On Not Being Killed by Some Unfortunate Juxtaposition the 2013 Venice Biennale

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker On Not Being Killed By Some Unfortunate Juxtaposition The 2013 Venice Biennale Left to right: Hilma af Kint, The Dove, No. 13, 1915, oil on canvas, 158 x 131 cm; The Dove, No. 12, 1915, oil on canvas, 158 x 131 cm. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation and the Venice Biennale. n 1909, American woman of letters Anna Seaton-Schmidt1 described the 8th Venice International Biennale as an “ensemble never before attained in a modern salon,”2 one that catapulted it into preeminence I 3 as an international exposition. The insertion of individual exhibitions within and throughout the Palazzo delle Esposizioni had transformed it, and the Biennale, into an exemplary art gallery. Paintings and statues were . grouped psychologically. Those influenced by the same traditions, climate, culture, were placed together in surroundings which enhanced their esthetic value. Architecture, decoration, exhibits, thus blended in one harmonious whole, an immense advantage not only to the visitor but to the artist, who, instead of finding his picture or statue killed by the unfortunate juxtaposition of some fellow artist’s work violently opposed to his own discovered, to his exceeding joy, the value of his creation enhanced by its surroundings.4 More than a century later, at the 55th Venice Biennale, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, or Central Pavilion as it is known in English, has again been transformed into an art gallery whose architecture, “psychologically” grouped objects, and rooms dedicated to individual artists shimmer in a harmonious whole. No objects are “killed” by unfortunate juxtapositions; on the contrary, the 2013 international exhibition is a carefully crafted foray into 6 Vol. 12 No. 5 Left to right: Augustin Lesage, Symbolic Composition on the Spiritual World, 1925, oil on canvas, 205 x 145 cm; Symbolic Composition on the Spiritual World, 1923, oil on canvas, 158 x 117 cm. Courtesy of Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne and the Venice Biennale. Rudolph Steiner, Blackboard Drawing, April 14, 1923, chalk on black paper, approximately 90 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the Rudolph Steiner Archive, Dornach, Switzerland, and the Venice Biennale. Aleister Crowley and Frieda the present and into a past rich in utopian Harris, Atu XII—The Hanged Man, 1938–40, watercolour on dreams of non-objective and spiritual paper, 61 x 45 cm. Courtesy of Ordo Templi Orientis and the worlds. Here, for example, occult paintings Venice Biennale. by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint from 1915, the Tarot cards of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris, the healing divinations of Emma Kunz, the fantastic architecture of Augustin Lesage, the pan-language cards of Xul Solar, and the trance drawings of Anna Zemánková hold company with a stunning array of contemporary art from around the world. Adjacent to the Emma Kunz, installation view at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. large-scale, cosmological, blackboard Courtesy of the Emma 5 Kunz Centre and the Venice drawings of Rudolf Steiner from 1923, Biennale. for example, are densely rendered, large- scale “cosmographies” by Chinese artist Guo Fengyi in ink, pen, and pencil on long paper scrolls dating from 1989 to shortly before her death in 2010. “I draw in order to 6 know,” Guo Fengyi once said. Vol. 12 No. 5 7 The Italian-born, New York-based artistic Marino Auriti, Encyclopedic Palace of the World, c. 1950s, director of the 2013 Venice Biennale, wood, plastic, glass, metal, haircombs, model kit parts, Massimiliano Gioni, has named his ensemble in 335 x 213 x 213 cm. Courtesy of the American Folk Art the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Arsenale Museum, Gift of Collette Auriti Firmani in memory of Marino The Encyclopedic Palace in honour of the self- Auriti and the Venice Biennale. taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, Left: Guo Fengyi, Huangdi Mausoleum, 1996, coloured who filed a design for an imaginary museum ink on rice paper, 259 x 71 cm. Courtesy of Long March with the U.S. Patent Office in the 1950s. Auriti’s Space, Beijing. museum “was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite.”7 His model, The Encyclopedic Palace of the World, is a 335-centimetre-high spectacle of wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts. Gioni has assigned it place of honour at the entrance to the Arsenale, while pride of place in the Palazzo is awarded to a manuscript rich in paintings and calligraphy that was illuminated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between 1914 and 1930. Commonly known as The Red Book, the manuscript was only made public by Jung’s heirs in 2001. In his review of the 2013 Venice Biennale, Swiss critic Samuel Herzog describes The Red Book as both the beginning and the centre of Gioni’s encyclopedic ensemble. Devoid of transcription or explanation, it becomes, 8 Vol. 12 No. 5 however, “a mere symbol for Jung’s intellectual world. A narrative tent in whose shadow connections between the objects on display [in The Encyclopedic Palace] and their associated discourses could become visible” is absent.8 Is it not so, Herzog asks, that, “whoever creates an encyclopedia automatically stakes a claim for a certain sovereignty over interpretation— that probably applies even to very personal encyclopedias?”9 Holland Cotter also expresses reservations about Gioni’s encyclopedic strategy in his review for the New York Times: Mr. Gioni refers to the model of the “wunderkammer,” or cabinet of curiosities, collections of uncategorizable, often exotic objects first assembled in Renaissance Europe. This concept is not original, and it gets tricky when, as here, some curiosities are works by “outsider artists,” which can simply mean self-taught, but often implies having some form of physical, social or psychiatric disability. The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred.10 Nevertheless, Cotter and Herzog remain united in their praise of Gioni’s curatorial brilliance and the sheer pleasure of moving through his “single itinerary”11 among one hundred and fifty artists from thirty- seven countries: “the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong, and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded.”12 In his foreword to the catalogue to the 2013 Biennale, Gioni describes The Encyclopedic Palace as being “about knowledge—and more specifically about the desire to see and know everything.” Presentation of objects in the exhibition is not linear, he writes; instead it reveals “a web of associations through contrasts and affinities, anachronisms and collisions.” At the heart of the exhibition is a meditation on the ways in which images are used to organize knowledge and shape experience. Inspired by Hans Belting’s notion of an anthropology of images, and bringing together works and artifacts from different contexts, Gioni seeks to ignite new sparks from “the coerced coexistence of heterogeneous objects and the friction between art and other forms of figuration:”13 In an interview that took place shortly after the opening of the Biennale, he noted: “We live in the twenty-first century and therefore I wanted to create an exhibition in Venice that is simultaneously historical and contemporary. For we live in an age of synchronicity.”14 An ambitious collateral exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Voice of the Unseen/Chinese Independent Art 1979–Today, also seeks to create an encyclopedic ensemble of art both historical and contemporary. Curated by Vol. 12 No. 5 9 Wang Lin, Professor at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute; Luo Yiping, Director of the Guangdong Museum of Art; and Gloria Vallese, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, the exhibition was organized by the highly regarded Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou. Situated at the head of the Arsenale,15 separated by a narrow canal from Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace and the official pavilion of the People’s Republic of China, Voice of the Unseen opened to the press and international art community on May 30 with an academic forum.16 The following day, the English language China Daily reported on the exhibition and noted that nearly twenty Chinese curators, critics, and art historians at the forum had addressed subjects such as the State system, historic veneration, and the quest for value. Wang Lin was quoted as saying that “the fragmented presence [of Chinese contemporary art in the West] cannot reflect the real look [complexity and variety] of Chinese contemporary art. Many excellent Chinese artists and their works deserve a chance to be seen.” It was noted in the article that the exhibition contained a temporary library of more than one thousand Chinese artists’ portfolios and that all the artworks had been recommended by an academic committee composed of twelve renowned art critics.17 Voice of the Unseen, like The Voice of the Unseen, installation view at Venice Encyclopedic Palace, is an exhibition Biennale, 2013. about knowledge. If Massimiliano Gioni addresses the desire to see and know everything, the curators of Voice of the Unseen are swayed by a desire to tell everything. Although they seek to structure their “vast encyclopedia of contemporary Chinese life and culture” by dividing it into nine sections (Family, Village, Ruins, Poverty, Body, Landscape, Memory, History, Magic),18 the exhibition remains an overwhelming array of heterogeneous objects by one hundred and eighty-eight artists and artist groups coerced into coexistence and, at times, into unfortunate juxtapositions. Devoid of transcription, explanation, or a “narrative tent” that goes beyond the briefest of surtitles, the objects on display remained mere symbols of vital, diverse, and highly complex intellectual, cultural, political, and artistic discourses in China today, discourses that weigh heavily upon the visitor to Voice of the Unseen in their absence and indiscernibility.

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