the encyclopedic palace of the world
marino auriti, “encyclopedic palace of the world” (ca. 1950), arsenale pavilion .
above – marino auriti, il encyclopedico palazzo del mondo or encyclopedic palace of the world, ca. 1950s
venice biennale oliver croy and oliver elser’s “387 houses of peter fritz, ” right, part of the main show, “the encyclopedic palace. ”
marino auriti, il enciclopedico palazzo del mondo (the encyclopedic palace of the world), c. 1950s, installation view, arsenale. courtesy: la biennale di venezia; photograph: francesco galli
with the headline: beyond the ‘palace, ’ an international tour in one city .
encyclopedic palace / palazzo enciclopedico / palacio enciclopedico / palais encyclopédique or monumento nazionale. progetto enciclopedico palazzo (u. s. patent no. 179, 277 )
each week, over one million subscribers trust us to help them make sense of the world .
.) for a truly encyclopedic show about the human condition, that seeems to be a gap .
,
the encyclopedic palace ,
is that happiest of things: a staggeringly ambitious undertaking that has been beautifully realized and immediately acclaimed, bound to inspire other biennial curators to contend with its innovative approach .
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after retiring in the 1950s, he began work on the tower, a stack of seven cylindrical layers surrounded by a colonnaded piazza, constructed of wood, glass and plastic (including hair combs). he conceived it as a model for a museum to be called the encyclopedic palace of the world, which would display the range of human achievement, “from the wheel to the satellite. ”
andre may be a big name, but the encyclopedic palace also teems with creative spirits like auriti who operated outside of the mainstream art world, such as the chinese artist guo fengyi, a former technician in a rubber plant who made drawings so dense and detailed that they appear to be made out of animal fur rather than pencil or ink .
view of “il palazzo enciclopedico, ” arsenale, 55th venice biennale, 2013. center: marino auriti, encyclopedic palace of the world, c. 1950. wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts, 355 x 213 x 213 cm. courtesy of la biennale di venezia. photo by francesco galli .
valérie rousseau, “encyclopedic palace, ” exhibition label for self - taught genius: treasures from the american folk art museum. stacy c. hollander and valérie rousseau, curators. new york: american folk art museum, 2014 .
“today, in a world full of conflicts and shocks, art bears witness to the most precious part of what makes us human. ”
the kraken has risen for the 55 th time, drawing itself up out of the canals and extending its reach into every disused building, church, park, alleyway, boat and purpose - built pavilion on the film - set known as venice. this edition, the encyclopedic palace, takes its title and curatorial foundation from the ideas of marino auriti and the museum he wanted to build housing all the world’s knowledge .
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the show takes its title from the name of an imaginary museum dreamed up by marino auriti, an italian émigré who spent his retirement creating a painstaking architectural model of a 700m - tall encyclopedic palace of the world, which he hoped would be built in washington dc. his vision was never realised, but, for gioni, who places auriti’s model at the entrance to the arsenale, it is testament to a particular model of human creativity: idiosyncratic, obsessive, and motivated by the same desire to catalogue the world around us that led aristocratic collectors to keep cabinets of curiosities in centuries gone by .
although ‘the encyclopedic palace’ is often thrilling, what gioni has achieved is not exactly new in the realm of postwar exhibition - making. take a look at the catalogue for harald szeemann’s documenta v (1972), and you’ll find that it included sections titled ‘artistry of the mentally ill’ and ‘individual mythologies’, as well as an area dedicated to museum - like collections by artists. if this sounds familiar, it’s because they constitute the three dominant themes of ‘the encyclopedic palace’. if what gioni has done feels new, that could say more about the way in which biennials of the last decade have become stagnant and routine .
artists, according massimiliano gioni, director of the biennale, are the central focus of the show “the encyclopaedic palace, ” which borrows its title from a utopian project by architect marino auriti .
s mark gubb, one of 23 artists who received a venice go and see bursary from a - n to visit the biennale during the preview period, reviews the encyclopedic palace exhibition at the arsenale and giardini – and pops his head in at a few national pavilions, including jeremy deller' s english magic show .
on november 16, 1955, self - taught italian - american artist marino auriti filed a design with the u. s. patent office depicting his palazzo enciclopedico (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 .
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because of an editing error, a picture caption on thursday with an art review of the venice biennale misstated part of the name of the main show in some editions. as the review correctly noted, it is “the encyclopedic palace, ” not “the encyclopedia palace. ” in addition, the review misstated the surname of an artist whose work sits amid roman sculptures at the national archaeological museum and referred incompletely to her. she is maría magdalena campos - pons, not camos - pons, and while she was born in cuba, she is an american citizen and lives in massachusetts .
cuoghi' s belinda is one of the many bizarre, unsettling and peculiar things that have been brought together by massimiliano gioni, director and curator of the current venice biennale' s keynote exhibition, the encyclopedic palace. a colossal enlargement of a microscopic life - form, cuoghi' s sculpture was made by a 3d printer, then coated in so much stone dust that it is unrecognisable as anything at all, except perhaps a monument to futility. it is a great misshapen lump. that it exists is what seems to matter, and it is one of many works in the encyclopedic palace whose interest lies as much in the artist' s backstory as in the work itself .
, has been fine - tuning a novel format of exhibition since his 2010 gwangju biennale that begins instead with a thoroughly researched thesis and then sets out to prove it through a range of objects, many of them artworks and some of them not (books, documentary materials, etc .). in
the encyclopedic palace ,
the thesis seems to be as follows: life is mysterious and unknowable, but secular humanism and art present myriad ways of engaging with the world around us, and their consolations are largely sufficient .
venice biennale commissioner proudly described
the encyclopedic palace
as
a message of hope
and a call to
build your own encyclopedic palace ,
and indeed the show is a feel - good affair, presenting many possible paths to being actualized human beings (or whatever the best thing is people can achieve in a secular universe). gioni noted in his speech that there' s a
melancholy note
in the show, because so many of the visionary and mystical efforts by individuals in the show
failed ,
such as marino auriti' s attempt to construct a $ 2. 5 billion skyscraper on the washington mall to house all of human knowledge in his namesake
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 ?
it is the one - off brilliance of individual artists that arrests me in gioni' s show, rather than its compendiousness; it would have perhaps better suited an actual museum than a biennale, if there were ever a museum big enough for it. maybe that' s the point of the show, which was inspired by an enormous architectural model built by marino auriti, an italian émigré to the us in the 1920s. auriti wanted his encyclopedic palace of the world to contain the sum of all human knowledge, every important artefact. like auriti' s mad building, this exhibition has megalomaniac ambitions. you expect gioni to leap out of auriti' s tiered architectural cake of a building yelling :
today we curate the biennale! tomorrow, the world !
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 .
these personal cosmologies, with their delusions of omniscience, shed light on the constant challenge of reconciling the self with the universe, the subjective with the collective, the specific with the general, and the individual with the culture of her time. today, as we grapple with a constant flood of information, such attempts seem even more necessary and even more desperate. the 55th international art exhibition explores these flights of the imagination in a show that, like auriti’s encyclopedic palace, combines contemporary artworks with historical artifacts and found objects .
these personal cosmologies, with their delusions of omniscience, shed light on the constant challenge of reconciling the self with the universe, the subjective with the collective, the specific with the general, the individual with the culture of her time. today, as we grapple with a flood of information, such attempts to structure knowledge into all - inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate. the 55th international exhibition of art will explore these flights of the imagination in a show that—like auriti’s encyclopedic palace—will combine works of contemporary art with historical artefacts and found objects…
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camille henrot: animals are perceived as more mysterious because we don’t understand their language, and what we cannot quickly put into words is projected on them and they become an answer, a sign on the road. it’s the anthropomorphic way of seeing the world. in every culture, animals become concepts. it’s the way mythological stories are formed. for example, the turtle is a representation of the universe, the heaviness of creation. atlas carrying the world .
“the encyclopedic palace” appears to be an alchemical project—a nexus of conversions, from much of what has been inscribed within the realm of outsider art into treasured specimens “outside of” the claims of history. in the figures of the giraffe zarafa and perhaps even in the squirming worm in john bock’s above the point of glowing silence (2013), nestled in a far corner of the arsenale grounds, we are reminded that in today’s neoliberal regime of knowledge production, distinctiveness is a burden of the past that can quite easily be converted into novelty for cultural and political use in our present. and in these times of accelerationism, it is even more evident that the claim of novelty is after all a vice that leads to histories of plunder as subsumption. (5 )
these seemingly disconnected fragments add up to some sort of coherent whole: ‘ugly and cute’ (clearly a clay model of e. t .) sits next to ‘anna o dreaming the first dream interpreted by freud’. nothing directly connects any of this stuff, but it all makes sense together, highlighting how we need all of these things to try and make sense of the world. this room, as a single element, seems closest out of anything to representing what an impossible task the encyclopaedic palace is .
necessarily, the approach in this section feels more museum - like, but that’s not to say the show becomes dry or formulaic at any point. highlights include the architectural models of austrian insurance clerk, peter fritz, discovered by oliver croy and oliver elser in a junk shop. this vast collection of models represent a very real take on the world; farm buildings, gas stations, modest family homes, banks and churches. fritz clearly wasn’t trying to reinvent the architectural wheel, but these models allude to an imagined world, barely different from our own, but a world created by fritz nonetheless .
once outside, you’re in a world of hit and miss among the national pavilions, which tend to be high in polish, low in impact. some of the best extend the accumulative density of mr. gioni’s show. this is true of sarah sze’s assemblages of countless tiny found things in the united states pavilion, and of archival photographic installations by petra feriancova at the pavilion of the czech republic and slovakia .
the exhibition will place at its heart
a reflection on the ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world .
inspired by what scholar hans belting has called
an anthropology of images
, the biennale arte 2013 will attempt
an inquiry in the realms of the imaginary and the functions of imagination .
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 .
in a press statement, the curator pronounces the exhibition to be “an inquiry in the realms of the imaginary and the functions of imagination. ” when standing before the delicate clay figures of shinichi sawada—an autistic japanese artist who compulsively sculpts the monstrous beings registered in his psyche—i couldn’t help but think, with an admitted dose of hyperbole, that autism also emerges as a mirroring, performative behavior within the show. it is marvelously illustrated, but renders a false uniqueness around the individual through a retreat from the world. “the self” imagining the world into being is thereby compromised as a politically irrelevant and illusory paradox .
for too long now, contemporary art has belonged to big - ticket artists, churning out signature work that feels overly glossy and slick. what we find in the encyclopedic palace is something different: an exhibition privileging wonkier, more homespun offerings by lesser - known talents. here is a view of the human imagination as an untameable beast, dominated by dark desires and impulses, now finally unleashed and allowed to roam free .
he’s right. the encyclopedic palace, curated by massimiliano gioni, a young director from the new museum of contemporary art in new york, and featuring work by more than 150 artists from 38 countries, is a triumph. instead of a sprawling, unstructured hodgepodge, we find an intelligent, well - argued proposition, which suggests that contemporary art is setting off in new directions. walking through it isn’t enervating at all, but energising and exciting .
mr. jaar is telling a story about the alignment of art and power: many of the older, pre - world war ii pavilions are relics of a murderous nationalism were built as cultural trophies by economically competitive nations that created colonial empires and eventually led europe into war .
the debate about the catalogue, the archive, the fabrication of personal genealogies, becomes almost implicit in any artistic practice of interest. by definition, an artist is a collector of images. between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, aby warburg’s “mnemosyne atlas, ” composed in 1929, received renewed critical attention. in 1989, the first edition of atlas, an impressive collection of images by the german painter gerhard richter, was published. in the early 1990s this collection of personal images heavily influence art produced by emerging artists, for whom the archive, its documentary material, became a style and no longer merely a source. i truly feel that massimiliano’s “encyclopedic palace” should have included some of the first artists to confront this discourse at the beginning of the 1990s, such as renée green or mark dion, among others .
guardian art critic adrian searle ventures through the weird and wonderful landscape of the world' s foremost art festival. from creative savants to phallic yachts, via recreations of biennales past and a machine that scatters pennies from heaven, join him as he sifts through the highlights .
camille henrot: i hope that woman artists are now at a point where they don’t have to react to centuries of humiliation but can just do what they feel up to. the experience of being a woman has an impact on the way you see the world, but i’ve always been interested by the idea of the neutral .
if anything, this part of the show seems to discuss, more directly, the curator’s interest and take on the encyclopaedic palace, at the same time showing us how and why such a place is impossible, but revealing artistic attempts to harness this intangible knowledge and represent it to the world. i’m left wondering if one of the notions being explored is that art is somehow superior to mere knowledge, and whilst we willingly institutionalise the preservation of great art, it’s too messy and all - enquiring to ever be truly contained or held anywhere .
alongside the pavilions is the main show. often a disappointment, this year it is the highlight of the festival. “the encyclopedic palace”, curated by massimiliano gioni of the new museum in new york, is about how people order all the information that bombards them. alongside some well - known names, mr gioni has included works made by self - trained artists from the periphery of society, such as asylum inmates and autistics. shinichi sawada, who barely speaks, has a gallery dedicated to his deeply sinister clay animals. his work—and the show as a whole—offers something different: art that is genuinely surprising .
camille henrot: everything that’s a moving image – including the turtle giving birth – i shot for the film. the only found footage is the animated gif with the monkey going to the moon and the image of my computer in my living room playing (rainer werner fassbinder’s 1973 sf classic) world on a wire .
other works, like a series of model houses obsessively built by the austrian clerk peter fritz (credited as the artwork of oliver elser and oliver croy, who discovered them in a junk shop), are less pieces of visual art than object lessons in the weirdness of the human mind and our pursuit of meaning in the world. by including these works, gioni makes much of the show into an investigation of the psyche—particularly in the giardini, which is organized around carl jung' s hermetical
carolee schneemann is the recipient of the golden lion for lifetime achievement of the 57th international art exhibition .
camille henrot: the exhibition is called the pale fox, the title of a book by marcel griaule and germaine dieterlen written in 1965 (derived from the myths of the dogon people in mali). it’s an extremely complex story depicting the creation of the world as a messy, chaotic process. there are a lot of moments when amma, the creator, has to start over. the pale fox character plays an important role by always bringing disorder to the world because he’s impatient. he’s restless and always unsatisfied. to me, the pale fox refers to the sickness of curiosity – how curiosity becomes a malady. so the exhibition refers to the urgency to reconstruct a coherent system in which everything can be included and explained, but also the necessity of disorder to the creative process .
douglas crimp once made the argument that the museum should be added to michel foucault’s trio of institutions of confinement: the clinic, the asylum and the prison. at points in ‘the encyclopedic palace’, it felt as though gioni had this genealogy in mind, with several recent works developing from situations of confinement. for example, rossella biscotti developed dream diaries with the inmates of a women’s prison on giudecca (the prison of santo stefano, 2011), while eva kotátková’s asylum (2013) was made in collaboration with patients at a psychiatric hospital near prague. this is not to mention the many works that were made from within the walls of asylums and prisons, such as the handkerchief paintings (or paños) made by inmates in texan jails .
the main show, “the encyclopedic palace” — organized by massimiliano gioni, 39, chief curator at the new museum in manhattan and this biennale’s director — is a quiet success. spread over two sites, in the park called the giardini and the fortresslike arsenale nearby, it’s immense, with more than 150 artists, but as tightly thought out as a small show — maybe too tightly to allow for wild - card surprises. most shows on this scale are too messy; this one may be too neat. but it works .
all of our frames come with picture quality. 090 mm plexiglass, which blocks 66% of uv to prevent color fading from exposure to light, keeping your art protected for years to come. it is now considered the industry standard for artists, museums and galleries throughout the world .
it was interesting to note which pavilions drew prohibitively long queues and simply stayed that way. these included usa, germany, france (once it opened) and finland. i’ll be honest, i didn’t queue, so have no idea of the encyclopedic delights contained within .
does finishing an exhibition that claims to be about competing visions with a stately parade of works by old white men – bruce nauman, otto piene and stan vanderbeek are also in the final galleries – feel like more than carelessness? yes, i think it does. but then ‘the encyclopedic palace’ prides itself on magnanimous inclusiveness, even while less than a quarter of the participating artists are women. how does this still happen? perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that a return to the museum is a return to business as usual, but it is a little sad .
a sense of cosmic awe pervades many of the other works on display, from melvin moti’s films to laurent montaron’s reflections on nature, all the way to the sublime landscapes of thierry de cordier. the ceramic dreamscapes of ron nagle, the intricate patterns of anna zemánková, the mental maps of geta bratescu and the painted palimpsests of varda caivano describe an inner world where natural forms overlap with imaginary presences. these secret links between microcosm and macrocosm also animate marisa merz’s hieratic figures and maria lassnig’s fleshly ones: both turn self - portraits and bodies into ciphers of the universe .
the world’s biggest art festival, the venice biennale, has never been just about art. in 1930 italy’s fascist dictator, benito mussolini, saw the biennale’s potential as a propaganda showcase and ran it from his office. he regarded the event as such a success that four years later he took hitler on a personal tour. since the second world war state involvement has been more arm’s length. the british pavilion, for example, is run by the british council and the state department delegates responsibility for the american pavilion to the peggy guggenheim collection, which is based in venice .
the encyclopedic palace begins in the giardini' s general pavilion and ends several hundred yards away. as the biennale' s themed exhibitions always do, it feels interminable. that said, gioni has given it a surging flow, filling it with surprises and electrifying moments. we go from the spiritual to sex, from the biblical to the angst - ridden, from the trees to the stars. watch out for pawel althamer' s room of flayed figures, and avoid them if you can. linger over cindy sherman' s photographs of 1970s transvestites living a life of suburban normality in upstate new york. and marvel at french philosopher roger caillois' s gorgeous collection of cut and polished rocks .
the exhibition brings together many examples of artworks and figurative expressions that reveal approaches to visualizing knowledge through representations of abstract concepts and manifestations of supernatural phenomena. in the galleries of the central pavilion, intertwined with works by contemporary artists are the abstract paintings of hilma af klint, augustin lesage’s symbolic interpretations of the universe, the divinations of aleister crowley. yet the ecyclopedic palace is not a show about artists as mediums. rather, the works of these artists help illustrate a condition we all share: we ourselves are media, channeling images, or at times even finding ourselves possessed by images .
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at the end of this tour of the 55th venice biennale, what i’m left with is the feeling you have after a sleepless night spent searching the internet with dozens of web pages left open. we don’t even recall where we started. such is knowledge in the age of the digital. it is the “wikipedic palace, ” after all. it is a greedy and bulimic show with blind spots and omissions. with its interesting but fragmented materials, the contents have somehow already been assimilated by the discourse of art .
the bodies imagined by evgenij kozlov are animated by the fantasies of a rapt adolescent, and seem right at home next to friedrich schröder - sonnenstern’s seductive matrons and kohei yoshiyuki’s voyeurs. a similar scopophilic yearning is also found in the paintings of ellen altfest, who trains a lenticular gaze on the bodies of her subjects, as if trying to capture and discover the world one inch at a time .
auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all - embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history of art and humanity, as one that eccentrics like auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and self - proclaimed prophets who have tried often in vain, to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness .
. but that' s not entirely true, since the show suggests many twists on the old it' s - not - the - destination - it' s - the - journey philosophy, according to which everyone should just
do the best you can ,
as auriti wrote as one of the inspirational maxims he hoped to etch around the base of his palace. (next to it he wrote ,
the central thrust of the exhibition positions sicily as the fulcrum of geopolitical conflicts over migration, trade, ...
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 .
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the ecstatic gift drawings of shaker communities transcribe divine messages, while the drawings of shamans from the solomon islands are peopled by deities and demons. the depiction of the invisible is a key theme of the show, as evidenced in the cosmographies of guo fengyi and emma kunz, the religious icons and danses macabres of jean - frédéric schnyder, and artur zmijewski’s video of a group of blind people painting a world they cannot see. the idea that images are living, breathing entities, endowed with magical qualities and capable of influencing, transforming, and even healing, may seem like a dated concept cloaked in archaic superstitions. yet how can we deny the talismanic power of an image when we still carry pictures of our loved ones in our cell phones ?
camille henrot: national geographic was a huge inspiration. there’s this awareness of the disaster man is making in nature, but then there are these bright colours saying, ‘get a subscription! ’ and, ‘amazing pictures of the world by canon! ’ we continue to consume the gorillas disappearing. we even find a way to consume destruction .
the gallery will be closed july 6—july 15 for installation of handstitched worlds: the cartography of quilts .
schneemann was a pioneer of feminist performance in the early 1960s and has been one of the most important figures in the development of performance and body art .
in the redesigned spaces of the arsenale, 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 .
plus — a significant plus for anyone fed up to here with big - buck art — “palace” doesn’t seem to have much interest in the mainstream market. it doesn’t say no to it, exactly. it just goes its own interesting way, not without problems .
from jung’s red book, to shinro ohtake’s scrapbook assemblages, to xul solar’s collaged volumes, the exhibition celebrates the book – an object now at risk of extinction – as a depository of knowledge, a tool of self - exploration, and an escape into realms of fantasy. yüksel arslan illustrates the encyclopedia plates of an imaginary civilization that resembles a slightly warped version of humanity. 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, frédéric bruly bouabré’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 .
everyone should visit the romanian pavilion, where alexandra pirici, manuel pelmuş and a small group of performers restage dozens of works from the previous 54 biennales: using nothing more than their own bodies, they act out and mime picasso' s guernica, hans haacke' s famous destruction of the german pavilion' s floor in 1993, paintings by modigliani, sculptures by rodin, performances by marina abramović and photographs by nan goldin. both homage and parody, these quick - change charades in the otherwise empty pavilion take place all day, every day. marvellous, funny and affecting, the immaterial retrospective of the venice biennale is much more than a parlour game. it is about history and memory – and it shows that the real encyclopedic palace is not to be found in a collection of objects, but in people themselves .
on one level, the show feels like a conscious celebration of britishness, but at the same time points out how crap things can be too – strikes, barricades, the troubles and high ranking suicides, amongst other things. what it does do, overall, is present an artist who’s just fascinated by the world and how all this stuff might fit together – very much in keeping with the main theme of the biennale .
as a basis for a biennale, this is both interesting and curatorially canny; an exhibition about all the knowledge in the world can hardly be accused of including anything superfluous or irrelevant. that said, the exhibition at the core of this year’s biennale, split across the two key sites of the giardini and arsenale, is engaging, inspiring, beautiful, dark, amusing, enlightening and, above all, well - curated. this genuinely feels like somebody’s attempt to make sense of such a gloriously - ridiculous idea .
1) michael allin, zarafa: a giraffe’s true story, from deep in africa to the heart of paris (new york: delta, 1999). 2) special thanks to hannah hurtzig for bringing the story of zarafa to my attention. 3) when french poet frank andré jamme came upon tantric painting in 1970, he noted with astonishment: “it was strange that such modern, occidental - looking patterns already existed in india during the 17th century. ” this problematic view remained unchallenged by the display within “the encyclopedic palace. ” see frank andré jamme, ed. , tantra song. tantric painting from rajasthan (los angeles: siglio press, 2011). 4) see urltoken. 5) see urltoken .
its three galleries have been turned over to the creation of the world, though anyone expecting images of the almighty will be disappointed. the high point is “a sensory journey where the audience is involved in a dialogue that encompasses a crossing of temporal experience”. this is biennale - speak for an interactive video. in “creation” by studio azzurro, an italian art collective, the viewer can stretch out a hand in the manner of god on the ceiling of the sistine chapel, and touch a figure on a film being screened on the surrounding walls. the pavilion, which also includes photographs of disintegrating landscapes by a czech artist, josef koudelka, is regarded as a success for its dogma - lite approach .
the official catalogue and the short guide of the biennale arte 2017 are now available for online purchase .
exhibitions and initiatives enriching the diversity of voices that characterizes the international art exhibition .
and of course, the show is not the whole story. the biennale is as much an archipelago of islands as venice itself is .
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is the lack of social mobility in the arts due to a self - congratulatory conviction that the sector represents the ...
more than 80 participating countries in the historic pavilions at the giardini, at the arsenale and in the city centre of venice .
in this first room is auriti’s own model of his palace – a beautiful architectural model of an impossible dream. it’s only when we look at the ubiquitous information panels on the wall that we see the ramshackle odds and ends auriti used to mock - up his vision, including the likes of hair combs. surrounding the model, on sweeping circular walls, are jd ‘okhai ojeikere’s photos of nigerian women and their immaculately sculpted hair, maybe a further nod to the power of the hair - comb - as - sculpting - tool. in the next room, roberto cuoghi’s belinda looks like it’s come straight from the set of the latest alien blockbuster, and sits alongside lin xue’s meticulous bamboo and ink drawings of imaginary landscapes; alien, familiar, organic and intriguing, all at the same time .
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camille henrot: yes. while i was doing research at the smithsonian i made lots of ideas and discoveries. i’m very attached to objects. i think the arrangement of a domestic space is very much connected with building up your own mental order. collections, accumulation and hoarding are ways to build up a barrier between yourself and the other world, like an auto - immune system made out of objects. that’s what museums are about, but also an artist’s studio or your home .
the exercise of the imagination through writing and drawing is a recurring motif in the exhibition. christiana soulou brings to life the imaginary beings catalogued by jorge luis borges, while josé antonio suárez londoño translates into images the diaries of franz kafka. the rare stones collection of french writer roger caillois combines geology with mysticism, while the blackboard diagrams of rudolf steiner feverishly relate the idealist dream of grasping and conveying the universe as a whole .
gift of colette auriti firmani in memory of marino auriti, 2002. 35. 1
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second part of the photo tour through the central international exhibition: palazzo delle esposizioni, giardini .
camille henrot: to be honest, there were a lot of moments when i thought i would not be able to make my way into the institution. it was extremely difficult to do the research and get permission to film. some of the researchers and curators were very suspicious because my research of the history of the universe is basically research on everything and that’s the opposite of scientific research’s spirit of division and specification .
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handstitched worlds: the cartography of quilts
explores the relationship between quiltmaking and map - making .
the other part of the show in the padiglione centrale dei giardini includes three other great father figures. here is the red book by carl jung, the grandfather of modern psychotherapy. after his death, jung’s successors would try to hide this work. jung began compiling data for this diary of the unconscious in 1913, the year he broke away from freud, at a time when he feared he was teetering on the edge of madness. leaving the magic circle of the red book, or liber novus as it was originally titled, we find ourselves in front of a cast of andré breton, the father of surrealism, made by rené iché. a decade after paul klee, the surrealists turned to madness as a means of freeing language from bourgeois conventions, logic and linear thinking. the movement helped re - evaluate the creative value of artistic expressions by the insane. nothing is new here; and so it went during the rainy inaugural days of the 55th biennale .
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 .
camille henrot: i was doing a lot of internet research on the smithsonian database. i often had a lot of windows open on my desktop. when you look at a cluster of windows on a desktop, your mind makes these connections, not because there is a connection but because your brain needs to resolve the images. i encountered a very interesting text about the invention of hypermedia publishing, which talks about the pop - up window and the scroll and the ideas behind these designs. i found that the whole design of the computer, the way computers organise information, is connected to the original ambition of the computer to be an extremely powerful machine potentially capable of dealing with everything – starting with immense numbers. the very first computer was a calculation machine. from the beginning, the computer tries to answer archimedes’ the sand reckoner ’s very old question of determining limits of number and operations: what is the size of the universe ?
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 .
appropriately enough, the exhibition contains many variations on the idea of collecting – including rare specimens of stone emblazoned with swirling patterns gathered by the french intellectual roger caillois; the pages of the american minimalist carl andre’s surprisingly un - minimalist, 100 - page scrapbook passport, which is chock full of diverse and fascinating imagery; or a series of more than 40 black - and - white photographs taken by jd ‘okhai ojeikere recording fluctuating fashions in the hairstyles of nigerian women from the sixties to today .
it' s an unusually upbeat and earnest show as a result, weaving artists and non - artists of all kinds—some terrifically accomplished and successful, some of them outsider artists who lived in institutions or on the fringes of society—into a beautiful tapestry of common, questing humanity. gioni' s layout is masterful, too, having tamed the gargantuan arsenale (with the help of architect - to - the - art - stars annabelle selldorf) and made the best of the knotty warren that is the giardini. considering the significance of the show, however, it' s worth lingering over a few of its novelties to consider how the parts meshed together. here are four observations .
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later, it is time for rudolf steiner and his blackboards drawings. founder of the anthroposophical movement, steiner was a prolific and inspiring lecturer who is said to have held all - inclusive conferences even for the milkman and the plumber who came to his house. i think of joseph beuys, who isn’t in the show. in the central garden pavilion are exceptional gems, like kp brehmer’s skies and aleister crowley and frieda harris’s tarot cards. pardon my leaps between styles and periods, but that is what occurs in massimiliano’s palace, built upon his personal cosmology. are we witnessing curatorial superpowers? is massimiliano a curator of exhibitions who would like to curate worlds? isn’t this omnipotence the secret ambition of every curator? let’s just rearrange the universe the way we like it, man. i begin to feel overwhelmed by all the material .
the atlas of the empire. pavilion of the istituto italo - latinoamericano (iila). commissioner: sylvia irrazábal. curator: alfons hug. 19 artists and groups. arsenale, isolotto .
we make our way to the center of the galleries in the arsenale and arrive at the heart of the show — the section curated by massimiliano with artist cindy sherman. as i approach the three figurative sculptures that open this section — by jimmy durham, paul mccarthy and john de andrea — i have the sense of something that looks familiar but feels alien. i experience an uncanny feeling .
artist’s practice is a series of short videos made by the artists selected for viva arte viva about themselves and their way of working.
the encyclopedic palace of the world ( il palazzo enciclopedico del mondo ) is a mixed media , sculptural model that was created by self-taught italian-american artist marino auriti in the 1950s . now in the permanent collection of the american folk art museum in new york city , the work came to international attention in 2013 when its name was adopted as the title of the 55th venice biennale by curator massimiliano gioni . 
the encyclopedic palace of the world (il palazzo enciclopedico del mondo) is a mixed media, sculptural model that was created by self-taught italian-american artist marino auriti in the 1950s. now in the permanent collection of the american folk art museum in new york city, the work came to international attention in 2013 when its name was adopted as the title of the 55th venice biennale by curator massimiliano gioni.
the encyclopedic palace of the world (il palazzo enciclopedico del mondo) is a mixed media, sculptural model that was created by self-taught italian-american artist marino auriti in the 1950s. now in the permanent collection of the american folk art museum in new york city, the work came to international attention in 2013 when its name was adopted as the title of the 55th venice biennale by curator massimiliano gioni.