Culture of excess
Venice Biennale's encyclopedic theme is overwhelming but Adrian Searle spots glimpses of gold
When Roberto Cuoghi was in his mid-20s, he gave up art and transformed himself into his father. He grew a beard, dyed his hair white, put on weight, started wearing his father's clothes and adopting his mannerisms. After seven years in this perverse role, the Italian artist then reversed his premature ageing process, studied the ancient Assyrian language, and began making art once again, including a monstrous sculpture that sits in the Arsenale in Venice.
Cuoghi's is one of the many bizarre, unsettling and peculiar things that have been brought together by Massimiliano Gioni, director and curator of the current Venice Biennale's keynote exhibition, "The Encyclopedic Palace". A colossal enlargement of a microscopic life form, Cuoghi's sculpture was made by a 3-D printer, then coated in so much stone dust that it is unrecognisable as anything at all, except perhaps a monument to futility. It is a great misshapen lump.
There is far too much to take in. I am wearied by inner visions, exploding symmetries and visual mutterings
That it exists is what seems to matter, and it is one of many works in "The Encyclopedic Palace" whose interest lies as much in the artist's back story as in the work itself.
"The Encyclopedic Palace" begins in the Giardini's General Pavilion and ends several hundred metres away. As the Biennale's themed exhibitions always do, it feels interminable. That said, Gioni has given it a surging flow, filling it with surprises and electrifying moments. We go from the spiritual to sex, from the biblical to the angst-ridden, from the trees to the stars.
Watch out for Pawel Althamer's room of flayed figures, and avoid them if you can. Linger over Cindy Sherman's photographs of 1970s transvestites living a life of suburban normality in upstate New York. And marvel at French philosopher Roger Caillois' gorgeous collection of cut and polished rocks.
It is the one-off brilliance of individual artists that arrests me in Gioni's show, rather than its compendiousness; it would have perhaps better suited an actual museum than a biennale - if there were ever a museum big enough to house it.
Maybe that's the point of the show, which was inspired by an enormous architectural model built by Marino Auriti, an Italian immigrant to the US in the 1920s. Auriti wanted his Encyclopedic Palace of the World to contain the sum of all human knowledge, every important artefact. Like Auriti's mad building, this exhibition has megalomaniac ambitions. You expect Gioni to leap out of Auriti's tiered architectural cake of a building yelling: "Today we curate the biennale! Tomorrow, the world!"
