Stardust Memories

Continued… To enter The Encyclopedic Palace in the Giardini: I walk through the atrium of paintings by Carl Jung. Facsimiles of his drawings with greasy fingerprints intact, rather like the new publication of Nabakov’s coffee ringed manuscripts.The paintings are displayed in a sort of Masonic circle with the original album perspex-encased, untouchable, looking like the a lunatic shaman’s Book of Kells. It’s like a passage from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. A beautiful model village is ferociously minded by an emasculated-looking Venetian guard. These card houses were found by Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser in 1993 in a junk shop in Austria. They were made by an insurance clerk called Peter Fritz. Not much is known about Fritz other than his profession, and the two Oliver’s assume that he copied existing buildings. I wondered if, like the creator of the ‘Walberswick Scroll’, John Doman Turner, he had modelled an entire town. Around the edges of the room are meticulously drawn and carefully considered imaginary buildings. Achilles G. Rizzoli is the creator, we learn from the small information plaque which everyone is photographing instead of reading. Rizzoli is a man who in another lifetime might have had a Joseph Cornell-like existence. He lived with his mother his whole life in San Francisco. He was an architectural draughtsman who secretly made dedications to his mother with these fanciful buildings, ‘Mother Symbolically Represented/The Kathedral’ (1935) and the ‘The Tower of Jewels’ and other titles that sound like F.Scott Fitzgerald short stories. So we have entered via Jung’s paintings into our collective subconscious. Is there a suggestion here that ‘Outsider Art’ is more truthful, a more direct common communication of creativity, a leveller a salve? I email Roger Cardinal to ask what he thinks of the inclusion of so much Outsider Art. The recent show, ‘Souzou’ at the Wellcome, enlightened me that there wasn’t really a concept of Outsider Art, the creations exhibited were seen more in the context of work as a means to good mental and physical health. The ceramics of Ron Nagle are fun, glossy, labial figurines that remind me of the wonderful porcelains of Annie Attridge and a little of Memphis design. Hilma af Klint I know of through my friend Hayley Lock, who recently travelled to Sweden to see her paintings. Hayley has asked me to lick one for her. My partner Alex stops me. He knows I would. I kissed an Ermine moth at a train station once just to appal him. Klint made her work in a trance and coughed her unconscious beautifully onto canvas and graph paper in sublime liquid colours. I’m creating my own Wunderkammer whilst in Venice. Today I’m going to Padova (Pa Dover) as Alex is calling it as it is one of his favourite habitats. Tomorrow I hope to see all of the superior Manet’s which were missing from the RA show, Bedwyr Williams, Cattelan , Arsenale ‘Encyclopedic Palace’ and the ‘Museum of Everything’ and if there’s time I’ll swim in the Lido like Tadzio in a sailor suit about to enter the primeval swamp.