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| BETWEEN THE COORDINATES OF TIME AND ART Solvita Krese | |
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Not long after returning from Brazil, where I took part in the opening of the São Paulo Biennial and installed a work by Gints Gabrāns, I had the opportunity to visit Berlin and view the excellent Francis Alÿs exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The major part of the exhibition was composed of notes of impressions accumulated over years spent in Mexico and references to the Mexican culture and traditions. The exhibition opened with a written text by the artist, which ended with a quote, the author of which, unfortunately, I cannot remember. It was the following sentence fragment: "... remember, that in South America time is nothing more than one of the coordinates." This sentence had the effect of a precisely chosen tone in a saturated palette of sound, which cannot be ordered into a unified whole.
My myriad impressions of Brazil are formed to a large degree by images that comprise a well-known stereotype: Brazil's rainforests, myths of Eldorado, the gigantic statue of Christ in Rio, the melody of the bossa nova, Ipanema Beach - just like in the Brazilian soap operas. It is not easy for art to compete with the intensity and diversity of the surrounding environment, though the São Paulo Biennial has become one of the most well known South American brands. The São Paulo Biennial could be called the younger relation of the Venice Biennial. It began in 1951 and is the second oldest Biennial, which continues to gather a huge number of artists and entice record-breaking crowds. According to the statistics, the last São Paulo Biennial was attended by 670 000 viewers, in this way surpassing, for example, blockbuster exhibitions such as documenta. The São Paulo Biennial creates an axis of communication between the south and north. It is not just the geographical position that causes São Paulo to avoid a euro centric position. It claims to be a kind of explorer of marginal territories and is one of the first mega-exhibitions that began to display the work of Asian and African artists. In the last 20 years, over 50 new biennials have been established in the international art world, some more, some less able to survive. Many of these are held in peripheral cities rather than in metropolises - such as Gwangju, Dakar, Tirana, Sharjah - and attempt to study both regional and long considered marginal artistic territories. As opposed to the Venice Biennial, where each country has its own pavilion, at São Paulo all the participating countries are assembled under one roof - in the grandiose exhibition building designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer's architecture, as well as the Biennial itself, is testimony to the unusually rapid and widespread modernisation of Brazil. In the 1950s countless mega utopian projects were implemented in Brazil, including the São Paulo Biennial. The most significant of these, of course, was Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, which was built in the middle of a rainforest based on a plan by Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. In this year's Biennial the 25000 sq. metre space displayed works by 135 artists representing 55 countries. As opposed to previous shows, the artists invited by Alfons Hug displayed their work alongside 'national' displays, creating one unified exhibition. The overall theme for the Biennial, as defined by the curator, is "Free Territory" which is used to refer to a type of no-man's land, not only drawing attention to its geographical and socio-political categories, but also investigating its aesthetic dimension. The territory delineated by this concept includes pockets of pristine environment, unused and abandoned fragments of urban space, outer zones, refugee camps, pirate radio stations, the secret paths of smugglers and other types of freedom absorbing zones. A parallel theme for the Biennial is "Image Smugglers", which is also a reference to the territory of freedom created by the artists, in which strategies of power lose their leverage and the flow of images breaks down customary boundaries. "We will astound you right from the start" announces a sign at the main doors of the Biennial building, stating the ambitions of the organisers and promising new discoveries or surprises within. The reason for this statement, however, never materialises. The most surprising is Niemeyer's building itself, which with its synthesis of baroque dynamics and ascetic modernism interferes the territory of art works. It could be suggested that the layout of the exhibition, which groups artists' works according to their medium, is in itself a surprise. The lower floor is dedicated to large installations, one part of the building being occupied by a gallery of paintings and the other by a block of black video art cubes, while the top floor displays small installations. The curator of the exhibition justifies the simplified layout as being due to the architectural precondition and does not even consider grouping the works according to thematic lines or conceptual approaches. Brazilian Paulo Climachauska, who has created a mirror image of the exhibition pavilion consisting of tiny rows of digits, is one of a number of artists who have created their works as a reference to the exhibition hall, achieving enough of a generalised image and joining the current study of the symbiosis of art and architecture in the international art world. The main axis of the Biennial works comprises the transformation of space, the mapping of territory and problems of urbanisation. The exhibition contains a number of large format photography series, which document successes and failures in Chinese urban planning (Edward Burtynsky, Canada); landscapes of Lima from a foreigner's perspective (Thomas Struth, Germany); and the frozen peace of an English village subordinated to the logic of motorised transport (Naoya Hatakeyama, Japan). Architectural utopias are demonstrated by delicate models of buildings tied together with thread (Carlos Garaicoa, Cuba), urban reality is displayed in the form of embroidered blankets and soft toys (Yin Xiuzhen, China), an attempt is made to portray the dynamics of cities with the use of pictograms (Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Mexico). In his introductory text, Alfons Hug asserts that there is an apparent scepticism against new technologies and a growing interest in the "good old" wooden installations created by craftsmen, which can be found in no small number amongst the works exhibited in the Biennial. Some of these, joining the discourse on the study of the articulation of urban space and the style of "retro modernism", tend to offer alternative and conceptual solutions for space or possibilities for creating shelter (Maxim Malhado, Brazil; Jorge Pardo, USA). A more original architectural study of living spaces is demonstrated through a series of photographs by Veronika Zapletalová from the Czech Republic, in which the viewer can see a large number of summer houses built using a do-it-yourself method, and ascertain that the most daring creative ideas can be achieved through architecture without an architect. Observations of the city and space in a number of artists' works sensitively intertwine with biographically emotional references and anthropologically or intuitively led interest in the stories of others. The series of photographs by the Polish artist Krzysztof Zielinski, "Hometown", shares his personal confusion with the viewer, by recording the familiar features of a township through the camera lens on the first day of the new millennium. The Brazilian master Paulo Bruscky has transported his apartment to the exhibition pavilion, allowing the viewer to wander through the rooms, in which the backstage of an artist's laboratory are presented to the outside world. Simryn Gill (Australia) knocked on stranger's doors and asked their permission to photograph their living rooms when visiting Malaysia for six weeks. Viewing these photographs, it is almost always possible to guess the person's race, religious conviction and income level. While avoiding a removed view or level of voyeurism, the artist has succeeded in creating metaphors about the lives of the people she has met. A synthesis of poetry and documentary photography can be found in Alec Soth's photographs, which were taken over a number of years of travel along the Mississippi, which record the living spaces of people he has met more so than the river itself. Many stories can be found in the painting section, which is dominated by large-format figurative compositions in a more or less expressive or realistic style. Neo Rauch (Germany), with the help of cinematic drama and shot composition familiarises the viewer with the mise en scene of various stories simultaneously. The Austrian artists Muntean/Rosenblum create figurative compositions, which are reminiscent of frozen and distanced advertising photographs from lifestyle magazines. Pavel Pepperstein (Russia) occupies himself with the deconstruction of "political hallucinations" by combining various political symbols and signs without a clear political manifestation in paintings created in the style of agitation propaganda. In turn, the Lithuanian artists, brothers Mindaugas & Gintautas Lukosaitis, draw small scenes from the battles of the Lithuanian resistance movement, in their way continuing the muralist tradition nurtured in Latin America. Exhibited on the third floor in the "small installations" section, one of the most noticeable art works was Gintis Gabrāns' "How to Get On TV", which attracted media attention and stimulated visitors' interest. Four life-sized Starix figures held TV monitors, on which the visitor could view the transformation of a homeless man from Riga central railway station into a dandy, clothed all in white; and clips from Latvian Television with appearances by media stunt-man, Starix. Starix as an image appropriator infiltrated the media world and made the viewer believe that everything was real. Gabrāns denies that he is interested in deconstructing and unmasking the strategies of the media, although he is delighted about the arrival of Brazilian TV crews and their serious bustling about while filming the white-costumed Starix figures with the skyscrapers of São Paulo in the background. Gabrāns, as a skilled master of subversive methods, enacts another "double dissolution" of the situation. The artist maintains that his main object of interest is happiness, or the sum of preconditions that create this difficult to define feeling. He studies fluctuations in the scale of values that are related to changes in the cultural milieu or socio economic situation. For many people, to appear on TV means to live their lives more fully - perhaps then you will be more loved or noticed. The concept of "fame" becomes equivalent to the concept of "happiness". Appearing on TV is like the promise of happiness. Television - the measure of all things. In this instance television is not longer a commodity, the message of which needs to be decoded, it is like a test which must be answered, and the answer is already encompassed in the question and defines your place in the system of social coding. Starix reveals to the viewer the various ways to reach the longed-for trampoline of happiness, how to discover the algorithm of happiness. When discussing shared moods and thematic threads or observable trends of the Biennial, it should be noted that there is the tendency to avoid critical discourse or the use of actively social and political pathos. The artists' interest in the relationship between space, architecture and urban dynamics, as well as materialization of biographical motifs and stories tend to dominate. A distinctive background is created through the proportion of South American, African and Asian artists, whose work is often oriented towards the documentation or interpretation of local traditions, environment and rituals. The wide collection of photography by African artists, the carnivals of Brazil, recording diverse facial features of the ethnic groups of Paraguay, the documentation of Peru's sacred places, rituals accompanied by drumming in Egypt serve as an introduction to cultural elements so different to those of Europe. Interest in the Other serves as an impetus for many euro centrically based artists. European artists' travel records of China, Latin America and Africa have become an indivisible part of current exhibition practice. Has euro centric culture drained its reserves? Cosmopolitanism and nomadism stimulated by globalisation has encouraged the creation of a wide group of European artists and intellectuals, who, either led by curiosity or escapism, undertake shorter or longer journeys to, or take up residence in the territory of the Other and every now and then make an appearance at some international art showing, feeding the exhibition audience with curious trophies and exotic impressions. The journey has become a particular type of format for life, an initiation ritual. This is possibly related to time and the search for the formula for happiness. Being in Brazil, you get the feeling that there is no need to frantically keep up with the times and try to stay in circulation: that you have caught hold of time by swinging in a hammock, and it will never disappear. This is just like Catherine Opie's (USA) photographs, in which she has recorded early morning at Malibu beach with tiny figures of surfers in the distance. In the photographs, nothing is happening. The surfers are simply standing motionless in the calm waters and waiting for a wave. The story is about waiting, about a conscious avoidance of grasping the decisive moment. | |
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