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Brazil, Latin America: The World

Isobel Whitelegg
Version of record first published: 16 Feb 2012

To cite this article: Isobel Whitelegg (2012): Brazil, Latin America: The World, Third Text, 26:1, 131-140
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Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 1, January, 2012, 131 140

Brazil, Latin America: The World

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The Bienal de Sao Paulo as a Latin

American Question
Isobel Whitelegg

1. Frederico Morais,
unpublished statement, 18
October 1980, from the
Reuniao de Consulta de
Crticos de Arte da
America, Arquivo
Historico Wanda Svevo,
Fundacao Bienal de Sao
Paulo

For us Brazilians. . . the most important thing is to define a position in

relation to the continent. The danger of lacking a well-defined continental
politics on the part of Brazil is that of taking Latin American art only as a
fashion, as Latin-Americanism. And in this way, to play the international
game, considering Latin America as a theme, as an opportunistic approach
and one that is, naturally, superficial.1
Frederico Morais

2. In the context of the

Reuniao de Consulta de
Crticos de Arte da
America, MAC-USP/Hotel
Brasilton, Sao Paulo 16 18
October 1980, organised
by Amaral under the
auspices of the Fundacao
Bienal de Sao Paulo.
Amaral invited critics from
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El
Salvador, Ecuador,
Guatemala, Guyana,
Honduras, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru,
Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic,
Uruguay and Venezuela.
(Cuba, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Guyana,
Honduras and the
Dominican Republic were
unable to attend.) She
devised a set of questions to
which all participants
including Damian Bayon,
Ticio Escobar, Jorge
Glusberg, Angel Kalenberg,
Mirko Lauer, Frederico
Morais and Marta Traba
were invited to respond.

In October 1980, two Brazilian critics, Aracy Amaral and Frederico

Morais, presented proposals for the transformation of the Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo into a Latin American biennial.2 Their ideas were
well rehearsed the product of a pan-continental discussion that had
been active for at least five years. In light of more recent curatorial
models their plans also seem prescient. By bringing into question the
role of North American institutions in fostering Latin-Americanism,
and in asserting the need for Latin America to rewrite its own history
of art, they stand as propositions relevant to current debates concerning
Latin American art as an epistemological field differentiated by loci
of enunciation that are ordered by regimes of language, power and
visibility.
To speak of Latin American art in Brazil is at first glance contradictory, the reception of an art of which Brazil already forms a natural
part. There is little natural, however, about the idea of Latin American
art. Within the region, the construction of a continental consciousness
is associated with the effort of a generation of critics, supported by a
series of colloquia in different locations in the 1970s.3 The versions generated by Juan Acha, Damian Bayon, Marta Traba, Amaral, Morais and
others do not provide a consensus; but the network established in the
process constitutes a movement characterised by a committed search
for the establishment of common denominators or shared conditions. It
was this context that supported the development of a bid to stage a
Latin American coup of Brazils international biennial.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.641222

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3. In 1966, UNESCO
instigated an initiative
promoting meetings
concerning Latin American
culture, within different
cities of the continent and
with the participation of
interdisciplinary critics
from different Latin
American nations;
UNESCO conferences
focused on visual art
included those held in
Quito, 1970, and Mexico
City, 1974 (organised by
Damian Bayon).

Amarals 1980 proposal re-ordered the hierarchies between the Latin

American and the International, reflecting her long-held belief that the
bienal had been founded upon geopolitical error modelled on Venice,
the bienal held the world as its primary domain of projection, directly
placing Brazil in relation to the normative International with no continental mediation standing between the two. Amarals stated convictions were
that we cease, once and for all, to be observant of others and see ourselves and our neighbors more; we stop being an alternative to the
Venice Biennale, and that the biennale should be a manifestation of a
need.4 The Latin American biennale imagined by Amaral would not be
isolationist but rather would include works from Europe, the USA and
Asia selected from a Latin American perspective. This realignment, to
read the International through the critical lens of the Latin American,
was also an attempt to recruit the longevity and patrimony of the Fundacao Bienal (Sao Paulo Biennial Foundation) in shifting the most powerful
locus of epistemological enunciation concerning Latin American art from
the North to the South:
Only in this way will we no longer depend on the methodology of North
American universities for the formation and updating of libraries, or elaboration of reflection on Latin American art.5

4. Aracy Amaral, unpublished

statement, 18 October
1980, from the Reuniao de
Consulta de Crticos de
Arte da America, Arquivo
Historico Wanda Svevo,
Fundacao Bienal, Sao Paulo
5. Aracy Amaral, unpublished
statement, 18 October
1980, op cit
6. Frederico Morais,
unpublished statement, 18
October 1980, op cit
7. A phrase coined by the
Uruguayan literary critic
Angel Rama, which Morais
cites in Spanish (una
remozada galera de
dictadores).
8. Aspects of Moraiss 1980
statement are woven into
Re-writing the History of
Latin American Art, his
curatorial statement for the
I Bienal do Mercosul. See
Frederico Morais,
Reescrevendo a historia da
arte latino-americana, in
Catalogo Geral da I Bienal
do Mercosul, FBAVM,
Porto Alegre, 1997, pp 12
20. The Mercado Comum
do Sul is a free trade
agreement set up in 1991
and originally covering
Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay
and Uruguay.

Like Amaral, Morais was convinced that the bienal should answer to
necessity, that it should not be gratuitous, but address work to be done.
Responding to the question of which period should be served by the exhibition, he asserted:
After the trauma of the vanguard, the neurosis of being modern, having
overcome the positivist vision of artistic evolution via an escalation of
isms, the compartmentalisation of art in periods of pre-Columbian, Colonial, Republican, Modern, Vanguard, etc. has no more sense today.6

The question, he stated, is how to read history with an emphasis on

formation not information. For Morais, a Latin American biennial
could represent an urgent project of research to identify the shared conditions under which artists had worked under Latin Americas rejuvenated gallery of dictators modes of creation and subterranean
circulation, the use of metaphor or cipher as a weapon of the oppressed.7
Such a project would reveal that the notion of the fantastic was not
escapism, but rather a dive into social and political reality and one
that could, moreover, be activated as a historical reading, addressing centuries of repression from the colonial period to the recent past. Morais
asserted that, as a colonised country, Brazil inherited a vision of the
world that is not ours and like Amaral he stated the need for Latin
America to rewrite its own history of art and the potential role of a
Latin American biennial in that process. This idea, nearly two decades
later, became the premise for the first edition of the Bienal do Mercosul,
curated by Morais in 1997.8
The appearance and steady continuation of the Bienal do Mercosul in
Porto Alegre may provide a conclusion to the 1980 petition to use a biennial form in order to realign and resolve Brazils relationship to the body
of land in which it sits. Whether it constitutes a remedy to the lack of a
definitive position as observed by Morais is a moot point. There
remains, in the coexistence of the two bienals, a literal ambivalence.

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133

9. See Aracy Amaral, Do

Simposio de Austin, in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico: Entre o Feijoada
e o X-Burguer, Nobel, Sao
Paulo, 1983, pp 222 225;
originally published in Vida
das Artes, Rio de Janeiro,
JanuaryFebruary 1976
10. See Aracy Amaral, Crticos
da America Latina Votam
contra uma Bienal de Arte
Latino-americana, in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico, op cit, pp 358
363; originally published
(in Spanish) in Re-vista del
Arte y Arquitectura, vol 2,
no 6, 1981, Medelln,
Colombia
11. See Aracy Amaral, A
Bienal Latino-Americana
ou o Disvirtuamento de
uma Iniciativa, in Amaral,
Arte e Meio Artstico, op
cit, pp 296 300; originally
published in Encontros
com a Civilizacao
Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro,
October 1978
12. In Marta Trabas view the
Bienal Latino-Americana
displayed prejudice and
favourable treatment to
certain countries including
Brazils 140-strong
representation of artists.
She reportedly termed it a
racist biennale citing a
failure to provide captions
for works from Uruguay,
Paraguay, Bolivia and the
Dominican Republic, and
the total absence of artists
from the Caribbean and
Ecuador. See Simposio da
Bienal termina com
propostas e criticas, Folha
de Sao Paulo, 7 November
1978. Her in absentia
response to Amarals 1980
consultation expressed a
scepticism rooted in
disappointment with the
1978 event.

Sao Paulos focus on Latin America is inconsistent, ambiguous to the

extent that the moments at which an emphasis is announced with
respect to the forthcoming 2012 edition, for instance it seems appropriate to ask, with curiosity or with suspicion, what is driving the decision to
be Latin American. The bienals non-committal relationship to Latin
America is one provocation for retrieving, in what follows, a history of
its engagement with the idea of Latin American art as part of the
events ill-remembered critical history and the related reception, and
influence, of Latin-Americanist thought on the part of Brazilian critics
and artists.
The Fundacao Bienal had, in 1978, hosted a Bienal Latino-Americana
de Sao Paulo. That event, however, had not replaced Sao Paulos recognised international exhibition but rather the series of national biennales
that had been held, since 1972, in the off-years in between. The anticipated second edition was postponed. The 1980 Reuniao de Consulta de
Crticos de Arte da America (Consultative Meeting of Art Critics of
America) organised by Amaral, under the auspice of the Fundacao
Bienal, in its place, was intended to debate the future of the initiative.
It also reactivated an earlier more radical proposal to replace the international with the continental, a plan that she had been involved in drafting in 1975.9
By 1980 the biennale was at low ebb. After a decade marked by international withdrawal, and the death of its founding father, a proposal for
definitive reform was both opportune and necessary. Not simply a discussion amongst like-minded critics, the meeting was one that could, it was
hoped, effect change. Nine of the critics present at the meeting voted in
favour of the proposal that there should be one Latin American biennale;
the majority decision (twenty-three in favour) was for an International
Biennale that would contain a Latin American emphasis constituting
no to any future Latin American biennial.10
The 1978 Bienal Latino-Americana de Sao Paulo had been a catalyst
to the 1980 meeting, but was an event only indirectly linked to the conversations that Amaral and Morais maintained with their Latin American
peers. Amaral herself had described it as the betrayal of an initiative11
and the historiographical register overwhelmingly consigns the Bienal
Latino-Americana to failure. The testimony of Latin American critics
involved in a parallel symposium in 1978 likewise contributes to the
verdict that the Bienal Latino-Americana was fatally flawed.12 I am not
seeking to contest that verdict, but rather to establish how the Bienal
Latino-Americana relates to the debates concerning the role of a Brazilian
biennale in relation to Latin America those that preceded the event and
those that have followed it.
Immediate criticism focused both on its title-theme, Mito e Magia
(Myth and Magic), and on inadequate consultation in imposing that
theme in concert with a static, anthropological curatorial order (Indigenous, African, Euro-Asian, Mestizo). The form and name of Bienal LatinoAmericana had been decided by the Conselho de Arte e Cultura (Council
of Art and Culture) under the directorship of then President of the bienal,
Luiz Fernand Rodrigues Alves. Latin American critics Juan Acha (Peru/
Mexico) and Silvia Ambrosini (Argentina) were consulted after the fact.
It remains impossible to ascertain the author of the title Mito e Magia.
In a round-table discussion organised by the O Estado de Sao Paulo

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13. See Olney Kruse, Mesa

Redonda, A Bienal: A
pesquisa de arte latinoamericana, entre Mitos e
Magia, Jornal Da Tarde,
O Estado de Sao Paulo, 28
October 1978, pp 2 3.
14. The twenty artists, as billed,
were: Gabriel Borba, Artur
Barrio, Mauricio Fridman,
Ivald Granato, Claudio
Tozzi, Lfer [Luis Fernando],
Helio Oiticica, Antonio
Dias, Sergio Regis,
Ubirajara Ribeiro, Ruy
Perreira, [Francisco] Inarra,
Genilson [Soares], Olney
Kruse, Regina Vater, Gretta,
Alfredo Portillos, Ibanez
Ma, Lygia Pape and Rubens
Gerchman. Alfredo Portillos
(a member of the Grupo de
Los Trece) participated in
both Mitos Vadios and the
Bienal, as did Marta
Minujn who, alongside
Ana Maria Maiolino, was
one of several unadvertised
participants. See Arethusa
Almeida de Paula, Mitos
Vadios: Uma Experiencia
da Arte de Acao no Brasil,
unpublished thesis
(mestrado em Historia da
Arte), Universidade de Sao
Paulo, 2008, available at
http://www.
dominiopublico.gov.br
15. Aracy Amaral, Do
Simposio de Austin, in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico, op cit, pp 222
225. Originally published
in Vida das Artes, Rio de
Janeiro, JanuaryFebruary
1976.
16. See Florencia BazzanoNelson, Marta Traba:
Internationalism or
Regional Resistance?, Art
Journal, winter 2005,
pp 87 89.
17. See Aracy Amaral,
Aspectos do naoobjectualismo no Brasil, in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico, op cit,
pp 384 385.
18. The manifesto was printed
and circulated during the
event, and at the Bienal; its
content is reproduced in
journalistic accounts,
including Francisco
Bittencourt, Dos Mitos e
Magia aos Mitos Vadios,
Tribuna da Imprensa, Rio

newspaper, Rodrigues Alves and Carlos Schmidt art critic and member
of the organising committee engaged in a comical effort to evade
that question.13 It was, however, Schmidt who took responsibility
for the realisation of the exhibition, while Acha organised the parallel
symposium.
The criticism directed against Mito e Magia was underscored by the
title of a collateral event Mitos Vadios (Lazy Myths) a one-day
happening, organised by the performance artist Ivald Granato on the
Sunday after the Bienals opening, in a Unipark parking lot at the foot
of Rua Augusta. It involved twenty billed artists and several late-joiners
including the then recently repatriated Helio Oiticica; his participation
has contributed forcefully to the historiographical persistence of Mitos
Vadios.14
The context in which Amaral reported the existence of a different,
shelved, plan to transform the Bienal into an exclusively Latin American
event is an article reviewing her observations following an October 1975
symposium organised by Damian Bayon at the University of Texas,
Austin.15 The event, known commonly as the Austin Symposium, was
also significant for Marta Trabas increasingly polemical defence of a
culture of resistance, as argued by her 1973 work Dos decadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanas, 1950 1970 (Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Plastic Arts, 1950 1970). Following a
radical turn in Trabas thinking provoked by political exile and a
reading of the works of Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre
she argued that industrialised nations were dominated by an ideology of
technology, supporting an internationalist aesthetic of deterioration
exemplified by experimental forms of art. For Traba, experimental new
media art neither expressed nor adequately communicated with the undeveloped context of Latin American societies. In material terms, resistance
meant a deliberate return to the non-alienated media of painting, printmaking and drawing. Moreover, the visual codes of such media should
ideally convey mythical atemporal elements, thus fulfilling a capacity
to pull the national reality from its underdevelopment and transpose it
to a magical, mythical, or purely imaginative level superior to the imitation of tasks proposed by highly industrialised societies.16 As such, the
theme eventually adopted by the Bienal Latino-Americana de Sao Paulo
was distinctly Trabian in orientation.
The effect of Trabas provocation on both Amarals and Moraiss considerations of the political import of more experimental practices is
marked, while the thesis of resistance, and its prescriptive approach to
form, was directly contested by the realisation of Mitos Vadios.
Writing in 1981, Amaral dismissed Mitos Vadios as an irrational
gesture of reactionary individualism insensitive to debates marked by a
moment of deep political tension prior to the processes that inaugurated
the beginning of the end of military rule.17 The event has since become
something of a myth in itself. With the exception of the spotlight
placed on Oiticicas Delirium Ambulatorium, there is no systematic documentation of the concerns of individual interventions by the remaining
artists involved. One register of the event, however, is a manifesto,
authored by Artur Barrio together with the architects Dinah Gimaraes
and Lauro Cavalcanti.18 From the point of view expressed by this text,
Mitos Vadios was not simply a protest acted out against the general

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de Janeiro, 2 November
1978 and Roberto Pontual,
Hay Que Hablar, Jornal
do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro,
12 November 1978.

art system, but a retort to Traba on the part of a group of Latin American
artists whose means of experimentation would fall into a camp counter to
her definition of resistance.
Rather than remembering the event according to its more celebrated
participants, or dismissing its irreverence as absurdist, Mitos Vadios
may be seen to articulate retaliation on the part of artists against the negation of the critical potential of their work. As such, it anticipates the corrective readings of Traba that have been made by a later generation of
critics who have placed a particular emphasis on the political potential
of Latin American conceptualism. Translating her surname to the Portuguese, Trava, in order to underscore its literal meaning (lock) the manifesto reads a return to non-alienated forms as an argument for the
media imposed under European Academicist colonialism a return
that, moreover, would serve an art market offered new Latin American
versions of a medium for which buyers already had an appetite. As
such, this reading of Traba was in accord with Moraiss earlier response
to her presentation at the 1975 Austin Symposium. Although more
respectfully put, Morais too had voiced the suspicion that the very
same forms that she defended politically were those that would appeal
to and create a market for Latin American art.19
The artists involved in Mitos Vadios lived and worked in distinctly
urban contexts: Rio, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. The last words of
their manifesto attempted to convey a Brazilian reality that could not
be simply carved into promiscuous cosmopolitanism and the resistance
of closed areas where the preservation of tradition could return an
aesthetic of resistance:
In reality, myths and magic are found in their natural state on the streets
and/or in the forest, they are inseparable from broad Brazilian reality.
The attempt to reduce them to an exhibition, according to conventional
framing, results in tourist shop style space, a simple sampling of exotic
objects, without recognising a real deepening radicalism in Latin
America.20

19. See the contributions to the

Austin Symposium by
Frederico Morais cited in
Andrea Giunta, America
Latina en disputa: Apuntes
para una historiografa del
arte Latinoamericano,
presented at Studies from
Latin America, Instituto de
Investigaciones Esteticas,
UNAM/Rockefeller
Foundation, Oaxaca,
February 1996, available at
http://servidor.esteticas.
unam.mx/edartedal/
oaxaca.html
20. Mitos Vadios manifesto,
cited in Francisco
Bittencourt, Dos Mitos e
Magia aos Mitos Vadios,
op cit

Mitos Vadios did, however, emphasise only one dimension of radical

practice, the intimate networks that connected artists primarily
working in urban centres and often those with some access to supportive
institutions Walter Zaninis Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Sao
Paulo, Moraiss Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio and the Instituto Di
Tella (and later the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion) in Buenos Aires.
Whereas myths and magic are indeed found in their natural state on
the streets and/or in the forest the extent to which Brazils internal contradictions can be resolved within a shared network of urban radicalism is
questionable, and as Morais had also acknowledged there was truth
in Trabas thesis of opposition between the open and the closed.
The event that the Bienal Latino-Americana had replaced, Sao Paulos
Bienal Nacional, had allowed for the possibility of perceiving Brazil as a
microcosm of the dialectic of development and underdevelopment that
preoccupied Latin American art critics at that moment. In extending
the projection of a national project to encompass Latin America,
rather than taking the gamble of reducing or removing international
participation, replacing the Bienal Nacional was a small sacrifice on the
part of the Fundacao Bienal. But thinking of this succession in purely

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136

21. See Walter Emanoel de

Carvalho Mariano,
Etsedron, unpublished
thesis (Mestrado em Artes
Visuais), Escola de Belas
Artes, Universidade
Federal da Bahia, Salvador,
2005; available at http://
www.bibliotecadigital.
ufba.br. Mariano provides
a convincing interpretation
of the groups figurative
sculptural environments
as an animation of the
visual language of woodcut
(a media in which all
members had been trained
at the School of Fine Arts,
and one strongly associated
with radical pedagogy and
leftist politics in Brazil).
22. See Aracy Amaral,
Etsedron: Uma forma
de Violencia, in Amaral,
Arte e Meio Artstico, op
cit, pp 247 248; originally
published (in Spanish) in
Artes Visuales, Mexico,
April June 1976.

administrative terms a simple replacement places inadequate focus on

the effect that the Bienal Nacional had on the constitution of the international biennale and on wider critical perception of Brazilian artistic
production.
Brazils national biennale was not an insignificant event. Artists were
chosen by regional juries from pre-bienal exhibitions across the country,
and this selection process returned a showing with the capacity to contest
the dominant Rio Sao Paulo axis. It could be assumed that existence
under a military dictatorship would make a nationalist project inevitable,
but these exhibitions did throw Brazils internal dependencies into relief,
while also revealing the work of younger artists and collectives whose
work often articulated political concerns. This was notably the case
with the five projects produced by the Bahia-based collective Etsedron
(the word Nordeste reversed) for whom Sao Paulo presented a strategic
stage to display the underside of Brazils neo-liberalist economic miracle.
Formed in 1969 by students on both formal and open courses of the
School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, during
the decade of its existence Etsedron developed a distinct method of practice rooted in collectivity. Its members produced their work during a
series of convivencias or shared lived experiences, living with rural communities in the arid hinterland of the Northeast sertao in a process that
approximated the procedures of ethnographic fieldwork. The works produced in situ were anthropomorphic figures, twisted into shape from
available aesthetic materials vines, straw, leather, gourds, seeds and
roots. These were presented in Sao Paulo within a series of Ambientais
(Environments) where the area of the pavilion occupied was typically
demarcated by a deep dirt floor. The animation of each environment
was completed by the performance of music and dance, together with
slide-projections and the transmission of recorded sounds.21
Writing on the work of Etsedron in 1976, Amaral understood the
jarring presence of its combatively rural and regionalist aesthetic in Sao
Paulo according to Trabas distinction between cosmopolitan-open and
resistant-closed regions of the Latin American continent. For Amaral,
the Brazilian Northeast was a region that because of its lack of economic oxygen zealously maintained its cultural traditions. Moreover,
she read Etsedrons collective work as an alert addressed to the southern
metropolis, not necessarily in drawing attention to the economically
drained north, but in reminding the country-continent of its roots.
Indicative of her preoccupation at that time, the article closes by again
calling for a Latin American focus for the Bienal de Sao Paulo:
If we are to appreciate, without prejudice, a proposal such as Etsedrons
and also that of a mulatto or rural [sertaneja] art in a Biennial modelled
on Venice what a scandal! then maybe we should align ourselves (following Juan Achas exhortation) with a Latin-American critical focus.
This is the crucial point: could there possibly be a Brazilian expression
or language not copied from the blueprint of Western culture? Are we
autonomous enough for that?22

Between 1973 and 1978 and across different incarnations of the biennale,
Etsedron maintained a consistent presence participating in the Bienal
Nacional 1974 (where the collective was awarded the main prize),
three consecutive Bienais Internacionais (1973 1977) and finally the

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137

23. See Isobel Whitelegg, The

Bienal de Sao Paulo:
Unseen/Undone (1969
1981), Afterall 22,
Antwerp London Seville,
2009, pp 106 113.
24. Cited by several journalistic
accounts, including
Escandalo en la Bienal,
Punto de vista: Revista de
cultura, Buenos Aires,
March 1978, p 13.
25. Aracy Amaral, O Regional
e o Universal na Arte:
Porque o Temor pelo
Latino-americanismo?, in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico, op cit, p 293;
originally published in
Estado de Sao Paulo,
Suplemento Cultural, 8
October 1978
26. Frederico Morais, America
Latina nao pertence a Sao
Paulo, Aracy (Latin
America doesnt belong to
Sao Paulo, Aracy), O
Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 13
October 1978
27. See Aracy Amaral, A
Bienal Latino-Americana
ou o Disvirtuamento de
uma Iniciativa, op cit, pp
296 301 and Frederico
Morais, Bienal de Sao
Paulo: O Desencontro da
America Latina, O Globo,
Rio de Janeiro, 10
November 1978, p 33

Bienal Latino-Americana, 1978. Etsedron was also drawn into a debate

significant to the perception of Latin American art in Brazil when in
1977 the government-sponsored Itamaraty prize was awarded for the
first time to a Latin American participant, the Buenos Aires-based
Grupo de los Trece (Group of Thirteen). Ostensibly collaborative, the
dynamics of the Grupo were distinct from those of Etsedron. The force
driving and framing its visibility was entrepreneur, cultural promoter
and Director of the Buenos Aires Centro de Arte y Comunicacion
(CAyC), Jorge Glusberg, whose aspirations were unashamedly internationalist to the extent that his promotion of the CAyC might be seen
as the paradigm upon which Trabas negative assessment of technologically experimental, conceptual media was based. Glusberg also had a
record in Sao Paulo. For the XI Bienal Internacional (1971) the first
edition realised after the international boycott he had secured the Fundacaos support for Art Systems, an hors concours exhibition of international conceptual art. His attempt to recruit North American and
US-based Latin American artists to the show was met with an effective
campaign of political resistance, and that project remained unrealised.23
While some saw the Grupo de los Treces conquest of the Bienal Internacional as a vindication of Latin American art, others perceived the prize
as a logical consequence of Glusbergs ambition and the considerable
funding he invested in the realisation of the project. In protest against
the groups award Brazilian artist Frans Krajcberg dismantled his work
before the close of the biennale, claiming that the jury were under
undue pressure; he had also taken offence at being awarded a lesser
prize, seeing it as more appropriate for promising younger artists than
those of his age and experience, and offered his winnings to Etsedron
(who refused it). Press reports suggest that Krajcberg was not alone in
his antipathy, anonymously citing commentators who had suggested
that the prize was an official favour to Argentina (country of a friendly
regime) or asking what would happen if they awarded it to Etsedron,
for example, and showed the whole world a vision of Brazilian misery?24
The precedent established by Grupo de Los Trece in 1977 was significant to the critical debate surrounding the Latin American biennial the
next year, and a point of reference in a briefly flaring polemic between
Amaral and Morais. In response to an article by Morais, Amaral
argued, Latin American Art is not in fashion, as Frederico Morais
would incorrectly see it, just because the Grupo de los Trece won the
prize at the last biennale.25 In his defence, Morais clarified the nuance
of his argument, that, conversely, the fashion for Latin American art
had allowed Grupo de Los Trece to win; the prize was a consequence
of Glusberg expressing Latin Americanism in an internationalist language
(conceptual art). Amidst a jury made up largely of foreigners, under the
sway of Latin-Americanism, their success was perfectly predictable.26
Amaral and Morais maintained and maintain distinct critical
voices, in their appraisal of Brazilian artists and in their readings of
Latin American criticism. Their response to the 1978 Bienal LatinoAmericana was reconciled by shared frustration but also a desire that
the project should continue, reflected two years later in their
contributions to the October 1980 consultation. The criticism detailed
in their reviews of the 1978 show is not a polemical diagnosis of
failure, but rather an indication of corrections to be made.27 Moraiss

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28. Edison de Luz, cited in

Dimistificar valores
culturais falsos: a proposta
do Etsedron (Demystifying
false cultural values:
concerning Etsedron),
Folha da Tarde, Sao Paulo,
6 November 1978
29. Helio Oiticica, interview
with Lygia Pape, Revista de
Cultura Vozes, vol 72, no
5, Rio de Janeiro, 1978, pp
363 370, as cited by
Lisette Lagnado in II
Seminario Semestral de
Curadoria, Revista
Marcelina, FASM, Sao
Paulo, 2009, pp 103 104
30. Frederico Morais,
Reescrevendo a Historia
da Arte Latino-americana,
op cit
31. The term no-objetualismo
(non-object-based art) was
coined by Acha in Mexico
around 1973 in the context
of a Marxist approach to
counter-cultural protest,
the Mexican artist
collectives known as los
grupos and indigenous
popular aesthetic
processes. See Miguel A
Lopez and Emilio
Tarazona, Juan Acha y la
Revolucion Cultural. La
transformacion de la
vanguardia artstica en el
Peru a fines de los Sesenta,
introduction to Juan Acha,
Nuevas referencias
sociologicas de las artes
visuales: Mass-media,
lenguajes, represiones y
grupos [1969], IIMA,
Universidad Ricardo
Palma, Lima, 2008,
pp 1 17
32. Aracy Amaral, Ainda A
Bienal in Amaral, Arte e
Meio Artstico, op cit, p
399; originally published in
Estado de Sao Paulo,
Suplemento Cultural, 20
December 1981

observation of a deep-seated disjuncture between the exhibition and

Achas parallel symposium where the absence of critical discussion of
artworks was symptomatic is pertinent. Even now, the impression
given by the two separate volumes of the catalogue is that of two discrete,
autonomous conversations.
We dont know if our work has Latin American characteristics, nor
do we know what they would be Edison de Luz, a member of Etsedron,
had commented as a reaction to their presence in the Bienal LatinoAmericana.28 The Latin American biennial was, as the Mitos Vadios
manifesto stated, a top-down manifestation. In an interview with Lygia
Pape, Oiticica added his voice to the suspicions raised by other artists,
a viewpoint that was, as he admits, formed by his recent experience of
New York:
I never liked to separate Latin American art as an isolated thing, for
various reasons. . . For one I do not want to be included. . . Latin
America is composed of heterogeneous things and this makes it all very
problematic. For example, Brazil has nothing to do with Peru and things
like that. I think it is an artificial thing, a forced manner. In New York,
I was already against it, because I thought it was a fabricated minority,
this Latin American art, artists kept separate in a manufactured minority
in a country that is already full of minorities. So it is a very reactionary
thing in my view. . . I think Brazil has more to do with New York than
other Latin American countries. Or with some European traditions. For
example, Germany is closer to Brazil than Peru, from a certain perspective.
In terms of artistic lineage, its true. Its all very problematic. Could it be
art made here? In general the examples that they give are imported
things if one may say so secondhand things. Im also hearing that in
this biennale the proposed theme is myth and magic, but these are philosophical concepts. Myths and magic are not a Latin American privilege,
quite the contrary.29

Given the enduring role that Oiticica is made to play in more recent definitions of Latin American Art, it is tempting to recruit his testimony as an
argument against any regional denomination. However, what his comments seem to reveal is rather an uncharacteristic lack of eloquence, a
simple lack of familiarity with the question at hand (its all very
problematic. . . could it be art made here?). Whereas the taking of a position against Latin Americanism in New York, another manufactured
minority in a country that is already full of minorities, was based
on experience, he had little of that to work from in considering the
emergence of Latin Americanism in Brazil. As Morais stated in 1997:
. . . the idea of a continent to be discovered still persists today and mobilises
the imagination of Latin American artists, who themselves, as much as
foreigners, do not know the territory in which they live.30

The same might be true of Latin America as a critical territory; Oiticicas

identification of Peru as the antithesis of Brazil reveals the absence of a
conversation between his proximity to Ferreira Gullars theory of the
non-object and (Peruvian) Achas coining of the term no-objetualismo.31
In response to the 1981 edition of the Bienal, curated by Walter
Zanini, Amaral protested What emphasis can be seen in this biennale?
None.32 At the 1980 meeting, Zanini had submitted his response to
Amarals consultation in the form of four concise points, asserting the

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139

33. Walter Zanini, unpublished

statement, 18 October
1980, from the Reuniao de
Consulta de Crticos de
Arte da America, Arquivo
Historico Wanda Svevo,
Fundacao Bienal, Sao
Paulo. Zaninis four
concise points closely
resemble his project for the
1981 Bienal Internacional
de Sao Paulo (suggesting
that he had already been
invited to curate the
forthcoming biennale).
34. See Cristina Freire, Poeticas
do Processo: Arte
Conceitual no Museu,
Editora Iluminuras, Sao
Paulo, 1999.
35. Amarals engagement with
Achas no-objetualismo
emerges in texts including
Aspectos do naoobjectualismo no Brasil,
presented at the I Simposio
sobre arte nao-objectual,
Medelln, Colombia, May
1981 and republished
alongside Tentativa de
cronologia de principais
eventos do naoobjectualismo no Brasil in
Amaral, Arte e Meio
Artstico, op cit, pp 376
390. Her Tentative
chronology of the principal
events of non-object based
art in Brazil begins with
Flavio de Carvalhos 1931
Experiencia no 2.

case for only one biennale (international) and observing that, were the
biennale to be focused on current tendencies organised according to the
principle of analogous languages, Latin American artists would in any
case be related directly to artists from other parts of the world.33
Amaral was correct in observing the absence of defined emphasis, and
thus justified in her frustration that the result of the 1980 consultation
had been ignored. But Zaninis project was a faithful rendition of an
aspect of interaction between Brazil and the peripheries and centres of
its own and other continents, one chiming with Moraiss desire to use
the event as a means of researching processes and languages developed
to ensure practice survived political repression. This, a minor expression
of internationalism, was one to which Zanini held privileged access.
Many of the Latin American and international artists represented in
1981 had been those between whom his Museu de Arte Contemporanea
had facilitated contact directly or via the circulation of information in
forms such as mail art, video or the documentation of live practice.34
Amaral and Morais made distinct contributions to the Latin American
problem, particularly in providing contrasting readings of the social and
political role of experimental practice a considered, Brazilian-accented
response to both Trabas hypothesis of cultural resistance and Achas noobjetualismo.35 These continental conversations prompted their reconsideration of experimental practice, which deserves to be recognised as a
forerunner of more internationally visible revisions. Amarals proposition
that the Latin American perspective could replace the International as a
normative basis for selecting works for the biennale remains plausible,
but the parameters of a critical, but coherent and non-divisive, Latin
American gaze were left undefined; this remains work to be done.
The one edition of the Sao Paulo Bienal to approximate that operation
Paulo Herkenhoffs Anthropophagy-themed biennale of 1998 was a
normalisation of Brazilian theory, a question of re-ordering its relationship to the World that again circumvented the continental question.
Oswald de Andrades Antropofagia may be perceived within the
Anglo-American field as part of a Latin American panoply (it has
certainly been cannibalised by artists and curators elsewhere) but it is
at heart a nationally specific critical address to Brazils postcolonial position vis-a`-vis Europe.
To some extent, Brazils continental indigestion can be attributed to
the inherent (not always desired) resistance that it carries, for reasons
that are obvious but also significant. In its dominant scale, the fact
that, as a country colonised by a different nation, Brazil inherits not
only a different language but distinct geographies of relation in particular, its ties to Africa put into place not only by the reach of the Portuguese
Empire but also by the particular centrality of slavery to the development
of its economy. A profound attachment to internationalism at the heart of
the biennale forestalls confrontation of the internal contradiction and
inter-regional illegibility that Etsedron exposed while also standing in
the way of it ever conceding to a continental identity.
And yet, the phrase Latin America is already in emphatic circulation
in relation to the forthcoming 2012 edition of the Bienal de Sao Paulo. As
the present Director of the Fundacao Bienal has asserted, an event curated
by a Latin American (Luis Perez Oramas) acting on a global platform
(Curator of Latin American Art, Museum of Modern Art New York)

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140

provides the parameters to position the Sao Paulo Bienal in the three
domains that the institution interacts with, Brazil, Latin America and
the World. The biennials previous excursions into the Latin American
question show the extent to which these three domains are categories
that are neither stable nor separable from one another: the triumph of
Glusbergs Grupo de Los Trece as a high-budget metropolitan version
of Latin American difference created for and rewarded by a visiting international audience; Etsedron in Sao Paulo as a microcosmic manifestation
of divisive internal contradictions within Latin America; Zaninis Bienal
and Mitos Vadios as the coming to visibility of minor transnational networks and with it the infeasibility of locking peripatetic artists and
ideas into a limited aesthetics of Latin American resistance.
Just as the biennials episodes of being Brazilian (1972; 1974; 1976),
being Latin American (1978) and being International (1951 2010) were
separately administrated regimes that nevertheless produced effects and
generated critical legacies for the event in continuum, so Sao Paulo
remains a stage where these three ways of describing Brazils position
are played out in a dissonant relationship with one another one that
has never been adequately resolved by curatorial intervention, outside
the solutions imagined by Amaral and put into effect by Morais in Mercosul. When the Latin American question was debated in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, the persistent issue at stake was whether the biennales
desire for continental solidarity was committed, and open to debate, or
merely opportune. In the present day, the fact of Brazils financial ascendance, and its position as forerunner amongst emerging Latin American
economies, must also be taken into consideration when listening to it as
a national voice speaking within, to or maybe for its continent. A
vote for compromise in 1980 marked the dissipation of an incipient critical emphasis that will require a concerted effort to recover. In the absence
of a defined position in relation to the continent, one that is as this biennale has in its history proved to be both critical and creative, the risk of
Brazils biennale playing an International game in respect of Latin American art remains.
Unless otherwise stated, Brazilian sources are translated from Portuguese to English by
the author. This article has developed, thanks to conversations, archival research and
seminar discussions concerning the critical history of the Bienal de Sao Paulo, in collaboration with Vinicius Spricigo (Centro Interdisciplinar de Semiotica da Cultura e
da Mdia, PUC/SP) and with the support of the AHRC (in the context of Meeting
Margins: Transnational Art in Europe and Latin America, 1950 1978), the University of the Arts London, and the Arquivo Historico Wanda Svevo, Fundacao Bienal
de Sao Paulo.