The 23rd Sao Paulo Biennale

The 23RD .. SAO PAUl.O BIENNALE CLIVE KELLNER S ituated in the Parque Ibrapuera, a sprawling park in the heart of Sao Paulo, is the Oscar Niemeyer building that houses the Sao Paulo Biennale. The 23rd Sao Paulo Biennale which opened on the 5th of October 1996, under the curatorship of Nelson Aguilar who has returned for the second time as the chief curator, set itself the unenviable theme of the "Dematerialization of Art Towards the End of the Millenium", a curious criterion, bearing in mind that such monumental heavy weights as Picasso, Goya, Munch, Klee, and Warhol were in attendance. The line-up of these figures was as much a marketing strategy to attract large crowds required by Bielmale organizations as it was to appease politicians and funders; a view easily supported by the large advertising billboards around the city and banners that decorated the exhibition hall. Sao Paulo is a city of 23 million people, whose politicians control an enormous budget comparable to a small country's gross national domestic income. Political intrigues and power struggles were manifest at the opening, where a strong lineup of politicians were jostling to make speeches. The Mayor, the Governor, the State President, as well as the president of the Biennale himself, portrayed on a large screen as if at a football game, were all there. Divided into three separate sections, the first floor contained the "Universalis'; a group of six exhibitions curated by selected curators. Each presented works from the various continents, i.e. Africa and Oceania, North America, South America, Eastern Europe, Europe Occidental and Asia. The seventh segment featured Brazilian artists. The second floor contained the national pavilions and the third floor was the host of the special exhibitions , individual selectors nominating specific artists: Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat, etc. Particularly strong representation came from the Latin American section of "Universalis" curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez whose selection consisted of Ricardo Brey, Jose Antonio Hemandez-Diez, Gonzalo Diaz, Luis Camnitzer, and Maria Teresa Hincapie. Poignant representations reflecting marginalization, temporality , dislocation, and loss featured consistency throughout the sections of the national pavilions. This sensibility was evident in the works of the Martinican, Marc Latamie and the South African, Willem Boshoff. Boshoffcreated a morphological dictionary for the blind, etched in Braille in which "extinct" words are given meaning through the interpretation ofa non-sighted participant. Such inversions of perception challenged the conventions of the "gaze", rendering language as a tactile form. His work was not only appropriate but also consistent with the theme whereby dematerialization was seen as a process of object entropy and where traditional notions of the support or the primacy of the object and the relation to the viewer, have come to be questioned as desired criteria for the making and understanding of contemporary art. Sadly this was not the case for many of the other selections. One then has to question Aguilar's and several other curators' decisions in their selections, which bear little or no semblance to any form of dissolution of artistic boundaries or of materiality for that matter. Many curators presented artists who work in materialist paradigms, some ofwhich tended to synonimize installation art with dematerialization. If there was a consistent theme exhibited in the various shows, it is one of rematerialization. There was so much painting evident that an entire floor was given over to the likes of Picasso, Cy Twombly, Munch, Goya, Warhol, and Arnulf Rainer. Within the discourse of a particular genre or medium there are exceptions as indicated in the work of Basquiat and Bourgeois. Basquiat, although working on a traditional support (canvas) deconstructs the semantic structure which holds representation together. By revealing cryptic codes, he underscores conventional modes of representation . Interestingly enough, several ofthe younger artists held their own more than adequately against luminaries such as Sol Lewitt and Anish Kapoor, who presented a work which would amicably suit any film production set in a science fiction narrative, or any airport terminal for that matter. Kapoor's work was situated in a location from which it could be viewed from the three floors. Across from this work was the Danish pavilion of Christian Lemmerz, who created, for lack of...