By Claire Rigby

As the São Paulo Bienal draws to a close this Sunday, and visitors hurry for a last-chance look at the sprawling exhibition, a series of images comes to mind again and again, foreshadowing some of the artworks that will be most vividly remembered, perhaps, when the 31st Bienal is far away in the distant past.

It’s hard to imagine Éder Oliveira’s immense, haunting portraits being easily forgotten; or the sight of Yael Bartana’s Templo de Salomão, crumbling to dust as São Paulo stands, impassive, around it.

[Esta matéria foi publicada hoje na Folha. Para ler em Português, clique aqui]

Profoundly memorable too, with its surreally powerful images and simmering radical chic, a collection of posters by the Austrian/British duo Ines Doujak and John Barker, part of the installation ‘Loomshuttles/Warpaths’, has lingered in the mind of many a visitor, crystallising, with their insolence and visual impact, many of the 31st Bienal’s most pressing concerns – colonialism and imperialism, rebellion and resistance.

A papier mâché sculpture, Haute Couture 04 Transport (see image below), depicts a German Shepherd dog penetrating the late Bolivian labour leader and feminist, Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, who is doing the same in turn to a queasy-looking Juan Carlos I. The former King of Spain spews cornflowers onto a bed of German SS officers’ helmets, rotten and crumbling with age. “It’s a visceral representation of forms of exploitation,” the artists told Folha de S.Paulo. “It plays with and subverts relations of power”. It does, it’s safe to say, do that. A wall and an advisory notice were added to the installation in October, to hide the sculpture from the eyes of under-18 visitors to the Bienal.

Two bowler-hatted altiplano women stare out combatively in the poster ’Twill’, while ‘Velvet’ (above) depicts an insurrectionary figure swathed in teargas, wearing a knitted Peruvian ukuku balaclava – South America’s very own, original Anonymous-style face mask. Another poster, one of two to have been made in Brazil as part of Doujak and Barker’s residency here, shows a masked MTST activist in front of the Prefeitura de São Paulo.

Insurgency hangs in the air; and for one of the artists involved in ‘Loomshuttles/Warpaths’, it reaches deep into the past too.

The angry years

A a young man in London in the 1970s, John Barker, now 66, was a member of the Angry Brigade – an armed libertarian communist group that carried out at least 19 bombings and six attempted bombings between 1970 and 1971. Their targets included police stations, a Territorial Army Centre, the homes of government ministers, and the Spanish embassy, which they strafed with machine-gun fire in December 1970. They bombed the Ford motor car factory and the home of the company’s chairman, a number of banks, and a BBC vehicle covering the 1970 Miss World pageant.

They even bombed the Biba boutique on Kensington High Street, at the heart of ‘swinging London’. “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy buying,” reads an Angry Brigade communiqué issued after the attack. “Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.”

Britain in the early 1970s was seething with political unrest, protests and strikes, under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Edward Heath. The Angry Brigade hoped to help escalate that tension by the use of spectacular, revolutionary violence. Writing in the Preface to Gordon Carr’s book The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerrilla Group, Stuart Christie, an alleged member of the group who was nevertheless acquitted at trial, wrote, “their methods – effective or ineffective, rightly or wrongly – did give voice to a social conscience, and expression to an important libertarian impulse at a time when it felt that huge social change was still possible.”

On 12 January 1971, a demonstration against the Industrial Relations Act, which aimed to restrict the influence of Britain’s powerful unions, brought thousands onto the streets of London in protest. That night, the Angry Brigade set off two bombs at the home of Robert Carr, the Secretary of State for Employment. The Carr bombing brought the might of Scotland Yard down upon the group in an investigation that led to the formation of the Bomb Squad, now known as the Counter-Terrorism Command.

The reckoning

The Angry Brigade’s plans started to unravel when a scam involving fraudulent cheques, used to fund their activities, was uncovered, leading to the arrest and trial of two alleged Angry Brigade members in early 1971. In August that year, John Barker and seven other people were arrested in London, and charged with “conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property”. Evidence presented against the Angry Brigade at the Old Bailey, London’s highest criminal court, included gelignite and detonators, guns and ammunition, as well as the printing press used to produce many of the communiqués issued by the group.

In December 1972, after a six-month trial, Greenfield, Barker, Anna Mendelssohn and Hilary Crick were found guilty and sentenced to ten years each, classified as Category A prisoners – a threat to national security. “In my case, they framed a guilty man,” Barker wrote of his conviction in his 2006 prison memoir, Bending the Bars. Barker served a further prison sentence in the 1990s, convicted for his part in a major cannabis smuggling operation.

Happy to answer questions, with Ines Doujak, about the Bienal artworks themselves, Barker preferred not to be interviewed on the subject of his radical past in relation to ‘Loomshuttles/Warpaths’, writing in an email to Folha, “The work does, and needs to, stand on its own merits”.

Barker nevertheless spoke about the angry years in an interview he gave to the Guardian in June 2014, on the publication of his novel Futures, a crime story in which the cocaine trade is the pivot linking the fates of a cast of London characters.

He looks back on his years in the Angry Brigade, he told the Guardian, with “critical respect” for their commitment and their anger – “which I still feel, and probably even more so”. Regarding the decision to take up arms, Barker told the East End Review, also in June, “It’s not a moral question is it? It’s, you know, did it do anything strategic? I’m totally against terrorism as I understand it, which is indiscriminate killing. Obviously you don’t want to hurt people.”

Like the USA’s Weathermen, but in contrast with Germany’s Baader Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction, and the Italian Red Brigades, thought to have been responsible for 34 deaths and close to 50 deaths respectively, the Angry Brigade took care to avoid causing injury to people. Only one person was harmed as a result of its bombing campaign: Elizabeth Wilson, the housekeeper of a neighbour of John Davies, the government minister for Trade and Industry. Wilson stepped into the hall moments before the bomb, disguised as a gift for Davies, exploded, injuring her legs.

It was a miracle, said a forensics expert, speaking at the Angry Brigade trial, that nobody was killed or seriously injured as a result of the group’s bombing campaign. “Mr Yallop, would you tell the court what is the statistical probability”, asked Anna Mendelssohn, representing herself at the trial, as did Barker and Crick, “for there to exist an associated set of 27 miracles?”

The São Paulo Bienal

Visiting ‘Loomshuttles/Warpaths’ with curator Charles Esche in the penultimate week of the Bienal, we asked how Doujak and Barker had come to take part. The work Ines Doujak has been producing over the last decade or more was a good fit with many of the curatorial collective’s concerns, says Esche – “that is, relations between the coloniser and colonised; between indigenous and colonial cultures.”

Were the curators aware of John Barker’s past when the invitation to take part was issued? “We didn’t know about him until we learned of his work as Ines’s partner in ‘Loomshuttles/Warpaths’, but it did become apparent then,” says Esche. Did it matter? “I don’t believe it needs to ‘matter’ in any concrete sense,” says Esche. “Should there be a consequence for the fact that he served time in jail for actions he carried out 40 years ago?” Esche mentions President Rousseff, who when she was arrested in January 1970 on the Rua Augusta, was armed. “Does it matter that Dilma took up arms in the context of the military dictatorship?” He mentions Menachem Begin, the former Irgun militant against British rule in Palestine, who became prime minister of Israel in 1977.

Esche also mentions Gerry Adams, an alleged former IRA leader and the president of the Northern Irish political party, Sinn Féin, which first emerged as the political wing of the Provisional IRA. For the Angry Brigade, although it had no direct connection with the Irish Republican movement, one of the triggers for its campaign of violence was the Troubles, the armed conflict that gripped Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998.

In August 1971, the British Army arrested 342 civilians in Northern Ireland, imprisoning them without trial in an act that sparked widespread outrage. The Angry Brigade’s response to the mass internment was to bomb the Territorial Army Centre in Holloway, in what was to be the group’s final attack before its members were arrested.

Armed and dangerous as they were, the Angry Brigade were small fry compared to the real wave of violence and bombing about to be unleashed in the UK, as the IRA bombing campaign, which had begun in 1968, got underway in earnest in the early 1970s. By the time of the Peace Process in 1994, the IRA had killed more than 1,700 people, including 644 civilians.

“The Angry Brigade actions,” Barker has written, took place “before the IRA made bombing a serious business.” In 1973, an IRA bomb exploded at the Old Bailey. “I was in [Wormwood Scrubs prison] when the Old Bailey bomb went off,” wrote Barker, in a review of an Angry Brigade history, Anarchy in the UK. “The whole jail celebrated, and I was relieved I’d already got my sentence. Bombing had got a lot heavier, and we’d have got heavier sentences.”

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By Nathan Walters

On a purely aesthetic level, pixação—the spiky black glyphs that pop up at dangerously high spots on buildings and spread like a virus on any exposed stone (pixadores surface of choice)—doesn’t offer much to most viewers.

The graffiti style, which is most dominant in São Paulo, can be academically explained in a few different ways: runic inspirations, pulled from old heavy metal album covers, or unbridled Dadaist impulses. But for most people, this doesn’t make it any more palatable, which is the point. It’s the “Kilroy was here” and “f*** the police” tags reduced to an illegible signature that empowers its author because it flies in the face of society’s tastes. It’s no wonder the government and property owners despise it.

To curb the spread of pixação in Rio, the government and property owners have long been more lax in enforcing vandalism laws against graffiti artists painting colorful, generally aesthetically pleasing works that both brighten up blighted areas and serve as a buffer against pixação.

For more than two decades, this gentleman’s agreement has led to a booming graffiti scene in Rio, thrusting artists’ works onto gallery walls, garnering the admiration of foreign artists and public art enthusiasts. It also managed to block some pixadores.

With a recent decree signed by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, the understanding between artists and the government was laid out in black and white. The new decree goes even further than a 2009 law permitting graffiti works on private property with owner’s consent; it fully legalizes urban art works on designated city property.

The new law establishes a framework wherein graffiti works will be legal on some public spaces—columns, gray walls, walls without doors or windows, skate parks and construction siding works—so long as the sites are not historically protected. Viaducts and other public facades where anti-graffiti paint have been applied will remain off limits, “because of the high cost of implementation and the need for maintenance cleaning,” according to the decree.

Eixo Rio, a quasi-governmental entity that works as a bridge between Rio’s urban youth community and city hall, will administer the law, and will be responsible for creating an 11-member CariocaGraffiti Council. The group will meet bi-monthly to discuss projects and plans to implement “Cells of Revitalization” for potential tourist attractions.

But what should have been a moment of triumph for the city’s urban artists, official recognition of years of hard work, was greeted by disdain by a large group of graffiteiros, who are worried that the government’s involvement will have a stifling effect. Over the past few weeks, tempers have flared and artists in Rio’s friendly, largely unified scene took to each other’s virtual walls to launch polemics against the decree.

“The thing is, graffiti is a ‘free form’ of art, it normally doesn’t ask for permission. So how are you going to put rules on it?” questions Lelo, a Rio-raised, São Paulo-based muralist.

One of the primary concerns with the new law is that with new, legally designated areas, enforcement will be tightened on popular, non-designated areas.

Many artists feel the new rules are about moving graffiti out of Rio’s more touristy South Zone, a move aimed to appease the hordes of tourist that will descend on the city in the coming months. Criticism of this perceived “tourist-over-locals” agenda is often lobbed at Paes, and is one of the major issues those in the graffiti community have with the new law. But it is not the the only one.

“Usually in Rio, when a law seems to be progressive or vanguardist it’s because it’s hiding real fascist intentions,” says Gustavo Coelho, a Rio-based filmmaker who directed a documentary on pixação.

Just a few days ago, workers wielding paint rollers were starting to whitewash the walls of Rio’s jockey club, the city’s answer to New York’s 5 Pointz and long-known as Rio’s best open-air graffiti gallery. Years of cultural history lost, almost.

Last year, city hall, through Eixo Rio, established an organization, #StreetArtRio, to digitally catalogue the city’s urban art treasures. The imitative is aimed, among other things, at preserving the Rio’s urban works through a massive online photo catalog. The murals that have graced the privately owned Jockey Club wall can still be seen on the site, saving viewers some sunscreen but perhaps diminishing the viewing experience.

For others, the decree, which most say was sprung on them without time for discussion, is a publicity-friendly diversion from other more serious issues confronting the prefeitura and Rio’s disgruntled youth.

“It was a great distraction maneuver by the mayor to create completely irrelevant news that occupied a large space in the media that could have been used for a much more useful discussion about the problems facing the city, like removals of entire communities, the transport mafia, education, and corrupt and unprepared police,” says Rio artist Villas, known for his colorful wooden “love birds” affixed in locations throughout Rio and beyond.

While some artists are left just with questions as to the motives and what the decree will actually achieve in practice, others are happy and willing to explore the new level of cooperation between artists and city hall.

Airá Ocrespo, a veteran of Rio’s urban arts scene, is unfazed by the criticisms, choosing instead to move forward and test the boundaries of the decree.

“This decree positively impacts society because it acknowledges that graffiti is part of the urban landscape and is a reality in the city. This is a big paradigm shift,” says Ocrespo. “Enough talking, let’s do something.”

Ocrespo’s feelings are shared by a large group of artists, predominantly from Rio’s Zona Norte and Zona Oeste, who are welcoming of the changes. For them, changing and experimenting with new arrangements is better than nothing. Whether Paes’ new decree manages to fundamentally change how graffiti is done in Rio will only be seen in the months to come. The walls will speak for themselves.

Photos by Nathan Walters

Artists from Latin America and the world come together in Porto Alegre for a Bienal still named after Mercosul, the stalled regional integration project. Claire Rigby reports on the transformations on offer there.

By Claire Rigby

Moving, evocative, mysterious, provocative: not all great art supplies these sensations, but when it does, it has the power to leave your brain smouldering with new ideas for days. Taken in sufficient doses, that sense of connections being made, and new understandings taking shape via artworks, can even last a lifetime. It’s transformational – it’s the point of art, and it’s art’s sacred calling.

Last week’s opening weekend at the Bienal do Mercosul Porto Alegre, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, was suffused with interesting, important ideas transmitted via a collection of artworks chosen with precision, all woven into in an interconnected web by the thoughtful young curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.

Entitled ‘Weather Permitting’ (‘Se o clima for favorável’, in Portuguese), this biennale is a tapestry of big, poetic ideas around shapes and masses underground and in the atmosphere, and concepts related to time travel, space and climate – climate in a physical sense, rather than in the concept’s ecologically-charged, more common present-day guise. The exhibition takes place in a row of three adjacent museums in downtown Porto Alegre, and in an old gasworks building, the Usina do Gasômetro, repurposed as a cultural centre. It also takes place in a monthly series of discussions-slash-expeditions to a nearby island and former prison, Ilha do Presídio.

This is the Bienal do Mercosul’s 9th edition – the first took place in 1997, when Mercosul, the Southern Cone economic bloc founded in 1991 and modeled on the EEC, still seemed like it might become a meaningful regional force. As one of two biennales in Brazil (the other is in São Paulo), the Bienal’s setting in the breezy, creative city of Porto Alegre has come to mean more to it than its connection to the failed South American political alliance.

In the grandest of the three main venues, Santander Cultural, a giant, hyper-realistic ceramic squid by the Peruvian artist David Zink Yi lays splatted on the floor, dead, its ink oozing around it (see main image, top). In the main atrium of the next-door building, Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, a thick carpet of powdered rust has been laid down by the always compelling Cinthia Marcelle, aided by the reckless intervention of nocturnal insects, scurrying minute tracks into it, night by night. And in the adjacent MARG (Museu de Arte de Rio Grande do Sul), a suspended 6m-long satellite made of finely meshed wire hangers and ham radio equipment looks almost invisible until you are right beneath it, staring up. It was constructed by the artistic duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla with the intention, in part, of making contact – real contact, by radio – with the International Space Station as it spins through the atmosphere, passing over every 90 minutes, 250 miles overhead.

The opening weekend brought the static artworks together with a series of performance pieces. On the grassed-over roof of the gasworks, the artist David Medalla gave a performance that wove dance, poetry, clouds of balloons and the setting sun into a joyful happening that left parts of the audience, thick with artists, gallerists and a Brazilian and international art crowd, wreathed in smiles and tears.

The work of Medalla, who was a leading member of the 1960s avant garde and a co-founder of London’s Signal Gallery in 1964, has been gathering new interest and recognition in recent years, not least thanks to his association with São Paulo’s Baró Galeria, and he was one of only a handful of artists to have more than one work in the Bienal, including a specially commissioned version of his 1960s Bubble Machine, a cluster of perspex towers from which dense, featherlight foam sculptures are emitted slowly, minutely, and around the clock. Earlier that afternoon, in a techno-music/psychogeographic sound performance, the young Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui worked a radio signal from the Ilha do Presídio island, out in the estuary, into a hypnotic and discomforting soundscape, shaping the sounds with his hands using a theramin-like contraption on his mixing desk.

You can see a short film here, of the curator, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, pointing out the prison island along with the rest of the Bienal’s venues as she flies over Porto Alegre in a helicopter (in Spanish). In person, Hernández, who lives in New York, is a fascinating speaker, expressing her ideas with precision, artistry and effortless depth.

This is the curator speaking off the cuff as she smoked a cigarette down by the river on the Saturday afternoon of the opening weekend, when questioned about the ideas that influenced her choices of themes for the Bienal: “Understanding the weather is also a way of understanding how observation works – understanding the importance of contemplation, and of observing something.”

Some new people turn up at the riverbank, in sight of the gasworks, where another performance is taking place. Hernández gets a light for her cigarette, greets the new arrivals, and picks up her train of thought again. “When I say ‘observe’ and then I move to ‘contemplation’, it’s because they’re related: they are about looking inside – a constant movement between what you are looking at and what you know. Understanding the reality, and co-existing better. It’s about losing yourself, but also understanding yourself more.”

• The Bienal is on until 10 November, and if a trip to Porto Alegre is possible, it’s highly recommended. If not, some of the texts associated with the Bienal are available for download here. An e-book of essays, The Cloud, and one of the artworks, an album of songs by the Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres, commissioned for the Bienal, can be downloaded track by track at the same page.
• Listen to the sound of mud bubbling and popping in a vat, part of ‘Mud Muse’, a sound and mud sculpture originally made in 1969 by Robert Rauschenberg.

All photos Ⓒ Claire Rigby.

By Claire Rigby

There’s rarely a dull month in São Paulo as far as art is concerned. At any given moment, art lovers lucky enough to be living here or passing through have an immense calendar of world-class exhibitions to choose from. But knocking them all into a cocked hat is is the mighty Bienal, which brings 111 artists to São Paulo from 7 September, lasting right through into December.

I took a tour round the preparations for the immense art exhibition this week – see above, and see below for more about the Bienal, the setting up and what to look out for.

But the teams of workers involved in pulling the Bienal together aren’t the only ones labouring to make September a month to remember in the SP art world. The very existence of the biannual art show is provoking top-notch exhibitions at galleries all over the city, as gallerists scramble to capitalise on the big-hitters in town for the Bienal.

Retrospectives of the works of the late Lygia Clark at Itaú Cultural and the newer star Adriana Varejão at the MAM are some of September’s immediate off-Bienal highlights; and in one of the most exciting developments in the SP art world this year, a team of bright young things, currently racing to have everything ready, from the artworks to the building itself, is about to open the most interesting new art space in town, Pivô.

A brand new not-for-profit exhibition space and art centre, Pivô, whose name means ‘pivot’, is opening inside the majestic Copan building, in the heart of downtown São Paulo, in a formerly empty 3,500-square-metre space it hopes to occupy for many years to come. I took a tour of the building this week and met the people behind it – look out for that in the forthcoming issue of Time Out São Paulo, and see Folha’s photos of the building here.

But I also took a walk around the Bienal building as the setup progressed, plunging into a hive of activity as workers cracked open crates and shifted artworks into place, artists worked on their installations, and one by one, finished exhibition spaces were sheathed in paper to protect them from dust before their unveiling at the opening party on 4 September.

In the image at the top of the page, the superb Bienal building’s sinuously curved balustrades and columns are wrapped in brown paper, to save their surfaces from the rough and tumble of setting up. Look a little closer and you’ll see a slash of yellow along the furthest bannister. That’s the start of an art intervention in the vão, the Bienal building’s towering main space, where instead of a large-scale artwork like the last Bienal’s ill-starred ‘White Flag’ installation by Nuno Ramos, featuring a trio of live vultures, the French artist Olivier Nottellet is creating a building-wide symphony of blocks and lines in white, yellow and black. That’s the artist, above, halting in his painting of the first column to show us his render of the artwork on his phone, created on a miniature model of the Bienal building.

Crates arrive in the building, above, and are opened ready for installation. The artworks inside these sturdy packing crates, 24 in total, were sent from Feroz Gallery in Bonn, Germany, and contain dozens of images by the photographer August Sander, whose ‘People of the 20th Century’ is a sweeping portrait of Germany and its people – 600 of them, as pictured by Sander over five decades at the turn of the 20th century.

With many of the artworks already in place and hundreds of events confirmed, from performances to talks and tours, plus detailed information on many of the nearly 3,000 artworks already in the bag, this year’s Bienal looks to have been a model of good organisation so far, under the stewardship of Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Venuezuelan-born curator of Latin American art at New York’s MOMA.

The team in charge of the archive of the works of the late Arthur Bispo de Rosário, an ‘outsider artist’ who spent most of his life interned in the Colonia Juliano Moreira psychiatric hospital in Rio. Some 350 pieces from the collection of around 800 works, which represent the artist’s entire output, have been brought to the Bienal, where Rosário looks likely to be one of the most buzzed-about artists featured. In 1938, Rosário had a vision of Christ accompanied by seven blue angels, who instructed him to make an inventory of the world, and he did, creating meticulously gripping artworks at the same time. Rosário’s embroidered banners, robes and dozens of objets, wrapped and catalogued and strangely beautiful, have been the subject of laborious restoration by the curators of the Museum that bears his name, inside the Rio hospital where the artist spent the 50 years up to his death in 1989.

Sheathed in gauzy paper through which you can just make out the stunning, unique photographic self-portraits that make up his Bienal show, Nino Cais’s artworks are little masterpieces of the mundane and the extraordinary, drenched in rich, lovely combinations of colour. The São Paulo artist sets up elaborate mises en scène in which he features in mystical poses, his face covered in a proliferation of strange ways, from crocheted doilies and tea towels to pot plants and half-put-on sweaters.

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