Hear
A prophecy fulfilled? Look differently? Search for beauty in the edges? Something happened on the way to Venice that changed the rules of the game. The 60th Biennale by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa broke the Eurocentric scheme of big names and powerful galleries, with eight outlets in the global market like the multitarget Gagosian. The first Latin American to direct the mother of all biennials, founded by Umberto de Saboya in 1896, Pedrosa looked the other way. Not because he was distracted, but with intention. “Foreigners everywhere” is the motto of this inclusive Biennial, open to the periphery, to artists queerto the unknown, to the margins.
outside the mainstream, which has hit hard the 58-year-old curator, director of the MASP, the largest museum in São Paulo. Someone hard to tame, he managed, after an incredible marathon of travel, to stage the immovable persistence of his desire.
Venice is the consecrating stage of the world. Two sample buttons are enough. First, the phenomenal leap of Gabriel Chaile from Tucumán, who after being chosen by Cecilia Alemani, director of the previous Biennial, became a major league artist. And the other case is Leonora Carrington. She went from being an exquisite surrealist to an international art market record holder.
Curious, at least, in both cases the Argentine businessman Eduardo Costantini was the absolute protagonist. He bought Chaile’s work for his new Escobar museum at the 59th Venice Biennale and, last week, he was once again the man with the record, paying US$28.5 million at Sotheby’s in New York for Dagobert’s distractions, a painting by Carrington that multiplied by nine his own record for an Olympic jump. Star curators, critics, journalists, collectors and museum directors parade through the Venetian Giardini that smell of jasmine. In the five days before the official opening, everything is cooked. The awards are chosen, hundreds of articles are published and the trend of which will be the artists of the last batch is set. Berni won the grand prize for engraving in Venice and conquered the top with his very original embossments, the same thing happened with Julio Le Parc, with Giacometti, with Rauschenberg who was the first North American artist to triumph at the Biennale. Then… records rained down for Leo Castelli’s artists. The example best known to Argentinians is that of Tomás Saraceno, born in Tucumán, who graduated as an architect from the UBA, who after being chosen by Daniel Birnbaum for the 2011 Biennial began a meteoric career that does not stop.
With Adriano Pedrosa history repeats itself. At the 60th Biennale, La Chola, artist, emerged triumphant and was mentioned by the jury. queer, born in Guaymallén, Mendoza, selected by the director for his own exhibition at the Padiglione and the Arsenales, the symbolic settings of this universal showcase. La Chola’s watercolors were all sold for five times their value. Remarkable performerthe Mendoza artist is on her way to Art Basel, a Swiss art watch, to write another chapter in this story, with her gallery owner Nahuel Ortiz Vidal, a Buenos Aires native with art DNA who runs the Barro gallery in La Boca and has a branch in New York.
The great figures of the market are not in this edition of the Biennial, open until November, only the Perrotin gallery stands out with the work of the Colombian Iván Argote: a statue of Columbus made into rubble. Legal association, Argote’s work is quite similar to the Columbus of Buenos Aires moved from the Casa Rosada to the Costanera, who had his moment of being lying on the floor in the middle of the rubble.
It is too early to know how the shift to the new inclusive world will end. from “Stranieri Ovunque” (Strangers everywhere). It is clear that the focus is on the edges. Spain did not win, which was the number one for the Golden Lion due to the quality of the submission by Sandra Gamarra curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio. The Golden Lion for best national pavilion went to Australia, with a minimalist installation loaded with messages. The artist Archie Moore, son of a British man and an Australian woman, of indigenous origin, wrote his 65,000-year-old family tree in chalk. Impressively, in doing so he demonstrated how a culture silenced and sidelined for an eternity… is still alive.
The Golden Lion for best artist was won by a collective of Maori artists with a beautiful work made only with ribbons, low cost and superlative effect. Look at the global south, at the marginalized, aboriginal, queerunknown and ignored implies a paradigm shift and a free attitude on the part of the organizers. It is also about leaving the script and the canon to explore with all the senses in a world dominated by tensions, wars, interests, borders and porous sexual identities. Something is changing. And art knows it.
