{"id":2451,"date":"2013-05-25T21:50:29","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T21:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2451"},"modified":"2013-05-25T21:52:12","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T21:52:12","slug":"new-guide-in-venice-by-carol-vogel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2451","title":{"rendered":"New Guide in Venice by Carol Vogel – NYT"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Captura<\/a><\/p>\n

By\u00a0CAROL VOGEL<\/a><\/p>\n

Published: May 23, 2013<\/h6>\n

Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of this year\u2019s\u00a0Venice Biennale<\/a>, was marveling at the rich history of this 118-year-old international contemporary art exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cKlimt showed there in 1905,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is mind-blowing to me. Since then there has been Morandi and Picasso, Rauschenberg, Johns and so on. Maybe I\u2019m romanticizing, but the past is still very present.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a rainy afternoon in April Mr. Gioni was having lunch at his regular haunt, a tiny Italian restaurant in Lower Manhattan near the\u00a0New Museum<\/a>, where he is associate director and director of exhibitions. His BlackBerry was buzzing with e-mails and his phone kept ringing. Yet Mr. Gioni, 39, ignored it all, speaking earnestly with his usual intellectual intensity jolted with unexpected moments of deadpan humor. He was explaining what it\u2019s like to be the youngest artistic director in 110 years to organize the first, oldest and most venerable international art event in a calendar packed with an unrivaled number of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course I\u2019m nervous,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is center stage and it\u2019s difficult because it comes with so many expectations and so much history.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he braces for the art world to descend on Venice for three preview days beginning on Wednesday, followed by the public opening on Saturday, Mr. Gioni estimated that nearly 500,000 people would come to see the Biennale by the time it ends on Nov. 24. As artistic director, his job is not only to be the diplomatic face of the Biennale but also to organize an enormous exhibition in two sites: one in a central building in the shaded gardens at the tip of Venice where the national pavilions are, and the other in the nearby Arsenale, the meandering medieval network of shipyards. The job entails an overwhelming amount of juggling and his ambitious vision has only made it worse.<\/p>\n

Even though Mr. Gioni was born in\u00a0Italy<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 in Busto Arsizio, 40 minutes northwest of Milan \u2014 the logistics of working in a city like Venice are a notorious nightmare. Adamant that this will not be a boiler plate survey of contemporary art, Mr. Gioni has enlisted 158 artists, nearly double the number of the two previous Biennales.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will zigzag across histories, covering 100 years of dreams and visions,\u201d said Mr. Gioni, noting 38 countries are represented. \u201cA biennale can be pedagogical without being boring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Encyclopedic Palace\u201d is the theme. It is taken from the title of a symbol of 1950s-era Futurism \u2014 an 11-foot-tall architectural model of a 136-story cylindrical skyscraper that was intended to house all the knowledge in the world. Its creator, the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, dreamed it would be built on the National Mall in Washington. The model now belongs to the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, which is lending it to the Biennale. \u201cIt best reflects the giant scope of this international exhibition,\u201d Mr. Gioni said, \u201cthe impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paolo Baratta, the longtime president of the Biennale, said that \u201cafter 14 years of having traditional curators I thought it was time to ask a man of the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a time when contemporary art is flooding the world,\u201d he added, \u201cit seemed to make more sense to present a show that doesn\u2019t just include a list of artists from the present but rather looks at today\u2019s art through the eyes of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philippe S\u00e9galot, a private art dealer, called Mr. Gioni \u201ca rising star.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though he\u2019s so young,\u201d Mr. S\u00e9galot said, \u201che\u2019s already a brand and one of the most sought after curators around. As a result expectations are unusually high. Everyone wants to see what he\u2019ll deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Gioni is mixing high and low, with masters mingling with self-taught and outsider artists. Besides Mr. Auriti, there will be work by names likely to be unfamiliar to even art world insiders. There are arcane objects like a deck of tarot cards created by the British occultist and artist Aleister Crowley, abstract paintings by the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint and shaker drawings on loan from the\u00a0Hancock Shaker Village<\/a>\u00a0in Pittsfield, Mass. For one show within a show, the photographer\u00a0Cindy Sherman<\/a>\u00a0is organizing an exhibition at the Arsenale. Known for photographing herself transformed into hundreds of different personas, including movie stars, Valley girls and menacing clowns, she appealed to Mr. Gioni because, he said, \u201cimage plays a big role at this year\u2019s Biennale, and Cindy has spent her life representing herself as others.\u201d Ms. Sherman is creating a kind of bizarre doll\u2019s house with works by little-known artists, prison inmates and popular figures like Robert Gober, Charles Ray,\u00a0Paul McCarthy<\/a>\u00a0and Rosemarie Trockel.<\/p>\n

An old ship is coming by boat from Iceland; a 200-year-old church is en route from Vietnam; and dozens of contemporary artists need hand-holding while they grapple with installing videos or preparing for complex performances. \u201cRight now I wish there was another me,\u201d Mr. Gioni said with a sigh.<\/p>\n

Besides organizing the event he has also been a fund-raiser. Money is always tight at any Biennale, and his budget of about $2.3 million simply wasn\u2019t enough to cover his expenses. He has raised more than $2 million on top of that, he said, \u201cmostly from private individuals and foundations and philanthropists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Mr. Gioni is considered something of a star within the close-knit world of contemporary art, he had a larger presence early in his career as the doppelg\u00e4nger of the mischievous Italian artist\u00a0Maurizio Cattelan<\/a>. Mr. Cattelan, who is more than a decade older, routinely sent him in his place to do radio and television interviews and even lectures. The prank worked for a while, Mr. Gioni recalled, until a series of mishaps. He was speaking at a lecture organized by the Public Art Fund when Tom Eccles, its director, showed slides of Mr. Cattelan\u2019s self-portraits. \u201cIt was obvious I wasn\u2019t him,\u201d Mr. Gioni recalled.<\/p>\n

Then there was the time he posed as Mr. Cattelan on television and the station\u2019s switchboard became jammed with viewers complaining that an impostor was on the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaurizio was so in demand and I liked it because I thought it was a way to be a committed critic, giving your words to an artist,\u201d Mr. Gioni said.<\/p>\n

Less than a month before the Biennale was set to open, Mr. Gioni could be found sitting around the dining room table of his apartment, a spare sun-filled East Village walk-up that he shares with his wife of three years, Cecilia Alemani, director of art at the\u00a0High Line<\/a>. With him were three assistants, each glued to laptops. Wearing jeans, a white shirt and red sneakers, Mr. Gioni had a way of juggling complex issues with a cool head, quoting wise words from a philosopher one moment and making a wry joke the next. The group was reviewing each artist in the exhibition, name by name, and checking the status of their work.<\/p>\n

What about Roger Hiorns? Mr. Gioni asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s concerned his installation will be too near a door,\u201d replied Helga Christoffersen, an assistant.<\/p>\n

Mr. Gioni explained, \u201cIt\u2019s a pulverized altar from a church from England.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s going to be a big hit with the Catholic folks,\u201d he said deadpan, receiving a big laugh from the group. (For the first time the Vatican is represented in its own pavilion at the Biennale.)<\/p>\n

Camille Henrot? \u201cMissing in action,\u201d Mr. Gioni said slightly nervously.<\/p>\n

The group then looked at images online of the \u201cS. S. Hangover,\u201d the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson\u2019s fishing boat that will have six horn players performing on the water in the Arsenale for four hours every day for six months. \u201cWe\u2019re working with a conservatory in Venice to find the players,\u201d Mr. Gioni said.<\/p>\n

When trying to visualize the installation of the circular entrance in the main pavilion where he plans to display 40 pages of Carl Jung\u2019s \u201cRed Book,\u201d an illuminated manuscript on which he worked for more than 16 years, Mr. Gioni grabbed a ruler, went into the living room and measured out the space on the floor with masking tape, trying to figure out the correct height for the climate-controlled vitrine.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s obsessed,\u201d Mr. Cattelan said. \u201cWhen he gets in bed at night he\u2019s not just thinking about the big picture but also about the number of electrical outlets or the height of a video. He gets caught up in the details most curators normally don\u2019t take care of. Being super bright helps; so does his superior knowledge of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Gioni\u2019s methods may be a bit unconventional, but then he didn\u2019t come to the job in the same way as many of his predecessors. He never got a Ph.D. in art history; nor did he spend years climbing his way up the curatorial ladder. But at 39 he has had more hands-on experience overseeing biennales than anyone of his generation: In 2003 he was the curator of the section called \u201cLa Zona\u201d at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 he was co-curator of the fifth edition of the traveling biennial Manifesta, a roving European event that was held that year in San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; in 2006 he organized the fourth Berlin Biennale in collaboration with Mr. Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. And in 2010 he was the youngest and first European director of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, its eighth, which attracted more than 500,000 visitors and got rave reviews.<\/p>\n

Besides his role at the New Museum, where he has spearheaded many ground breaking shows including \u201cThe Generational: Younger Than Jesus<\/a>,\u201d its first triennial, he is also artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan. Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said Mr. Gioni \u201csees curating as an art form.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is terribly well read without being academic so that he can cut across centuries and create a new story,\u201d Ms. Phillips said.<\/p>\n

Although it all sounds like pretty serious stuff, but Mr. Gioni has a lighter side too. In 2002 Mr. Gioni, along with Mr. Cattelan and Ms. Subotnick, started \u201cThe Wrong Gallery,\u201d a minuscule space that was little more than a doorway with a classic Chelsea aluminum-glass front door on West 20th Street. (In 2005 the spoof gallery was evicted, then decamped to the Tate Modern in London in 2005, closing three years later.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Gioni\u2019s parents are retired \u2014 his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was the manager of an ink factory. When he was 15 he moved on his own to Vancouver Island in Canada, where he attended the United World Colleges; later he received a degree in art history from the University of Bologna. The youngest of three siblings, he describes himself as the black sheep of the family.<\/p>\n

To support himself through school he worked as a translator and eventually became editor of the Italian edition of Flash Art, where he met Mr. Cattelan; in 1999 he moved to New York as its American editor. He met Francesco Bonami, now an independent curator, and did some work with him. Mr. Bonami was the artistic director of the Venice Biennale in 2003 and it was he who asked Mr. Gioni to organize \u201cLa Zona\u201d there. Ms. Phillips hired him at the New Museum in 2006 after seeing the Berlin Biennale, which she called \u201ca standout.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the instantaneous nature of culture today and the proliferation of art fairs and giant exhibitions, Mr. Gioni still believes there is a place for biennales. \u201cI grew up with them,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw my first one in Venice in 1993. They are no longer a fixed formula. This is the first decade of a new century and this show will deal with our age of hyperconnectivity, by looking at what goes on in our heads rather than online. It is about the synchronicity of the past, the present and the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:<\/p>\n

\n

Correction: May 23, 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying caption misstated the age of Massimiliano Gioni. He is 39, not 40. The article also misstated the employment status of Ali Subotnik. She is a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles \u2014 not an independent curator.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n