"South America's Answer to SoHo" (XXth Sao Paulo Bienal), The World & I, Mar. 1990, pp. 200-05.

XXth Sao Paulo Bienal

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Every two years, Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo, Brazil, becomes South America's answer to Soho. All three tiers of Oscar Niemeyer's huge, poured-concrete Bienal Foundation building (built in 1964) welcome an array of contemporary art from around the world. Since the first Sao Paulo Bienal in 1951, the festival has become the premier visual arts event in South America and one of the largest international exhibitions of contemporary art anywhere.

The XXth Sao Paulo Bienal (October 14 - December 10, 1989) offered paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and performances by approximately 150 artists from 40 countries in Europe, north Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The art of Latin America was particularly well-represented, with the host country, alone, presenting 23 artists.

The Bienal is a multifarious affair from which one may attempt to draw conclusions regarding current artistic practice. For instance, the fact that there is only one traditional realist among the Latin American exhibitors -- the still-life painter Carlos Tonelli of Uruguay -- says something about the prevalence of abstract and conceptual modes of artmaking.

That surrealism persists in the work of only two artists -- Uruguayan Jorge Damiani, who paints flesh-toned clouds drifting through mysterious boxes and skulls, and Cuban Rubén Torres Llorca, whose dark labyrinth contains dramatically-lit, fetishistic sculptures that combine African and Christian motifs resonant of the hybrid religious practices of the Caribbean -- suggests that Latin American artists have moved into new spheres of aesthetic activity. The relative absence of neo-expressionism, "appropriationism," and art that substitutes words for visual imagery indicates Latin American independence from recent vogues in the American art market.

Some critics would argue that social commentary, politics, ideology, and even epistemology are extrinsic to the domain of art. However, such themes can be expressed artistically. And in this international venue, the works that articulate socio-economic and political content appeared the strongest and the most consequential, particularly when perceived in relation to the countries from which they come.

In the paintings of Cuban Gustavo Acosta, for example, one sees the colosseum, a distant aqueduct, and an isolated triumphal arch in murky, apocalyptic landscapes. Like the swan songs of an Imperial regime, these paintings have a special poignancy coming from Castro's Cuba.

Guillermo David Kuitca of Argentina paints the floor plan of a house that has no exit or entrance, and whose outer wall is girded by prickly thorns. He also paints road maps on little beds and on mattresses that hang on the wall. The maps of the Netherlands and West Germany are clean and bright, while those of Eastern Europe and Russia are filthy and worn. The artist denies that there is any intentionality to such variations, though the suggestiveness hardly seems accidental.

The expressionistic painting, Politicos en el Congresso (1984), by Peruvian Enrique Carlos Polanco, shows plump characters with grisly, Ensor-like faces filling the rows of a legislative assembly. Juxtaposed with a colorful and folkish village scene, these works implicitly contrast the decadence of national government with the vitality of rural life.

Angry drawings by Chilean Jorge Gaete Villalón depict menacing farm and kitchen implements that lacerate and crush fruits and vegetables. "The fruit being done violence is an analog for the power of the army, the government -- authority that does not consider the rights of the people of the world," he explains.

The role of technology, and by extension, the industrialized nations, in guiding the fate of Latin America was a frequently encountered topic. One example is Colombian Diego Mazuera Gomez's large painting of a figure holding a skyscraper to his ear as though expecting to hear a message. In work from underdeveloped countries, a preponderance of industrial materials metaphorically reflect artists' awareness of their countries' attempts to modernize. From Brazil alone can be cited Frida Baranek's thicket of tangled copper wire, Marco do Valle's corrugated-metal floor strewn with Amazonian rubber mats, and Ester Grinspum's ponderous, rusted-iron vessel.

The Chilean artists are particularly distrustful of the incursion of modern industry on society. For example, Bernardita Vattier's ink-on-vinyl pictures portray people and cattle in intimidating architectural settings. These images deal with the conversion of the native habitat, the loss of individuality in urban culture, and the general decay of the quality of life.

In "Santiago Pictography" (1988), a series of views of the Chilean capital, Vattier's countryman Enrique Zamudio captures a drear, gritty, urban jumble. One antidote to such squalor is the Brazilian Antonio Peticov's project, already underway, to plant rainbow-colored groves of trees on the banks of the unsightly, 26-kilometer course of Sao Paulo's Pinheiros River.

The dominant issues with which the world currently associates Brazil are the burning of the rain forests and the international debt. The first may have inspired an impromptu performance piece by some Sao Paulo residents who lit wooden matches and piled the burnt sticks and empty boxes on the floor. One of the most striking images in the show is Cildo Meireles' I Forget (1989), a kind of funerary shrine to the debt: a tepee coated with thousands of monetary notes from countries around the world stands in a bone-covered field within a circular wall of stacked candles. Meireles employs the paper notes as a decorative ornament in a scheme that embraces notions of shelter, physical survival, and death. (For more on Meireles' work see page ?)

The political atmosphere of the show seems to have been missed by the judges who awarded the Gusmao Foundation Prize for Brazilian art to three expressly non-political artists: Marcos Benjamin, whose handmade, painted-wooden sculptures have an atavistic, totemic character; Flávia Ribeiro, whose asphalt and encaustic canvasses and books are indebted to Anselm Kiefer's; and Flávio-Shiró, the Japanese-born veteran of the artworld whose agitated, abstract-expressionist canvasses continue to speak the formal language of the 1950s.

Perhaps a more representative candidate would have been the Brazilian, Jac Leirner, who covered her gallery walls with a colorful and attractive array of plastic shopping bags from stores around the world. In an impoverished economy such as Brazil's this wistful comment on consumerism has an ironic, but upbeat, tone, which epitomizes the Sao Paulo Bienal exhibition as a whole.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©