The Venice Biennale was the last place I expected to encounter the Hodag. If you attended elementary school in Wisconsin, as I did, you learned about this mythological monster, a hybrid frog-elephant-dinosaur with clawed feet and a spear-like tail. It resided, according to a late-19th-century hoax, in the city of Rhinelander, in the woodsy region that downstaters call “up north.” The Hodag is mentioned on a wall label in the Biennale, next to a cabinet full of woodcarvings—some of animals, others of fantastical beings—by Levi Fisher Ames, who toured his curious carvings around Wisconsin in the 1880s.
Mr. Ames is one of dozens of so-called outsider artists in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the 55th edition of the Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, associate director at New York’s New Museum. “People might say it’s the thrift-store biennial,” he told The Observer in an interview in late April, “because there’s a lot of found material.” Like 387 model houses by the Austrian Peter Fritz (1916-92), found by two artists in a junk shop in 1993.
Mr. Gioni’s remarkable exhibition, which opened to the public on June 1, traces a line from Carl Jung’s Red Book, completed in 1930, an attempt to document a personal cosmogony through the illustration of visions, to Ryan Trecartin’s videos, completed earlier this year, attempts to envision “post-humans” evolved from animations. A significant portion of space is given over to figures obscure and, in the case of nearly a third of the show’s artists, deceased.
When a familiar name appears, the artist is often represented not by a signature work but by an outlier. Carl Andre is not here in the form of a grid of metal slabs on the floor, but rather by an 100-part work on paper, Passport—a representation of ideas that were preoccupying him in 1970, when he made it. Had its owner been willing to lend it, there would have been a just-as-offbeat inclusion by the late Mike Kelley: an idiosyncratic taxonomy of found objects ranging from business cards to pornography. Throughout the show, Mr. Gioni said, “there is a confusion about who is an artist and what is an artwork. The Kelley would have made that more explicit.”
(The owner of the Kelley piece, Los Angeles-based collector Kourosh Larizadeh, told The Observer that for a number of reasons, including his mourning the recent death by suicide of the artist, who was his friend, he was not able to accommodate the loan of the more than 10,000 objects, including a film, that constitute The Harems (1993-2012), an 18-part work that the artist, he said, intended to be shown as a single piece.)
About halfway through “The Encyclopedic Palace” is the piece that gives the show its title, a scale model of a skyscraper by the Italian-American Marino Auriti, who worked on his magnum opus beginning in the 1950s after retiring from an auto body shop. It was meant to contain all the world’s knowledge; he envisioned it installed in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Gioni’s underlying theme—the quixotic attempt to know, and to categorize, everything—brings to mind a scene from Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, in which the protagonist is conversing with an artist friend:
“I don’t read philosophy.”
“I read everything,” I told her.
She looked at me with something like renewed surprise.
It’s a theme well suited to the Venice Biennale, where attempts to see everything—the curated show, as well as 88 national pavilions and 45 collateral events scattered throughout the city—can result in taking in exactly nothing, never mind retaining any of it. The very experience of Venice during the Biennale’s preview days is a frenzied one, with the heaving lines for the vaporettos, the water taxis that, even if you could get one (the ultra-wealthy hire them for the week, greatly reducing what’s available for ordinary folk), run you a hundred euros for a five-minute ride, and the texts, e-mails and phone calls imploring you to see this or that project in this or that palazzo down a dizzying maze of alleys you’re unlikely to emerge from without getting lost several times. Mr. Gioni compared it to a Ryan Trecartin video.
If not quite encyclopedic, Mr. Gioni’s show is certainly well populated. It has 158 artists, twice as many as the last two biennales. “The easiest thing I could have done,” Mr. Gioni said back in April, “was shrink the show to 30 or 40 artists, and give them more space. I thought a lot about that possibility, but then I thought, that’s a bit lazy. And then it becomes a hierarchy—my top 40.” A side effect of curating exhibitions like the Biennale is that you inadvertently become a tastemaker and, obliquely, a market maker. “So,” he said, “I decided, let’s make it bigger.”
A subtheme running through the show is memory. A video by French artist Aurélien Froment has a woman describing Giulio Camillo’s famous 15th-century Theatre of Memory. (“The Camillo of today is probably Julian Assange,” Mr. Gioni said. “Or Bill Gates.”) But the exhibition itself is, in a way, designed to be forgotten, at least in its particulars. Mr. Gioni has succeeded in making his show “dense to the point where you get lost in it. You can’t see the borders. You forget the details.” It’s a concept he says he “stole” from the late Swiss artist David Weiss, who once told Mr. Gioni that in 1981, when he and Peter Fischli began work on Suddenly This Overview, a piece included in “The Encyclopedic Palace” that is composed of hundreds of small, gray, pedestal-bound sculptures in the shapes of things like shoes and tiny figures, they’d just taken a trip to Disneyland, where part of the point of its vastness is creating a sense of total immersion—you can’t see Disneyland’s limits. “That’s a bit like Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace,” Mr. Gioni said. “A delirium of not knowing when it ends.”
One of the expectations Mr. Gioni thought people would have of his Biennale was that, being relatively young himself (he’s 39), he would include primarily new work by young artists. Doing so could have been cost-effective: showing brand-new, sellable art by emerging figures attracts financial support from those artists’ dealers, who can be counted on to chip in on things like crating and shipping. As The New York Times reported, Mr. Gioni instead supplemented the meager $2.3 million budget the Biennale allotted him with $2 million in contributions from both individuals and foundations. “It’s easy to finance a certain kind of emerging artist in Venice,” Mr. Gioni told The Observer. “I tried to put together a strong group of supporters that allowed me to include things that were not necessarily sellable.” According to wall text at the Biennale, they include MoMA trustee David Teiger, New Museum trustee Dakis Joannou and the Trussardi Foundation, which has Mr. Gioni as its artistic director.
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He isn’t so much innovating, he said, as going back to basics. Biennials were cross-generational until the 1990s, when they proliferated around the world and began being dominated by young art. “The biennial became a space for a type of international art and for a type of what Peter Schjeldahl has called ‘festivalism,’” he said. “That mixture of interactive, participatory, joyful, spectacular art.” This “spectacular art of a certain scale” has now, he said, “paradoxically,” migrated into the commercial setting of Art Basel, forming the Art Unlimited section. Mr. Gioni wanted to “break away from this pressure of the new.”
And, by extension, the market. The Venice Biennale, which since 1895 has been the world’s most influential group show, is commonly considered a notch to tick off on an artist’s résumé, an arbiter of increased value. Mr. Gioni’s puts the kibosh on this sort of horse-trading—good luck finding Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner at the Basel Art Fair.
