28th Bienal de Sao Paulo: In Living Contact.

28TH BIENAL DE SAO PAULO: IN LIVING CONTACT

Curated by Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, Including: Mabe Bethonico, Erick Beltran, Carsten Holler, Armin Linke/Peter Hanappe, Dora Longo Bahia, Allan McCollum, Rivane Neuenschwander, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Carla Zaccagnini, among other artists. Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Rampaging graffiti artists spray-painted the empty first floor of the Sao Paulo biennale building--the Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo--the day after the 28th Bienal de Sao Paulo's opening. This renegade group called the "Pichadores," known in Sao Paulo for attacking cultural institutions, was protesting the extraordinary decision by the curators to leave this biennale exhibition space empty. The 40 vandals involved ended up in an ugly struggle with security guards, who were assaulted and even had their faces spray-painted.

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The biennale curators, Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, stated that they left this first floor empty as a space for reflection on the theme of this year's biennale, In Living Contact, as well as a place to reflect on the history of the Bienal de Sao Paulo and on biennales in general. In truth, the biennale committee was plagued by infighting, which ultimately led to financial problems. The only alternative to a pared-down biennale would have been to cancel it altogether--an option almost chosen for the 27th edition held in 2006. In a show of resilience, the curators of the 28th edition worked with limited means.

Originally defined as a "void," and then as an "open space," the first floor was also used by the curators to connect the building--and, by proxy, the biennale exhibition--to the surrounding Ibirapuera Park and the public using it. This openness, they said, was the intent of the building's architect, Oscar Niemeyer.

Three of the 42 artists included in the biennale, Carsten Holler, Carla Zaccagnini and Mabe Bethonico, exhibited works that assertively reinforced the curatorial intent to connect the public exterior and the biennale's inner sanctum. By including one of Holler's oft-exhibited slides (Valerio Sisters [2008]), Mesquita and Cohen risked redundancy, but overcame it because of the piece's site-specific bridging of the biennale building's exterior and interior. Besides, it is a crowd-pleaser. So is Zaccagnini's Reacao em cadeia com efeito variavel (Chain Reaction with Variable Effect) (2008), which provided park visitors with a playground located several hundred metres from the biennale pavilion. While swings, teeter-totters and merry-go-rounds are typical of such a space, Zaccagnini's design is far from it: visitors to this playground operate a fountain by swinging, spinning and bouncing up and down. The harder one plays, or the more players there are, the higher the fountain's jets rise. The notion of a public fountain--and, by association, any public fixture--requiring cooperation to make it work stresses how infrequently public art intelligently explores collectivity, given its ever dominant tropes of individualism and heroism. Complementing Zaccagnini's gesture of incorporating the park into her work, Bethonico's Unido Cultural Ibirapuera (Ibirapuera Cultural Union) (2008) uses a newsletter to disseminate research from the archives of institutions concerned with or found in that location.

Other works successfully play with the pavilion space itself. Paul Ramirez Jonas' Talisman (2008), for instance, gives out keys granting visitors access to sections of the biennale pavilion not intended for public use. Dora Longo Bahia's sanctioned graffiti, Escalpo 5063 (Scalp 5063) (2008), comprises small patches of blood-red paint peeled off a canvas and adhered to the intricately decorative floor patterns of the exhibition space, that are characteristic of Niermeyer's buildings. High above on the pavilion wall, Rivane Neuenschwander installed a signboard, Um dia como outro qualquer (A Day Like Any Other) (2008), but instead of showing the real date, it has the day, time and month all set to zero. The signboard thus implies that biennales can exist beyond the parameters of time, space and location; they can define themselves by more than a spectacular opening and exhibition.

In addition to addressing the biennale space, Mesquita and Cohen have allowed for public reflection on the history of biennales by providing a browsable library of catalogues from previous biennales held in Sao Paulo and elsewhere. Indeed, there is much for the public to do here: go down a slide; power a fountain; collate an encyclopedia as part of Erick Beltran's El Mundo Explicado (The World Explained) (2008); type a letter as part of Neuenschwander's [...] (2005); or take home a souvenir booklet of photos printed digitally as part of Armin Linke and Peter Hanappe's Phenotypes--Limited Forms (2007).

But one thing the public cannot do much of here is "look" at art. The pavilion's second- and third-floor walls are nearly empty, and art exhibited in the space is sparse. Allan McCollum's installation, Eighteen Hundred Drawings (1988-1991), a series of 1,800 black-and-white drawings of abstract forms, manages the tenuous balancing act of overcoming the tedious emptiness to arrive at comfortable spaciousness. McCollum says he designed the series of loose, organic abstract logos to function as portrait images "that consider [people] within a group such as can happen with family crests, heraldry, logos, flags, banners ..." The horror vacui space-filling that these hundreds of drawings perform is exhibition-saving.

The sparseness of the 28th Bienal de Sao Paulo undoubtedly succeeds in providing a much-needed pause from the nonstop glam typically seen on the international art circuit. Perhaps in retrospect it will stand as a significant cultural marker for the transition from art-market excess to recessionary no frills.

Tellingly, superstar curator Jens Hoffmann mounted a concurrent response exhibition at Sao Paulo's Galleria Luisa Strina called This is Not a Void. Crowded with conceptual and post-conceptual art, the show is a more erudite, "official" unofficial response to the biennale's "void" tactic than the graffiti vandalism. Mesquita and Cohen's success in enticing a leading curator into an applied debate about biennale curation testifies to the impact of their something-from-nothing reflection on the topic.