Dossier #1 Venice Special September 2013
On the occasion of the launch of art-agenda’s new iPad app, which can be downloaded free here, we are happy to introduce art-agenda Dossier. The Dossier, available on the app and on art-agenda’s website, will appear regularly and contain in-depth special features on major exhibitions and theoretical debates; newly commissioned artists’ projects in various formats and media; conversations and interviews; historical reviews, and more. Dossier #1 Venice Special contains three hard-hitting critical texts on the 55th Venice Biennale by regular art-agenda contributors Natasha Ginwala, Adam Kleinman, and Ana Teixeira Pinto. Happy reading!
The Palace of False Mirrors
Natasha Ginwala
Zarafa was a gift from Mehmet Ali Pasha of Egypt to Charles X, King of France. She, along with two others, was the first giraffe to be seen in Europe after three centuries. In 1826, her incredible journey began in the grasslands of Sudan, where she was captured. Zarafa was then taken to Khartoum, transported down the Nile River, and finally loaded onto a ship departing to Marseilles. For her appointment with the king, Zarafa was made to walk to Paris over forty-one days, accompanied by eminent naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and a “street audience” comprised of several thousand French citizens.(1) After taking up residence at the Jardin des Plantes for eighteen years, when death came, Zarafa was stuffed and displayed in its foyer.
“The Encyclopedic Palace,” the title of this year’s 55th Venice Biennale, draws us into a vortex of apocryphal narrative objects. The tale of Zarafa could easily be read as a slice of fiction; however, her transcontinental voyage and transfer from “nature” to prized object (in life and in death) conveys an entrenched polemics of the self, representation, and display.(2) It is precisely at this intersection between the life of an individual and the collectivity that “imagines” his/her social role and function that one may begin to re-investigate the curatorial premise of Massimiliano Gioni’s “palace.” Staged as an elaborate pleasure garden of sorts, it impels the aesthetic order of outsider art into a universal grid, sanitized and made legible for consumption by the cosmopolitan contemporary art world. In “The Encyclopedic Palace,” biographical idiosyncrasies masquerade as bodies of knowledge, such that the exhibition refrains from contextualizing individual artistic output within the crossings of international history, social belonging, and political intent. Instead, it shrewdly nudges us to apprehend the creative zeal of the artist and the outsider as part of a false holism—that of the “Western” genius. We witness a dismantling of contingencies within the broader cultural milieu in favor of a stifling circuit of (predominantly Euro-American) material exceptionality. The outsider is, after all, also a social category met with awe and repudiation in equal measure—a Vasari-style Lives of… palace precludes the intricacies of this figure. continue reading
Google Won’t Save Us
Adam Kleinman
Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable.
—Paul Valéry (1871–1945)
Forget the Golden Lion, the real brass ring can only be grabbed by the most nimble of curators on our ever-accelerating global biennial carousel. A major exhibition offers the promise of more than just a free ride—these players flirt with the possibility of becoming cultural arbiters, as their curatorial offerings confer not only acceptance, but also precedent on an increasingly crowded stage. Exhibition choreography can help such bids for eminence, but the balancing act of wedding an unyieldingly large group show with some kind of singular frame is the key to popular success. The trick to doing so is quite simple: use an elastic enough device to bind it all together. To this end, Massimiliano Gioni, curator of the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale, turned to one of the most flexible of containers around, namely the encyclopedia. “Today,” he said, “as we grapple with a constant flood of information, such attempts to structure knowledge into all-inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate.”(1) And with the looming specter of big data analytics, data mining, consumer profiling, and even racial profiling, multinational corporations and governments certainty agree with Gioni; all echo the both Baconian and Hobbesian idea that knowledge, and moreover its classification and use, is power—a power ultimately equated by Bacon with the abilities of God.
Fittingly, for an art exhibition entitled “The Encyclopedic Palace,” Gioni turned not to these thinkers, but to the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti (1891–1980), and his project the Encyclopedic Palace of the World as the emblematic core of the Biennale. Nothing more than yet another take—albeit a megalomaniacal and fantastic one—on the age-old library, Auriti’s giant archive aimed to “hold all the works of man in whatever field” so as to provide a utopian resource that might help to change the way people think, to borrow a phrase from another encyclopedist, Denis Diderot. Wisely, by way of disclosure, Gioni also called attention to the potential rub of focusing vast subjectivities through a cylopic eye by equating the monomaniacal biennial model with Auriti’s basically “absurd dream.” Primed on paradox, though, Gioni revs up the artist list by throwing in some self-trained artists into the mix, ostensibly as a possible counter to the “professional canon” of the art world. This is a pretty old tactic if there ever was one, and yet, something else also lurks within these inclusions. continue reading
Tree of Life
Ana Teixeira Pinto
In 1796, upon observing a vast array of animal fossils, paleontologist Georges Cuvier noticed a puzzling fact: none of the specimens in his collection corresponded to present-day species; they were all remains of fauna now extinct. Approximately half a century later, in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species many religious-minded individuals met the ungrateful task of having to reconcile the material evidence of preserved fossils with the belief that species were unchanging parts of a divinely designed hierarchy. Allegedly, one of the arguments employed to refute evolution asserted that fossilized Dinosauria were nothing but props, placed by God on the world stage to give mankind an illusion of temporal depth—similar to the way that a stage designer would arrange visual clues to achieve the effect of spatial depth.
Much like the Victorian theologian who sought to refute evolution, Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Venice Biennale “The Encyclopedic Palace” replaces the materiality of history with a similar illusion of temporal depth. Bracketing out all sociopolitical context, the exhibition restages art and aesthetics as an experience of “cosmic awe” before the mysterious harmonies of existence and the great chain of being.
The Arsenale venue opens up with the cyclopean architectural model of the eponymous palace, the Encyclopedic Palace of the World, which the auto mechanic Marino Auriti painstakingly built in his Pennsylvanian garage in the 1950s. Needless to say, the difference between a curiosity cabinet and an encyclopedia is the difference between taxonomy and taste, and the “The Encyclopedic Palace” is much closer to the latter than to the former. Roughly put, the exhibition is composed of two distinct demographics: passionate amateurs and accidental authors—mostly dead—on the one hand, and professional artists on the other. Operating in a temporal void, “The Encyclopedic Palace” showcases the works of the former to conjure a chimerical past made to match the anachronistic present of its own making. The result is art without history: a perfect loop inside of which the market rules supreme. continue reading
Read more:
recent reviews
reviews by Natasha Ginwala
reviews by Adam Kleinman
reviews by Ana Teixeira Pinto
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