XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo - Critical Essay

After a nearly four-year hiatus during which infighting and political posturing nearly brought about its demise, the Bienal de Sao Paulo resurfaced with an exhibition that was a compromise from its inception. In desperation two years ago the Bienal Foundation made the tactical decision to turn to a foreign curator, Alfons Hug, an act of disavowal akin to what academic departments call receivership: the "we can't do it; you do it" approach to conflict (see News, January 2001). A German national who has held various curatorial and cultural-envoy positions worldwide (mostly with the Goethe Institut; he is currently director of the Rio de Janeiro branch) but who had never curated a major international show, Hug was faced with an unenviable task: to bring the highprofile exhibition, one of the three most important biennials in the world, into line, making it fiscally responsible while preserving its significance. In this endeavor Hug was as successful as anyone could have hoped. The event was efficient, pleasant, and quite elegant, rather like a large, sensible German sedan. But glaringly absent were the heat, chaotic spontaneity, and grace under pressure (to say nothing of the "body and soul") that shape Brazilian life as much as they inform the stunning Oscar Niemeyer building that housed the show.

Whereas the previous installment of the biennial, organized by Paulo Herkenhoff around the theme of anthropophagy, was so theoretically dense as to almost occlude the art, the theme of this year's exhibition, "Metropolitan Iconographies," was a pretty spindly skeleton on which to hang a show. It's not that numerous large exhibitions have already explored the theme of the city (Hans-Ultich Obrist and Hou Hanru's Koolhaas-designed "Cities on the Move" at the Wiener Secession, Catherine David's "Cities & Networks" at Documenta X and the Tate Modern's "Century City" spring to mind). On the contrary, confronting how art emerges from and expresses the evolving metropolis under globalization ought to be a critical imperative. The rub was that too much of the work in "Metropolitan Iconographies" was precisely iconographic--illustrative and indexical instead of generative or transformative. The result was a show that left too much of our sense of city intact.

Under this general rubric there were several complementing-and-competing models of exhibition--the familiar World's Fair model (each of seventy countries sent one artist); the UN Security Council model (curators in eleven art-world hubs each chose five area artists); the "think global, act local" model (Agnaldo Farias, exhibition director at the Sao Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art, selected thirty young Brazilian artists and organized a minishow of "benchmark" works by Karin Lambrecht, Carlos Fajardo, and Nelson Leirner)--along with a small, glitch-plagued section on international Net art and a few special project rooms featuring a number of major artists: Jeff Koons, Sean Scully, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Juliao Sarmento, and Vanessa Beecroft. Hug chose to do away with the Bienal's traditional inner sanctum, a room of masterpieces from the last several centuries-historically a big draw, since seeing a Rembrandt, van Gogh, or Picasso, normally housed in European and North American museums, remains someth ing of a treat for a Brazilian audience. Hug's decision was probably a necessary space-clearing measure, but it exposed a fraught choice: pleasing the jaded bienalista/art tourist or the isolated local for whom a biennial presents a major opportunity to be exposed to a broader world of art.

This year the special air-conditioned chamber housed the contemporary big guns. Koons presented a suite of hideous tropical-themed paintings; Gursky a smallish selection of crowd scenes and panoramas; and Beecroft some rather drab photographs and a video of naked bleached-blonde Teutonic models from a 2001 performance in Vienna. On the biennial's opening day Beecroft offered a new spectacle, lining up some fifty darkskinned young Brazilian women wearing nothing but Afro wigs and Azzedine Alaia high-heeled shoes in the central foyer of the Niemeyer structure, where they performed the de rigueur stand-at-attentionand-eventually-lie-down routine. The transition from erotic charge to boredom was effective, and the dialogue with the architecture (often the most interesting aspect of Beecroft's work) pretty rewarding, but there was something off-putting about the insensitivity to, or flouting of, racial politics: A nappy wig is, after all, not simply an exotic version of a blonde model's slicked-back haircut. Anal ogously, Kara Walker's Slavery! Slavery! installation, abutting the special exhibition, ran into some translation problems; it was smart to choose Walker, one of America's most important young artists, to represent the United States, but the political, visceral power of the work-originally shown, appropriately, in the heart of the US at the Walker Art Center in 1997 but now presented in the context of Brazil's quite different legacy of slavery-seemed defused.