Today the Venice Biennale released the rather epic list (see below) of artists who will participated in curator Massimiliano Gioni's exhibition "The Encyclopedic Palace," which is slated to run from June 1 through November 24 and, despite its title, is dominated by the same American and European artists you'll encounter at most major international shows of contemporary art. "With works spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions," Gioni writes in his introduction, "and with over one hundred and fifty artists from more than thirty-seven countries, the exhibition is structured like a temporary museum that initiates an inquiry into the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience of the world."

The exhibition's title and theme were inspired by Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, who conceived of an encyclopedic museum of world culture in Washington, D.C. that would be 136 stories tall with a 16 block footprint, and called the "Palazzo Enciclopedico" (or "Encyclopedic Palace"). Though he spent years working on a model for the enormous structure in his home in rural Pennsylvania - and filed a patent application for it with the U.S. Patent office - Auriti's palace, as you may have guessed, was never built.

Gioni sees such "delusions of omniscience, shed light on the constant challenge of reconciling the self with the universe, the subjective with the collective, the specific with the general, the individual with the culture of her time." In our contemporary situation of sensory overload and data deluge, the curator considers "such attempts to structure knowledge into all-inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate."

The list of participating artists includes a who's-who of contemporary American heavyweights -Nauman, Condo, Sherman, McCarthy, de Maria, Guyton, Serra, Trecartin, and so on - a similarly comprehensive cross-section of major European artists - including Fischli & Weiss,Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Steve McQueen, and Sehgal - a select few from other regions - four artists each from Africa and South America, and nine from Asia (so much for being encyclopedic) - and historical artifacts like Haitian Vodou flags, Shaker gift drawings, and anonymous Tantric paintings. As GalleristNY notes, the number of artists in the exhibition who've recently shown at the New Museum - where Gioni is the associate director and a curator - is conspicuous, though not entirely surprising.

The full list is below:

Hilma af Klint

"The Encyclopedic Palace" runs June 1-November 24 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.

"I use 'dead' things, or materials people think of as garbage," says Abraham Cruzvillegas, "and give them a new use by revealing instead of hiding their nature." Over the past 10 years, the Mexico City-based artist has become recognized as a key figure among his generation, bringing a fresh conceptual strategy to the use of found materials and improvisational processes. The result is a riveting body of work that he calls autoconstrucción, or "self-construction," made from found objects to which he's given new life while working in urban and rural environments in Mexico City; New York; Paris and Saché, France; Glasgow, London, and Oxford, UK; and Gwangju, South Korea.

Each of these commonplace components contributes its own striking character and seemingly precarious form to a sculpture or installation. Here, the artist sheds light on his practice and how it underpins his artistic vision while also serving as a metaphor for the construction of his own identity. Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites is the first major exhibition to focus on this multifaceted project.

Origins

The autoconstrucción concept comes from a building technique that is led by specific needs of a family and by the lack of funds to pay for constructing an entire house at once. People build their own homes slowly and sporadically, as they can, with limited money, with the collaboration of all family members and the solidarity of neighbors, relatives, and friends. Houses show the autoconstrucción process in their layers, through which it is possible to experience their transformations, modifications, cancellations, and destructions; they evolve according to changes in the lives of their residents.

Aesthetic decisions are intertwined with the ability of the builders to use anything available or at hand, depending on place, circumstance, or chance. The combinations of materials and hybrid construction strategies are very rich and diverse. Autoconstrucción is not a weekend hobby; it's not bricolage or DIY culture-it's a consequence of unfair wealth distribution. As opposed to massive building projects, it points to an autonomous and independent architecture that is far from any planning or draft: it's improvised.

While this kind of building happens all around the world, as in Brazilian favelas or South African shanty towns, in my personal experience I lived with autoconstrucción during the first half of my life, witnessing the evolution of my parent's house in Ajusco, south of Mexico City. This is a land of volcanic rock that was settled starting in the early 1960s by immigrants from the countryside looking for a better life in the big city.

Bit by bit, they started building houses with lava stones and recycled materials gathered in other neighborhoods. For years there was no water and in general, no services at all. Fighting for this land to become property, as well for streets, access to electricity, etc., became an everyday activity. Women became leaders in those movements, along with young guys and children, while men were working, many of them as construction workers in so-called modern Mexico.

When I Started to Use It

I have appropriated the term "autoconstrucción" as a name for all my work since 2007, when I improvised a whole exhibition in New York, working only with materials found around a gallery. I was attempting to reproduce the dynamics of autoconstrucción-rather than represent the results, I wanted to activate the process. I started working with the idea as a personal fact (and not as a chosen subject matter) that had been underlying my work since 1999, when I took many pictures of the houses in my neighborhood, the volcanic rock there, and details of my parents' house.

Then I wrote the story of my own experience, what I witnessed all those years, without nostalgia- just facts. This text became a book accompanied by many images, including some lent by neighbors, captured during the early years of the autoconstrucción. It was published in Glasgow, where I was invited by Francis McKee to do a project at theCentre for Contemporary Art. At this point I've made autoconstrucciónsculptures, drawings, paintings, videos, a theatrical play, and a film. Maybe it's time to move to "autodestrucción."

What It Means

As a structure in which everything is possible, autoconstrucción can take shape in infinite and diverse ways. It is a way of thinking more than a method or a technique; it's a way of life. Improvisation and testing all kinds of combinations according to specific needs (like expressing oneself) are rules of autoconstrucción, rules that provide absolute freedom. For me, autoconstrucción is the most authentic type of creativity, because it blooms in the most adverse circumstances. It's pure ingenuity and will, fueled by hermeneutics, use, function and/or contradiction. It is transparency, simplicity, and change.

System of Production/Ideological Framework

It's easy to perceive the economic and cultural origins of the materials composing an autoconstrucción; and this evidence produces complex readings for both viewers and inhabitants. The will to construct is more important than the aesthetic or economic value of any or all of the materials that might be used. When an object is discarded by a person, it's valueless; for autoconstrucción, it could be seen as prime matter.Autoconstrucción does not deal with garbage, but with prime matter.

Recycling has only recently become a widespread practice, but for centuries in so-called underdeveloped countries, scavenging and harvesting used materials and objects has been an activity. Pepenadores in Mexico pick cardboard, metals, discarded furniture, cans, bottles, paper, and other materials from the garbage in order to give them a new life. They collect, classify, accumulate, resell, and transform these goods. Then a new cycle starts. When I make an artwork with found objects or materials-i.e., aluminum, wood, a forgotten bicycle, my own hair, shark jaws, a cowbell, teeth, a chair, wax, coins, plastic, or sheep dung-theyretain their original qualities and defects.

Even if the piece is later dismantled, its fragments remain as they were before they were incorporated: there is no alchemical transformation, there is no trick or magic. Transformation occurs only in the viewer's mind. And in my hands, of course. So, a stone is a stone before, during, and after the art/architecture approach; it does not represent anything else but a stone being a stone as a stone. When the same stone is removed from the pavement to be thrown over a police barricade, or through the window of a government office, it will still be a stone. But a happy one.

Autoconstrucción meant for me, for many years before making art, a constant struggle with authority, and not only because of growing up in a challenging situation, learning to deal with scarcity, solidarity, roughness, and resistance to the environment, to the local governors, to self-indulgence. Now it's more an ideological consequence in which all my acts involve my genealogy and my future as trying to arrive to a certain degree of consciousness based in all that I've mentioned above.Autoconstrucción is not biographical or anecdotal, is not narrative, it's not thematic or communicative. It is the very expression of survival and work. It's also humorous, ironic, paradoxical, and delirious.

An artist and member of the International Taoist Taichi Society, Abraham Cruzvillegas lives and works in Mexico City. In the past year, he participated in Documenta 13 in Kassel, won the Fifth Yanghyun Prize in Seoul, and presented a solo show at Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco. On March 23, he opens “TheAutoconstrucción Suites,” a major exhibition of this long-running project at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Events in galleries can sometimes combine the best of two worlds, and in the case of the recent solo performance by Evan Parker at the Thomas Dane Gallery, those two worlds are art and music. The Gallery put the evening on quietly, in a relatively small space, and it was completely amazing.

Anyone who knows Parker's style will be fully aware that music is a flexible term and his circular-breathing, ten- to fifteen-minute bursts of densely-layered, amelodic, soprano saxophone with continual fluttering and super-rapid fingering is something that has to be heard to be properly appreciated.

To that end, I recommend listening to this for an introduction (that was then and this is now, but it gets the vibe across) - and you'll get an idea why, over a forty-year career, Evan Parker has carved out an untouchable reputation for ploughing his own artistic furrow.

The performance accompanied Thomas Dane's excellent Dominick Di Meo exhibition Limp Voyeur In a Humid Landscape - the first overview of 'self-acknowledged recluse' Di Meo outside the US and a UK introduction to a man who, in Chicago in the '50s, was part of the 'Monster Roster' - reason enough for an examination of his work.

Dominick Di Meo Limp Voyeur In a Humid Landscape is on at the Thomas Dane Gallery until April 13.
www.thomasdane.com

Ici, ailleurs Exposition inaugurale de la Tour-Panorama et l'année Capitale

Pour l'inauguration de ce nouvel espace, une ambitieuse exposition invite des artistes contemporains des deux rives. Si toute œuvre s'inscrit dans un contexte originel et une histoire singulière, le voyage et le nomadisme qui caractérisent l'artiste contemporain constituent une expérience existentielle, qui devient le lieu même de la création. À l'ère de la globalisation, au contact de la diversité du monde et des cultures, l'identité de chacun se trouve sans cesse remaniée. Une quarantaine d'artistes issus des pays du pourtour de la Méditerranée ont été choisis sur leur aptitude à nous repenser en êtres aux identités plurielles, en perpétuel devenir, et sur leur capacité à investir le réel en une réflexion critique. Ils appartiennent pour la majorité d'entre eux à la génération née dans les années 1960-1970 et jouissent d'une reconnaissance sur la scène internationale. Parmi les œuvres exposées, dont un grand nombre de propositions inédites conçues pour l'exposition, quelques-unes traitent du paysage méditerranéen. Elles sont nombreuses à interroger les notions d'identité, de citoyenneté, du même et de l'autre. Plusieurs s'attachent à transmettre l'expérience de l'émigration, de l'exil et du déracinement. Elles offrent aussi une vision de l'histoire au présent, par le biais de l'articulation de récits personnels à l'Histoire. En prise avec les réalités sociales, politiques et géopolitiques, elles nous informent de l'état du monde.

In 1977 Michael Landy's father, John Landy, a miner, was seriously injured in a tunnel collapse at the age of 37. Severe spinal injuries rendered him housebound and unable to return to work. In his poignant video Four Walls, Landy explores his father's previous enthusiasm for working around the home, referencing his collection of tools, DIY manuals, home improvement magazines and videos, assembled over decades, both before and after the accident. Reflecting on the struggles of his father's life, the video displays photographs and line drawings of optimistic young couples and growing families pursuing the modern dream of the improved house, set alongside the recurring difficulties of blocked guttering, eroded surfaces, decayed structures, skinned knuckles and clogged drains. The images are overlaid with a soundtrack of his father whistling his favourite songs.

Four Walls originally formed part of Semi-detached, the installation of a monumental and meticulously rendered sculptural replica of the front and rear facades of his parents' Essex home in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in 2004.

The National Museum of Art, Osaka presents a special exhibition entitled What We See, which will focus primarily on works that make use of the moving image.

In face of ongoing and unparalleled technological revolution that has occurred over the last century, the advent of globalization, and daily life in contemporary society, which is continually inundated with a huge quantity of information, we are exposed to a bewildering amount of change on a daily basis. In the course of ordinary life, the things that are presented as a "reality" sometimes seem to be occurring in a dream, making it seem as if we are experiencing a complete fabrication. At the same time, the realities that are presented as fiction are imbued with a greater intensity, and function no differently from reality, giving us the sense that the line between artifice and actuality is growing increasingly vague.

In the field of art, the concept of reality was nearly always linked to Realism. And by the time photography emerged, unlike painting, it was thought to have the ability to capture a genuine state of reality. It has since become clear, however, that photography does not always embody this function and that the reality it does embody is not necessarily factual. With the rise of the moving image, and the subsequent use of computer graphics and digital technology, scenes that do not actually exist came to be presented with a heightened sense of reality. For example, a film with the characteristics of a documentary that has been edited and molded according to a certain perspective produces a fiction that is detached from reality.

Today, there are many video works that reflect the state of contemporary society in which the distinction between fact and fiction has been lost. In these works, which blend fact and fiction, the artists are asking us to consider the current whereabouts of truth. Does truth exist in something that was created as a fiction? Is reality truth? When reality becomes a fiction, does truth begin to fluctuate? Or on the other hand, when fiction is formulated as reality, does it lead to the emergence of truth?

This exhibition will present a collection of video works by ten artists from around the world including two from Japan: Hiraki Sawa and Shino Yanai. In contemporary society, with its flood of information and images, we must search for the whereabouts of the essential truth contained in the realities and fictions that are presented in these expressions of the moving image.

Artists:Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Cyprien Gaillard, Johan Grimonprez, Chia-En Jao, Sojung Jun, Steve McQueen, Hiraki Sawa, Pei-Shih Tu, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Shino Yanai

The Espace culturel Louis Vuitton is pleased to announce the opening of its twentieth exhibition: Correspondences. The primary focus of the exhibition is Mail Art, and its aim is to bring together works by creators from different generations with different sensibilities who have all chosen to use the post as an artistic medium. Whereas from the 1950s to the 1970s this democratic "attitude" was part of a desire to circumvent the art market and distance oneself from institutions, artists from the generations that followed saw this media as a means to experiment with ways that would allow them to renegotiate both spatial and temporal references as they pertain to works of art that are frequently interactive in nature.

In this exhibition, several ramifications of Mail Art will be associated. The first is historical, and gives a major place to pioneering artist Ray Johnson whose work has rarely been shown in France. Johnson invented the New York Correspondence School and at the end of the 1950s began his body of work based on letters to which he asked friends to put finishing touches. Through this process, he gave a voice to artists such as Eleanor Antin, Alighiero Boetti and Jan Dibbets who took onboard this trend synonymous with a reproducible approach that was for the most part free-of-charge, thereby setting itself outside all traditional conventions.

However, it was not only the art market and the exhibition venues that were hard hit by Mail Art. This was also true with regards to the status of creator, destined here to be shared (as incarnated by the work of Vittorio Santoro) or even wiped out all together (as seen in that of artist Danh Võ) within the network of simple or complex correspondence established by senders who were in reality dependent on addressees. The art of correspondence is intimately connected to the idea of a network; a network comprised of artists, friends, or anonymous people whose members are brought together by a simple letter or package, the contents of which (occasionally veiled as in the case of Stephen Antonakos, or not) are often adapted to meet packaging constraints. Eugenio Dittborn and Walead Beshty displayed much inventiveness in this regard. The art of correspondence can also intersect with other activities, notably those of a professional nature, as demonstrated by Kurt Ryslavy, thereby allowing artists to bring art into daily life. The Espace culturel Louis Vuitton sought to give carte blanche to two artists: videographer Clarisse Hahn and sculptor Guillaume Leblon, each of whom respond in their own way to the myriad facets and possibilities of an art form that, no matter what supporters of the digital era may say, is as relevant and original as ever.

Regardless of the reasons for writing the letters that form this correspondence, and the repercussions they may have had, they invite us to travel through time and space where senders and recipients, works of art and spectator/ readers, are united at the heart of a common creative dynamic.

Curator: Erik Verhagen

Selected artists: Eleanor Antin, Stephen Antonakos, Walead Beshty, Alighiero Boetti, Jan Dibbets, Eugenio Dittborn, Clarisse Hahn, Ray Johnson, Guillaume Leblon, Kurt Ryslavy, Vittorio Santoro, Danh Võ

Artist Walead Beshty collaborated with Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose, to create On the matter of abstraction (figs. A & B).  Comprised of post-war non-figurative works drawn from the Rose's permanent collection, the exhibition takes the architecture of the museum's original building (Max Abramovitz, 1961), and uses it to structure two parallel narratives. The entry level, a terrazzo clad room with floor to ceiling windows, features works in the tradition of analytic abstraction by Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin and Judy Chicago, among many others.  Downstairs, the materially laden objects on display demonstrate a contrasting investment in the unruly. With works by Mark Bradford, Jessica Stockholder, Ana Mendieta, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg and Charline von Heyl, among others, the lower level focuses not only on the gesture and body of the artist but also on the cultural detritus of the world at large. Beshty describes the visitor's descent to the lower floor as a movement from "the cathedral to the cave… both existing as traditional sites of ritual, contemplation and communion." here re-imagined as a passage from "line to stain."

Within the same space, Beshty created a separate work, a mirror and glass floor that runs throughout both levels of the building: Untitled (Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University: Waltham, Massachusetts, February 12 - June 9, 2013). According to Bedford, "While Beshty's floor is not part of the exhibition on the surrounding walls, it does function as a physical armature for the viewing experience, straddling-perhaps even collapsing-the dialectical concept that structures On the matter of abstraction's two parts.  But while Beshty's floor may lack an image of its own, it absorbs the world around it through reflection, becoming by virtue of context a highly representational device.  Over time and through use, the surface cracks as a result of visitors' movements, subsequently taking apart the images of the objects we see in it, until finally that reflected world is nothing more than a dense matrix of fractured images and jagged lines."

The Bass Museum of Art continues to reinterpret its mission to inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collections and contemporary art, with The Endless Renaissance: Six Solo Artist Projects. In diverse ways, the six artists invited to present solo projects reconsider objects and concepts from art history, showing how works and ideas transform over time and in front of different audiences. In video installations by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, traditional works of art are presented and reassessed by various audiences, engaging the works in their own terms. Barry X Ball's interpretations of notable sculptures and Hans-Peter Feldmann's manipulated paintings demonstrate contemporary examinations of art from the past. The works of Ged Quinn combine anachronistic references to art and literature to the strong traditions of landscape and still-life painting. Walead Beshty's diverse works also maintain an awareness of their own histories, providing viewers a clear record of their provenance.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Presenting her 2010 film installation The Annunciation, Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b. 1959 Hämeenlinna, Finland) usually works in various multimedia formats. Often presenting large-scale, multi-channel installations, Ahtila probes the inner workings of cinema and how it is used to perceive the world.  For The Annunciation, Ahtila is exploring the Christian narrative from the Gospel of Luke, a scene which has been thoroughly depicted throughout art history.  In the film, characters are played mainly by non-professional actors, and it is set in an artist's studio. The installation also includes several images of Annunciation paintings, showing Eija-Liisa's direct engagement of significant art historical works in a contemporary fashion.

Barry X Ball
Directly engaging the historic tradition of the portrait bust, Barry X Ball (b. 1955, Pasadena, California) utilizes digital technologies and unconventional types of stone in creating his body of work. Taking digital scans of his models, which include prominent historical sculptures and contemporary art-world figures, he uses a computer to manipulate and ultimately carve the sculptures. The resulting works provide eerie portraits of their sitters, simultaneously recognizable and obfuscating. The translucent nature of many of the types of stone he chooses gives his works a glowing, ethereal quality - a celestial quality which sculptors have been intensely pursuing throughout art history.

Walead Beshty
Exploring the very art world of which they are a part, the works of Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London, England) are diverse and often conceptually based. Keenly aware of their own histories, Beshty's FedEx boxes and copper sculptures offer a detailed record of their journey between various locations. The FedEx works are displayed with their packaging, but they also chronicle the cracks and scratches they receive during their shipment. Similarly, Beshty's copper panels are handled without gloves, allowing fingerprints and smudges to become part of each work's appearance. As the history of art is concerned very much over a work's provenance, or its record of ownership, Beshty's works offer the viewer tangible accounts of their own prior histories gives his works a glowing, ethereal quality - a celestial quality which sculptors have been intensely pursuing throughout art history.

Hans-Peter Feldmann
Throughout his career, Hans-Peter Feldmann (b. 1941, Dusseldorf, Germany) has collected images and objects, exploring how we find meaning and value in various everyday items. His work also examines the way that art functions, including the way it has traditionally increased the social status of its owner or has been used as historical record. In challenging the way that art-world works, Feldmann doesn't sign his works, give them titles, or allow the use of labels. Using found images and paintings, he tweaks the objects ever so slightly, by adding a clown nose or crossed eyes, for example. In the end, these manipulations are just enough to subvert the original object's meaning. Feldmann's use of humor also allows him to question the viewer's expectations of art throughout his work.

Hans-Peter Feldmann's presentation was curated by Helena Tatay.

Ged Quinn
In his paintings, Ged Quinn, (b. 1963, Liverpool, England) places elements from literature, history and mythology within pastoral landscapes. Reassessing such landscapes with specific references and allusions to history, literature and mythology, Quinn probes the psychological depths of Romanticism and other schools of painting. Each painting operates on multiple levels, consisting of fragments of information. Disregarding typical linear narratives, Quinn's works result in complex systems of information that invite endless interpretations. Exposing themes such as mortality, melancholia and transcendence, Quinn's intensely philosophical and methodical paintings reflect his interest in how ideas travel throughout history.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1959, Trad, Thailand) explores the connections between the legacy of Western art and various Eastern cultures. In her works for this exhibition, she engages masterworks from prominent European artists that are well-known to Western audiences. She presents these works to rural Thai villagers and farmers who are likely unfamiliar with the legacies of each work. In doing so, she explores the connections that are created when two diverse realms are instantly intersected. As the Thai audiences approach these works with humor, concern, confusion and delight, several commonalities arise between two seemingly disparate cultures.

The Endless Renaissance - Six Solo Artist Projects: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Barry X Ball, Walead Beshty, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ged Quinn and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook will be on view during Art Basel Miami Beach 2012 with a VIP reception on December 5, 2012 9pm-12am. Special museum hours will be: Thursday, December 6 through Monday, December 10, 2012, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and regular museum hours thereafter. The exhibition runs through March 17, 2013.