woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni has staged a massive project premised on failure as the main exhibition at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale. Taking its name from self-taught artist Marino Auriti\u2019s abandoned attempt to design a museum to house all the world\u2019s knowledge, The Encyclopedic Palace<\/em>announced its two main themes from the outset: an interest in the production of non-artists, eccentrics, and hobbyists; and an insistence on the impossibility of encapsulating the world\u2019s cultural production in one place. But Gioni\u2019s show never strays into disaffectation. Instead, it is marked by an enthusiasm for the eccentricities that motivate the impulse to catalogue, evinced most powerfully by Camille Henrot\u2019s Grosse Fatigue<\/em> (2013), a single channel video that uses pop-up browser windows and a hip hop soundtrack (the lyrics mash up the Old Testament with New Age spirituality) to create a collage of some of the thousands of objects stored at the Smithsonian Institute.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nMuch like Henrot\u2019s video, The Encyclopedic Palace<\/em> is an exhibition of texts as much as images, with more than one hundred thousand words appearing in the show. But while traditional didactic panels often stifle a curator\u2019s intuitive placement of works, these artists\u2019 texts operate differently, allowing the viewer to draw nuanced connections between the exhibition\u2019s rooms while effortlessly unpacking each artist\u2019s practice. In one particularly striking pairing, a series of anatomically perfect models of surly teenaged girls, created by Morton Bartlett over thirty years and undiscovered until his death, leads directly to Peter Fischli and David Weiss\u2019s sprawling Suddenly this Overview<\/em> (1981\u200a\u2014\u200a2012), a collection of two hundred unfired clay sculptures clumsily monumentalizing different objects, concepts, and events from human history. Seen together, the works highlight a recurring tension between a painstaking attention to detail and amateurish enthusiasm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the show\u2019s only flaws is that it sometimes suggests only \u201ccrazy people\u201d (marginalized figures, \u201coutsider\u201d artists, or those declared criminally insane) would earnestly try to reinvent the world in miniature form, while artists have the critical distance to make the same gesture with an attitude of knowing performativity and self-deprecating irony. There are moments, however, when the distinction between these two positions breaks down, as it does with Sleep Study<\/em>, a series of tiny and impossibly beautiful porcelain sculptures by seventy-year-old artist Ron Nagle that evoke extraterrestrial forms and primal dreamscapes. Sketched by the artist each night while watching Charlie Chan movies before he goes to sleep, these intricate scenes in rich hues flecked with gold suggest a sincere determination to create alternative worlds that only seem possible in the routine act of watching television in bed. It is in these moments that The Encyclopedic Palace<\/em> is at its best, celebrating the kinds of worlds that can be dreamt up in the banal space of the everyday.<\/p>\n