Sunday, June 23, 2013

The Encyclopedic Palace, Part III

 
The Encyclopedic Palace at the Arsenale in Venice.
Francesco Galli, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia 

What a huge outpouring of love my grandfather’s architectural model has received from all over the world – from the time of the announcement that it would go to Venice for the Biennale, to its trip there, to its reassembly and unveiling in the Arsenale. The whole journey still seems like a miracle to me.  

Here’s my attempt to bring together as many posts as possible about Marino Auriti and his great labor of love. First, the post I wrote in 2012 about the Encyclopedic Palace’s course from my grandfather’s garage to a storage locker in Delaware, where it languished for 22 years, to the American Folk Art Museum. And then the post about when we learned it would go to the Biennale.  

Here’s a video from the American Folk Art Museum that shows the art handlers packing it up so carefully for its trip to Italy:


An eblast from the AFAM:


A lovely, thoughtful article, “The Museum of Babel,” by Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set.

The Backstory of the Venice Biennale,” by Leigh Anne Miller, who interviewed my sister Colette (aka Poogy) and me, and did such a great job with it – a joy to read.

An article by Alessia Gargiulo from a Milan-based website called Swide – with some zany typos and factual errors, but a nice piece nonetheless.  

The American Folk Art Museum’s tumblr page about the Encyclopedic Palace at the Biennale.

Another tumblr page that someone set up.

Marino’s biography on his hometown’s website.

A photo sent to me by Sandro Salvi, the mayor of Guardiagrele – a banner hung across an entrance to the town to welcome the cyclists of the Giro d’Italia:


A gazillion Twitter feeds. 

The many New York Times articles about the show and/or curator Massimiliano Gioni, with mentions of Marino’s work in just about all of them. 

Vogue Living Australia’s blog

Something in Brazilian Vogue.

A mention in German Vogue.

Something on Gioni in Italian Vogue.

A mention in French Vogue.

An article from Style.com.

A talk with Gioni from Wmagazine.

A video with Guardian art critic Adrian Searle on the Biennale, with some great stuff about the Encyclopedic Palace toward the end – just before he lays down on a bench and cycles his legs in the air. Lovely! Somehow he reminds me of Mark E. Smith.


 

And this really cracked me up – “two ‘soft’ (Oldenburg-like) versions of Marino Auriti’s ‘Encyclopedic Palace of the World’” by Macau artist and architect Carlos Marreiros – who has clearly read his Rem Koolhass. With thanks to my talented and beautiful niece, Adrienne Fitzgerald, for finding that. 



 

Finally, a laconic Wikipedia entry that someone (?) has written about my grandfather – which is perfect, because Wikipedia might be the closest thing we have to realizing the dream of his limitless place of knowledge. Or maybe that’s the internet itself. At any rate, I give up! It’s impossible to achieve anything like completion. The internet is too vast, the duplications and reduplications (and curious distortions) seemingly infinite.


And with that, it’s time to go before I risk plagiarizing Borges.

See you in Venice in September.  



Sunday, May 26, 2013

"Holy Land USA"

Image compliments of Wikipedia.

My thanks to The Brooklyner for publishing my story, “Holy Land USA,” in their most recent online issue. Nice people and a pleasure to work with!

Saturday, February 23, 2013

The Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Biennale di Venezia


Friends!  I was so overwhelmed by the amazing news that the Encyclopedic Palace is not only going to the 2013 Venice Biennale but that they named the whole ever-loving Biennale after it pinch me! – that it's only now that I can sit down and write about it with any kind of sense. 
  
The back-story of the Encyclopedic Palace’s journey from the workshop of my grandfather, Marino Auriti, to a 22-year stay in a lonely storage locker in Newport, Delaware to, finally, the American Folk Art Museum can be found here on my blog.  For the press release from the Biennale in English, look here (“...the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists...”).

Marino Auriti with my melancholy grandmother, 
Maria Rachele Auriti, née di Sipio, in Brazil in the 1920s.

The way this thing has exploded all over the internet is still making my head spin and I send out my thanks to all you kind strangers who have written about it.

A carriage built by my grandfather in Guardiagrele, Italy.

A mail truck built by my grandfather in Guardiagrele.  
I remember my mother Colette being so proud of the breadth of 
the rounds it made I think it went between Pescara and Chieti, 
but that seems pretty ambitious for the time.

My family and friends are all amazed and thrilled, and I’m still walking around smiling at the news.  And yet I’m also left wondering what my grandfather, who died in 1980, would have made of all this.  Would it have perplexed him?  After all, the Encyclopedic Palace that he built in his workshop was only a model, one step along the way toward an actual building.  As I was emailing to a young woman in Rome who’s writing her thesis on Simon Rodia of Watts Tower fame and my grandfather (will wonders never cease?), Marino Auriti might have been a dreamer, but he was also a pragmatist.  He wanted the Palazzo Enciclopedico built.  I imagine he thought “paper” architecture had its place, but that place had little to do with him.  Utopian though he might have been, I think he was much closer in spirit to a Buckminster Fuller than an Étienne-Louis Boullée.  

The coffee thresher designed by Marino Auriti and a partner  
that would have produced untold wealth, so the story went,  
had Marino’s partner not beat him to patent.
 
Or maybe my grandfather would have just been thrilled by the news.  

Back in April of last year, Stacey Hollander at the American Folk Art Museum had hinted that the Encyclopedic Place might be going to the Biennale, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.  I carried this in my mind for months, however, and in September, during the final days that the Encyclopedic Palace would be on display at the Folk Art Museum, I went up there to say goodbye to it.  Who knew what would happen to it as far as I knew, it might go back into storage.  It was a crazy hot summer day, and when I got to the museum it was mostly empty.  I walked around the Encyclopedic Palace, smiling like mad, and then did something I hadn’t done since I was a child I crouched down and looked through its tiny celluloid windows, into the building.  And I remembered how as a kid I was always outraged that it was empty inside.  I fully expected to see all of humankind’s inventions already in there, in perfect working order, each of them shrunk down to 1:400 scale.  
 
Marino Auriti paints the Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti.

After I said my good-bye, I crossed the street to Lincoln Center, lay down on the hot grass on that lovely, tilty lawn by Diller Scofidio + Renfrew itself as utopian a piece of architecture as you can find in New York City and I thought about my grandfather and the nature of miracles.    

My grandparents.