The Livre Rouge in gardens

This essay is presented as a sort of guided tour of the 2013 Venice Art Biennale, an event which broke from tradition in two ways. Although the Biennale is usually confined to celebrating the values propagated and exploited by the cream of the world’s tiny contemporary art scene, the director and curator of last year’s Biennale were committed to focusing its attention and ours on the singular expressions attested to by the creations of today and yesteryear, more discreetly and sometimes almost secretly. Even more surprisingly, the original Red Book by Jung was exhibited and presented as an introduction and keynote work for the Biennale. This article considers the exhibition within the context of the usual definition of art brut; the supposed acquaintanceships between surrealism and psychoanalysis, the kinship and differences between the Red Book and Asian ways of meditation and wisdom; the question of whether the Red Book is art; and the relationship between the book and Jung’s later work. In particular, this essay notes a piece of performance art by Tino Sehgal, Rudolf Steiner’s writings on graphics and education, and Roger Caillois’s rock collections. These and other encounters can be related to Jung’s approach and to the way we ourselves engage in rapport with the unconscious.