'Whelmen': Palazzo Fortuny, Venice

At Palazzo Fortuny, two weeks ago, I came upon a new way of being overwhelmed, and I’m still trying to fathom it. Theorists have explored the field of art and emotion (its location and dynamics and its whereabouts) for decades but that whole discussion is not interesting to me. What is interesting to me, is the fact that I found a new way of feeling that inherently is, yet seems to fall outside of, the realm of ‘emotion.’ At Palazzo Fortuny, something happened, not suddenly, but over the period of about three precious hours./ If I can put you in my place—take yourself to a massive and warm room with walls curtained in yards of rich fabric, quietly overlaying colour and texture, and put over this a myriad of artworks spanning paradigmatic decades, and in-between and around place vitrines holding curious and precious objects--both archaic and contemporary, and then place tables down the centre to present architectural models and fragments and sculptures that seem from the same careful hands, and then tuck at the back a row of wooden glass-doored cabinets full of open books with the fine lines of art-science. And around this one massive room, create other rooms—one previously the now-gone artist’s studio with the trace of his works and paint marks on the wall, and in others, collect unexpected contemporary works stretching the reach of media and the hand-made up to the minute./ Take everything that is precious to you and collect it—although you did not necessarily know each piece by first sight. Put it cheek by jowl, as if each work kisses the next, and the next, and the next. Walk into that room and sink into the soft and large couch at its end to reorient yourself, grab your breath and say to yourself ‘ye gods, I am here’. Then you are at Palazzo Fortuny, with me, in Venice. /Oh yes, in Aotearoa we look far, far North, maybe because the plenty is there and the South is too abstract, and too cold. But ‘discovering the greats in Europe’ is not what this is about, although to be in such close contact begins the feeling: something visceral but that re-interprets emotion./ In the mid 15th Century, the world ‘overwhelm’ came from the root ‘whelmen,’ which was about being turned upside down, about being completely submerged. Maybe this gets to the centre of my Fortuny experience./ If you are still with me: imagine you are under the curved and overarching hull of a massive and expansive wooden boat. It points ahead and beyond you. It is over and above you, and you are in it: it is the vault you occupy. You are submerged in daytime, almost in a sonic way, like you have closed and sealed some secret door behind you./ On finding yourself here, the first word you say out loud is ‘wow’: first documented in the 1900s, it is an exclamation of amazement, from the same root, it references delight and amazement. It also draws into it the 16th Century ‘in-volere’: to be involved, to take in, and the other sense of the same century: ‘to be removed, carried away.’/ Yes, there is the temptation to consider the word ‘bliss’ in all of this, but this isn’t the word./ Whelmen. What if you could just lay each encounter down, like a sedimentary shock layer, and keep layering without necessary ecstasy, with some deep form that does not call for tears, that is beyond it, that reaches into something else? ‘So you think you’re overwhelmed’ I say to myself, and this is the word that walks with me under the boat. 'Whelmen.' /