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South America's Answer to SoHo
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17799 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
1,863 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
Once every two years, the huge Bienal Foundation building in Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo, Brazil, becomes South America's answer to SoHo. All three tiers of the spacious, poured-concrete hall, built in 1964 by Oscar Niemeyer, fill with an array of contemporary art from around the world. Imagine more than one hundred galleries under a single roof, and you will have some idea of the scale of the exposition.
Begun in 1951, the Sao Paulo Bienal is the premier festival of its kind in South America and one of the oldest and largest international exhibitions of contemporary art anywhere. Its only rivals are the Venice Biennal and the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, West Germany.
Essential, each participating country designates a curator who organizes one or more artists' work in an official, national presentation. Other artists exhibit by special invitation from the three Brazilian curators who manage the Bienal's International Fine Arts, Brazilian Fine Arts, and special Events/NewMedia/Performing Arts sections.
The twentieth Sao Paulo Bienal last autumn included paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and performances by approximately 150 artists from forty countries in North and South America, Europe, northern Africa, and Asia. Rooms radiated out from the walkways that encircle the building's open, central space, providing separate areas for each artist or delegation.
Though many works are for sale, the commercial element is secondary to the desire to gain international notice. Prestigious prizes are awarded to an individual artist and to a country, a third prize is awarded in the Special Events section, and the Alexander Gusmao Foundation's Prize (whereby $40,000 is provided to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the purchase of artwork) is awarded a Brazilian artist.
Grand Prize
Martin Puryear, the American sculptor, took the grand prize for best artist in the 1989 Bienal, and France won for the best collective delegation. Puryear, the first black to officially represent the United States a ta major international exhibition invests his nine abstract sculptures with an ambiguous mixture of biomorphism, modern design, and primitivism. Using techniques taken from boat making, furniture making, wheelwrighting, and weaving, he manipulates organic materials into cryptic forms: a squared block of wood capped with a dome of packed
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