Destination: Sao Paulo (24th Bienal - art exhibition).

There is nothing modest about the 24th Bienal de Sao Paulo: work by 264 artists (living and dead) spread over three floors of a 30,000-square-metre building; 33 curators feverishly working (independently and in concert); a four-volume catalogue (the three volumes available the opening week held more than 1,180 pages); a budget in excess of US$9 million; and an anticipated attendance of approximately 500,000 over its two-and-a-half-month run. No less ambitious was the exhibition's premise: covering 400 years of art through four interwoven exhibitions in order to examine the concept of anthropophagy and the history of cannibalism in Brazilian art and culture, in the Western world, and in the wider contemporary global context. Chief Curator Paulo Herkenhoff took inspiration from the 1928 Manifesto Anthropofago of Sao Paulo poet and writer, Oswald de Andrade. Taking 165 slices off the greater metaphorical possibilities, he forwarded his list, along with copies of Andrade's original manifesto and a conceptual schematic plan for the exhibition to his fellow Bienal curators for their consideration.

Cannibalism - the eating of human flesh - as the ultimate finale in human wars of supremacy and the cultural destruction of the other, is differentiated from anthropophagy: The latter is not motivated by a desire to destroy or dominate, but is rather a form of cultural communion, an act of assimilation and appropriation leading to a hybridization and pointing to difference. Anthropophagy, it seems, is a way of absorbing the admired qualities of the other (whether enemy or beloved). If, in the modern world, cannibalism as metaphor suggests the realm of international capitalism - devouring resources, asserting control and supremacy (i.e. survivor takes all), anthropophagy may be manifested in the voracious appetite of cultural discourse. Certainly, as a temporary event of international scope housed in a museum-scale building, the Sao Paulo Bienal itself seemed to provide the cannibalism of the modern museum as its own inevitable subtext.

On a billboard outside the Bienal pavilion (designed by Oscar Niemeyer and opened in 1957), the first line of Andrade's manifesto, "only anthropophagy unites us," defines the context. Inside, on the ground floor, curators representing sixty-eight countries installed the works of their chosen artists in an exhibition of official national representations. An exhibition of contemporary Brazilian works commingled with "Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros, Roteiros" (on the second floor) and "Nucleo Historico" on the third.

The centrepiece exhibition, "Nucleo Historico" was housed in a climate-controlled gallery at the centre of the third floor. In grand understatement, the catalogue declares the undertaking as a "small, critical, interpretive, poetic and speculative exercise." Seventeenth- and 18th-century Europe provides the starting point: four dignified and exotic portraits by Dutch artist Albert Eckhout - each painting approximately 2.65 x 1.5 meters - present four women of Brazil in 1641 as seen in the European mirror: an African and a Mameluke woman (Brazilian, as a consequence of the European slave trade) as well as women of the indigenous Tupi and Tarairu. The Tarairu woman is posed casually, as if on her regular market day. She holds a severed hand; a foot dangles from a basket on her back.

Judging from this beginning, "Nucleo" (centre) seems a misnomer - neither a compact core nor a quick digest. Included were mini-exhibitions of work by Vincent Van Gogh, Rene Magritte, Roberta Matta, Alberto Giacometti, David Siqueiros, Francis Bacon and Bruce Nauman, with side orders of Louise Bourgeois, Max Ernst, Eva Hesse, Gustave Moreau, Edvard Munch, Dennis Oppenheim, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson. If this sounds like a primarily Eurocentric feast with a leg of American Empire served a la carte, it was Brazilian modernism that enveloped (devoured) this core. Among the selections was a survey of the 1920s works of Tarsila do Amaral. Her anthropofagia series of paintings orchestrated a tropical morphology and references to cultural otherness. Breaking from European influence (though she studied with Leger in Paris), the works are described in the catalogue as her "audacity." More contemporary Brazilian works were integrated into "Nucleo" as interlopers nipping at the heels of European masters - with Tunga's two-metre-high steel and magnet assemblage TaCePe (1986-87) propped near Eckhout's 17th-century painting Danca Tapuia and in view of Nauman's neon Eat/Death (1972); Cildo Meireles's four-metre-long wooden folding ruler (appearing normal but with irregular increments) was installed in a wall vitrine below and to the right of Van Gogh's Trees on a Slope (1887).

On the second floor, generous selections of work by Lygia Clark (1920-88) and Helio Oiticica (1937-80) provided evidence of an important transition in contemporary Brazilian work. It would be inadequate to describe their respective works as Fluxus, but by the 1960s both had abandoned conventional art production to explore various incarnations of installation and performance. Clark redressed (undressed) Andrade's manifesto in 1973 with her viewer-participation work titled Baba anthropofagia (drool anthropophagy). Photo documentation from the performance, on view here, invokes the experience of the original moment: imagine the trauma of blind sensation in which, lying on the floor, you are completely enveloped in fluorescent dental floss.

The drooling was in keeping with the multi-curatorial delirium of the second floor. Titled "Roteiros" (routes) repeated seven times (as in Andrade's manifesto), this section included seven curatorial undertakings from a world carved into atypical servings: Oceania, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Canada/USA - the latter organized by a regional outsider, Brazilian curator, Ivo Mesquita. Mesquita stretched the poetic elasticity of "Rotieros" (etc.) by spreading his selections of work by General Idea, Janet Cardiff, Jeff Wall, Sherrie Levine, Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser throughout all three floors. Asher's shanty-town photographs were wrapped around columns "invading" the contemporary Brazilian section. Levine's work appeared on the second and third floors, her photographed Van Gogh next to the real thing. Cardiff's work consisted of a private audio-CD tour that led participants around the building and outside, everywhere and nowhere. At one point, Cardiff tells us that the building smells of raw sewage and burned meat. By wearing the mandatory "Janet Cardiff" tag, we were absorbed into both her roteiros and her audio-sensory anthropophagy. Jeff Wall's back-lit cibachrome Dead Troops Talk (1992) - an earth-tone monochrome of a staged Afghani apres-battle scene - echoes Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). A sketch for the raft of shipwreck despair and cannibalism is installed in the Nucleo (though this version includes a ship - and hope - on the horizon). General Idea's Fin de Siecle occupied one end of the second floor - three fabricated baby seals adrift atop a Styrofoam ice field, offering a vision of the mystic north in this tropical site. The work had a calm and assertive presence in a surrounding sea of Asian works, which leaned toward the literal and grotesque side of anthropofagia: Curator Apinan Poshyananda's catalogue essay recounted flesh-eating mythologies and tales of psychopaths throughout history. Gee, Apinan, lighten up.

The overriding Bienal agenda inevitably sifted down to the ground floor, where countries were represented by single artist-and-curator tag teams (the exception being the countries of Latin America, with one curator for all twelve). Judy Pffaf's (USA) welded-steel and uprooted-tree "jungle gym" was the largest of the misunderstandings, offering little except a spectacular view of the building's interior from a four-metre-high catwalk outside. Johan Muyle (Belgium) appeared to be leaving Las Vegas - with his goofy three-metre-high painted and animated portraits (that is, with moving parts), one of which spewed "tears" into an inflated wading pool (and onto the floor). Equally puzzling and irritating was Sylvie Fleury's (Switzerland) First Spaceship on Venus - seven, three-and-a-half-metre high 1950s sci-fi rockets in pastel lipstick colours, each pumping out cliched space-techno-pop sounds: the anthropophagy of Mary Kay, astronaut.

Such mis-creations were balanced by several thoughtful, site-related undertakings. Mischa Kuball's (Germany) Public Light/Private Light provided a contemporary counter-point to Eckhout's itinerant pictorialism. Kuball went into seventy-two Sao Paulo homes and replaced their rustic-to-modern light fixtures with a single style of generic modernist white plastic tube-light fixture. The domestic settings and inhabitants were photographed "before and after" and the original lights were then installed at the Bienal, with the before-and-after snaps hanging like price-tags (or some consumer-oriented sales bumph) from each fixture. Brian Maguire (Ireland) took up residence for eight weeks in a Sao Paulo favela (a squatter's "town") and produced a series of drawings of children. These works, which belong to the children's respective families, were borrowed for the Bienal and installed alongside in situ photographs as a collective portrait of the faces of Brazil's contemporary plural society. The drawings grace the front and back covers of the Bienal national representation catalogue in which a passage from Jonathan Swift's satirical A Modest Proposal (1729) is quoted - the passage advocating the breeding of children for consumption as food.

Olafur Elliason (Denmark) constructed a large artificial ice pad that extended out of the building - another northern vision for the tropics and a visual echo with General Idea's Styrofoam ice pads almost directly above (but out of sight).

Equally thought-provoking were a number of readymade entries. Kim Soo-Ja (Korea) was represented by her in-progress project, "Cities on the Move," a round-the-globe truck journey of 11,000 miles. A flat-bed truck loaded with wrapped bottaris (colourful Korean bed clothes that are also used for carrying personal belongings) was parked inside the pavilion. A documentary video-projection replayed a portion of her trek along Korean mountain roads - Kim Soo-Ja riding atop the bottaris and shot from the perspective of a trailing camera, with the truck out of frame. Like the works of Kuball and Maguire, this one refers to everyday life. Ken Lum's (Canada) installation consisted entirely of mirrors (as one might find in a tasteful living room or hallway), each with found photographs inserted along the simple-but-beautiful wooden frames. We see the mementos of other lives as we are reflected (consumed) and re-reflected in the mirrors. Nearby, Elke Krystufek (Austria) had planned to show a work that used one of Lum's mirror works - perhaps as an invitation and actualization of the spirit of the Bienal's anthropophagy - but this did not come to pass and another artist (fellow Austrian Isa Genzken) was appropriated instead.

Anecdote (or non-event) is one of many indicators of the multi-levelled ambitions of the Bienal, its successes and failures. A monochrome section of the "Nucleo" is another such emblem, offering up works-in-the-flesh by Kasimir Malevich, Peiro Manzoni and Lucio Fontana (though the curatorial rationale of "white consuming all other colours" seems under-developed) and paintings from the 1920s and 40s by the Venezuelan Armando Reveron (1884-1954) that are an out-of-the-blue revelation - Reveron's white and non-colour (fugitive?) landscapes and scenes proving the vitality and originality of non-Eurocentric modernism and self-determination.

It was not enough to walk around and admire one thing above another. The Bienal posed a severe test of memory - to recall what has been seen and to appreciate the connective tissue and routes (roteiros and more roteiros). Andrade's manifesto remains a critical moment in Brazilian modernism. When in 1928, six years after Sao Paulo's ground-breaking "week of modern art," Andrade asserted that modernism was possible in the "virgin forest" of Brazil, he called for a modernism distinct from the European model - one that would embrace the contradictions of Brazilian culture and drive the engine of its identity. In conversation, Ivo Mesquita spoke of the persistence of the modernist ideal and the equally persistent absence of contemporary black Brazilian artists - noting that racial and class distinctions prevail, as does the chasm between the art world and the real world. Though art can't change these facts, the subject (Brazil's own socio-cultural conditions) is far from exhausted and Sao Paulo's next Bienal would do well to continue its exploration, begun this year, of these risky paths.

End note: One end of the exterior of Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion is dominated by the work of Sao Paulo artist Regina Silveira. Huge black animal tracks cover the side of the building, fanning out as they move upward in a distorted perspective from a single point. Here was a public and monumental sign of two natures (the primal/animal world and human culture) and an emblem of the multiple roteiros explored inside. I think Andrade would have approved.