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Latin America?
In the past, the model for international art exhibitions often emphasised cultural categories under which artists could be brought together. What happens is that a category that relies on national or geographic boundaries fails to express the multiplicity of cultures within that heading. It becomes obvious that there is no one Latin America, no homogeneous culture and therefore no possible totalizing categorization. It becomes necessary to criticize the kind of thinking that relies on distinctions of North versus South as a construction that sustains oppressive power relationships. To continue to base short term solutions on further binarial distinctions such as developed/under-developed, first/third world, colonial/post-colonial is to be further seduced by the subtle and hidden systems of colonization as they are concealed in 20th century art-historical categorizations (the universalization of modernism -- Eurocentric modernism).

It is the continued use of these binarial distinctions that reinforces the existing power relationships. What we see at the institutional level are three simultaneous objectives: the ethnographic interest in third world cultural production as a kind of pre-modernism, the search for third world manifestations of modernism, and a post-modern critique of the two preceding aims. Underlying the institutional enterprise are two desperations: the need to expand and manipulate markets, and a deeper anxiety concerning the very act of classification and collecting.

To quote Michel Foucault: "Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic."

Globalism?
International art biennials are attempts to bring artists together from all parts of the world under the umbrella of "globalism." These exhibitions, which for the most part emerged after the Second World War and were inspired by the traditional Venice Biennial (first held in 1895), are the art world's reflection of the globalization and capitalization of culture. Biennial exhibitions are based around the idea of cultural tourism and exportation, attracting foreign investment and creating an up-to-date image within the international community. The larger interests of these exhibitions are also multinational capital expansion and the break-down of national borders by technological advances in information and communication.

Nowadays there is a proliferation of biennials all over the world: Johannesburg, Sud-Africa; São Paulo, Brazil; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Kwangju, Korea; Havana, Cuba; Sidney, Australia; Caracas, Venezuela; Cuenca, Ecuador; Whitney Biennial, New York; Istanbul, Turkey; Venice, Italy (to name the most prominent ones). Any city aspiring to be a cultural host-site has a biennial or a major international exhibition. Such is the case with any of the mentioned biennials as well as The Carnegie International, which takes place every three years in Pittsburgh, USA; Documenta which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany; or Manifesta which occurs every two years in a different city.

At the moment, thank the heavens, there is a re-structuring of biennials or any mega-international exhibition, a new conceptualization. Rather than being merely cultural diplomacy or politics, there are curators and biennial directors thinking and contributing to new ways of thinking about biennials. The São Paulo Biennial 1998 is a great example.

The São Paulo Biennial: Its history
The first São Paulo Biennial was put on in 1951 by the Italian-born entrepreneur Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho. Hosting exhibitions of a retrospective and historical character as well as of contemporary art, the prestigious Biennial de São Paulo grew and became an important reference point for the international art world. Among the artists whose important exhibitions the Biennial has hosted during the past 46 years are: Joseph Albers, Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Gilbert and George, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh, among many others.

XXIV Biennial de São Paulo

The XXIV Biennial de São Paulo, which takes place from October 4 through December 13, 1998 under the curatorial guidance of chief curator Paulo Herkenhoff and adjunct curator Adrinoa Pedrosa, is structured in three segments: Núcleo Histórico, "Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros", and National Representations. This biennial promises to be an excellent one!

To counteract the biennial mania of globalism and universalism, the curators of the São Paulo Biennial decided to not have a general theme, but rather a paradigmatic concept: epaisseur (density, a notion developed by the French philosopher François Lyotard) which relates both to complexity and compactness in the articulations of objects and thoughts. The concept of density, the curators state, "could be applied at least in three basic levels at the XXIV Biennial: the art exhibited, curatorship, and the relationship of the biennial with its public."

The Núcleo Historico departs from the early twenties in Brazil when, in the modernist process, artists and writers attempting to understand the configuration of Brazilian identity concluded that among the forming cultures (African, Indian and Portuguese) there was one -- cannibalism -- which cultivated a symbolic practice of incorporating the Other's values to construct their own. The "Manifesto Antropofagia" (Oswald de Andrade, 1928) proclaimed antropofagia as a process of absorption and blending of other cultures in the formation of Brazilian identity. Antropofagia then became a model for cultural practice which is still current, and perhaps foretold how most contemporary culture is constructed nowadays.

Some of the artists that will be participants in the São Paulo Biennial are:

Tarsila do Amaral (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1886 -- d. São Paulo, 1973)
Like most of the creators of modernism in Brazil and elsewhere, Tarsila do Amaral emerged from an academic background, having first studied with Pedro Alexandrino in São Paulo in 1916. Later, during her stay in Paris (1920-1922) she took classes with the conservative painter Emile Renard and others at the Académie Julian. Her second trip to Paris, which she undertook in late 1922 with Oswald de Andrade, who later became her husband, marked the beginning of fundamental changes in her aesthetic approach. Although one can sense the impact of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Cézanne and Van Gogh as well as the Fauves in certain of her works from 1921 and 1922, the first major statement of Tarsila's new approach was made with the 1923 painting The Afro-Brazilian Woman (A Negra). In this image a woman of African descent is shown with exaggerated anatomical features. She stands out in high relief against a background composed of two key elements: a structured geometrical system of color bands and a stylized banana leaf. Tarsila had seen and quickly understood the tenets of Cubism and was evidently anxious to assimilate them into her art. Yet at the same time, she was tenacious in giving this pictorial mode her own private stamp, making of it a truly Brazilian product of her imagination. The surface of The Afro-Brazilian Woman, unlike those of earlier paintings, is smooth. Few brush strokes are evident and there is a striking coolness and control in every aspect of the picture. Tarsila had made many friends in the avant-garde circles of Paris. She studied with André Lhote, an artist defined by Robert Rosenblum as "the official academician of Cubism". She also became friendly with the somewhat less doctrinaire (and, for her art, much more significant) master Ferdinand Léger, whose studio she visited frequently.

Tarsila's interest in the culture and art of her own country was certainly strengthened by her stay in Paris at a moment when the "primitive" and the "exotic" were of such interest to the members of the intelligentsia there. The fascination with non-western cultures (often approached with a naïve and colonialist point of view) was pervasive and must be taken into account in any study of modernism during this period. Tarsila became a focal point for other artists, poets, and novelists who gravitated to see her, seeing in her both the embodiment of sophistication and, inevitably, a representative of what the Europeans saw as an "aboriginal" society.

An Oneiric quality informs Tarsila's paintings of the 1920s. In Abaporu (a title that derives from the Tupi-Guaraní language: aba signifies "man" and poru means "one who eats") a mammoth creature with a tiny head rests next to a huge cactus plant beneath a burning sun. In Antropofagia similar male and female figures with monumental arms, legs, and breasts rest in a highly abstracted tropical landscape. The monstrous nature of these beings in their scorching setting echoes elements of Oswald de Andrade's Anthropophagite Manifesto of 1928, another statement of the autonomy of Brazilian culture, thought, and life.

Armando Reverón (b. Caracas, Venezuela, 1889 -- d. Caracas 1954)
The work of the Venezuelan modernist Armando Reverón has often been associated with French Impressionism. Yet his light-saturated landscape paintings have much more to do with the artist's own visionary experiences and personal approach to natural phenomena than any lessons he may have learned during his contacts with Parisians artists. After several years of working in a Symbolist-related mode, this singular master developed an approach to landscape painting which often took him to the brink of pure abstraction. His thinly painted canvases (especially those done after 1926, the year in which he initiated his "white period") seem to breathe the heat-saturated air of his surroundings in the then-isolated seaside village of Macuto. The 1926 painting Light of my Grove (Luz tras mi enramada) does not suggest a specific place, but possesses a dreamlike quality where scintillating luminosity creates an almost painfully shimmering effect. Very few tones except the whites and blues are perceptible in this painting and many related works. Reverón seems to want to de-materialize the content of his pictures, making them quasi-sacred ruminations on nature.

David Alfaro Siqueiros (b. Chihuahua, Mexico, 1896 -- d. Mexico City, 1974)
The historian of Mexican muralism Antonio Rodríguez has stated that there are several aspects of David Alfaro Siqueiros's art that differentiate him from his fellow members of the Mexican mural Renaissance. These dissimilarities include his political militancy and active participation in the revolutionary struggles; his interest in developing his thought along theoretical lines; and his desire to support technical and stylistic innovations in his own art as well as that of others. There is an aggressiveness and tenacity to the paintings of Siquieros that surpass virtually all of his contemporaries. This assertive determination to make his ideas understood in the clearest possible way often militates against the use of narrative in his art. The figures in both his murals and canvas paintings are transformed into iconic symbols with an unusually powerful effect. Siqueiros rarely depicted the history of his nation in the panoramic ways that both Rivera and (to a lesser extend) Orozco were fond of doing. The central idea in much of Siqueiros' oeuvre is the oppression of the lower classes of Mexican society. The 1933 Proletarian Victim (Víctima proletaria) is a terrifyingly graphic example of this direct approach to subject matter. The nude woman's flesh is tightly bound by thick ropes that bite into her skin causing it to fissure and bleed. In what is perhaps Siqueiros's most famous picture, the 1937 Echo of a Scream (Eco de un grito), universal destruction, desolation, torment, abandonment, and hopelessness are personified by the wailing baby whose own enlarged head floats above a field of rubble. Siqueiros was inspired to create this commemoration of ruin and devastation through his experiences of fighting with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. There are no clues which are specific to either time or place, yet this image (like Picasso's grand anti-war statement Guernica painted in the same year) clearly encapsulates the cataclysmic terror of bloody conflict.

Siquieros is an artist whose message is communicated not only through potent images but also by his use of nervous, rapid lines and especially through the increasingly textured surfaces that characterized his paintings as his career progressed. Form and content are engaged in an equal struggle for expressiveness.

Roberto Matta (b. in Santiago, Chile, 1911 -- lives in Paris)
Of all of the artists whose work is discussed here, Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren (known as Matta) is the Latin American artist most closely identified with the European Surrealist movement. Although born and reared in Chile, where he received a solid Jesuitical education, Matta is the quintessential peripatetic artist whose career has evolved in Paris (where he first went in 1934 to study architecture with Le Corbusier), New York, Mexico City, and elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. He officially joined the Surrealist group in 1937 shortly after he had begun to paint full-time.

Matta's trips to Mexico were significant for the development of his style. He was impressed by the dramatic nature he saw there -- the volcanos, mountain ranges, dry plains, vibrant colors -- and incorporated some of these features into his paintings. Listen to Living (Ecoutez vivre) of 1941 articulates a long-standing preoccupation of the artist. In a manner that suggests his interest in the representation of surging, non-specific places, he implies the duality of the creating and destroying forces of nature. Many examples of his work done during the early 1940's "featured a horizon-less spaces that evoked states of mind as well as physical locations (which might as well be cosmic as aquatic)." By the following year, 1942, Matta had virtually eliminated all references to any horizon line in his "landscapes." Here Sir Fire, Eat! is potentially disorienting to the viewer. It is a dense, almost impenetrable work containing (as is true with most of the artist's compositions) certain vague hints of menace.

Another feature that enters Matta's visual vocabulary in the early 1940s is his use of webs of lines that spread throughout the picture, creating depth and defining shapes and forms. In Eronisme of 1943 these lines function in a variety of ways; some of them appear to represent specific patterns with quasi-geometric proportions while others are purely random in their placement.

Victor Grippo (b. Junin, Argentina, 1936 -- lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Victor Grippo's installations address the dichotomy of order and disorder; more specifically they unveil the disjunctions between the precision of scientific knowledge, empirically derived wisdom, and the chaotic realities of everyday existence. Always interested in scientific investigation, Grippo juxtaposes precision instruments with the most banal of foodstuffs -- the potato. This tuber is native to the region of northern Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru and is staple of the diet in that region (as it is in other parts of the world). Grippo's Analogy (Analogía I) has been described as "grounded in the very incongruity of the proposal that the potato can stand for human consciousness." Yet the artist intends that nothing in his work should bear the least relationship to the local or the folkloric; "it does, however, have considerable rapport with the artisanal".

Lygia Clark (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil 1920 -- d. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1988)
The careers of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica are inextricable intertwined. Both belonged to the Neo-Concreto group of Rio de Janeiro and both were concerned with breaking well beyond the boundaries of "established" art. In the work of Lygia Clark we observe a scintillating tension between the rigidly abstract and the intimations of the organic. Her early art training took place in Rio de Janeiro with the noted landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Burle Marx's intense involvement with the organic form in his work partly inspired Clark, who constantly struggled to integrate life forces into her artistic outlook. After creating a series of hard-edge abstract paintings, like Ovo of 1959, she moved on to produce series of three dimensional metallic sculptures. Trepante of 1959 is one of several examples in which Clark combined metal with wood to suggest a vital organicity. Among the most interesting of this category of her sculptures are the aluminum structures which she called Bichos or "machine-animals" -- works that combine hints of living and breathing beings with the coolness and distance of the art of, for example, Antoine Pevsner. In her later years, Clark became a psychotherapist and many of her therapeutic techniques were intimately linked to her work. Her Masks (Máscaras) and other objects and articles of clothing that could be put on and used to temporarily alter the personality of the wearer were essential elements of her aesthetic and psychological strategies. In a very real sense, one can call Lygia Clark a body-artist or participatory-artist who used her creations in tandem with other people to open their minds and change their attitudes. The therapeutic aspects of her work are singularly important. Her achievements reached into directions that are far from the path of the conventional definitions of art.

Hélio Oiticica (b. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1937 -- d. Rio de Janeiro, 1980)
Clark both collaborated and had strong spiritual affinities with Hélio Oiticica. Oiticica is an artist who might be said to hold a position in the cultural consciousness of late twentieth-century Brazil analogous to that maintained by Andy Warhol in the United States or Joseph Beuys in Europe. "Creator," "shaman," "rebel," are among the many apt terms which could be used to describe the singular significance of Oiticica's production. Although he had a one-person exhibition in London in 1969, his work has only recently come to the attention of a large audience with an International retrospective organized in the winter of 1992 by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Oiticica was the son of a middle-class intellectual family from Rio. His father, from whom Hélio inherited many of his intellectual interests, was well-known in political and intellectual circles as an anarchist theoretician. Before his untimely death at the age of forty-three, Oiticica rarely exhibited in a conventional gallery or museum setting and certainly did not conceive of his work in the orthodox sense, as art that could be bought and put on display for the viewer's pleasure. He did participate, however, in the ground-breaking exhibition entitled Information organized in the summer of 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

After early study with the painter Ivan Serpa, he created a series of metasquemas, works composed of geometrical forms painted in gouache on paper, which he showed at the Grupo Frente exhibitions in Rio in 1955 and 1956. He also began his extensive writings in notebooks or on any other available paper. Oiticica's (mostly unpublished) writings were preserved thanks to the efforts of his family and friends who founded the "Prejeto Hélio Oiticica" in Rio after his death to safeguard the fragile works. His writings are critical accompaniments to the art itself and must be read to understand the often illusive thought process that went into their creation.

In 1959 Oiticica made the transition from canvas to three-dimensional reliefs and he showed his works at the Neo-Concrete exhibitions in Rio and Salvador, Bahia, and at the Konkrete Kunst show which was organized in Zurich in 1960 by Max Bill. Thereafter, the inventions of Oiticica crossed many boundaries of definitions in the art world. Among the categories into which Oiticica divided his works are those of the bólide, the penetraval, and the parangolé. Guy Brett, the author who has perhaps best expressed the underlying principles of the artist's contribution, described these categories by stating that "all are linked by the meaning of the word bolide in Portuguese: fireball, nucleus, 'flaming meteor.' These inventions of Oiticica's are decisive for ordering the chaos of reality, not as formal relationships, but as 'energy centers' to which the psyche and body of the human being immediately feel attracted -- 'like a fire' as Hélio once remarked." Among the bolides are glass containers filled with earth, gauze, and other materials or boxes that open at unconventional places and were painted in shades of yellow, salmon, pink, or red. Many of these works had much in common with the Minimal art then being developed in other nations.

There is much in Oiticica's work that is specific to Brazil. His installation or Penetravel, which he called "Tropicália", first seen in April of 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, contained live macaws and native plants. The spectator walked through a labyrinth, stepping on various textures while becoming aware of the tropical scene. This was, in a sense, a wry commentary on Brazilian kitsch; the artist was intimately concerned with popular culture, having become an intimate part of it. He had gained, for example, the rank of passista (or principal dancer) in the samba school of Mangueira, one of Rio's oldest favela shantytowns.

In November 1964 Oiticica wrote that: "The discovery of what I call parangolé [a slang word meaning animated situation and sudden confusion and/or agitation between people] marks a critical point and defines a specific position in the theoretical development of my entire experience of color-structure in space, principally in reference to a new definition of what would be, in this same experience, the 'plastic object,' or rather, the work." The phenomenon of parangolé might be related to Body art, Happenings, and Performance. One of its most well-known manifestations is the series of parangolé capes worn by friends of the artist. In addition, a wide variety of other objects also comprise the "experience" of parangolé including banners and tents. At the heart of parangolé is interaction, movement, and the transformation of one's consciousness of reality.


Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. Colombia, 1961 -- lives in Chicago)
Nothing I had seen by Manglano-Ovalle prepared me for his video installation at Chicago's Gallery 312 which was on view during the inaugural of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in late June 1996. Untitled (Flora and Fauna) is a beautiful, mesmerizing work which becomes increasingly disturbing and repulsive the longer one watches. In this work, two pairs of video monitors stacked one upon the other play aggressive video images of a flower in time-lapsed bloom and a ferocious barking dog that leaps towards the screen. This work "uses the eighteenth-century concepts of flora and fauna to represent our contemporary environment," notes Manglano-Ovalle. It presents an artificially constructed nature in which the time-lapsed flowering is syncopated with an ultrasound of the heart beat of a 20-week old fetus and the barking dog. Manglano-Ovalle's use of sound in this work comes directly out of his Woofer series which incorporates the deep vibrations of car audio systems common in the urban subculture. "I wanted to generate nonmusical sounds that have the same deep resonance of 'street-thumping' audio car systems."

Bonnie Clearwater, "Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle," TRANS>arts.cultures.media, Vol 1/2, Issue 3& 4, 1997: 89.

Bonnie Clearwater is the Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami.


Meyer Vaisman (b. Caracas, Venezuela -- divides his time between Caracas and New York)
Meyer Vaisman's work deals with the duality of existence and challenges the notion of the hybrid. His stuffed, dressed and mounted turkeys, which are often disguised as animals, literally wear their new identities. Often grotesque, Vaisman's caricatures of evolution mirror the cultural condition of the Americas. The turkey, symbol of the founding of United States and the domestication of the "wild", is dressed and redressed. His "ranchos" are a hybrid of the literal facade of the "rancho" or the favela and inside it lies furniture from the upper middle class of the seventies.

Sandra Antelo-Suarez

Doris Salcedo (b. )
The expanded, renovated and long-awaited New Museum (NYC) recently opened with the first U.S. museum exhibition to feature the work of acclaimed Colombian sculptor and installation-artist Doris Salcedo. In her work, Salcedo, who often visits remote, ravaged villages in her native country, examines the phenomenon of violence and its victim, evoking both loss and the process of healing, the importance as well as the pain of memory. Salcedo's affecting pieces are rarely made from anything more elaborate than old shoes, discarded furniture or architectural fragments, pieces of clothing or bits of bone -- in other words, the detritus of life, reminders of the stubborn presence of thousands of Latin America's "disappeared." This ghostly portrait of Cain's children is a direct outgrowth of Salcedo's research with the inhabitants of Colombia's high mortality rate areas.

Christian Viveros

Los Carpinteros -- New York ...........

The ytoung Cuban group Los Carpinteros (The Woodcarvers) opersates in a way that paradoxically transcends local context. Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castilio, and Dagobertos Rodriguez, recent graduates of the State Academy of Art, made their first major appearance in Cubas fifth Biennial. All in their mid 20's, these aretists belong to a generation that is only indirectly familiar with the events of the 1950 revolution, and has groewn up with the advantages afforded by an exemplary (by Latin American standards) educational and social welfare system. This background explains the irreverence with which the trio integrates motifs from everyday life in Cuba, art history, and the socialist past in their work. Havana Country Club, a rrealistic panel painting with a carved frame, depicts a company of well-heeled gentlemen playing golf in front of a palatial edifice