Venice Biennale 2013 Part 1

It's a picture perfect fall day in October and I need to get outside and revel in it's yellow leaves but first I cannot resist writing just a few words in anticipation of my upcoming trip:  a life long dream unfolding soon to see Venice and this year's Biennale.   I will fly to Milan and then take a train to Venice in just a few weeks, a fast red train, if the online photo is an accurate indication, then find my way along the Grand Canal to La Biennale di Venezia.  I can envision the horizontal stripes on the gondolier's shirt already.  But before I float away with my fantasy within a fantasy, I best stick to the art part.

This years title, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by the NY's New Museum curator, Massimiliano Gioni, was inspired by a fellow Italian, Marino Furiti.  His 1950's vision of a building where all the knowledge of the world would be contained was conceived to be built on the National Mall in Washington DC. It was never realized but the original architectural model will be on display in one of the rooms of the Biennale. For the Futurist, Furiti, this complete body of knowledge housed in a single building seemed quite plausible. Presumably it would have been a world library filled with books. Today, in the age of electronic information exchange, perhaps all we need is a virtual library.

The pieces of knowledge I am most interested in seeing are in the Central Pavilion where curator Gioni has brought together forty pages of The Red Book, Carl Gustav Jung's illuminated manuscript of his personal dream interpretations and mandala paintings created during the time after his split with Freud.  Also I am so jazzed to see the original paintings from 1942 by Frieda Harris for Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot Deck.  I own this deck and marvel at the exquisite details in the reproductions, the images Lady Freida Harris created for these fortune-telling cards, otherworldly conceptions of the suits filled with references to ancient Egypt, archtypal chalices, eggs and serpents, putti shooting eros, griffins and flying horsemen. She studied synthetic geometry in 1937 based on the principals of Goethe and applied them to the designs of the cards, as well as her study of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy.  I think it is brilliant move that Gioni included these works along side of 21st century contemporary painting, video and sculpture -what one would expect to see in this context. This work bridges the gap between the centuries bringing forward the idea of the artistic realms of the subconscious, the spirit within the development of creative expression first brought into the contemporary dialogue in the twentieth century. Those mysterious realms of thought and feeling that all artists draw from and recontextualize.

Noted in a recent review, Gioni's Biennale "ruthlessly leaves the 20th century behind" and "posits the absurdity of knowledge as meaning in our information overloaded era."* True words or not, I look forward to looking back at the history in every building along the Grand Canal, at the still relevant work of Carl Jung and Lady Frieda Harris and the delightful good fortune that their work should be shown together to consider in terms of information of the unconscious, the dreamy and the mystical - all so much a part of the watery Neptunian place that is Venice.

In the same Central Pavilion there are Shaker Gift Drawings; some work by the Swedish mystic, Hilma af Klint, her paintings are considered some of the first abstract art and Anonymous Tantric Paintings. I have read there is a 200 year old church from Vietnam, perhaps better described as a temple, that will also be part of this exhibition. I cannot image how it was moved nor do I grasp the greater question of why? But I want to lay eyes on it never- the- less and perhaps in the process understand the curious human interventions that make up the totality of this exercise.

I just had the happy luck of the draw to place a painting from my new series of work in the City of Albuquerque Public Art and Urban Enhancement collection-thrilled and honored. To celebrate I am making this trip.  Seeing Venice itself will be a sweet cake for the eyes and the biennale I expect will be the icing. But then again, maybe it will be a gondolier.

 

Footnote  *Financial Times, A Picasso for the Facebook Age

by Jackie Wullschlager