Page 138 - ARTE!Brasileiros #37

ART VERSUS IGNORANCE ENGLISH VERSION

1 | A DETAIL FROM THE WORK UNCONFORTABLE OBJECTS (2012), For someone who is not an art critic, like me, these
MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL impressions are enlightening. They reveal a difficulty
of our intelligentsia to assimilate the challenges
REVIEW BIENNIAL | PAGE 113 brought by contemporary collapse. The issues driven
DECOLONISATION IN THE by the so-called “ecology”, as shown by Déborah
Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Há Mundo
32 SÃO PAULO BIENNIAL por Vir? (2014) do not belong to an area, but to an
nd
era. Among mistakes and successes, the 32 São Paulo
nd
Biennial reflects on the protagonist role that
BY PEDRO DE NIEMEYER CESARINO art can represent in these troubled times.
The presence of Vídeo nas Aldeias is significant. Its merit
MORE THAN 50 YEARS AGO, anthropologist is in extrapolating the role of a single creator - Vincent
Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that the apparent Carelli - to turn into a collective agency. His projects
technological simplicity of indigenous societies actually have allowed, for the first time in our path of domination,
translates in worlds geared to “a life worth living.” that indigenous people took the reins of the audio-visual
In fact, this simplicity is an effect of modern technology and hauled them their own criteria,
short-sightedness, whose idea of development leads something that has not disappeared with the new visual
us increasingly into the abyss. The so-called conquest tools but, rather, has been translated in a unique way. A
of development, said Lévi-Strauss in “Cultural greater attention to forms of thought present in movies
Discontinuity and Economic and Social Development”, of Vídeo nas Aldeias could also offer various elements
only exists because of the destruction of indigenous to more lasting (and perhaps happier) alternatives
societies, of the looting of their mineral and territorial to the failed “phallocentric white male” politician.
resources; and the looting of their own bodies - The work of Colombian Carolina Caycedo also reaps its
Earth, Pachamama - which modern societies keep fruits of activism that, even if they do not highlight the
separate from them and use for their own rapacity. (also important) role of the individual artist, they do
The reversal of this process is under the responsibility not despise poiesis, present there to produce a blunt
of all contemporary thinking agents, even in dark times. reflection about the containment of the flows. It’s what
It’s the task of artists, curators, intellectuals and writers we see in the photomontages of dams (metaphors for
involved in emergencies whose transversality cannot be various types of impoundments, including political). It’s
understood as mere ideological intrusion in the sphere what stands out, too, in the series that includes visual
of art. It cannot be understood neither as an alleged narrative Watu and its dialogue with the Amerindian
deviation of public attention of large exhibitions such as written pictographic tradition, both from a plastic
the Biennial - which, by the way, had its larger audience construction standpoint and a textual one, incorporating
in this present edition. However, it is curious that the the Indian cosmological speculations about the
autonomy of art, even dissolved long ago, seems to be environmental disaster of Rio Doce.
surviving in the mind of Brazilian critics. Anyway, the presence of thinkers of the expressive
According to Rodrigo Naves, in an article in O Estado de forms - which seems to me something broader
S.Paulo newspaper printed on 20 September 2016, when than the Western artist figure - could be extended
a “patronizing attitude towards the Brazilian people” to a more effective presence of other agents.
supposedly present at the 32 São Paulo Biennial It’s still under non-indigenous artists sieve (as Bené
nd
is moved away, it’s possible to see a few convincing Fonteles, Maria Thereza Alves or Gabriel Abrantes)
moments arising” in which it is astutely incorporated that indigenous people mark their presence, comfortable
into the creation of the poorest populations of the world in narratives and references of others. It is, however,
to the achievements of modern and contemporary art.” a Biennial that opens its curatorial axis for the
Besides that, the exhibition seemed to be a failure to him art produced in Africa, and from its dilemmas,
because it relied on a redeemer role of minorities that, as demonstrated by the works of Misheck Masamvu
however, would merely contribute to “specific and Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi. The trap, however,
changes in laws and customs, although their poor would add value to their paintings and drawings just
vocation for being at power – maybe luckily so – as “conquests” affected by the adoption of a plastic
would not put them as an alternative of government”. form established by modern art, as if it were
Therefore, actual art would have been lacking the criterion required to assess its relevance and
at the Biennial, by its excessive attachment to its introduction into the selected field of sound art.
“ideologies, [which] are paper tigers”. It would also be insufficient to invalidate other
Arts critic Aracy Amaral (O Estado de S.Paulo, 27 proposals that exploit issues such as feminism,
September 2016), in turn, despise the massive presence colonialism and the activism of the imagination
of works that do not reach the level of true “works”, as mere anthropological impromptu devoid of high
a “larger painting”, a “know-how” characteristic aesthetics or academic preparation. If it’s true
of the production of individual artists. The indigenous that in this Biennial, as well as in other recent and major
presence in the exhibition would be reduced to what exhibitions, the creative, transversal and politicized
she presents as the “work of Vincent Carelli”. thinking is still in search of its own way of expression
The attempt to “dialogue with the environment” would in order to create a challenging dialogue, is not less
be, still, compromised by the “difficulty of a poetic true that it highlights, above all, a transforming action.
or contact with the current reality through art”, It is precisely this action that can still make art, beyond
that wouldn’t have reacted, for example, to the its elitist configurations, a powerful tool of critical
tragedy of the mining company Samarco, in Rio Doce. exercise, able to project conditions of a life worth living.

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