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| 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.
