, accompanied by stacks of B/W photographs depicting
the dolls in a variety of intricately staged tableaux, both with and without
their clothes. Before their discovery no
one knew of his unusual obsession with these dolls, which he modeled from clay
before casting in plaster and painting naturalistically.
Giardini: Central Pavilion - The
Encyclopedic Palace. Imran Qureshi, Moderate Enlightenment, 2006/9, opaque
watercolor on wasli paper. Imran Qureshi
first learned the Mughal tradition of miniature painting, while at Art College,
where the tradition saw a revival beginning in the 1980s. Qureshi saw new possibilities for a style
historically reserved for the portrayal of religious icons, military battles,
and courtly life. His depictions both
harnessed and challenged the typical characteristics of the paintings,
inserting emblems of present-day Pakistan into the highly ordered and often
idyllic landscapes of miniature painting. In Qureshi’s series of miniatures,
Moderate Enlightenment, various characters take part in common leisure activities:
they lift weights, hold shopping bags, or, with the sobriety of two men caught
at a crossroads, blow bubbles at one another.
The curious figures seem to assume a special significance on the
flattened picture plane, challenging the historicity of traditional Mughal
style, while embodying contemporary culture shifts that quietly counter Western
preconceptions of the Islamic world.
Seen in the Central Pavilion, Patrizio
Bertelli and Miuccia Prada.