Even if Portugal Arte took place this summer. I have decided to post something.
Lisbon – “This show is an independent movie made to be a blockbuster” said Stefan Simchowitz, a cultural entrepreneur as he likes to be described and the artistic director of the country’s first art Biennale at the inauguration in Lisbon on 16 July. Portugal Arte, subtitled “A Survey of Contemporary Art” has been on the minds of Simchowitz and Miguel Carvalho, the Biennale’s president and a food industry businessman, for at least three years. With a limited two million euro budget mainly provided by Portuguese electricity operator EDP, they have finally managed to get the show off the ground this summer.
The four-member organisation has gathered a remarkable 720 artworks by 364 artists from around 10 different nationalities, mainly American. “Our role with this event is to present museum-quality contemporary art to an audience that does not consistently travel the art circuit and to create a stage for the public to engage with new contemporary cultural dialogues; to democratize it so to speak” said Simchowitz. “It is up to the audience to define their experience or reaction to my choices and up to the artists to create their world within their own individual framework.”
With 600 indoor and 120 outdoor pieces the ambitious Biennale reaches out to the public giving them a chance to see artworks that would normally belong in private collections or galleries. “Everyone is a VIP. This also differentiates Portugal Arte from any other biannual event” said Simchowitz at the Biennale’s opening with guests including Palais de Tokyo’s director Marc-Olivier Wahler and Fred Hoffman, curatorial consultant for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles and the Jewish Museum of New York, and famous for the 2005 acclaimed Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective organised by the Brooklyn Museum.
Multiplicity and diversity are at the heart of this countrywide event. While Biennales traditionally take over a single city, Portugal Arte spreads across four: Lisbon, Grândola, Portimão and Vila Real de Santo António. It features the vision of not only one curator but a group of curators and artists working in a collaborative process and exploring a variety of themes.
The Pavilion of Portugal, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza Vieira and located in Lisbon’s Parque das Nações, offers the largest exhibition space. Left empty since its construction for the Universal Exhibition of 1998 and especially revamped for the Biennale, it looks as if it was designed to welcome contemporary art. While the first room under the theme “Gradation” curated by the American artist Garth Weiser explores new abstraction with a selection of New York-based painters including Alex Kwartler, upstairs, a large airport-style billboard by João Louro is the first Portuguese artwork of the exhibition to welcome the visitor. “Curator and artist Johannes Van der Beek was excellent both in balancing nationalities across the show and selecting Portuguese artists” said Simchowitz.
“California Dreamin” is the next section and was curated by Fred Hoffman and Paul Young, L.A-based curator and a highly respected journalist. It showcases an astounding selection of media. Video is highly represented with “The Comic That Frenches Your Mind” by psychedelic Frank Zappa’s videast Bruce Bickford or Bruce Nauman’s 1969 “Pulling Mouth”. More recent, the video by Julika Rudelius has a look at childhood and rebellion, where Chanel-dressed little girls put on make-up until they go berserk and reduce their salon to dust.
Later, “Pink Terror” by Mark Barzman, a Guy Bourdin-inspired video shown in a high-ceiling dark room features violent characters smashing watermelons, shooting guns or firing bangers. The tone is often corrosive and sombre. “I have drawn my conclusions in the past about how contemporary art functions within the system as opposed to contemporary art as a generic term. This exhibition is a response to that.” adds Simchowitz. Jonathan Monk’s deflated bunny, a direct criticism of Jeff Koons’polished, dollar-driven pop art, arguably encapsulates best the latter comment.
But Portugal Arte does not limit itself to challenging the art establishment. Above all it surveys humanity and freedom of speech in a country whose eventful history is marked by oppression and revolution. The choice of Grândola as one of the hosting cities certainly serves as a symbol. It was the cradle of the revolution of 1974, where the movement which led to the overthrow of Salazar’s dictatorship was triggered by young officers. Here, “Serendipity”, an exhibition organised by Cuban curators Juan Delgado Calzadilla, Nelson Herrera Ysla and Elvia Rosa Castro, explores through paintings and videos the creativity stemming from the Caribbean island’s varying domination. In particular, “Todas iban a ser reinas” (“They were all going to be queens”), a poignant video by Gustavo Pérez, features disillusioned Russian women who emigrated to Cuba in the 1980s in the hope they would find the Eldorado. John Miller’s “Refusal to accept limits”, already shown last year at the Kunsthalle of Zurich, expresses a similar desire to push the boundaries. Its gold-painted archaeological ruins mixed with dumped refuse openly criticise the distraction consumer society is driving us into. The installation is a key part of “Personal freedom”, the self-explanatory titled exhibition curated by Van der Beek and shown in the Pavilion of Portugal.
With seventy per cent of exhibited artworks from the United States, the event is still a far cry from the multicultural platform it aims to be. Tight funding cannot have helped, as the Biennale’s short one-month duration and timid public attendance illustrate. Still, Simchowitz and Carvalho plan for the next edition of their striving survey of contemporary art to focus around Portugal’s cultural connections with Brazil. This might prove a risky direction given the confusing definition of the event for the public, as well as its young age. If anything, Portugal Arte’s impressive public installations have raised some interest among the population. “Nothing lasts forever”, a specially commissioned public temple by New York-based collective of artist Faile, displayed in central Lisbon and the most expensive production of the Biennale, was vandalized on the night of the opening. This could be the ideal start to Portugal Arte’s blockbuster script.
More info on: www.portugalarte.org
