Exhibitions: Biennial Bash in Brazil

Like salesmen, science-fiction addicts and orthopedists, art lovers have conventions too. They are international in scope, the occasion for awarding prizes, and come every two years, presumably on the theory that it takes at least that much time for things to change. Most prestigious of those conventions are the Venice Biennale (70 years old), Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International (69 years old) and the relative newcomer, Brazil’s São Paulo Bienal, started in 1951.

By the time the public gets in for a look, as is happening this week at São Paulo’s eighth Bienal, most of the shouting is over. The real convention takes place in the preview week before the opening, when critics, dealers, collectors and artists live exclusively on cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and art-world politics. With 5,000 works from 54 nations spread along some five miles of walls in an Oscar Niemeyer-designed pavilion, Brazil’s biennial provides plenty to politic about.

Quintessence in a Tent. At the advance showing last week were giant tapestries from Poland, motorized mechanical sculptures made out of scrap iron and continuously-tuning radios by Switzerland’s Jean Tinguely, and batches of Latin American assemblages glued together out of such rummage-sale remnants as sequined bras, false teeth, rubber gloves and old shoes. There was pornography from Holland by Johannes Oldeboerrigter (painted genitalia piled on platters) and pornography from Sweden by Ulf Rahmberg (comic-booklike engravings of copulation). There was a Uruguayan artist named Carlos Paez who offered a circus happening in a black tent with motorized cutout forms, flashing lights and noises of factory din, screams, sighs and sobs controlled by the artist himself from an electrical console. Said Paez: “I want to present the quintessence of a slice of life.”

Late Starter. An international jury of 21 picked the prizewinners, although it could not wait until the U.S. entries (delayed by dock strikes) were uncrated. The U.S. entrants, a rather pallid and particular group of seven “cool” hard-and soft-edge abstractionists, were conceded to be out of the race anyway, since Americans won both the last São Paulo and Venice biennials. The Grande Prémio (a gold medal, shorn by poverty of its usual cash bonus) was split between Italy’s Alberto Burri and France’s Victor Vasarely.

Burri, 50, is a late starter who began making art while detained as an Italian army doctor in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. He stood eminently in line for his medal, since he had won minor prizes at the Carnegie International in 1958 and the Venice Biennale in 1960. One of the many European art brut abstractionists who explored the beauties of raw texture after World War II, Burri makes a sort of mad Braille with collages of blistered burlap (called sacco), charred wood (combustioni), and lately, slashed and melted sheets of colored plastic. How to make an esthetic of ugliness is his prime concern, but in the fresh face of contemporary attempts to create more colorful and realistic art, Burri’s tortured veneers have come to seem a little drab and dated.

Hungarian-born Vasarely, 57, shares only one thing in common with Burri—he is also a onetime medical student. But, as a grand poppa of op art, he and a group to which his son Yvaral belongs have pioneered the complete opposite of a concern for surface texture with high-key colors and razor-cut patterns that baffle the eye. Significantly in terms of São Paulo, two of his son’s Paris-based Groupe are South Americans with whom Vasarely has great popularity.

Decorative Futility? Although this split decision was diplomatically designed to please everybody, those few people who still think art prizes mean more than pumpkin pie awards at a county fair were hardly satisfied. Rio’s O Globo labeled Burri’s latest “the mere decorative futility of burnt holes in transparent plastic.” Correio da Manha simply called the prizes “a scandal.” Surely exaggerated, but the overall impact of the São Paulo Bienal was like that of most conventions—fatigue and confusion.