"Encyclopedic Palace" in the Age of Abstraction: Reflecting on Venice. Steven Henry Madoff, Modern Painters. October 2013
16.10.2013

The 55th Venice Biennale will end in three months. What will we have learned from it? The national pavilions spread across the grounds of the Giardini and throughout Venice have never shown a higher quality of work overall nor such an extraordinary level of consistency. It seems to me that we have technology to thank. Finally, universal access to information is actually universal. And not simply static. It’s alive. We can walk through shows, watch videos, look at installations, hear artists and theorists and curatorstalk about what they’re doing. Universal access means the universal instruction manual in full-motion capture. To make work that speaks the lingua franca of the moment, using inexpensive, amazingly sophisticated tools is here. We see the results at this Biennale. Whether it’s the minimalist interrogation of the nature of categorization itself in the Estonian pavilion by Dénes Farkas or the clever, Tino Sehgal–like enactment through dramatic dialogue of past Biennale exhibitions in the Romanian pavilion (while Sehgal won this year’s Golden Lion prize for the Biennale’s best artist) or the complexly elegant video narrative ultimately about capitalism and the value of memory by Jesper Just in the Danish pavilion or Sarah Sze’s U.S. pavilion about complexity or Akram Zaatari’s immensely moving Letter to a Refusing Pilot for Lebanon or the Israeli pavilion’s show by Gilad Ratman that married psychological internalization to structural and expressive excavation or the Angolan pavilion’s elegant conversation in a private museum between contemporary photographs of consumer detritus and ravishing paintings on eternal themes by Botticelli and Giotto, among others (which won a Golden Lion for best national pavilion), well, the list could easily go on, and every critic has run his or her pick of this year’s greatest hits already. But my point is that there was the true sense of a global conversation, a technologically enabled fluency of accomplishment on view
as never before, and it brings me to a larger point, though it will take another moment—a slight detour—to get to it.

My subject is really “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the central exhibition curated by this year’s director, Massimiliano Gioni. And my question is, what in our global culture instigates a show such as Gioni’s? That technology has something to do with the distributed saturation of a common language of elevated making and thinking throughout the rest of the Biennale (and there were 88 national pavilions exhibiting this year) only affirms the drift of my thoughts. With that, I want to drift across the water from the tree-lined Giardini to a single installation—one of the 47 collateral events of the Biennale, which gives you an idea of the ambition to encompass the entire world of artistic production, to strive for totality, and totality, the mandate of wholeness and encompassment, is essential to the concept
of Gioni’s “encyclopedic palace.” But let me stop first at a former brewery where the Spanish artist Dora García installed The Joycean Society.


García leaves the space largely empty: a table with some heavily annotated copies of James Joyce’s books, notably the night-lit, polylingual dreamscape of Finnegans Wake that baffles and amuses an annual gathering in Zurich of the text’s scholarly detectives, whose literary guesswork fills an hour-long video playing at one end of García’s cavernous room. Across the way, she displays panels of wallpaper of her own design that show, among other things, a picture of her sleeping son and a text and schematic drawing that map out the barest summary of Jacques Lacan’s interlocking concepts of the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic. That’s it. There is often a quality of a mute voyeurism of ideas in García’s art. She likes to watch people at their
labors of thought and discussion. A feeling of cool distance can fill her work, while her subjects themselves are heatedly engaged, politically, psychologically, intellectually. Detachment and involvement fused are characteristic of spectacle, and she uses it here as a form of charm in a literal sense because Joyce’s words are an enchantment of knowledge, a magical transformation by linguistic violence to all languages. This is the subtext of her video, the way Joyce’s oneiric polylanguage bleeds under the skin of rationalism. It strips humanity back to the condition of creative chaos, to an Adam in Eden who swallows the serpent, to a First Man who names all things and then names them again and again, ungoverned, cancerously prolific, the seed of the world’s terror and wonder.

García’s work across the water is a key to Gioni’s exhibition. I sat with García in a café near her show for an hour one atypically rainswept afternoon, proposing that what she’d captured in
this observation of Joyce’s linguistic comedy of hybridized wordplay without end was analogous to the condition of abstraction in
 our digital age, or what might more succinctly, if a little loftily, be called the Age of Abstraction. I mean by abstraction that
 the unchecked dissemination of images on screens everywhere around us—images that have no weight, are easily removed
from context, and are effortlessly re-formed and reoriented—give us the continual experience of a parallel world of dematerialized things. This abstraction of things renders a curious reciprocity. The world of the real is real enough, it’s true, and yet it is overlaid with the autonomous presence of spectral representation.
We know the things that surround us have physicality. They have weight, volume, texture. They’re inscribed with the histories of their production. We feel them, hold them, and manipulate them. They are phenomenologically present. But what rests on top of them like a second, diaphanous skin is the onslaught of their digitally etherized reproduction. We swim 
in this data stream of spectral representations, which is sensed minute by minute every time we turn to the Web to see something, and we do this all day long.

The Age of Abstraction is one of extrusion and extension, by which I mean that all of the world is shoved through the sieve of digital presentation, extruding its ethereal presence and distributing it, distending it without boundaries, such that the regime of the image, as it is often called, is now one that proposes the radical concept of a sovereignty of images that has no absolute originary ground, indeed no Adam even in his state of metastatic abandon—only the post-Adamic, Joycean soup of forms in the act of ungovernable transformation. Abstraction 
is the universalizable condition of the real and its spectral representations combined, a condition of density and extension in ceaseless production. When representations do more than float their membranes above the body of lived existence, fundamentally altering it, what does existence become?

And so I arrive at Gioni’s “Encyclopedic Palace.” It is massive. There are more than 150 contributors, twice the number in either of the last two Biennales’ main shows, and the curator rejects
the exclusively contemporary in favor of more than a century’s breadth of artistic production. No style reigns, no movement,
 no moment. (Some critics have praised this as a refutation of the art market, but the art market rewards novelty and discards it while never fully dispensing with earlier forms for the possibility of latent value, just as Gioni proves here.) His palace is also immensely elegant. No Venice Biennale’s central exhibition I’ve attended in more than 20 years has felt so seamlessly assembled. But here, too, there is something to be understood from this ambient sense of a relentless, continuous surface of information. Gioni acknowledges the effects of abstraction and the challenge of addressing it when he writes in the catalogue: “What room is left for internal images—for dreams, hallucinations, and visions—
in an era besieged by external ones? And what is the point of creating an image of the world when the world itself has
become increasingly like an image?” He organizes the exhibition along loose thematic lines: inner visions, then the exteriority
of the body interpreted and transformed, then renderings of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, inward and upward. Other
tropes of organization are applied as well, such as a “progression from natural to artificial forms,” as Gioni writes, and what he determines to be works whose own organization into collections and taxonomies figure “a prehistory of the digital era” that conjoins past and present in the dream of a total knowledge.

Yet he doesn’t address directly in his writing what so clearly influences his exhibition in its actual formation, an aspect essential to the Age of Abstraction and consequently to this show, which can be summarized in the idea of proliferation, of quantity, of numerousness, seen in the sheer number of images and objects in series and ordered grids that dominate his show, continually offering us taxonomies and typologies, as well as endless displays of works based on theme and variation, which is itself a quantifying mode. They fill Gioni’s two venues, the Giardini’s Central Pavilion and the Arsenale nearby. Both spaces were renovated by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, who gave them a pristine museum-like airiness. The Arsenale, with its procession of long and graceful galleries like the unfurling of declarative sentences, or perhaps like series of mathematical equations, best exemplifies abstraction’s essential principle of numeration 
that lies profoundly, if not entirely consciously, at the base of “The Encyclopedic Palace.”

Yet equally in both venues he announces from the start 
that numerousness is the curatorial means he will wield like a rhetorical device to foreground an argument that rises to existential summary. He begins the Arsenale with J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s typology of African women’s hairstyles depicted 
in more than 40 black-and-white photographs, a decidedly secular subject. The Central Pavilion opens with Carl Gustav Jung’s
 The Red Book, whose pages display ornate symbolic forms, more than a little spiritual in feeling, that seek no less than Joyce 
to find in dreams a hidden language, primordial, universal, and asleep in every mind. The poles of inner and outer vision are launched here and given a circular format—an arrangement that rhymes with the derivation of the wordencyclopedia, which has at its root the ancient Greek kuklos, “circle.” Kuklos is embedded in the term enkuklios paideia for a circular, that is to say, well-rounded, education, a sphere of general knowledge. There are a few other circular installations in Gioni’s show, notably 
the fantastical, animalistic terra-cotta sculptures of Shinichi Sawada in the Arsenale. But what overwhelms his enterprise
is the numerousness of grids. The circle is a sign of closure, of encompassment, but in our era of mass digitization the circle
as a collection point of data becomes a node, and nodes assemble asymmetrically in networks. The locality of knowledge takes
its place in the non-place of the data stream; the physicality of things is supplemented or removed from its locus by the seamless progression of mathematical code that is modular, infinitely replaceable, tied only to its algorithmic chain of internalized logic. The anchor of originary being, of things made by hand in haptic space, is replaced by what I’ll call being-on-the-surface, of virtual images, as I’ve said, that hover above the things of the world, rushing relentlessly before us in our global network whose visual analogue is the grid.

here should I begin in Gioni’s inventory of grids? With Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser’s layout of 387 little model houses constructed by a Austrian insurance clerk? They’re wonderful and amusing, a suburban realization of the cheerily colored hell of mechanized capitalism that is oblivious to individuals and is therefore unpeopled. Or the 997 daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, and snapshots in Linda Fregni Nagler’s
 The Hidden Mother, 2006–13? Or Matt Mullican’s maze of walls, Untitled (Learning from that Person’s Work Room 1), 2005, covered in scores of grids of numbers, lists of drinks, word associations, doodles, and more. Or examples of spatially distributed forms in series and variation, such as Fischli/Weiss’s Suddenly This Overview, 1981–2012, with its 130 unfired clay sculptures of a multitude of things. Or Levi Fisher Ames’ rows of compartmentalized boxes filled with figures for his Animals Wild and Tame from the turn of the 19th century. Or Pawel Althamer’s 90 plastic and metal sculptures with abstract bodies and realistic faces, Venetians, 2013, that play loosely with Rodin’s rotated figures in the Burghers of Calais. I could go on. And on. For what Gioni gives us with his connoisseur’s eye for the well-crafted, the sensuously formed, the seductive filiations of shapes and colors, is gallery after gallery of madly numerous, ordered things in an ecstasy of the mathetic; a seemingly endless accumulation of heterogeneous images and objects that hemorrhage into homogeneity and would seem to point toward totality and its implication of the absolute, but only point and never arrive.

Of course, I should note that Gioni never says encyclopedia. He writes “encyclopedic,” and its subject is the figure of the palace—a high-flown rhetorical gesture that announces the grandness of the Venetian enterprise on the world stage. Yet a little more etymological detective work uncovers the obsolescence of this image of the grandiloquent “palace,” since its Latin birth in the word palasalludes to the putting down of stakes in the ground to mark off the boundary walls of a building. What does a fixed, impervious enclosure have to do with the contemporary conditions of abstraction, of the porous, streaming, infinitely extending plane in which inner and outer are no longer diametri­cally polar, but twist like a Mobius strip of interpenetrating knowledges of every kind, dreamlike and fluid in their flitting speed? Nothing. A nothing that takes in everything—the 
entire gridded, taxonomized empire of Gioni’s multitudes, of a world obviously given to us not as a triumph of a desired totality, 
but as a repudiation of the sovereignty of the total and the absolute. Being­-on-­the-­surface is a symptom of the instability of what
was once solid, of the dematerialization of the object under the regime of abstraction. It is an expression of de­origination or
 more positively of the liberation from origins that the unrelenting flow of data through and around us has incurred.

If anything, the figure of the encyclopedia today is replaced by Wikipedia, and its organization is neither circular nor vertical in
its density but assumes the condition of perpetual incompleteness, instability of value, instability even of truth, which we so often feel today that we must put in quotation marks to announce the condition of the suspect, of the spectral. In this same way 
Gioni’s enterprise, in its overflow of grids, of series and typologies and variations in what feels like ceaseless proliferation, is an acknowledgment fundamental to our culture on a profound
level of self­ reflection that no ground of experience or body of knowledge is reliable, can be enclosed, is palatialin the misleading sense of the curator’s title if the word is taken seriously—which
it evidently was not intended to be. But in this sense, the knowledge­ picture Gioni gives us, this being-­on-­the-­surface, must be understood to be without gravity, alien to the monotheism of essence and the absolute, a realization of indeterminacy in 
the face of a desire for wholeness. As an example, I think of Helen Marten’s gorgeous CGI animation in the Arsenale, Orchids, or a Hemispherical Bottom, 2013, in which her beautifully rendered household objects, children’s toys, and domestic pets give way without any apparently linear transition to one another in an almost Joycean narrative stream in which everything is equivalently sensuous and abstract, morphing with a magisterial techno­ authority that announces the rightful (dis)order of the unstable thingness of things. And I think of Ed Atkins’s brilliantly articulate video, The Trick Brain, 2012, also in the Arsenale, whose camera gazes with worried wonder at the late Surrealist leader André Breton’s private and now dispersed collection of books and objects, in which every item is a vertiginous totem of death, dissolving in the chemical bath of Atkins’s words that suggest the denigrated fate of matter.

What Gioni’s encyclopedic palace gives us, then, is not based on the idea of collection, but on the practice of dissemination,
 an expression of numerousness raised, as I’ve said, to the status of existential summary, but that is intuitive more than fully reasoned. And it is not a truly radical expression. For that you would need to wind back the clock one year to Carolyn Christov­Bakargiev’s Documenta (13). There the significance of things is understood not primarily for their mathetic quantity as for
 their radical autonomy. The thingness of things as she saw it (see my review in the September 2012 issue of this magazine) 
is one of individual agency: The life of each thing in the universe is intelligible to itself and expressible to others, if we only have the sensitivity to listen and enough knowledge to parse its speech. There is an explosive craziness to that idea, and it brought an amazing buzz to the objects she gathered, as well as reinvesting Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the readymade with an unexpected new life. Yet in her case and in Gioni’s there is a shared need. That need is simply to find again the physical being of objects amid 
the deluge of abstraction’s incursion into materiality that hollows it out and leave us in this state of tension between the presence of the real and the spectrality of being-­on-­the-­surface.

As Gioni comes to the end of his exhibition, where he states that he wanted to address the relationship between “the original
 and the copy, between technology and the handmade,” he leaves us hanging as to whether this relationship is one of bifurcation or mutuality, whether there is some sense of an essence that is lost or simply a form of addition, of supplement. But what he does state in conclusion, without encompassing the whole of his show, is in fact the reassertion of numbers. He is speaking about the last work in his palace, Walter De Maria’s Apollo’s Ecstasy, 1990. He praises the piece for the way in which “endless possibilities of the imagination are reduced to an extreme synthesis,” and the engine of that synthesis is its “complex of numerological calculations.” This is the emblem of the everythingness of everything that has come before it in Gioni’s enormous show—a condensation of innumerability, of De Maria’s glinting bronze horizontal rods stretched out in a row as if to enunciate the idea of pure extensiveness, abstraction in the Age of Abstraction, an analogue of 1s and 0s that replicate themselves: circular forms emphatically still and physical, yet with surfaces reflecting transient images endlessly passing, as if to say that the last page of the encyclopedia can never be written.

What can be done with the insolvency of the absolute as the subject for future exhibitions is yet to be seen. Christov-Bakargiev’s example of the reconsideration of the thingness of things in both their agency and frailty announced that there are extraordinary possibilities. Numeration is always a form of anteriority, of the past that I was when I made the calculation, when I counted and was among the counted, and a future anterior, of what I will have understood myself to have been as the 
next calculation supersedes the last. More than Gioni states, his rendering of the numeration of the world announces the technology-inflected demolition of a now-passed epistemological approach to the world; a palace whose galleries are now networks streaming with the spectral haunting of its images and objects, and under whose polished floors lies the body of the absolute.

Taken from http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/946572/encyclopedic-palace-in-the-age-of-abstraction-reflecting-on