International Art: The 25th Biennale in São Paulo has everything - the exquisite, the inspiring, the eloquent, the provocative - and, best of all, writes Marian Fitzgibbon, plenty of space to appreciate it all
'THE English painters I thought were pretty disappointing - one - Scott makes one feel, 'My God! what rationing has done!' " So wrote Miss Elizabeth Bishop, American poet, in 1954 in the early days of her extraordinary 13-year sojourn in Brazil. Which Scott, I wonder? Surely not William. But then again, his blue frying pans could look rather hungry.
That was the second Biennale in São Paulo. Just now, the 25th is in full swing. In the beautiful city park of Ibirapuera stands the Niemeyer-designed pavilion in which the exhibition has been held since its early years. A simple building, the gallery can comfortably house representation from 65 countries (11 more than the 24th event), as well as this year's special focus on The City, and a section on some giants of the international contemporary art scene. Visiting is a pleasure; no crowds, no queues, no perceptible marketing and a real possibility of undisturbed viewing. And this is in a building that was conceived for a very different type of art to that on show today.
For this Biennale is indisputably a further manifestation of the indissoluble marriage of art and technology: photographs, video, the Internet and installations. And while there was some painting and work that might be called sculpture in the traditional sense, São Paulo leaves one in a quandary as to whether conventional work is on the way out or on the way back.
The predominance of video in São Paulo is such that one is forced to reflect on what artists are actually trying to achieve by opting for this medium. And by going with the flow a little, one begins to see why.
It is a long time since a visual art work either demanded or received the degree of patience and persistence from me as happened here. Even when the core of the work is not the moving image, many artists made their own space in which to view their creation. You have to climb, crawl, squeeze in to view the piece. The creation of a place apart makes for focused viewing as well as a disorientation that is probably helpful to the reception of the work - remember the adage about making the familiar unfamiliar . . . And of course, a space apart, and a darkened one, is a requirement of filmed work, shutting out other noises and making one truly alone with the artist. When it works of course, that is. In truth, the net effect of the range of experiences to which one is exposed in the Biennale is dizzy-making and at times both deeply exciting and stimulating. Just like art is supposed to be.
The City theme, which is central to the 25th Biennale, says its German curator (and the first gringo to take this role), Alfons Hug, was not meant to be a creative straitjacket.
Eleven cities around the world were selected and to each Hug appointed a curator, who selected five artists. The results were intended to explore the response of art to the dramatic social and cultural transformations of modern metropoles. Caracas, Berlin, New York, Johannesburg, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Istanbul, Sydney, São Paulo and Bejiing participated as well as an imaginary 12th city - Utopica. In this selection, Hug eschewed Eurocentrism to make the Biennale a global event. He also expressed a wish to invoke humility, a rare enough commodity in the international art world.
As might be expected, there are no pretty pictures. Representations of alienation, death, destruction, poverty, cruelty and hypocrisy belie any notion of contemporary art as apolitical.
But in the lead-up to the World Cup and in Brazil of all places let me be crass and proclaim a winner. For this viewer, Berlin and Moscow took the laurels. Rather than destruction, the Berlin artists seem, not unsurprisingly, to be focused on construction . . . but then again, can one be sure? Wall-sized photos of the city in colour by Frank Thiel and in blurred black and white by Michael Wesley are given pride of place in the show and rise beautifully to the challenge, as do eight massive glossy neon-effect photos depicting stripes of colour, also by Michael Wesley.
The Moscow exhibit is one of harsh and overwhelming realism, but not without its pathos and poetry. Valery Koshliakov´s crude cardboard city, roughly thrown together, includes television screens detailing deaths by violence, by traffic, by the city itself. On entering one of these makeshift edifices, one views, as if from a river barge, video images of a city upside-down as reflected in the waters of the Moscva to a glorious soundtrack that is altogether at odds with the world outside. Alexander Brodsky's sullenly powerful installation of 20 large, rusted, military-type containers allows a glimpse through one end of a vast grey blighted city.
Street people, a notable theme of the whole Biennale exhibition, are given life-size colour representation in the photos of Boris Mikhailov, which also make rare reference to the sexual presence of these dispossessed. The photographs of Sergey Bratkov depict a series of uncomfortably provocative little Lolitas. All in all, a representation worthy of the land of Dostoevsky - who might well have christened the artists too.
Now to the national representations which, like it or not, took on at times the character of their country. The inexorable pull of the Eurovision maybe!
THE Palestine exhibit, six square metres of baked and cracked earth, painted wallpaper-style with red roses, brimmed with eloquence. A wicked and unworthy little demon in me noted that the Israeli piece, very clever in itself, a red slated roof on the ground, extended through the plate glass window beyond the confines of the pavilion itself!
And yes, I have to say it, the Irish did well! Sean Scully's very beautiful room of canvases in sombre or burnt tones had all the authority of the Rothko chapel in the (old) Tate. Clare Langan's video piece, Too Dark for Night, transcended any stereotypes to provide a haunting and genuinely absorbing video work. And if one may count him in this number, Willie Donnelly (Northern Ireland) as one of the British exhibitors rendered an anxious and compelling piece.
The Biennale leaves one fizzing with images: hundreds of naked people lying in a Roman piazza (Spencer Tunick, Canada); a room full of clocks, some ticking, some not, within a room full of rubble (Kimio Tscishiya, Japan); bombed mansions in the Afghan desert (Arthur Omar, Brazil); four white dresses, three bloodsoaked (Karin Lambrecht, Brazil); Turin shroud-like pieces crucified between desks and chairs to commemorate Brazil's disappeared (José Rufino, Brazil); an Arab woman caught between two worlds (Shirin Neshat, New York); life-sized photo-portraits of chained Pozzo and Lucky type inmates of a mental institution (Chien Chi-Chang, Taiwan); and most especially, the ethereal underwater rickshaw cyclists of Vietnam pursuing their Sisyphean task on the seabed and intermittently floating up like angels for air (Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Vietnam).
São Paulo, one of the top three world Biennales, has room for everything. As well as the spectacles described, I also found the small, the quiet, the exquisite, the lyrical, the controversial, the funny and the private. I had a much better time than Miss Bishop.
Dr Marian Fitzgibbon is the author of Managing Innovation in the Arts: Making Art Work (Quorum Books)