The international boycott of the 10th Biennial de Sao
Paolo of 1969 is a precedent for the international call for refusal witnessed
recently in artists’ responses to the Biennale of Sydney, Creative Time’s Living
as Form exhibition
at Technion University, the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and Manifesta 10. In December
of 1968, one year prior to the biennial, Brazil’s military regime officially
instituted broad measures of censorship and repression in the passing of Ato
Institucional #5 (Institutional Act #5) which came to be known as the AI-5. This brutal dictate
institutionalized torture and arrest as a means to suppress civil unrest.
Several instances of censorship of the visual arts and widespread arrests of
artists and intellectuals, both leading up to AI-5 and reaching a critical
capacity after its passing, contributed to the oppressive atmosphere permeating
Brazilian culture in the years preceding the 10th Biennial.
The
international call for withdrawal from the Biennial started with the French
delegation in the summer of ’69. The boycott was framed as withdrawal in
solidarity with Brazilian artists and intellectuals, while increasing international awareness of the political situation.
Following France, delegations from Holland, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Italy,
Mexico and Spain joined the boycott against the Brazilian regime. The US
eventually withdrew despite efforts by the delegation’s organizer Gyorgy Kepes
to ‘keep lines of communication open’ with the oppressed country. Using
participation as a different sort of protest, Kepes is quoted as referring to an old
Chinese saying: “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the
darkness.”
From
its inauguration in 1951 the Biennial de Sao Paulo provided Brazil a window
into international artistic currents. The exhibition first introduced
Concretism to Brazil, which became a hallmark of modernism in Sao Paulo. Later,
artists such as Andy Warhol and his Pop contemporaries entered the Brazilian
artistic imaginary via the Biennial. A fundamental question arises regarding
the boycott: would critical response to the political situation in Brazil have
been more pointed through direct, strategic participation in the exhibition? As
Claudia Calirman states in Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, “Despite all the controversy
around the withdrawals [which received much more media coverage internationally
than within Brazil] from the event, the most damaging consequence of the
boycott was to make the biennial an unsubstantial artistic exhibition.”
The question of “engagement or disengagement” can be seen recently in the controversy surrounding Manifesta 10. Curator Joanna Warsza - in response to petition
and repeated calls to change the venue from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg after the passing of “gay propaganda” laws, along with the military invasion of
Ukraine and annexation of Crimea - issued this statement:
As much as
we of course clearly and without doubt oppose the Russian military intervention
in Crimea and the position of the Russian government, we also oppose the tone
of westocentric superiority…. The projects will obviously not represent the
position of the Russian government. I believe that as long as we can work in
the complex manner and in the context-responsive way, as long as we—curator,
artists, team—are not exposed to the self-censorship, not being intimidated or
restricted, we will do so.”
Starting with the “Boycott
Biennial” of 1969, international artists chose to lend their works to smaller
independent exhibitions throughout the exhibition to mitigate the effects of
the debased biennial. In 1978, after the release of political prisoners and the
lifting of AI-5 the boycott was lifted. Still the fundamental principles and
questions of boycott, withdrawal, refusal or pointed participation will remain
as long as social injustice persists in the world.
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