Guest Author of December 2009

For our Monthly Guest Author column in December, we would like to introduce Vinicius Spricigo, scholar at the University of São Paulo. Vinicius Spricigo has extensively published on the Brazilian and international art scenes, and visited the GAM in 2009 for his research on exhibition practice in Germany. In his text, he discusses the São Paulo Biennale and especially its last two iterations in 2006 and 2008, which tried apply institutional critique to the Biennale system itself; while both the realization and the public’s and critics’ reactions are debatable, the curatorial concepts illustrate problems specific to the Brazilian cultural climate and history, and relate to the establishment – or import – of modernity in the first half of the 20th century.

Brazilian modernity, which is both Universalist by nature and part of a national project, nurtures cultural difference by “being ‘out of step’” with its Western counterparts; thus, artistic practice will often react to this shift, transforming it into means of distinction. As, conversely, Brazilian art is part of the modernist art movement, these developments have to be taken into account when discussing not only modernism in an international context, but also the subsequent processes leading to a globalized contemporary art scene.

We would like to thank the Bergen Kunsthall for their support in the translation of the following text.

From artistic internationalism to cultural globalisation: notes towards a critical reflection on the recent changes in the strategies of (re)presentation of the São Paulo Bienal¹

Introduction: institutional critique or crisis?

The 28th São Paulo Bienal curatorial project presented itself as a critique of the Bienal. At his first press conference after the appointment, Ivo Mesquita declared that the São Paulo Bienal had fulfilled its original mission of consolidating a local artistic system and international projection of Brazilian art². Thus, curators Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen’s conception was that it would be the moment to convert the exhibition into a platform for reflection and debate on the biennial system across in the international art circuit³, taking the history of the São Paulo Bienal itself as a reference, through a political strategy of reactivation of its memory and archive⁴. Its concrete result was the creation of a ‘Reading Floor’, a ‘flexible archive’⁵ set in the third floor of the Bienal pavilion⁶, including an exhibition space, a library with catalogues of different Bienals and periodical exhibitions from around the world, and a conference hall. The second floor of the Ciccillo Matarazzo building was left empty, while the first would, in principle, be made into a public square (as in Niemeyer’s original design), establishing “a new relationship between the Bienal and its surroundings – park, city – which opens up like the Greek agora, a space for encounters, confrontations, frictions”⁷. It was a sort of conversion of Oscar Niemeyer’s project into an architectural metaphor for the curatorial proposal, rendering the public dimension of the building explicit, while harbouring inside it a process of critical reflection on the institution.

It may have been appropriate, after all, for part of the press to label the 28th edition “the void Bienal”, despite the curators’ protests and the last-minute choice of architecture as the symbol of modernity’s utopias and impasses. The proposal to transform the pavilion’s ground floor into a public square was changed not only because of the (budget-motivated) abandonment of the idea of removing the casements in the pavilion’s downstairs windows, but also because of the heavy security apparatus set up after the opening, after a group of spray painters tagged the empty space in the second floor. After the incident, the curators declared the manifestation as a criminal act of vandalism against the cities cultural heritage, and the system of checks installed was similar to those found in international airports since 9/11. Such was the central point in Fábio Cypriano’s critique⁸, questioning the legitimacy of the choice of Ivo Mesquita’s curatorial project, undeclared interests in the use of public funds, the reasons for the demotion of curator Thomas Mulclaire, the lack of public at the debates etc. The episode was also referred to by architect Ligia Nobre, co-founder of the social organisation EXO experimental.org (www.exo.org.br), a platform for field research in art and urbanism in São Paulo active between 2002 and 2007. Emphasising the contradictions between the discourse and the practice of the curators, she asks: “the Bienal called the taggers criminals, and Cohen disqualified them as “those people from the periphery” during the press conference. This is not quite the kind of ‘living contact’ promised by her and Mesquita. If the 28th Bienal claimed to be a public space of social inclusion, should it not be open precisely to ‘those people from the periphery’?”⁹

Ironically, the incident at the exhibition’s opening is symptomatic of a crisis in the public sphere that had already been addressed by the previous edition. In a debate back then, Renato Janine Ribeiro commented on the present condition of the Sé Square in the centre of São Paulo. An important meeting point for public manifestations in the 1980s, such as those of the movement for direct presidential election after 20 years of military dictatorship, it has lost all its social dynamic after its remodelling by the local administration, becoming a space where the most visible form of ‘participation’ is that of taggers and graffiti artists¹⁰. Another example of the impasses of the modernising process in São Paulo is Luis Carlos Berrini avenue. Seen from the perspective of the favela on the opposite side of the Pinheiros river, it reflects the country’s extreme social and educational inequality, as well as the urban paradigm of protection and control discussed by Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas in relation to the end of the public sphere and the sensation of fear that leads to installation of fences, gates and vigilance systems¹¹. We are witnessing what Brian Holmes has called “the urbanisation of blindness”, in reference to the way in which the Paris 2005 protests did not manage to disrupt the flow of tourists or the city’s cultural life¹². During the preparation of the 27th SPB in 2006, a crime syndicate known as PCC (First Commando of the Capital), whose leaders controlled drug traffic by mobile phone from inside the jail, attacked police stations and public transport, and brought a metropolis of 18 million inhabitants to an almost complete standstill.

The end of the São Paulo Bienal?

The taggers’ radical response, and the heavy-handed repression dealt by the Bienal Foundation, evidenced the displacement of the conceptual axis of the Bienal’s last two editions. The speculations on the concept of art in terms of formal experimentation and evolution, or even the overcoming of the Western canon, characteristic of the 1990s, have given way to a discussion on the politics of art and other aspects of ‘life in common’ and the crisis of representation.

I take the relation between the end of the political and cultural modernising project, at the end of the 1960s, and the ‘void’ used as aesthetic or institutional-critical strategy, in order to question the premise the 28SPB’s curators set out from in 2007. The curator’s argument was that the Bienal had already achieved its initial goals (or its historical mission) to the extent that it had made São Paulo into one of the great centres of world art. I believe such a perspective belies a certain teleological appeal to the notion of progress implicit in ‘grand narratives’, criticised by post-modern and post-colonial theories in their analysis of the historical construction of European modernism and the tensions inherent in core-periphery relations. Besides, Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen’s idea dates back to the developmentalist discourse of the 1950s, the belief in the emancipatory promises of modernity, with no reference to the various fates of the modern project or the partial accomplishment of its aims.

The (counter) argument here is that the initial project of modernisation and internationalisation of Brazilian art proposed by the São Paulo Bienal arrived at its end a long time ago, since the boycott led by Mário Pedrosa against the tenth Bienal, in 1969, as a strategy against the military dictatorship – starting a phase which went down in Brazilian cultural history as a “cultural void”¹³. Adopting a different historical reading, this article critically reflects on the role of the São Paulo Bienal today. The goal is to examine the artistic and cultural debate that took place around the SPB in the last 57 years and to identify the central questions for a critical reflection on its history and its role as a political and cultural project. Firstly, we will look at the project of the São Paulo Bienal, initiated in 1951, in view of the significance the exhibition has had in the reformulation of notions of identity in Brazilian art, in their connection to the developmentalism and cultural transnationalisation that marked those years.

In many ways, the Bienal’s history belongs to the period of consolidation of the developmentalist project and of the flourishing of nationalistic, identitarian discourses in the first half of the 20th century. The specific project of the SPB resulted from the progressive ideas of Brazilian entrepreneur Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho, founder of the São Paulo Modern Art Museum¹⁴, and of the city’s situation in the post-war period as the centre of the country’s modernising and industrialising aspirations. Today, it is one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world, and personifies the contradictions of a country “condemned to be modern”, to borrow Mário Pedrosa’s words.

For a country that, in less than a century, had become independent from Portugal (1822), abolished slavery (1888) & established a republican regime (1889), modernity¹⁵, as a project with its sights set on a certain degree of historical development, represented the opportunity for breaking with the colonial past and the submission to European domination.

Colombian thinker Jesús-Martín Barbero, a key figure in Cultural Studies in Latin America, understands modernisation as a political action promoted by the Brazilian state with the support of self-appointed progressive elites for the promotion of societal transformation. This action, carried out by a centralising state, is centred on industrialisation and the reorganisation of the economy. According to him:

From the 1920s on, the majority of Latin American countries begins a reorganisation of their economies and readjustment of their political structures. Industrialisation is undertaken with import substitution at its centre, in the promotion of an internal market and the employment of a growing labour force, making state intervention, through investment in transport and communication infrastructure, decisive. Therefore, even when the start of the industrialising process responds to the international market’s functioning conditions, there are differences in the scope and rhythm which correspond to the degree of development of the ‘national project’ – differences that forge each country’s bourgeoisie from the second half of the 20th century¹⁶.

The main goal of Latin American modernisation was to break with the colonial relation in which the periphery produces primary commodities and consumes manufactured products. At the cultural level, this situation of colonial dependency expresses itself when “the colony is ethnographic material that lives off foreign-produced cultural imports”¹⁷.

Barbero stresses this ambivalence in Latin American modernisation and modernism: the process of creating a distinctive cultural identity and becoming a nation, in the modern sense, led traditional societies to emulate Western Europe’s steps towards modernity, adopting the hegemonic countries as a reference with which to validate their achievements¹⁸. Brazilian modernisation, however, would be out of step with its European model, with the result that being “out of step” would define our cultural difference.

If it is true that different national formations follow different paths and rhythms, it can also be said that the ensemble of this diversity will undergo a fundamental rearrangement. The possibility of ‘forming’ nations, in the modern sense of the word, will have to involve the establishment of national markets; these, in turn, will be possible to the extent that they adjust to the needs and demands of the international market. This dependent mode of access to modernity, however, will render visible not only the ‘unequal development, the inequality that is pre-condition for capitalist development, but also the ‘simultaneous discontinuity’ on whose back Latin America lives out its modernisation. (…) The non-contemporaneity of which we speak must be clearly distinguished from the idea of a constitutive backwardness, i.e., backwardness made into the explanatory key for cultural difference. This is an idea manifested in two versions. One, thinking that the originality of Latin America as a whole and Latin American countries was constituted by factors that escape the logic of capitalist development. The other, thinking modernisation as a recovery of wasted time, therefore identifying development with a definitive ceasing to be what one used to be in order to finally become modern. The discontinuity that we try to think here is situated in another key, that allows us to break both with an a-historical, culturalist model and a cumulative-rationality paradigm, with its pretension of unifying and subsuming under a single time all the different socio-historical temporalities. So as to think both what backwardness meant in historical terms, not as in a time that would have been stopped, but in relation to a historically produced backwardness; and what, in spite of backwardness, exists in terms of difference, cultural heterogeneity, the multiplicity of temporalities of indigenous, black and white, and the time produced by their mixture¹⁹.

This passage is worth quoting at length as it provides evidence of the sophistication of the idea of temporal discontinuity as a tool with which to comment on modern development in the periphery of capitalism, avoiding simplism and trying to think a modernity that cannot be reduced to imitation or a difference that cannot be exhausted in backwardness. Avoiding the mistake of positing an ‘ideal’ modernism in core countries and of adopting an evolutionist view of history where the fate of Brazilian civilisation would be to arrive at some pre-determined state, Barbero emphasises the contradictions that allow us to re-think the appearance of Brazilian modernism. Finally, as an attempt to overcome the colonial tradition of cultural dependence, Brazilian modern art sought its own local specificity, adopting the supposedly ‘universal’ model of the internationalist current that became hegemonic in the post-war period, which had abstractionism and painting as its main vehicles.

European modernism would appear then as a model to be imported and adapted to the local context. It is a spatial displacement, an “idea out of place”, to borrow one of the most important hypotheses for the interpretation of the relationship between our economic dependency as peripheric country, resulting from colonialism, and the recourse to models imported from core countries also in the symbolic field, as developed by literary critic Roberto Schwarz²⁰.

Anthropologist Renato Ortiz²¹ points out the ties, in Brazil, between modernism and the construction of a national project. The self-awareness of cultural dependency led to an effort to overcome the established hierarchy of core and periphery and the dynamic of emulation of foreign models – as a task carried out through the creation of a Brazilian modern art and of a distinctive, unified cultural identity for the entire nation. Therefore, “modernism, modernity & modernisation are interchangeable terms for us”; modernism in Brazil would then be “an idea out of place” that is progressively adjusted to a developing society²².

Inaugurated by the São Paulo Modern Art Week of 1922, Brazilian modernism was the starting point for a project of national culture and search for the “Brazilianness” of our art. While modernism contested local specificities and proclaimed a universal myth, the Brazilian modernist movement posed the question of Brazilian art. “Paradoxically, internationalist modern art sets Brazilian culture in the path of self-examination”²³.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between this first modernist moment and the internationalisation of Brazilian art that occurs after the war. The idea of culturally-dependent situation inherited from the colonial period and imported artistic canons gives way to a questioning of cultural imperialism and US hegemony during the Cold War²⁴. In line with public policies for the affirmation of modern art and North American post-war cultural diplomacy, the political and cultural project of the São Paulo Bienal was a decisive step for the modernisation of the Brazilian art system and the country’s insertion in the international scene, for better or worse²⁵. In the words of Lourival Gomes Machado, first artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art Bienal, “by its own definition, the Bienal should accomplish two main tasks: to place Brazilian modern art not merely in confrontation, but in living contact with world art; at the same time as it sought to establish São Paulo as an art centre on a global scale”²⁶. It is no surprise that these words were made into last year’s edition’s slogan. In this regard, the SPB saw, on the cultural plane, an attempt to break with a situation of dependency, defining the specificities of local production and promoting its inclusion in the international circuit.

The Bienal’s first impact in the local artistic sphere, as is well known, was to promote the rise of the movements of constructive art in Brazil. It is, in fact, an artist coming from this trajectory – Hélio Oiticica – who goes on to theorise the Brazilian avant-garde and the conditions of aesthetic experimentalism in peripheric contexts²⁷, shaping what remains today a frame of reference for the analysis of the process of internationalisation of Brazilian art and the different consequences of the appearance of popular mass culture in the country.

Now, in order to understand the “living contact” produced by the SPB until the early 1970s, we cannot forget art critic Sônia Salzstein’s remark that, despite the pressures of internationalisation, Brazil developed a singular experience that resisted any homogenising tendency. She writes: “It was an experience that could not be simply explained as a foreseeable effect of the expansion of Euro-American modernity nor as an epigone version of it, showing no more than regional interest or relevance”²⁸. Examples of such relevance, to mention but a few, include the formal experimentations of neoconcretism, the theoretical and poetic formulations of Ferreira Gullar and Hélio Oiticica, and the ‘tropicalist’ cultural effervescence that preceded the diaspora of Brazilian artists in the “years of lead” of the dictatorship²⁹.

From the 1980s on, during the process of democratic reorganisation of Brazilian society, the projects designed by Vilém Flusser and Walter Zanini³⁰ around the appearance of new languages and developments of conceptual art, as well as the reconstitution of the local art circuit, surrounded with doubts the policies of (re)presentation and the modernist discourses in which the identity of Brazilian art was defined³¹. Besides, as a consequence of the processes of cultural globalisation, the expansion of Western modernism beyond the established standards of artistic internationalism sparked a “crisis of representation” in the SPB in which the conventional dichotomies (local/global, core/periphery, modern/traditional etc.) seemed to become obsolete³².

In the guise of conclusion

Here, therefore, without ignoring the transformation that took place and the institutional and geopolitical contexts since the 1970s, we will discuss the insertion of the São Paulo Bienal in the dynamic of global art. In this new global order of the art system, a certain number of responses to present problems, or the ‘post-modern condition’, were articulated by curators Nelson Aguilar (1994-1996), Paulo Herkenhoff (1998), Lisette Lagnado (2006) and Ivo Mesquita (2008).

The recent changes in the SPB may show that the institution is moving away from a perspective oriented by the discourses of contemporary art’s hegemonic centres. Turning inwards to its own history, it has examined its modernist foundations, seeking to question its relation to Euro-America in the terms put forward by Oswald de Andrade in 1928’s ‘Anthropophagic Manifesto’³³. At least this was the device employed by curator Paulo Herkenhoff in 1988 in order to maximise the Bienal’s affirmation of Brazilian art, begun in 1989 with Stella Teixeira de Barros as the curator of the Brazilian representation. In his words, “Antropophagy is one of the first concepts of Brazilian culture to enter the international grammar of art”³⁴, offering an alternative and counterpoint to the so-called ‘Western’ interpretation of the history of art, which neglects the multiplicity of existing modernism and sets of parameters of exclusion³⁵. A few years before, in the 22nd Bienal, curator Nelson Aguilar had already organised special rooms for artists Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel to affirm the quality of local artists at the same level as other national representations of great renown³⁶. This strategy would be discontinued given the institutional crisis confronted by the Bienal around the turn of the century, and would only be taken up again in 2005, when Hélio Oiticica was chosen as the conceptual paradigm for the 27th SPB, and his texts became the theoretical frame of reference for the elaboration of the curatorial project presented by Lisette Lagnado. In a text on Oiticica from 1966, Lagnado mentions that critic Mário Pedrosa first used the term post-modernism when proposing the passage of art to a “state of culture”³⁷. This reversal of perspective, in which a Brazilian artist appears as the precursor of such a significant shift, allows for new interpretations of the international development of contemporary art³⁸. It also allows one to speak about contemporary art exhibitions from the point of view of a Brazilian experience, revealing a local contribution of the São Paulo Bienal to the global phenomenon of the spread of biennials across the world.

Inspired by Roland Barthes’ 1976-1977 Collège de France lectures, the 27th SPB started many months before the opening of the exhibition, with a programme of international seminars inspired by the platforms of Documenta 11 and the Documenta 10 100 Days – 100 Guests programme, in which the team of curators directed by Lagnado (Cristina Freire, Jochen Volz, José Roca, Rosa Martínez and Adriano Pedrosa) offered to the public access to the ideas that oriented the whole exhibition³⁹. The intention was to replace the Venetian model of national pavilions with a platform of debates on “the political” (that is, life in common) in which the blurring of boundaries between the public spheres of art and politics would set in motion a programme of self-critique and deconstruction of these institutions’ limits. The 27th Bienal’s response to the so-called “crisis of representation” was thus to abolish national representations altogether, “a system that undermined the possibility of establishing a project independently from the authority of constituted powers” and, with it, “giving a political dimension to an exhibition of such importance for the city, Brazil, and the world”⁴⁰.

Looking back upon the 27th SPB’s curatorial project today, with a distance of three years, it seems to me that there were two distinct visions at play: one that reached back towards institutional critique and the work of conceptual artists such as Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Dan Graham, Marcel Broodthaers (featured artist at the first of the international seminars); and one that turned towards contemporary production, where emphasis was placed on a political art, sociological in nature and visibly seeking an encounter with so-called marginalised communities. In a certain way, the background for this discussion was the idea of a ‘reconstruction’ of a public sphere that traversed a reflection on architecture and urbanism (another theme of the seminars) and political projects that incorporated the recognition of the other. In the realm of visual arts, this recognition was linked, for example, to the inclusion of ‘modernisms’ produced outside the legitimating centre of Western modern art.

Translated by Rodrigo Nunes

¹ This text presents some reflections arising from my PhD thesis, developed at the University of São Paulo’s School of Communication and Arts and financed by the São Paulo State Foundation for the Support of Research (FAPESP). The São Paulo Bienal became the focus of my research around the time of my collaborations with the coverage of the 27th edition’s seminars, on which I co-authored (with Liliane Benetti, from the Centre for Research on Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Art, University of São Paulo’s School of Communication and Arts) for the website of the Art Museum Permanent Forum project (www.forumpermanente.org). I thank Liliane for helping me revise the seminars and elaborate some ideas on the articulation between the aesthetic and political that remain with me to this day.

² Text accessed on the Bienal de São Paulo website, January 2007. http://bienalsaopaulo.globo.com/

³ Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, Em vivo contato, 28ª Bienal de São Paulo, Guia da exposição, 2008.

⁴ The Wanda Svevo Historical Archive, originally the Contemporary Art Historical Archive, was created by Wanda Svevo, secretary of the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo Bienal, in 1954. It presently occupies a 400 m2 area on the second floor of the São Paulo Bienal Foundation.

⁵ System conceived by Ana Paulo Cohen on the Istmo project. http://www.forumpermanente.org/.rede/proj-istmo/

⁶ The Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, former Palace of the Industries, was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and hosts the São Paulo Bienal since its first edition in 1957. It is part of a set of buildings in Ibirapuera Park that was opened in 1953 for the city of São Paulo 400th anniversary.

⁷ Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, Em vivo contato, 28ª Bienal de São Paulo, Guia da exposição, 2008.

⁸ CYPRIANO, Fábio. Um acordo de cavalheiros em vivo contato, Fórum Permanente de Museus de Arte (www.forumpermanente.org)

⁹ NOBRE, Ligia. “Taggers get into ‘living contact’ with vacant São Paulo Bienal.” Art Review, 4 de novembro de 2008.

¹⁰ Seminário Reconstrução, 27ª Bienal de São Paulo, 09 and 10 of June 2006.

¹¹ “The Social in Arte; between ethics and aesthetics”, a round-table with Claire Bishop, Antoní Muntadas, Sônia Salzstein and Paula Trope, November 9th 2006, School of Communication and Arts, University of São Paulo.

¹² HOLMES, Brian. “Beyond the global 1000”. CIMAM 2005 Annual Conference, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, November 2005.

¹³ The term (coined by the journalist Zuenir Ventura) expressed the disappointment arising from the rupture between the modernising process and the ideals of emancipation – an association, which led to the political support of many leftwing intellectuals to the modernising impulse, according to whose logic political democracy would be a natural consequence of economic growth.

¹⁴ The first biennials were promoted by the São Paulo Modern Art Museum, founded by Ciccillo Matarazzo in 1948. In 1962, with the creation of the São Paulo Bienal Foundation, the MAM ceased to exist and its collection was donated to the University of São Paulo. Intellectuals and artists who opposed the MAM’s extinction re-founded it in the following years. It occupies a space in Ibirapuera Park today.

¹⁵ In the sense I use it here, modernity signifies a stage in the development of European and North American societies which served as the ideal model for modernising agents in Latin America.

¹⁶ JESÚS, Martín-Barbero. Dos meios às mediações: comunicação, cultura e hegemonia. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2001, p.227.

¹⁷ Roland Corbisier cited in ORTIZ, Renato. Mundialização e cultura. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2000, p.93.

¹⁸ JESÚS, Martín-Barbero. Dos meios às mediações: comunicação, cultura e hegemonia. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2001, p.226-230.

¹⁹ JESÚS, Martín-Barbero. Dos meios às mediações: comunicação, cultura e hegemonia. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2001, p.225-226.

²⁰ SCHWARZ, Roberto. “As idéias fora do lugar.“ In: Cultural e Política. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2001.

²¹ ORTIZ, Renato. A moderna tradição brasileira: cultura brasileira e indústria cultural. 5a ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994.

²² ORTIZ, Renato. A moderna tradição brasileira: cultura brasileira e indústria cultural. 5a ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994, p.209.

²³ ZILIO, Carlos. “Da Antropofagia à Tropicália.“ In: NOVAES, Adauto. O nacional e o popular na cultural brasileira: artes plásticas e literatura. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983, p. 14.

²⁴ BELTING, Hans. O fim da história da arte: uma revisão dez anos depois. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006, p.51-58.

²⁵ PEDROSA, Mário. “A bienal de cá pra lá.“ In: AMARAL, Aracy (org.). Mundo, Homem, Arte em Crise. 2 ed. São Paulo: Perspectiva: 1986 (1975), p. 254-56.

²⁶ MACHADO, Lourival Gomes. “Apresentação”. IN: Catálogo da I Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1951, p. 14.

²⁷ OITICICA. Hélio. “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira.“ In: Hélio Oiticica. Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Artes Hélio Oiticica, 1992. (Exhibition catalogue)

²⁸ “It was an experience that could not be simply explained as a foreseeable effect of the expansion of Euro-American modernity nor as an epigone version of it, showing no more than regional interest or relevance”. SALZSTEIN, Sônia. “Pop as a crisis in the public sphere.” In: MERCER, Kobena. Annotating Art´s Histories. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005, p.102.

²⁹ Despite many artists staying in the country, the 1970s have become marked by the idea of ‘cultural void’ advanced by journalist Zuenir Ventura to oppose the period to the hegemony of a leftwing culture in the previous decade. VENTURA, Zuenir. A crise da cultura brasileira, Visão, 1971.

³⁰ Zanini was the first to occupy the post of São Paulo Bienal curator; until the 1970s, the function was performed by a general director.

³¹ Cf. Aracy Amaral’s texts on the internationalisation of the Brazilian art system and on the history of modern art in Latin America. AMARAL, Aracy. Textos do Trópico de Capricórnio: artigos e ensaios (1980-2005) – Vol. 2: Circuitos de arte na América Latina e no Brasil. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2006.

³² CANCLINI, Nestor. Culturas híbridas: estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade. 2. ed. São Paulo: Edusp, 2003.

³³ The Manifesto was inspired by a Tupi ritual consisting in devouring the bravest captives from the enemy army in order to absorb their vital force. Displaced onto the field of culture, the concept of anthropophagy has become a metaphor of Brazilian culture’s relationship with its European ‘matrix’. In its association with the exotic or primitive character of cannibalism, it signals a specific position of the development of an artistic avant-garde in the context of the rediscovery of the Brazilian modern tradition by 1960s Tropicalism. According to Hélio Oiticica, the experimentalism that characterises our modernism can be understood as a process of creation of a new, Brazilian artistic language through the incorporation of other, international languages – for instance, Pop Art and the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’ of French critic Pierre Restany.

³⁴ HERKENHOFF, Paulo. Bienal 1998, princípios e processos. Trópico, April, 2008.

³⁵ HERKENHOFF,Paulo. Apresentação. 24ª Bienal de São Paulo. Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos. Catálogo da Exposição. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, p. 22.

³⁶ Nelson Aguilar adopted the concept of ‘rupture with the medium’ to question the traditional categories of ‘beaux arts’ and the notion of artwork itself, confronting the Western modernist canon and the universalist conception of art. Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel were thus chosen by the curator as ‘beacons’ of national production for the 22nd SPB. Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel represented Brasil at the 1968 Venice Biennale, but did not achieve the recognition of international art circuit. After a retrospective in Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon and Minneapolis, ten years after his death in 1980, Hélio Oiticica achieved a certain visibility outside the country, with works at Documenta 10 (1997), alongside Lygia Clark, and at the Tate Modern (2007). There are doubts, however, as to the effects of the insertion of a few names in Brazilian art in the international circuit in what regards the recognition and systematic presence of Brazilian art outside the country, as well as to the benefits of building up a profile abroad to the consolidation of the local art system. Cf. FIALHO, Ana Letícia. Mercado de Artes: Global e Desigual, Trópico, 2005.

³⁷ PEDROSA, Mário. “Arte ambiental, arte pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica.” Correio da Manhã, 26th June 1966.

³⁸ LAGANDO, Lisette. O além da arte de Hélio Oiticica. Trópico.

³⁹ PEDROSA, Adriano. “Como curar junto.” In: LAGNADO, Lisette, PEDROSA, Adriano (orgs.). 27ª Bienal de São Paulo: Como viver junto. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, 2006, p. 84.

⁴⁰ LAGNADO, Lisette. No amor e na adversidade. In: LAGNADO, Lisette, PEDROSA, Adriano (orgs.). 27ª Bienal de São Paulo: Como viver junto. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal, 2006, p. 53.