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The Scion Space teamed up with Choque Cultural Gallery to set up São Paulo, an exhibition that celebrates the emerging art culture in the Brazilian city.
The show closed a couple of days ago. So why am i telling you about it? First because that's exactly what i tend to do these days, it takes me ages to get exhibitions online. But more importantly, the gallery was screening a lovely documentary: Temporal : The Art of Stephan Doitschinoff (aka Calma). Having this dream of painting a whole town, Calma traveled to Lençóis and started asking villagers if he could paint murals onto their houses. He soon ended up painting the inside of a chapel and even tombstones in the cemetery. Images of the opening on the Scion website and i uploaded mine over here. |
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Still going through the hundreds of pictures i took at ARCO, still trying to find the spirit to open the 2 kilos catalog of the art fair. In the meantime, here's a Peruvian artist i discovered at the booth of the gallery Lucia de la Puente. Fernando Gutierrez, aka Huanchaco, develops the story of Superchaco, a decadent Peruvian superhero trying to get to grips with the Chaotic City, Lima. Influenced by comics and pop culture, Huanchaco embodies the worst aspects of the Chaotic City. Devoid of any qualm, he is lazy, obnoxious and vulgar. Superchaco doesn't have any particular talent nor superpower. Yet, authorities call him, children look up to him and women fall for him.
The artist recycles and subverts symbols of consumer culture, rendering them "Peruvian' in all their contradiction.
The images that illustrate this post do not reflect what was at ARCO but the images i took at the fair were not exactly great: here, have a look. |
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Paulistas much chagrined by the pauperism of this year's São Paulo Biennial pointed me to its Off version, the Paralela '08. They made sure to add "You know this isn't a huge event either but there are a few interesting pieces over there!"
Titled From Near and Far, the event nods to De près et de loin, a book that documents a conversation between philosopher Didier Eribon and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Curator Rodrigo Moura chose artists who invite us to reflect on the influence of space in their respective works. Although the selection stretches over several continents, most of the pieces are by Brazilian artists. It's been a challenge to find information and good pictures about the artworks i liked the most so i'm going to highlight just a few of them and end with a slideshow, i added the name of the artwork and its author wherever i could so that you can get a better idea of what the Paralela was like (to see the titles of the pictures, i'm afraid you'll have to click on the images and go straight to clumsy clunky flickr).
By the entrance, the provocative and highly ironic photograph made by Rubens Mano shows the Niemeyer pavilion used for the Biennial since 1957. Empty, like most of the pavilion of the Biennial this year, it suggests the limitless potential of the unfilled site. Lina Kim's Rooms are also empty but they have reached a stage of total abandonment. The photographer patiently archives rooms that have been abandoned to time. Sometimes, objects and equipment such as cables, tired wallpaper, peeling paint, fire extinguishers or metal cabinets subsist but nothing reveals what the former function of the room. But outside, the vegetation keeps growing.
Sara Ramo explores everyday life. In her photo series, Como aprender o que acontece na normalidade das coisas, Ramo investigates the moment when objects stop making sense in people's life and generate chaotic situations. Like when she has all shampoos, soaps, towels and brushes pulled out of bathroom cupboards and laid on the floor.
That was already it, i'm afraid. Slideshow Paralela08: On view until December 7, at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, Sao Paulo. |
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Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections, currently on view at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, is one of those rare exhibitions you exit wearing the silliest smile on your face. You are happy. The selection of the artworks is faultless, each piece gets the space it deserves and needs, and the theme of the exhibition with tis mix of edginess and approachability is particularly appealing.
Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections is not an exhibition about cinema, but rather about the idea and concept of cinema and how contemporary artists imbue their works with creative and aesthetic principles that hark back to the cinematic language and its means of expression, wrote Curator Roberto Moreira S. Cruz in the catalog of the exhibition. The 18 works selected explore three core themes: narrativity, the illusion of visualness and the reference to the kinetic experiences of the pre-cinematic era.
To create its little cinematic devices, Brazilian artist Milton Marques uses all kinds of discarded technological instruments rummaged through second-hand shops: optical elements, step motors, printers, copy machines, fruit squeezers, cameras, mini-tv, etc. There is magic not only in the way he infused a new life into the abandoned objects but also in the outcome of his manipulation. Itau Cultural was exhibiting three of his sculptures: To activate the first one, you have to insert a coin in a slot and the photos of a photographic film will (almost) appear to become animated inside a tiny tv-like screen. Because the whole mechanism is exposed, the spectacle is also present out of the screen.
A mundane fruit squeezer powers another of Marques' work.
Marques' pieces provide some further thoughts on the analogy/dissimilarity between cinema and the 18 visual art works at Itau Cultural. Of course, the devices that project the moving images are quirky and ingenious. They clearly refer to cinema but even the space where they are exhibited is miles away from what you would expect to see in a movie theater. Visitors are not spectators bound to their seats, they can circulate and move from one screen to another. The screens themselves are worth a closer look. They do not come necessarily in the typical shape of a large-scale two-dimensional white canvas. As the rest of the exhibition demonstrates, some of these screens are tiny, one is the surface of a light bulb, one is made of sand, another one moves. Sometimes the images are split over multiple screens. 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a work by The Rufus Corporation + Eve Sussman, might look at first sight as almost cinematographic but it refers to other artistic disciplines such as performance, photography and painting. 89 Seconds at Alcázar is almost as haunting as the artworks it takes its inspiration from: Diego Velasquez's seventeenth-century masterpiece, Las Meninas.
Velasquez's painting is one of the most studied and discussed in the history of art. He shakes up the traditional rules of the pictorial architecture by placing King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Mariana both "outside" the painting as observers of the scene and "inside" the space through their reflection in the back wall mirror. Besides, he became one of the first painters known to address his own identity as artist by portraying himself in the act of painting the canvas. In the ten-minute high definition video 89 seconds at Alcázar, the court of Spain is animated. Its protagonists murmur and whisper in each other's ears, they move in a slow choreography across the space to finally take up their position in the painting. But unlike in the original artwork, the scene is envisioned from Velasquez' perspective.
The fact that the protagonists in baroque wardrobe do not look very Spanish is a bit uncanny. That detail left aside, the instant frozen in time by Velasquez's brush is brought back to life true to its original objective: to capture a scene in the everyday life of the royal family. Rosângela Rennó's Frutos Estranhos delicately plays with our perception. Each image, displayed inside a tilted portable DVD player as if it were a picture frame, presents what looks like a static image. Yet, because sound has been added and because the images have been edited and digitally manipulated, viewers have the feeling that they can perceive some type of subtle movement in photos.
In the early '70s Anthony McCall developed solid light films, which emphasize the sculptural qualities of a light beam as it comes in contact with particles in the air. In You and I, Horizontal III, he uses vapor from a haze machine to shape an almost tangible 3D ray.
I still have to meet someone who would remain indifferent to Hiraki Sawa's charming Going Places Sitting Down. I am not going to comment on the work. Instead, let me point you to the video over here.
There is much more to see at Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections. The exhibition runs until December 21 at Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo. If you can't make it to Sao Paulo before the show closes, a consolation prizes awaits you: the catalog is available online as a PDF (now you'll just have to click around, cuz it is burried somewhere inside one of those Flash obnoxiousness.) |
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I arrived yesterday in São Paulo and i still have to recover from the shock. This is the new Berlin, the new New York, the new 'i've never seen such an exciting place before.'
Fernando Llanos, his shirt with dancing skeletons and i went to visit the very disputed 28th edition of the São Paulo Biennale. There are so few artworks to see that the 2nd floor of Oscar Niemeyer's Bienal pavilion has been left completely empty (the pleasure of seeing the interior architecture of the splendid building is such a treat i'm not going to complain about the strikingly poor offer of art.)
Instead of the usual plethora of artworks, Curator Ivo Mesquita has organized a cycle of conferences focusing on the place and meaning of biennials not only in São Paulo but also around the world. According to Mesquita, the Biennial model is ill and must be quarantined. This is why the 2008 Biennial lasts only 42 days long, the normal length of a real quarantine. This is a brave and radical gesture, one that certainly gets tongues wagging. Everyone in town seems to have an opinion about the biennial, its future, biennales in other countries, the way this one should have been handled, etc. I think Mesquita marks a point here.
A few hours before hitting the biennale, we were walking along Avenida Paulista and stumbled upon this official statue wearing a life jacket. What looks like a prank has actually received the blessing of the government. Eduardo Srur did a total of 16 similar interventions all over the city, targeting XXth century monuments glorifying the heroes of national history. The life jacket invite passers-by to get a renewed, fresher look at the city landmarks. By creating a situation in which the city turns its gaze inwards again, Srur proposes a reflection on the connection between the citizen and city space and the possibility of recreating the collective landscape. |
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Sorry for the long silence, this visit to Brazil is far more absorbing than i expected. On Sunday, the organizers of arte.mov (the festival for mobile media art) took us for a school trip to the Instituto Cultural Inhotim. An hour drive away from Belo Horizonte, Inhotim is a contemporary art museum, made of pavilions and installations spread over a lush botanical garden. By garden i mean 600 hectares of natural reserve and a Tropical Park, with 45 hectares of gardens with botanical collections and five ornamental lakes, which together form an area of 3.5 hectares. Part of it was designed following the suggestions of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. The enormous variety of plants makes it one of the largest botanical collections in the world, with rare tropical species and a forest reserve which is part of the Atlantic Forest biome.
Since its opening in 2005, Inhotim has opened new pavilions to house permanent as well as temporary exhibitions and commissioned new site-specific projects to artists such as Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Victor Grippo, Chris Burden and Pipilotti Rist. It is a breath-taking place. You walk around and think 'Wow! If the Xanadu of art existed it would be this place. Or at least something disturbingly similar.' There is some 350 works to discover. I'm not sure i managed to track down all of them but here's a brief overview of my favourites:
Chris Burden's work is often reduced to the stunning performances in which he explored personal danger as artistic expression. For Shoot (1971), he had an assistant shoot a bullet in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Why stop there when you can do better? He set fire to himself, nailed himself on a car, had himself cut, starved, drowned, sequestered, etc.
The work on show at Inhotim, Samson, is of a different genre. It is potentially dangerous but not for the artist. The piece consists of a 100 ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The jack pushes two large timbers against the walls of the gallery. To enter the gallery, visitors must pass through the turnstile and each turn of the turnstile slightly expands the jack. If enough people visit the exhibition, Samson could, theoretically, destroy the building. The installation speaks volume of Burden's opinion of museums and art institutions which the artist identified with "the establishment." By forcing spectators to pass through the turnstile in order to satisfy their curiosity, Burden assigns them equal culpability in the potential destruction of the gallery space.
The True Rouge Gallery contains only one installation: True Rouge (1997) by Brazilian artist Tunga.
The work of Adriana Varejão has also been given its own beautiful pavilion, designed by architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez. Among the works exhibited, I particularly liked the Panacea phantastica (2003-2007). You don't need to know that the tiles portrays 50 species of hallucinogenic plants from different parts of the world to be slightly troubled when you see it.
John Ahearn's murals are often the outcome of a long immersion by the artist and his frequent collaborator, Rigoberto Torres, into a community. They spend time observing its people, their character, values, and vitality in order, in order to better portray everyday people, who rarely have a say in how they are portrayed.
The protagonists of Inhotim's murals are the people living in Inhotim's surrounding region of Brumadinho. A first mural, Rodoviária de Brumadinho [The Bus Station of Brumadinho] (2005), depicts the bus station of Brumadinho and the people who move through it, a place that is not only a center of transport but of social life as well, as it is also home to popular dances.
The other mural, Abre a Porta [Open the Door] (2006), depicts a solemn and spirited religious procession that takes place every year at the church just behind this mural and uphill from it, that is enacted by the Congado and Moçambique, two branches of a local population of pure African lineage descended from slaves who practice a kind of Catholicism that has absorbed animistic deities. And of course any collection of contemporary art has its Olafur Eliasson. There's actually more than one at Inhotim. The one i found most engaging is the Viewing Machine.
Looking like a grown-up and luxury version of the kaleidoscope gadgets for kids, the work creates an effect of reflected light with six mirrors forming a hexagonal tube. Visitor can maneuver the machine toward any point of interest. Through superimposed reflections, a myriad of forms is exposed. More images in my flickr set. |
