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55thVenice Biennale: The Encyclopedic Palace
various venues 1 June to 24 November
In a passage in Milan Kundera's 1988 novel Immortality, the author meditates on the ways in which his protagonist Agnes and her sister Laura attempt to define their own identity. He writes: 'Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional substitutes).'
These differing yet equally flawed approaches towards self-determination come to mind when wandering through "The Encyclopedic Palace', curated by Massimiliano Gioni for the 55th Venice Biennale. As an extensive representation of humankind's collective need to define itself, it skirts between both strategies: the latter, the ongoing and inexhaustible acquisition of the sum of human knowledge that, for all its ambition, is fated to fall forever short, and the former, the reduction of the excessive or extraneous, as if narrowing in towards an ineffable, absolute quality that continually eludes the artist's grasp. Although perhaps artist is the wrong word here. Rather, the exhibition prioritises the role of the visionary, the outsider motivated by a private obsession to order and understand the world around them. It is this ultimately futile desire to contain a vast, relentlessly accumulated surfeit of information that drives the central figure of the exhibition: the self-taught artist Marino Auriti, whose maquette for his Encyclopedic Palace of the World, 1955, an implausibly gigantic and expensive museum of all human creation, would sit for decades in storage, exhibited on only a handful of occasions. Auriti'...