The São Paulo Biennial and the Rise of Brazilian Contemporary Art

The São Paulo Biennial and the Rise of Brazilian Contemporary Art Kiki Mazzucchelli The 1950s: early years, will to modernity Every two years since 1951, the city of São Paulo has hosted an impressive influx of artworks from all over the globe. Created by the industrialist Francisco (Ciccillo) Matarazzo Sobrinho (1898–1877), who had founded MAM (Museum of Modern Art) Sao Paulo in 1948, the Sao Paulo Biennial emerged onto an art scene that was still fairly incipient. Things were changing rapidly, however. In the previous decade the city had undergone an unprecedented surge of industrialisation, and by 1950 its population had grown to approximately 2.5 million. While Rio – still the capital – had seen the significant development of modern architecture and landscape design fostered by great public commissions, São Paulo’s cultural sector was mainly being funded by private initiatives. The city had three museums,; two of which had been recently inaugurated: MAM and MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), the latter conceived by Italian dealer Pietro Maria Bardi and his wife Lina Bo and financed by communications tycoon Assis Chateaubriand in 1947. Thus, when the biennial began, it inevitably contributed to an expanding of horizons, breaking the isolation of a self-referential, provincial art scene and opening up communication channels with the rest of the world. Inevitably, it also became a persisting force that played a crucial role in shaping the Brazilian artistic milieu. Having emerged in a time when overseas travel was the privilege of a few, this ambitious exhibition offered the public an invaluable opportunity to experience art being made abroad alongside local production. In a city where even today there are no museums offering permanent displays of modern and contemporary art, the works that have featured at the biennial over the years have come to constitute what curator Ivo Mesquita calls ‘an imaginary collection’,1 one that helped form the visual vocabulary of several generations of artists, critics, curators and viewers. There have been more or less successful biennials over the years, of course, the event’s sheer scale being a constant threat to its overall quality, but there has been something memorable in 1. Curator’s talk at the 28th São Paulo Biennial under the umbrella theme ‘The Bienal de São Paulo and the Brazilian artistic milieu: Memory and Projection. Focus: 16th/ 17th Biennials – 1981 and 1983’, organised by Luisa Duarte. See http:// www.28bienalsaopaulo.org.br/palestra/em-foco-16-17-bienais-1981-e-1983 (accessed 11.04.12). every edition. In this respect, the São Paulo Biennial differs from the dozens of other biennials that emerged in the 1990s in all corners of the world, deeply embedded as it is in the collective memory of its local audience. From the very beginning, the biennial’s history was profoundly linked with the development of the local art scene. The first biennials were linked to MAM, awarding acquisition prizes to works that would subsequently enter the museum’s collection. These exhibitions also fulfilled a pedagogical function by introducing and contextualising twentieth-century European avant-garde movements. Organised by an artistic director rather than a curator, each biennial also included open submissions selected by a jury, works by artists selected by the organisers, and those presented by each country’s delegation. Lourival Gomes Machado, then MAM’s director, took on the artistic direction of the first edition in 1951, declaring that ‘by its own definition, the Biennial should accomplish two main tasks: to place Brazilian art not merely in confrontation, but in living contact with world art; and at the same time to seek to establish Sao Paulo as an art centre on a global scale.’2 As though anticipating or capturing the local interest in Concrete art, the jury of the first biennial famously awarded the international prize to the Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill’s Tripartite Unit (1948/9), a sculpture based on the principle of the Moebius strip. Bill’s work had already been shown in a comprehensive exhibition at MASP in 1951, causing a significant impact on a young generation of artists from both Rio and São Paulo. Whether the biennial award was the symptom of a latent interest or its cause, it helped forge a connection between the exhibition and the country’s artistic production at the time. Although characterised by a certain degree of improvisation, the first biennial was nevertheless well received. Plans for a second edition were boosted when Ciccilo Matarazzo was invited to preside over the celebrations of São Paulo’s four-hundredth anniversary. In this context, the organisation of a second biennial seemed a natural development. The exhibition, which had originally been mounted at the Trianon esplanade, where the landmark MASP building designed by Lina Bo Bardi would be erected at the end of the following decade, was moved to the newly inaugurated complex designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Ibirapuera Park, where it occupied two pavilions. Under the artistic direction of Sergio Milliet, the second edition brought together in a single exhibition some of the greatest artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century, including Cubism, Futurism and De Stijl, as well as retrospective exhibitions of work by such renowned artists as Klee, Mondrian, Munch and Picasso (having famously shown the latter’s Guernica [1937] for the first and only time in the tropics). According to critic Mario Pedrosa, the biennial of 1953 2. Lourival Gomes Machado, ‘Apresentação’, in Catálogo da I Bienal do Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1951). was the greatest modern art exhibition of the decade,3 and its capacity to mobilise such a comprehensive selection of high-quality works played a significant part in the establishment of the show as a permanent feature in the city’s cultural calendar. The biennials that followed maintained the tradition of focusing on historical avant-gardes (although not as opulently as in the second edition), including Expressionism and Surrealism, and on solo retrospectives by internationally renowned artists such as Léger, Morandi and Chagall. In 1957, for its fourth edition, the biennial would finally occupy the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, where it still takes place today. The biennial’s first major structural change occurred in 1962, when Matarazzo created the Biennial Foundation, which took over the organisation of the event from MAM São Paulo. This separation meant that the biennial would no longer award acquisition prizes and, to a certain extent, would lose its focus on pedagogical exhibitions. Nevertheless, the 1960s were an extremely fertile and inventive decade for both Brazilian and international art, and even editions that took place after the military coup of 1964 continued to feature innovative practices. But the relevance and purpose of the biennial format were already being questioned, and criticism increased as Brazil reached the end of the decade under a hardline dictatorship that had closed the national congress and suspended all political and constitutional rights. Led by Pedrosa as a protest against the regime, a boycott of the tenth edition (1969) marked the beginning of a decade during which the biennial would lose much of its critical significance. Supported by influential Brazilian artists and intellectuals, many of whom eventually had to leave the country, the boycott gained the support of such important personalities as French critic Pierre Restany, and throughout the 1970s the biennial received little coverage abroad. The 1980s: The curator’s era The appointment of Walter Zanini as the curator of the sixteenth edition in 1981 helped restore the biennial’s relevance both nationally and internationally. Respected by his peers in Brazil and abroad, Zanini was one of the notable art historians of his time and the first to receive the title of curator of the biennial. As director of MAC/USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo) from 1963 to 1978 (this museum, incidentally, was located on the third floor of the biennial pavilion) he organised numerous exhibitions which played a pivotal role in the development of conceptual practice, maintaining a close dialogue with young artists. Together with MAM (Museum of Modern Art) Rio, in the 3. Mario Pedrosa, ‘Por dentro e por fora das bienais’, in Aracy Amaral, org., Mundo, Homem, Arte em Crise (São Paulo, 1986). 4. Lisette Lagnado, ‘As tarefas do curador’, in Marcelina (antropofágica), 1/1 (2008). 1960s and 1970s MAC/USP became a hub for experimental, frequently critical art, even during the toughest years of the military dictatorship. Zanini had a keen interest in process- or time-based art such as Mail art, video, performance and other dematerialised forms which had gained prominence in the preceding years. As a curator, he was one of the few in the country who had a clearly defined programme of research. It was therefore no surprise that these art forms were represented in the biennial’s sixteenth edition. But perhaps Zanini’s most significant gesture o n t h a t o c c a s i o n w a s t o a b o l i s h t h e Ve n e t i a n m o d e l o f compartimentalisation of artworks into national pavilions, proposing instead an organisation according to what he termed an ‘analogy of languages’. This did not mean that the traditional national representations were abolished, but that, as much as possible, each country’s selection was made in direct consultation with the curator and his team. Importantly, it also meant that each country’s selection was no longer presented in a separate room as an independent exhibition. Instead, individual works were placed in relation to works from other countries in order to highlight specific affinities. Zanini’s interest in the art forms that had emerged in the 1960s and ’70s was reflected in his choice of such works as the installations by the young Brazilians Cildo Meireles and Tunga, videos and performances by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and a comprehensive collection of artists’ books. Another important feature was a large exhibition dedicated to Mail art, curated by artist Julio Plaza and bringing together contributions from almost five hundred artists worldwide. Historical works in more traditional media were included in order to illuminate or contextualise contemporary production; artists included were Alberto Burri, Philip Guston and Jannis Kounellis. Furthermore, the sixteenth edition included a presentation of Outsider art from both Brazil and abroad. It would be fair to say that Zanini’s project was the culmination of his work at MAC/USP, featuring a generation of artists that emerged in those years as well as their historical influences. The correlation between emerging local and international practice struck a positive chord, and seemed to truly reflect the cultural spirit of the time. He was also in charge of the next edition (1983) – a kind of second instalment of the 1981 show – featuring a large Fluxus exhibition, a room dedicated to Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho, and graffiti works by Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. The biennial had finally regained its momentum. The 1985 edition, which became known as the ‘Great Canvas Biennial’, was one of the most polemic in its histor y. Curated by Sheila Leirner, it foregrounded the correspondences between international and national production of the time, with a focus on the Neo-Expressionist return to painting that characterised great part of the North American and European art of that decade. It had also gained prominence in São Paulo, mainly through the work of the Casa 7 group formed by Carlito Carvalhosa, Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Monteiro and Rodrigo Andrade. However, the polemic was not sparked by the proposed theme or by critical discussions around it but by the display strategy chosen by the curator. The main contemporary section was located at the centre of the pavilion’s second floor and comprised three long corridors 100 metres long, 3 metres wide and 5 metres high. Along those monumental walls were exhibited numerous large-scale paintings, one next to the other, with only small gaps between them, so that there was plenty of visual interference from neighbouring works. This layout created the impression of a single, vast painting and erased notions of individual authorship. Works by renowned international artists were hung next to those by emerging Brazilians, suggesting aesthetic equivalences. Without the possibility of showing their work in isolation, many of the participating artists, particularly those from the German delegation, decided to remove their work from Leirner’s ‘Great Canvas’. The gaps created by their absence were preserved throughout the exhibition period as a reminder of the shock and discomfort caused by the curatorial project. Beyond the polemic, the biennial’s eighteenth edition will probably be remembered for its audacity in breaking down artistic hierarchies and showing young Brazilian painting under the same conditions as production from the Europe–US axis. The late 1990s and beyond: the rise and fall of the Biennial model It was not until 1998 that another São Paulo Biennial would have such a significant impact on the international scene. This time, however, it would also play a key role in securing Brazilian art’s place in hegemonic art historical narratives. The twenty-fourth edition, organised by curator Paulo Herkenhoff, marked the coming of age of the Brazilian art world and helped consolidate the international presence of contemporary Brazilian art. Taking as a starting point Oswald de Andrade’s notion of antropofagia, this was the first biennial to employ a home-grown theoretical concept as a critical paradigm to reflect about international artistic production. According to Herkenhoff, antropofagia was chosen amongst many other possible moments in Brazilian art history due to its great potential to serve as a framework to address issues of cultural difference in the global scenario.4 In his renowned manifesto, de Andrade famously presented the ritual cannibalism of the Tupi people as a metaphor for the critical process of Brazil’s cultural formation whereby European ideas and models were consumed, digested and transformed into something original and new. The 4 appropriation of the antropofagia model in the articulation of a large-scale exhibition like the biennial proved to be a successful tool with which to discuss issues relating to the increasing globalisation that had been almost exclusively linked to post-colonial discourse emerging from American and European academia. It was also a flexible model, lending itself to numerous associations and allowing the emergence of alternative historical readings and narratives. The curatorial remit was particularly well translated in the exhibition’s historical segment, with its display strategy of ‘contamination’, in which contemporary artworks were scattered amid historical exhibitions. The comprehensive historical section of the twenty-fourth biennial included a vast selection of works ranging from sixteenth-century travelling painters (Albert Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits of Brazilian people; Theodor de Bry’s depictions of cannibalistic rituals) to Brazilian Baroque works, Goya, Blake, Géricault, Van Gogh, Malevich, Mondrian, Armando Reverón, Tarsila do Amaral, Torres-Garcia and Oiticica. Specific juxtapositions were created in order to challenge Eurocentric historiography, whose Hegelian orientation largely excludes other modernities. This was evident both in general spatial terms and in more precise curatorial choices. The historical section, for instance, which presented several canonical Western artworks, could not be traversed without encountering such Latin American artists as Reverón, Matta and Siqueros. Herkenhoff excelled at creating unsuspected meanings out of the friction between works from different geopolitical and temporal contexts. Some of these were quite seen as quite shocking, for example the juxtaposing of Francis Bacon’s painting Seated Figure (The Cardinal) (1955) with the photographic documentation of Artur Barrio’s T.E. (trouxas ensanguentadas) [B.B. (Bloody Bundles)] (1969).4 Others, such as the reflection of Bruce Nauman’s neon piece Eat/Death (1972) on a painting representing an Indian cannibal as a monster, worked as a premonition of the extermination of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. The twenty-fourth biennial also featured a new generation of Brazilian artists in an exhibition entitled Um e/entre outro/s (One and/ among Others), curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Herkenhoff, which included the work of many artists who had emerged in the 1990s and who would gain international prominence in the following years, among them Adriana Varejão, Ernesto Neto and Rivane Neuschwander. Contemporary Brazilian art had a strong presence in this biennial. Seven other cultural regions (Africa, Asia, Canada and the US, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Oceania) were the focus of the segment Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. Roteiros. (Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.), whose title was taken from De Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’. In another non-hegemonic gesture, Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita, who had worked extensively in the region, was appointed as the curator of the Canada/US section. (Each region had a curator in charge of creating a kind of cultural cartography of that area in dialogue with the concept of antropofagia.) Having failed for financial and diplomatic reasons to set aside the Venetian model of national representations in this ambitious biennial, Herkenhoff attempted, like Zanini before him, to negotiate the selection of artists individually with each country’s delegation, but overall this remained the weakest of the four blocs that formed the 24th São Paulo Biennial. The ‘Bienal da Antropofagia’, as the 1998 edition became known, received immense international attention and praise, but this was not enough to save the exhibition from entering an acute period of crisis in the years that followed. All appeared promising with the appointment of Mesquita as chief curator of the next biennial, as he had the necessary experience as well as the full support of the local artistic community. His resignation followed on the heels of drastic budget cuts and internal struggles, however, and was in turn followed by the resignation of some members of the board. The twentyfifth biennial was postponed until 2002, when German curator Alfons Hug, who had made his career at the Goethe Institut, became the first foreigner to assume the job of chief curator. He would remain in post for the 2004 edition, having organised two generic shows that received little critical attention. For the 2006 edition, the Biennial Foundation created a more democratic system for selecting the chief curator, requesting a few well-known local professionals to submit proposals to an expert jury. The post was assumed by curator and writer Lisette Lagnado, who had a long involvement with the local art scene and closely followed the work of artists who had emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. For her project, Como Viver Junto (How to Live Together), which borrowed its title from a series of lectures given by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France in 1976–7, Lagnado formed a team with five guest curators: Cristina Freire, Rosa Martinez, Adriano Pedrosa, José Roca and Jochen Volz. Drawing on Barthes’ seminars and on Hélio Oiticica’s ‘Environmental Programme’, this biennial proposed a reflection on the ethics of living together in the contemporary world, presenting works which often had a social or activist dimension. Artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Gordon Matta-Clark and Ana Mendieta, often quoted as influences by young Brazilian artists, were included in comprehensive exhibitions which replaced the former historical segments. Lagnado managed to make important structural changes to the biennial’s format, significantly abolishing the outdated model of national representation against which many curators before her had struggled. Another noteworthy change was the extended duration of the show, which started at the beginning of 2006 with a series of international symposia that ran throughout the year. Each seminar was organised by a member of the curatorial team to explore topics which were also addressed in the exhibition. Furthermore, Lagnado’s project included ten artists’ residencies in three Brazilian states (Acre, Pernambuco and Sao Paulo) and projects that took place outside the biennial pavilion, such as Renata Lucas’s urban installation Matemática Rápida (Quick Mathematics) and the inclusion of JAMAC (Jardim Miriam Arte Clube), a community-based art project on the periphery of São Paulo that was made accessible by a free shuttle bus. In spite of managing to accomplish so many structural changes with the aim of bringing the biennial into the new century, and before being properly absorbed and debated, Lagnado’s project was eclipsed by yet another acute institutional crisis which included accusations that the Biennial Foundation’s president was involved in corruption. The financial situation was chaotic and, as a result, the publications of the twenty-seventh edition, a key element in the dissemination of its memory and critical fortune, were only published two years later. The crisis persisted after the closing of the twenty-seventh biennial, and cash flow problems threatened the realisation of the 2008 exhibition. After much deliberation and uncertainty, Mesquita was yet again appointed chief curator, soon announcing his plan to make this institutional crisis the starting point for the twenty-eighth edition. Famously leaving the pavilion’s second floor completely empty, Mesquita drastically reduced the number of participating artists and concentrated on the presentation of temporary events such as screenings, performances and talks. For better or worse, this was a turning point for the biennial: the local élite finally realised it had to intervene. The appointment of a new director with a background in finance aimed at professionalising the biennial’s administration and a board that included some renowned art collectors helped to restore its credibility. The effects of this increase in administrative efficiency were already evident in the 2010 edition, when funding no longer seemed to be an issue. In fact, the twenty-ninth biennial seems to have been marked by excess, presenting approximately 850 works by 159 artists with the theme of art and politics. There was also an excess of curators, with the main team (formed by chief curators Agnaldo Farias and Moacir dos Anjos) assisted by an international group of associate curators including Chus Martinez, Rina Carvajal, Yuko Hasegawa, Fernando Alvim and Sarat Maharaj. However, material abundance was countered by lack of time. Dos Anjos was appointed just a year before the opening, Farias shortly after him. The result was a densely populated show that created only a few interesting curatorial situations while failing to articulate its discourse in both the exhibition space and the catalogue. The thirtieth biennial (2012) started with the advantage of extra time for planning. Venezuelan curator Luis Pérez-Oramas, who works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was announced as chief curator in February 2011, and although the biennial’s activities were suspended due to federal investigations for almost three months in 2012, he and his team worked steadily from the moment the previous edition ended. His project, entitled The Imminence of Poetics, did not propose an overall theme. Instead, it included 110 artists, many of whom were not well known internationally, and works were organised according to thematic ‘constellations’. The thirtieth biennial also included exhibitions focusing on such historical artists as Brazilians Arthur Bispo do Rosário, who spent fifty years in a psychiatric ward in Rio, and Waldemar Cordeiro, a key figure in Concrete art. The Biennial Foundation seems to have accomplished a lot in organisational terms since the 2008 crisis. For the first time in its history, it has a website with information about all the biennials, including digitalised versions of every published catalogue. The small but dedicated team working in the archives is currently carrying out an extensive digitalisation project which includes valuable photographic documentation such as installation shots as well as other types of data. Importantly, finances seem finally to be in order. However, in these times of increased mobility and access to information, when it no longer plays a key part in the aggiornamento of the Brazilian circuit, the role of the São Paulo Biennial remains a topic open for discussion.