Under the present conditions of global mass tourism, it is difficult not to see important contemporary art events such as biennial festivals under a general touristic aspect. »Damned to be a Tourist,« wrote the mail-art artist H. R. Fricker as early as the mid-eighties; this slogan seems now, as a cynical marketing concept, to have caught up with one of the few really cosmopolitan manifestations of the now global biennial circus: the historical Biennial of São Paulo.

As opposed to previous Brazilian Biennials, particularly the last one, which took place in 1998 (see [i]springerin[/i] No. 4, Dec. 1998), the 25th jubilee edition did not make a convincing showing, either with an innovative format or a strong curatorial conception. It was indeed difficult to see anything in this hybrid conglomeration of different artistic approaches but the ultimate carbon copy of a globalisation and marketing trip based on the US/European art principle. If anything can be said regarding a common thread at São Paulo 2002, then it is that this international competition and exposition character turned out to be the dominant feature of the entire Biennial. The most eloquent expression of this was the exhibition architecture itself: whereas the modernist exhibition building by Oscar Niemeyer from the fifties only signalises isolation from the outside, this year's directors, under the leadership of German curator-in-chief Alfons Hug, managed with an extremely conservative and authoritarian interior architecture to erect a separating system of stands that tried to stave off all direct influences from the outside world.

This Biennial had as its overall theme »Cidades - Iconografias Metropolitanas,« which not only governed the special exhibition, but was also often a focus of the autonomously curated national entries. The »Urban Iconographies« were to be discussed using eleven large cities as examples (half of which, typically enough, are also venues for other art biennials): Berlin, Caracas, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Moscow, New York, Beijing, São Paulo, Sydney and Tokyo. Here, it was possible to circumvent restrictive cultural identity constructs - something which was mainly due to the individual city curators or the artists themselves, who also now have a globalised work ethos. However, the central curatorial concept as a whole gave rise to a questionable concept of urbanity that said nothing about contemporary sociological debates or debates on architectural history and urban development, but everything about individual artistic approaches.

While at the last São Paulo Biennial the central »Anthropophagy« theme was underpinned by academic reference to a specific historical production, this year the most striking feature was a complete lack of context and orientation. How is it possible, one wondered in the face of the overall theme »Megacities,« to avoid any concrete or discursive connection to the actual urban environment? In this situation, one could almost have wished for someone like Rem Koolhaas ... (the fact that the Dutch architect guru then turned up at a completely different exhibition project, namely, at the parallel exhibition »Arte/Cidade,« which had been organised jointly by Brazilian and foreign curators and focused on the much-neglected development zone in the east of São Paulo - and which even took place there in a vacant warehouse and its environs - is typical of a situation in which global art systems can join forces with local structures, with very productive results.)

However, there was also a handful of artists, personally chosen by curator-in chief Hug, gathered under the title »Iconografias Metropolitanas«: Andreas Gursky, Sean Scully, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Koons, Julião Sarmento and Vanessa Beecroft - all of them familiar old friends for western art lovers, despite Alfons Hug's claim that this exhibition was »not a Eurocentric« one. So it would seem that one really does travel about to remain among one's own kind - very much in the spirit of Boris Groy's tourism concept, who writes in his catalogue essay that »the traveller of today [has become] not so much an observer of local settings as of his own travel companions.« In opposition to global art tourism, in which »avant-garde politics were replaced by politics of travel, migration and nomadism,« the exhibition of western art in São Paulo in the only air-conditioned room in the 30,000 m2 Biennial building at any rate also appeared as a striking reflection of a shock-frozen »gated art community.«

The artist Ayse Erkmen, who had prepared a project as part of the Istanbul contribution that should really have broken through this mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, herself experienced the fact that you could easily be excluded. Erkmen wanted to put up banners on a balustrade inside the Biennial hall in co-operation with a worker from the favelas. The project had already been carried out - the banners carried slogans and texts by residents of the favelas - when Erkmen was first of all asked not to place her contribution at the intended location for the duration of the three opening days. When the Biennial directors moved Erkmen's work to a place outside the building without the knowledge of the artist, and when another place could not be found for it inside, Erkmen finally withdrew her work. The background to this whole incident was apparently that a performance by the artist Vanessa Beecroft for the Biennial opening had been planned in the hall exactly in front of the banners with messages from the favelas - and this didn't seem very opportune for an event put on by global art management.

Austria, too, tried to address »metropolitan iconographies« with its contribution, making the »urban network idea« - as curator Zdenka Badovinac said - the focus of the presentation. The fictive art figure Georg Paul Thomann who was sent to São Paulo is both a construct made from »forty years of avant-garde ideas in music, discourse, the arts and oppositional politics« (Diedrich Diederichsen in a critique of the Thomann catalogue in the TAZ newspaper) and a temporary station in the networking activities of the Austrian artists collective »monochrom.« The group's installation - a »Self-Portrait of Georg Paul Thomann's as Austria's Highest Mountain/Grossglockner« - finally turned out to be an extensive collection of quotes and a medial and compositional piece of handcraft that could be appreciated as an intellectual show of strength. It would, however, have gone too far to find critical potential in this self-parodying system that integrated everything and thus levelled off everything; it remains a nice anecdote that Austria sent a non-existent artist to this Biennial. But it remains a great irony that Austria probably could never be pinned down to its national identity at an international art event more emphatically than with this work, which in its self- referentiality seemed to be almost autistically motivated. In retrospect, the work seems like a frantic attempt not to behave like a tourist in São Paulo at any price.

Despite, or precisely because of, the overly large number of chic, yet uncritical international »gallery art« at the Biennial in general, some of the works and contributions that didn't fit this scheme were particularly noticeable: striking series of photographs of the realities of life in South Africa by Santu Mofokeng, Ruth Motau or David Goldblatt in Johannesburg's contribution, or the photographic prints by Luis Molina-Pantin, Alexander Apostol or José Antonio Hernández-Diez from Caracas, reflecting the conditions in the post-modern entertainment industry. Besides nine videos by Anri Sala (for Albania/France) and Stan Douglas (Canada) - among many others - the works of Johanna Montero Matamoros (for Honduras), who examines the communication structures of everyday urban life, or Los Carpinteros (from Cuba), who distributed symbolic watchtowers over the exhibition grounds, or the perhaps nicest contribution at the Biennial, the »Hypertext« drawings by the Caribbean artist Edward Bowen all reflected the now realised utopian dream of the 19th century and its romantic attitude to tourism: that »discoveries« of artistic productions can still (or again) be made.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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