An excerpt from Published Protest: The Platforms of Contrabienal
2020
Founded in 1951, the São Paulo Bienal was conceived as a vehicle for its host city to become an international center of art. After the Brazilian coup d’état in 1964, the Bienal came to be co-sponsored by the new right-wing military regime, led by dictator Artur da Costa Silva. In 1968, the Ato Institucional Número Cinco (AI-5) was passed, making censorship widespread and unpredictable. Under this act, the regime meant to instrumentalize the biennial as a cultural and institutional legitimization of their oppression. Replacing its original conceit, which looked to bring international attention to São Paulo and the art of the region, they made the event into a “broker” of cultural identity, hoping to connect with the larger transnational art market.1 In its new role as a repressed, censored, nation-making event, the São Paulo Bienal became resigned to the political theatrics of the dictatorial regime...
Contrabienal brought together protests from artists and art critics alike. In 1968, the critic Frederico Morais wrote on behalf of the ABCA, “If art is an experimental exercise of freedom as much for the one who creates as for the one who beholds or participates in the work… then repression and cultural terrorism strike simultaneously the artist and the art critic. And so, the shared protest.”2 Yet, critique, and other gestures of protest, have increasingly become institutionalized within the art world. As art theoreticians speculate about the “third wave” of institutional critique and ask if institutional critique is effective after its own canonization, how might we understand Contrabienal now? As the theorist Gerald Raunig wrote, “What is needed, therefore, are practices that conduct radical social criticism, yet which do not fancy themselves in an imagined distance to institutions; at the same time, practices that are self-critical and yet do not cling to their own involvement, their complicity, their imprisoned existence in the art field, their fixation on institutions and the institution, their own being-institution”...3
This instance of protest denied the apparent consistency of an institutional image, offering instead a plurality of ideas which stands in productive tension with its collective message. This tension resounds with Raunig’s description of a third wave of critique.4 Rather than publishing a letter written with one voice, then signed by many in consensus, Contrabienal catalogs many letters penned by many authors.
As published protest, Contrabienal resists categorization. It responded to the damaging practices of the 11th Bienal with an alternative platform which both performed an activist role and cataloged uncensored works. It archived oppression and exhibited the multiplicity of responses to the contested institutional politics of the biennial. In this way, it hybridized many platforms to become a host for public discourse and subversion to the fascist Brazilian government.
1 Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation," in Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
2 Frederico Morais, Diário de notícias (Rio de Janeiro), 8 October 1968.
3 Gerald Raunig "Instituent Practices: Feeling, Instituting, Transforming," in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: MayFlyBooks, 2009).
4 Ibid.
