La Bienal de São Paulo propone una exposición sin obras como «metáfora de un museo imaginario». El resultado ha sido de desconcierto y ha vuelto a encender la polémica sobre la bienalización del arte ante la proliferación clónica de estos eventos, más de 200, en todo el mundo
Pocos acontecimientos artísticos han levantado tanta expectación como la 28ª Bienal de São Paulo. La gran novedad consistía en toda una planta vacía, 12.000 metros cuadrados en uno de los edificios bandera de un dios de la arquitectura modernista, Óscar Niemeyer. En las otras dos plantas, 42 artistas procedentes de 22 países muestran su obra. El día de la inauguración, el comisario de la bienal, Ivo Mesquita (Río de Janeiro, 1947), una de las personas más reputadas en el mundo del arte, se desplazaba a toda velocidad en una silla de ruedas con motor por las tres plantas del pabellón. En los rostros de los visitantes percibió que su propuesta no había sido entendida o, mejor, que él no había sabido explicarla.
El día anterior a la apertura, Mesquita explicaba que esa planta vacía era «la metáfora de un museo imaginario, una representación de la historia más reciente del arte». Rechazó frontalmente que se tratara de un truco publicitario para llamar la atención sobre la bienal y añadió: «Esta nada debe de ser entendida como una petición de reflexión sobre el papel de las bienales en general y de la creación artística en particular. Pido un poco de calma y tranquilidad para meditar sobre el futuro».
De hecho, aunque es cierto que hay obra expuesta en las otras dos plantas, el grueso de la programación es puramente teórico. Decenas de mesas redondas, lecturas y conferencias en torno al papel de la creación, seminarios y acciones artísticas sin fecha determinada. Mesquita no quería un espectáculo al uso. En lugar de contemplación pasiva, optó por la reflexión activa. Su proyecto era una bienal sin estrellas, aunque muchos de los participantes son de sobra conocidos en el circuito artístico: Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic, Joan Jonas, Allan McCollum o Mat Mullican.
Conocidos o no, la verdad es que las zonas dedicadas a exposición tampoco tienen nada que ver con lo que los espectadores pueden encontrar en otras bienales. Aquí, todo el espacio ha sido unificado por el mobiliario diseñado por el artista colombiano Gabriel Sierra (San Juan de Nepomuceno, 1975), que ha creado en la tercera planta -donde se concentra más del 90% de la exposición- un contenedor gigantesco formado por pequeñas piezas de madera que hacen de mobiliario y separador. El resultado es que la obra individual de los artistas participantes queda neutralizada por estos muebles. Todo queda sometido a la dictadura de una especie de maqueta omnipresente. Además, las piezas expuestas carecen de cartelas explicativas. No existe el nombre del autor ni de la obra. La idea de la organización es que el espectador que tenga interés pregunte a las personas que hacen las veces de vigilantes.
El mobiliario de Sierra ha obligado a muchos artistas a modificar sus instalaciones, con el consiguiente e inevitable disgusto de muchos de ellos. Carlos Navarrete (Santiago de Chile, 1968) calificó la bienal de «feria del mueble» después de comprobar a qué había sido reducida su instalación, un homenaje a la memoria del que sólo ha quedado una vitrina en la que se muestran recortes de periódicos. De hecho, la única obra que no se ha modificado y que tiene casi tanto protagonismo como los muebles es la instalación del norteamericano Allan McCollum (Los Ángeles, 1944). La pieza de McCollum ocupa la parte central de la tercera planta con un centenar de cuadros enmarcados en madera con motivos vegetales. El primer golpe de vista ofrece una sucesión de hojas otoñales colocadas como si fueran sillas de un patio de butacas. La monotonía es el tema que este artista ha llevado a la bienal.
Y entre muebles y piezas, de repente el visitante se encuentra con lo que los organizadores llaman espacios educativos. Aquí es donde mejor se ve el objetivo del comisario de que São Paulo sea más un lugar de reflexión que una feria. Por ejemplo, se puede recordar cómo era la escritura en una máquina o ver cómo se fabrica el papel. No hay más que sentarse ante una Olivetti, darle a las teclas y llevarse el papel de recuerdo.
Son muchas las propuestas y todas en torno al vacío. Bien es cierto que las ideas externas no son bien recibidas. Hay que recordar la entrada de más de cuarenta graffiteros el domingo en que la feria se abrió al público. Casi todos eran estudiantes de Bellas Artes y a toda velocidad decoraron con sus sprays gran parte de la segunda planta del edificio. Uno de ellos fue detenido y la hazaña duró poco. Al día siguiente, los 12.000 metros cuadrados volvían a estar inmaculados.
El resultado general ha sido de desconcierto. Más que la reflexión, la bienal ha generado desagrado. En la jornada inaugural, alguien recordó que hace cinco años, en la Bienal de Dakar que Ivo Mesquita comisariaba, las obras no llegaron a tiempo por un problema de aduana. Lejos de desesperarse, el imaginativo brasileño abrió el certamen con un libro como todo objeto para contemplar. Entonces no le falló la creatividad. Esta vez no ha ocurrido lo mismo.
Angeles García
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/arte/ruido/vacio/elpepuculbab/20081108elpbabart_1/Tes/
2 comentarios
Diria mas bien, «adictos al vacío». Parece mas bien una tendencia general: buscar el mandato, el dictum, dicta, el dictamen…
Sonia Fox – crítica de arte
By Ligia Nobre
In the public ‘square’ on the ground floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion last week, electroclash band Fischerspooner played a gig to kick off the 28th São Paulo Bienal – the anti-biennial. Curator Ivo Mesquita, together with adjunct-curator Ana Paula Cohen, decided to offer a vantage point on international biennial bloat by leaving the enormous second floor of the pavilion completely empty and artwork-free, and focusing instead on lectures, performances, panel discussions and the presentation of archives – and a few artworks – on the third floor as the core of the exhibition.
Tags left in a co-ordinated action on the second floor and ramps of the Ciccillo Matarazzo during the public opening of the São Paulo Bienal / footage on TV Cultura. All photos: Ligia Nobre
But as the artworld crowd waited patiently for Fischerspooner, a more radical gesture towards the Bienal’s title in living contact unfolded upstairs: around 40 people began tagging the vast empty spaces and white walls of the pavilion in a coordinated guerilla action. ‘This is art’, read some of the tags.
Onlookers frantically shot future YouTube videos as the taggers were violently evicted by the Bienal security guards, education guides, and apparently even by Cohen herself, who was seen running after them. The next day, the Bienal labeled the taggers ‘criminals’, and Cohen dismissed them as ‘those people from the periphery’ during a press conference. Not exactly the kind of ‘living contact’ promised by her and Mesquita’s Bienal. If the 28th Bienal claims to be a ‘public inclusive and social space’, shouldn’t the institution be opening itself precisely to those ‘from the periphery’?
On the cover of the exhibition guide, the 28th Bienal’s graphic identity is a partly transparent sticker overlaid on top of the logo for the first Bienal, which took place in 1951 as part of the modernisation ideology of the ‘the country of the future’. Now that there are around 200 biennials around the world, Mesquita and Cohen aimed at ‘offering a platform for observation and reflection upon the culture and system of biennials, taking its own experience as a case study’.
But is their Bienal really able to present ‘a new format of exhibition’ capable of ‘promoting a new relationship with its audiences and the city’? The lead up to the exhibition was dogged by controversy over the non-transparency of the Bienal and allegations of corruption and conflict of interest in the spending of public funds.
The Square on the ground floor of the pavilion / work by Alexander Pills
Entering the pavilion through the marquee in the Parque do Ibirapuera, and then negotiating airport-level security at the entrance to what one has to assume must be the exhibition proper we see Erick Beltrán’s El mundo explicado (The World Explained): an encyclopedia of non-specialized knowledge set up as an off-set printing press. It is an archive-like collection of maps, diagrams, descriptions of explanations of how the world functions according to nonexperts, incorporating the contributions of the public. Selected posters of drawings, diagrams and maps made on the press are displayed on the third floor.
A video lounge on the first floor presents films and videos by Glauber Rocha, Jean-Luc Godard and Gunter Brus among others. One can watch seminal works not always easily accessible to the public in Brazil, but it seems anachronistic to distinguish these artists’ works from the others invited (Rocha, Godard, Brus and others are not listed as artists in the exhibition literature). Another inexplicable decision on the part of the curators relates to the ignorance of the historical format (4:3 and 1:1,3) of much of the video and film material, which has been stretched to 16:9 format to fill the new flatscreen monitors on which they are presented (the monitors have a 4:3 option in their menus).
Open Plan, the empty second floor of the pavilion / Lines for Carsten Höller’s slides, Valerio Sisters
From the first floor one ascends into a ‘void’ on the Open Floor, which, according to Mesquita and Cohen, is meant to draw attention to the ‘economy of art’ and allow a reflection on the architecture. However, the most striking feeling as one walks through the 250m long space is not of being able to appreciate Niemeyer’s transparent glass and concrete pavilion but instead the feeling of being surveyed by the large security contingent stationed across the room.
One of the most consistent curatorial statements was that this would be an exhibition without walls. However, arriving on the third floor, called the Plan of Readings, where most of the artists’ works are shown, together with a library with some but not all Bienal catalogues and an auditorium for the conferences, one is confronted with an exhibition packed full of wooden platforms, furniture, temporary wall structures and cupboards that make the space look like a Wood Fair. Whereas artists like Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, Jorge Pardo and others worked extensively with such structures over the last two decades, one wonders if Mesquita and Cohen have misunderstood the irony in aestheticizing exhibition and archive structures. Artists like Mabe Bethonico and Gabriel Serra seem to have been transplanted from Cohen’s recent community art centre project Casa del Encuentro in Medellin, Columbia and redeployed to make exhibition structures in the Bienal without much thought for the pavilion’s existing architecture or the broader artistic context in which the São Paulo Bienal operates.
Work by Angel Ferreira (left) and Armin Linke (back) / Work by Erick Beltrán
Distinct works – by Sophie Calle, Fernando Bryce, Rivane Neuenschwander, Javier Peñafiel or Marina Abramovic – are forced onto structures that make them difficult to find in the first place, let alone experience. There is no clear labeling or indication of the position of works anywhere in the entire building, and less than half of the works ended up in the position marked on the printed floor plans. This gives almost no chance to visitors from outside the inner circles of the artworld to know what or who they are actually looking at.
A few works manage to survive the exhibition design. Peter Friedl’s ongoing project Playgrounds (1995–2008) is a slide presentation of his photos of public playgrounds around the world. It was presented on one of the few white walls in the pavilion, at the insistence of the artist. Angela Ferreira’s third version of the long term project For Mozambique, is a stand-alone Constructivist-style structure devoted to the country’s immediate post-independence period, and it included a monitor showing a clip from Bob Dylan’s convert film Mozambique and a short film by Jean Rouch and Jacques d’Arthuys, made as part of a project for Mozambique’s new national TV and film infrastructure in the late 1970s.
Artist Mabe Bethônico (left) and curator Ana Paula Cohen (left) give a talk on the opening day / Library in the Plan of Readings area on the third floor
Another of the Bienal’s several controversies is that there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the concepts developed by Thomas Mulcaire while he was curator of the project – including selecting Angela Ferreira, Sarnath Banerjee, Joe Sheehan, Glauber Rocha and Peter Friedl – before he left in June 2008 due to conceptual differences with Mesquita and Cohen. Among other issues, Mulcaire reportedly objected to Mesquita and Cohen’s close relationships with certain galleries in São Paulo and their reluctance to involve all members of the Bienal board in discussions about how the institution could be reformed and how the presidency of the Bienal could become more transparent and accountable.
Apart from the intervention of the taggers, the other remarkable event on the opening day of the Bienal were the long lines for Carsten Höller’s slides, Valerio Sisters, which connected the three floors of the pavilion, both outside and inside. It was one of the few works that seemed to attract genuine interest and engagement from the audience. The other work that really got into contact with the city was the publication 28b, inserted in São Paulo’s Metro newspaper and distributed free around the city. The first edition had Höller’s slides on the cover, and contains another highlight of the Bienal: a serialised graphic novel called Dispatches from the City of no U-turns by Delhi-based artist Sarnath Banerjee, which contains a healthy dose of humour as it relates idiosyncratic scenes drawn from everyday life in São Paulo.