The extraterritorial zone: the 26th Sao Paulo Bienal featured an indoor sculpture garden and a curatorial concept of "image smuggling" between cultures

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell

In an introduction to one of three volumes documenting the 26th edition of the Bienal de Silo Paulo--the world's second largest ongoing exhibition program of its kind (1)--curator Alfons Hug (2) proposes the event as a nonhierarchical free territory, a no-man's land, even if the selection process mixed national representation and curatorial fiat. With considerable enthusiasm, Hug argues that art creates such zones. "By breaking through the barricades of the material world," he writes in a catalogue devoted to the work of invited artists, "the artist becomes a smuggler of images between cultures."

Located within the 82,000 square feet of Oscar Niemeyer's modernist pavilion in Sao Paulo's Ibirapuera Park, the works of participating artists were grouped in the glass-walled building's central vault and along the gently curving ramps that traverse the interior space in sweeping spirals. If the internecine controversy concerning the appointment of a curator that rocked the organization several years ago remains a vivid memory, in his second term at the helm of the project, Hug demonstrated the focus and esthetic chops necessary to realize the Bienal's ambitious programs. To embody his notion of the artist as image smuggler, he invited a core group of 80 artists from around the world--19 of them from Brazil--to act on behalf of an audience in search of the astonishing, if not the miraculous. The invited many would interact with 55 additional artists officially representing nations.

For this occasion, Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld shaped an indoor "sculpture park" visually open to the verdant light of the park beyond, a "salon" for paintings, situations for a variety of installations and a darkened multiplex for video projection. Photography was distributed throughout--no easy task, given the intensity of available light. The result: a rational and lively ensemble, more or less clearly installed and deferential to the needs of the works, and perhaps incidentally allusive to the exhibition's open-ended curatorial theme. While some observers applauded its legibility, others expressed disdain, dismissing the overall installation program as sterile, lacking the frisson that the presence of modern masters or superstars might have provided, or as a scrum of artists with too much in common, competing for place.

Among projects that addressed the physical fact of the pavilion or its history was a key work by Mike Nelson, the official representative of Great Britain and a short-list nominee for the Turner Prize in 2001. Into a small lobby that services a freight elevator on the building's second level, Nelson inserted a structure that, inside and out, appeared to be an authentic part of the building. Ambiguously titling the work modernismo negro (2004), Nelson crafted a facade 16 feet high that quoted Niemeyer's curvi-linear baroque modernism. Two guards stood at a pair of heavy, wood-and-glass doors that led to a darkened interior, where Nelson involved the viewer in a narrative suggested by various elements he gathered from around Sao Paulo. A metal-and-glass utility door led to a small chamber revealing a narrow spiral staircase and furnished with a chair, a bare lightbulb, a motor, ambient sound and a battered poster of a woman on horseback with a legend that read "Cherish yesterday ... dream tomorrow ... live today." Arranged under the darkened eaves in the attic above were a modernist chair, a banjo and a suitcase, their meaning left to the interpretation of the viewer.

The absence of official U.S. representation in Sao Paulo failed to dim the lights of the Bienal. Substantial contributions provided to the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions by the Pew Charitable Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation were withdrawn in December 2003. In an essay for the catalogue devoted to national representatives, critic and curator Eleanor Heartney notes that this partnership no longer supports official U.S. representation but "contributes to the support of all invited artists in the show who are citizens or permanent residents." Those invited were Mark Dion, Tom Sachs, Jorge Pardo, the Neistat Brothers, Rachel Berwick, Inka Essenhigh, Toba Khedoori, Julie Mehretu, Catherine Opie, Matthew Ritchie and Alec Soth.

In a collaborative work that traded on the appearance of scientific rigor, Dion researched the history of colonial Brazil to produce The Brazilian Exhibition of Thomas Ender--Reconsidered (2004). The project revisited the travels of an Austrian water-colorist who was a member of an early 19th-century expedition that Dion, in a brief catalogue text, describes as a serious scientific investigation. Dion's group--a scholar, four students and two artists--followed Ender's trail from Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo. Each participant played the part of a member of the original expedition and produced appropriate work. Brazilian artist Walmor Correa signed on as botanist, producing annotated drawings on vellum and a contemporary narrative based on Ender's experience. (As one of Hug's invited artists, Correa elsewhere in the pavilion presented a handsome series of quasi-scientific textbook renderings proposing improbable mutations of imaginary beasts.)