Refreshingly, his show is interested in creativity more broadly defined than is typical for the art world, and in the inner necessity that creative individuals of all stripes feel to develop systems for organizing their worlds. (In his writing and in interviews, Mr. Gioni emphasizes that his exhibition is not about artists as mediums but instead about all of us as media, “channeling images,” as he puts it in his catalog essay, “or at times even finding ourselves possessed by images.” “Hilma af Klint thought she was possessed by the voice of the universe,” he told The Observer. “Ryan Trecartin is possessed by the voice of Paris Hilton, or some blog.”)
Largely missing in “The Encyclopedic Palace” is work made on the scale of the mega-gallery, conceived by hyper-professional artists and crafted in factory-like studios staffed by small armies of assistants. What is driving much of the work in the show is the inner voice of the artist, rather than demand created by a market. In a fast-art world oversaturated with images and rife with overproduction, Mr. Gioni is advocating for a slow-art movement, one with implications for both production and reception—slow making, and slow looking.
Here, that slow looking is facilitated by Mr. Gioni’s having transformed the Arsenale, a hallway-like former shipyard the length of several football fields that houses half of his exhibition, from an overwhelming, raw environment into a museum-like setting. With its soaring ceilings, the Arsenale has a kind of built-in theatricality. Mr. Gioni enlisted the architect Annabelle Selldorf to “neutralize” the space; he didn’t want it to interfere with the art. And Ms. Selldorf’s white-box interventions have resulted in some extraordinary passages, such as a gallery lined with alt-cartoonist Robert Crumb’s intricate and bawdy drawings for the Book of Genesis that contains a circular gallery-within-a-gallery lined with glass cases housing small, spiny terracotta creatures created by Shinichi Sawada, a young Japanese man who suffers from severe autism. (Also aided by Ms. Selldorf’s work is a terrific show-within-a-show on manipulations of the human figure, curated by Cindy Sherman, who included some of the most terrifying artworks—they’re by Rosemarie Trockel—that you’ll ever see.)
As Mr. Gioni readily admits, he is reacting against a type of exhibition design that he has previously championed: the placement of artworks in nontraditional, often old or dilapidated settings. (When he co-curated the Berlin Biennale in 2006, he installed contemporary artworks in disused buildings around town.) The approach “has become a bit of a shortcut,” he said, “or a kind of assumption that as long as an artwork is installed in a decaying environment, or a nontraditional environment, it’s good, because it’s site-specific. I think that’s bullshit.”
Instead, the artworks here are free to speak on their own terms, and in concert with one another. And the story they are lassoed into telling—one that deals with mortality, memory, knowledge and information— is acutely pertinent to the present moment. The day Mr. Gioni’s Venice Biennale opened to the public, the Times published an article about Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, who is developing lifelike avatars that would come complete with the downloaded contents of a human brain.
Ultimately, this year’s Venice Biennale, an investigation into how the information-mania of the Internet era originated in the analog age, poses an unsettling series of questions: What will it mean to be post-human? Is it an inevitability? What kind of post-humans will we be? Exhibitions concerning our digital age have become tedious, as they tend to be no more than diagnostic in nature, summed up with the phrase, “Well folks, here’s the situation we find ourselves in.” Mr. Gioni’s exhibition is far more ambitious than that, perhaps best represented by the title of a frieze-like painting Paul Gauguin made in Tahiti in 1897: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The show takes on the big questions with an almost total lack of cynicism. And it is something even rarer these days: it is hopeful.
sdouglas@observer.com
Clarification: June 4, 2013: The following parenthetical clarification was added regarding a Mike Kelley artwork not included in the Biennale: 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.
