Elma Lia Nascimento
The São Paulo Biennial is the third most important art exhibit in the world surpassed only by Italy's Venice Biennial and Germany's Documenta exposition held in Kassel. The international display celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and to start the second half of its first century of existence, it introduced some significant changes in the 25th edition of the art show.
The latest version of Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, which started March 23 and will be open to the public until June 2, is showing the work of 190 artists from 70 countries and had already seen more than 300,000 visitors by the end of April. The theme of the expo: Metropolitan Iconography, with an explanation from the promoters: "it's the metropolis that essentially defines artistic practice." For the first in its history, however, the Bienal chose a foreign curator, German Alfons Hug. The expo also abandoned its traditional practice of creating special spaces to present masters of painting like Van Gogh, Picasso and Francis Bacon, who were shown in the past, thus boosting attendance.
The Paulista Biennial, however, has not abandoned its vocation for controversy. And American photographer Spencer Tunick, who provoked scandal in the US and faced jail time for his Naked States installation—he took open-air pictures of naked groups in every state of the Union—took his camera to São Paulo to stir the spirits and strip people from their inhibitions and clothes in the name of art.
New York-based Tunick ended in São Paulo—the largest South American metropolis, with 10 million inhabitants—its Nude Adrift tour, which took him during six months to 30 countries from the seven continents, including Antarctica. In Australia, 4500 people volunteered for collective nude pictures and 2500 did the same in Canada, but the art photographer was particularly pleased with 1200 people who showed up at six in the morning of a cloudy Sunday in Ibirapuera, São Paulo's largest park to take off their clothes.
He commented that the number of people who turned up for the performance was three times what he averaged in Europe. Quite a few of the naked models were press people who wanted to describe in the first person the nude statue feeling. One of them, Rede TV reporter Wagner Sugamelli was the first one to get naked and gave what other journalists called a show of exhibitionism and bad taste. Tunick talked about his disappointment with the small number of women participating (about 10 percent, when the average had been 45 percent) and the almost total absence of blacks.
Black artist Ana Lúcia Silva Santos told Brasília daily Correio Braziliense, "Unfortunately culture in Brazil is far from the people. That's why there are few blacks here. I was able to overcome my fear, since it's hard for me even to go to the beach on a bikini." Attorney Florivaldo de Almeida, 71, complained about the cold cement where people had to lie down for the second of three series of pictures, but "the human warmth improved the thermal sensation," he added.
The São Paulo civilian police intervened to prevent five-year-old Penélope Inácio from participating in the naked bodies carpet. The little girl was already naked and ready for the shot when she was spotted by a policeman, who forced her father to dress the child and take her out. Indignant, engineer José Carlos Ignácio, who was with his wife and Penélope's mother, lambasted the police action: "This is pure hypocrisy. There are children starving in the streets who should inspire more concern to the police than my daughter."
For the Brazilian media, the event was big news guaranteeing large front-page pictures in the countries largest and most influential newspapers and sizeable articles inside. Writing for São Paulo's Jornal da Tarde—sister publication of respected centenary conservative O Estado de S. Paulo—, reporter Armando Serra Negra confided: "All nudity was photographed. And I was there. How delicious. I felt a marvelous and subtle sensation (…) It was funny to see a zit in somebody's butt, the sexy tattoo on a lady's derrière, or vice-versa. Some pricks bigger than others, bellies too, pretty and ugly buttocks. Who cares. By and large the human body, be it perfect like the one from the brunette by my side, or from the fatso man or woman, full of tattoos spreading through their old age, is very pretty."
