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"Welcome to my life" is written in large letters on a wooden board,
announcing the uphill spill of an urban landscape made of brightly painted
hollow bricks. Meanwhile, further multilingual signs—many not without
humor—ask so-called favela tourists for donations. It's been at least
since the year 2007 that the Project Morrinho was made known to the
international art audience, when this initiative of young people from a
favela district in Rio de Janeiro was invited to participate in the 52rd
Venice Biennale. Having begun as a survival strategy of children, and
having changed the reality of life in this community, today it is a
recognized "Favela Art Project," which enables inhabitants to narrate their
own living conditions amidst a prosperous society (1), beyond violence and
poverty and from the perspective of the production of desires. That is to
say, desires do not only exist in one's imagination; rather they create
realities on their own terms, which can change the lives of all
involved.
But what does this project have to do with the 30th
São Paulo Biennial? With "The Imminence of Poetics" being the main
leitmotif, this year's artistic director Luis Pérez-Oramas and his
curators Tobi Maier, André Severo, and Isabella Villanueva examine
visual poetics as both the language of the contemporary and as an archive
of the future. They are guided by the poetics of territories, ideas of
languages, the reactivation of conceptual traditions, and the
subjectification of sonic landscapes. By drawing on the concept of
imminence, the curators have created a conceptual framework of (im)possible
correlations. This creates an ambiguous relationship between the curators
themselves and the 111 artists (2) (with more than 3,000 works, of which
1,500 were newly or reproduced for the exhibition) and the audience as
well. The curatorial principle could perhaps be paraphrased as one of
permanent addition, branching into infinite artistic universes. In a good
old conceptual tradition, voluntary participation of the spectator is kept
at arm's reach when constituting content. The exhibition architecture,
however, employs a more classical system of white cubes, which interlock
within each other. The inner core of the 30,000 sq m Ciccillo
Matarazzo Pavilion by Oscar Niemeyer was left open, thus revealing the view
between the three floors and generously establishing lines of sight. In a
similar way, 30 posters—which have been circulating as the bookjacket
of the catalog—were developed in a workshop to compose the Biennial's
visual identity.
Yet, this moving-between-worlds becomes a
curatorial end in itself as the hypertext of artistic poetics of almost a
century of art history is presented here without formally living up to it.
The classical canon of drawing, graphics, and painting to photography, the
readymade, and performance are called upon here—while one is left to
search in vain for the digital age in art. Moving images rather are an
expression of conceptual experiences of the world (Allan Kaprow, Bas Jan
Ader, Sigurdur Gudmundsson) and of early TV criticism (Ferdinand Kriwet)
than of a being-in-the-world by means of new social media. It is this
Biennial's merit that Brazilian traditions in performance art (Hélio
Oitica, Lygia Clark), which the 29th iteration had adopted, are now
embedded into a global perspective offered up by artists such as Franz
Erhard Walther, Simone Forti, or Jiří Kovanda, who, for their part,
dealt with the body as a social-artistic medium in varied contexts (such as
in post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring 1968). Today,
this tradition is upheld in the post-participatory art of Ricardo Basbaum,
for example. It is Basbaum, who in Você gostaria de participar de
uma experiência artística (Would you like to join an
artistic experience) (1994–ongoing) abandoned the idea of utopian
solutions in favor of a transformation of the problems by stating that "You
always have to keep a problem open." With Basbaum the artwork is no longer
the play of bodies with each other, but the collision of different
materialities in the collective. Conceived as "community media," the
artistic radio station Mobil Radio (Knut Aufermann, Sarah Washington)
created a transitory place for experimental music and discussion housed in
a small pavilion within the greater Biennial Pavilion (3). For the first
time, the Biennial invited 11 artists to exhibit in other places throughout
the city, such as the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (Jutta Koether) or
Estação da Luz (Charlotte Posenenske).
For the first time, August Sander's photographic encyclopedia Menschen
des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) (1911–1952) is
being shown in Brazil. Sander divided his portraits into 7 categories: the
farmer, the craftsman, the woman, the classes, the artist, the big city,
and the last human. With this survey, Sander, as part of the Cologne
Progressives, marks out the longing for an avant-garde language of the
prototypical. And yet his portraits can be read against the background of
the emerging socialist workers' movement of the Weimar Republic as well.
Other large photographic series by Horst Ademeit or Alair Gomez not only
confirm the principle of serialism, but also the desire for formal
typologies. Very much in opposition to such categorical thoughts are the
over 8500 photographs taken by the Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, whose
one-year performance consisted of taking a picture of himself every hour.
The line of seriality, though, was continued with the portraits of the
Peruvian descendants of Austrian and German immigrants, for example. These
images by the young Peruvian artist Edi Hirose in their medium format seem
old-fashioned and are formally quite similar to the portraits of Alfredo
Cortina, presented publicly for the first time here. In the 1950s, Cortina
belonged to the leading intellectuals of Venezuela. He photographed his
wife in recurring landscapes, "staging" her body as such to engender a
motif of artificial abstraction, morphing the natural landscape into a
fiction. Indeed, I could carry on and tell you about more of the artists
exhibited who worked in very similar ways, photography being one of the
curators' preferred mediums. In the sea of images, albeit, the artistic
approach to photography in the context of its own time tended to fade away:
from prototyping and contemporaneity, to staging and the conceptual
documentation medium, all the way through to the archive of everyday
life.
Flipping through the abundance of the photo albums of
history bears a certain slowness and attention. In the age of digital
platforms, these images quickly lose their poetic charm. What in Europe
began with the cabinet of curiosities of the traveling, researching, and
collecting subject, and later led to the development of the museum, here
presents itself as the cabinet of curiosities of the artistic subject, such
as in the intrinsic worlds of the well-known Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo
do Rosário, whose works can be classified along the lines of Art
Brut. The Biennial's affinity for a kaleidoscope of artistic introspection
and curatorial retrospection harmonizes and idealizes a cutaway view.
But if the curatorial motif focuses on myriad manifestations of
radical artistic subjectivity, it loses itself in the multi-clause
sentences of excessive prose. What began on the ground floor, with
Deleuzian rhizome-like spreadings, ends on the 3rd floor in a museum-like
retrospective. The exhibition misses out on the transfer: what was at many
points a socially engaged survey does not equate "poeticity" (artistic
activity) with "politicity" (social action), but rather releases the very
potential of contradictions and antagonisms. In so doing, it confronts us
with collective desire and action as opposing poetic modes of changing
reality.
(1) Brazil is one of the emerging BRIC countries,
with a "racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a
country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of
Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of
poverty, Brazil remains one of the world's most unequal societies." See
here.
(2) At least since the 29th edition of the Biennial, the
nationalistic construct of the pavilion definitely disintegrated,
therefore, a global variety of artists is given priority.
Pérez-Oramas and his team focused on artists who are lesser known or
who were never exhibited in Brazil before (22 of those are already dead).
However, with the new generation represented by just 6 artists born after
1980, and a total of 23 women, a significant disproportion remains.
(3) For the duration of the exhibition, the program can be listened
to live here or
at mobile-radio.net.
Sophie Goltz is a curator and art educator who lives in
Berlin. She works as the head of public programs at Neuer Berliner
Kunstverein (n.b.k).
 
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