Every two years the soaring, sprawling city of Sao Paulo, the wealthiest, most populous, most highly industrialized urban area in Brazil, opens the enormous Baroque concrete palace originally designed by Oscar Niemeyer as an exhibition hall for industrial machines and, for ten weeks, unfurls a survey of contemporary art from around the world unequaled in Latin America.
Two years ago the show had been organized around Expressionism and had offered an interesting survey of the Expressionist tradition both within Brazil and elsewhere. The exhibition revealed various little-known treasures of Brazilian popular art, and presented the current stars of neo-Expressionism from Germany, the United States, and other countries. It also confronted the public with a suffocating barrage of willfully bad painting by young artists who were obviously convinced that this was the right thing to be doing that year.
The 1985 exhibition brought home some simple truths: Big shows like this unavoidably must go with the market and with present trends. They are partly dominated by the preferences of national commissioners who have their own friends, obligations, and careers to think of and, above all, can only present what artists are actually painting. This last point may seem startlingly obvious, but visitors do not always bear it in mind.
'Critical Hanging'
Beyond that, the organizers may, as was the case in Sao Paulo, indulge in what has been termed a "critical hanging." This does not mean that the offending artists are lynched by a posse of irate critics, but that the worst and most indigestible of these works were actually hung together in long, narrow corridors, in a way that heightened the monotonous aggressiveness, the depressing sameness, and the self-satisfied lack of intellectual and artistic discipline.
This year's show, once again curated by Sheila Leirner, the young Sao Paulo art critic responsible for the presentation two years ago, took a new, unexpected departure. The theme chosen by Leirner, "Utopia vs. Reality," was refreshingly out of key with the mix of aggressive arrogance and nihilistic despondency one has come to expect in exhibitions of this sort. Not that the actual choice of a theme did much to impel artists to produce works attuned to the subject. Some did--although not always in a convincing manner--but most ignored it, sending in the same sort of works they have been producing quite regularly over recent years. What the choice of theme did achieve, however, was to impel the visitors themselves to view the 3,000-odd works assembled for the occasion from a different perspective.
Leirner astutely chose as her foil a text by Jean-Francois Lyotard, a leading French Postmodernist theoretician, in which he lays out a rather desperate program:
"Here is a course of action: harden, worsen, accelerate decadence. Adopt the perspective of active nihilism, exceed the mere recognition--be it depressive or admiring--of the destruction of all values. Become more and more incredulous. Push decadence further still and accept, for instance, to destroy the belief in truth under all its forms."
This sort of statement is worth examining more
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