Venice: Arsenale - 55th International Art
Biennale - The Encyclopedic Palace. The title chosen by curator Massimiliano Gioni for the 55th International Art Biennale, until November 24, is The Encyclopedic Palace. Massimiliano Gioni introduced the choice of theme evoking the Italo-American
self-taught artist Marino Auriti who in 1955 filed a design with the US Patent
office depicting The Encyclopedic Palace, 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, of course, 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. With works
spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions, and with over
one hundred and fifty artists from more than thirty-eight countries, the
exhibition is structured like a temporary museum that initiates an inquiry into
the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape
our experience. Blurring the line between
professional artists and amateurs, outsiders and insiders, the exhibition takes
an anthropological approach to the study of images, focusing in particular on
the realms of the imaginary and the functions of the imagination. What room is
left for internal images - for dreams, hallucinations and visions - in an era
besieged by external ones? And what is the point of creating an image of the
world when the world itself has become increasingly like an image?
Above: Marino Auriti – Encyclopedic
Palace of the World, ca. 1950s, wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, model
kit parts.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. In the redesigned spaces of the Arsenale, by
Annabelle Selldorf, the exhibition sketches a progression from natural forms,
to studies of the human body, to the artifice of the digital age, loosely
following the typical layout of sixteenth and seventeenth century cabinets of
curiosities. In these eclectic microcosms, natural artifacts and marvels were
combined to compose new images of the universe through a process of associative
thinking that resembles today’s culture of hyper-connectivity.
Above: Detail - Marino Auriti – Encyclopedic Palace
of the World, ca. 1950s.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, photograph, gelatin
silver prints.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Special Mention by the jury for Roberto Cuoghi for the
significant and compelling contribution to the International Exhibition.
Above:
Roberto Cuoghi, Belinda, 2013.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Silver Lion for a promising young artist in the
International Exhibition The
Encyclopedic Palace to Camille Henrot for contributing a new work that
in a sensuous and dynamic manner is able to capture our times.
Above: Camille
Henrot, a still photo of Grosse Fatigue, 2013, video installation (color,
sound), production: Silex Films.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. “In the drawings of Stefan Bertalan, Lin Xue
and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, we find stubborn attempts to decipher the code of
nature, while the films of Gusmão and Paiva, and photographs of Christopher
Williams, Eliot Porter, and Eduard Spelterini, examine ecosystems and
landscapes with an gaze that longs to capture all the Earth’s spectacles, large
and small.”
Above: Patrick Van Caeckenbergh Drawrings of Old
Trees.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: Hanginglump, 2012,
polystyrene, wirenetting, polyurethane expanding foam, fabric, bonding,
plaster, paint, sand.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Danh Ho, Hoang Ly Church, Thai Binh Province,
Vietnam, 2013, wood, steel, stone.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. The curator Massimiliano Gioni conducts a tour
and is explaining the Stretcher for the Caravaggio painting Nativita con I Santi
Lorenzo e Francesco d’Assisi, stolen in 1969, wood.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. “The aspiration
to create a magnum opus that, like Auriti's Palace, can contain and describe
everything, also flows through R. Crumb’s visual chronicle of the book of
Genesis, Frederic Bruly Bouabre’s cosmogonies, and the legends recounted by
Papa Ibra Tall. Camille Henrot’s recent video studies the creation myths of
different societies, while the nearly two hundred clay sculptures of Fischli
and Weiss offer a wry antidote to the romantic excesses of such sweeping
visions of human history.”
Above:
R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, 2009, pen and ink
on paper.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Shinichi Sawada, Untititled terracotta statues.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Arthur Bispo do Rosario, sculptures, mixed
media.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Rosella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed
into a cat…gatto… ha ha ha, 2013, installation of sculptures made in compost at
the dream workshop conducted by Rosella Biscotti and Daria Carmi inside the
Giudecca women’s prison in Venice January 5 - May 23, 2013.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Matt Mullican, Untitled (Learning from that
Person’s Work, 2005, collage on paper, on cotton sheets, 12 parts.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Michael Schmidt, Untitled works from the series
Lebensmittel (Food), 2006-10, C-prints.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. "At the
center of the Arsenale, is a curatorial project by Cindy Sherman, an imaginary
museum of her own devising in which dolls, puppets, mannequins, and idols
cohabit with photos, paintings, sculptures, votive offerings, and drawings by
prison inmates, composing an anatomical theater in which to contemplate the
role of images in the representation and perception of the self. The word
“image” is linked, by its very etymology, to the body and its mortality: the
Latin imago referred to the wax
mask the Romans made to preserve the likeness of the recently deceased."
Above: Charles Ray, Fall ’91, 1992, mixed media.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Jimmie Durham, Jesus. Es geht um die Wurst,
1992, wood, iron, steel, ink, paper, acrylic, mud glue.
Arsenale: The En cyclopedic Palace.
Hans Scharer, Madonna, oil and mixed media on panel.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. “Ryan Trecartin’s volatile, post-human bodies
introduce the final section of the Arsenale, where works by Yuri Ancarani,
Alice Channer, Simon Denny, Wade Guyton, Channa Horwitz, Mark Leckey, Helen
Marten, Albert Oehlen, Otto Piene, James Richards, Pamela Rosenkranz, Stan
VanDerBeek and others examine the blend of information, spectacle, and
knowledge that is characteristic of the digital era.”
Above: Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2011, Epson
UltraChrome K 3 inkjet on linen.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. "As a contrast to the white noise of the
information age, an installation by Walter De Maria celebrates the mute, gelid
purity of geometry. Like all works by this legendary artist, this abstract
sculpture is the result of complex numerological calculations, a
self-contained system in which the endless possibilities of the imagination are
reduced to an extreme synthesis."
Above:
Walter de Maria, Apollo’s Ecstasy, 1990, 20 solid bronze rods.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Paulo Nazareth, Santos de Minh Mae (My Mother’s
saints), 2013, mixed media installation.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. "Among the exhibition’s outdoor installations
and performances (which include John Bock, Ragnar Kjartansson, Marco Paolini,
Erik van Lieshout, and others, extending to the Giardino delle Vergini at the
very end of the Arsenale) are works that build on and transform the
sixteenth-century Venetian tradition of the Theatres of the World, visual
allegories of the cosmos in which actors and temporary architectures composed
miniature representations of the universe." Gioni writes.
Above:
Marco Paolini, Fen, Iron, wood, hay, words, realized with Roberto Abbiati.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. Ragnar Kjartansson’s outdoor musical
performance on the S.S. Hangover.
Arsenale: The Encyclopedic Palace. “Through these pieces and many other works on
view, The Encyclopedic Palace
emerges as an elaborate but fragile construction, a mental architecture as
fantastical as it is delirious. After all, the biennial model itself is based
on the impossible desire to concentrate the infinite worlds of contemporary art
in a single place: a task that now seems as dizzyingly absurd as Auriti’s
dream.” Massimiliano Gioni.