Venice Journal II: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico

Photograph of Il Enciclopedico Palazzo Del Mundo by Hallie Cohen

Il Enciclopedio Palazzo Del Mundo was a creation of Marino Auriti an Italian immigrant who ran a auto body shop in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It was basically an architectural model which would become a literal reality maybe not in the form he envisioned but as the theme for the current Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedio. It also became a de facto reality considering the tsunami of data that is now the condition of man. As the current Biennele attests art is produced with such ferocity that the invasion of imaginative works is like that of some form of killer bee in a Roger Corman movie. For all the brilliance of the works, walking through the Arsenale, where part of the Biennale takes place, in the middle of an August heatwave, is Auschsvitz. You are dripping wet when you're finished and almost numbed by everything from video works by Steve McQueen to R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis which fills a wall. Many of the artworks are self-referential to the extent they are about the profusion of art. They are about plethora itself. The Spanish Pavilion boasts a huge mound by Lara Almarcequi, 500 square meters of rubble composed of 225 square meets of brick and mortar, 152 square meters of cement and concrete, amongst other ingredients. You wander next to the Belgian pavilion to find “Cripplewood," a monumental wounded tree which is a collaboration between the South African writer J. M. Coetzee and the artist Berlinde de Bruyckere. The Japanese artist KoheiYoshiyuki captures voyeurs in a Tokyo park—a bit of one-upmanship of Thomas Struth's capturing the more innocent voyeurism of museum goers. And you relive the epistemological argument between Andre Breton and Roger Caillois over what makes a Mexican jumping bean jump. A series by the Australian anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik, who died in l953, offers “graphic works of Southeast Asia and Melanesia” by indigenous peoples. The artist Sarah Sze, represents the U.S. with her lo-tech collages of cultural detritus that are permeated with epiphanic moments in which the artist’s  esthetic seems to rise Phoenix-like from her own rubble. Imran Qureshi creates Persian miniatures of contemporary figures. No Palazzo Encliclopedico would be complete without some mention of Carl Jung and the original of his Red Book graces the exhibition.There is a model of Auriti’s Palazzo at the entrance to the actual Biennale. He’d hoped it would stand at the center of the Washington Mall as the highest building of its time, a Tower of Babel that wouldn’t fail. The curators describe Auriti’s Palazzo as being  “Designed to show the entire range of humanity’s achievements—from the wheel to the satellite and from ancient artifacts to the most vanguard art.” The current Biennale takes up where Auriti left off. “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate,” "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" were the words Dante famously coined on the way to hell. The same might be said parsing so much art. But it’s a heavenly kind of hell.

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976)

“The Destruction of the Object” (l923) is the show-stopper in the current Man Ray show at The Jewish Museum. The artist—born Emmanuel Radnitzky—had been jilted by his lover of three years, the legendary Lee Miller, and the resulting work, fired in the crucible of his heartbreak, made art-textbook history, a little like the image of the eye ball slit by a razor in Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (l929).  Radnitzky photographed Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Proust (on his deathbed), and Joyce. But it is the image of André Breton in front of De Chirico’s “L’Enigme d’une journée” that is the show’s second most stunning piece. Blend Surrealism with Futurism and what do you get? Something curiously naturalistic, like the metronome in “The Destruction of the Object”—a time capsule sending a nostalgic message back from the past, beyond love and loss.

Radnitzky was bar mitzvahed in Brooklyn, but eventually ended up in Paris in time for Dada and Surrealism, with its infatuation with the spontaneity of the photographic image. He moved to Hollywood, and then returned to Paris at a time when New York had emerged as the center of the art world. “All NewYork is Dada and will not tolerate a rival,” he said. The current exhibit, which includes Radnitzky's first film, Le Retour à la Raison (film stock, successions of geometric images, and a nude that all defy reason), is like a message in a bottle, washed up on some silent shore after bobbing solitudinously at sea.