“Incoherent” and “irregular” are some of the adjectives I heard many times about the 7th Biennial of Mercosul – Grito e Escuta (Scream and Listening). Even though I understand the context in which they were placed, and even though personally it has been easier to list works that I disliked more than the opposite – those that excited me – thinking about the nature of these criticisms (lack of consistency and regularity) leads me to envision some expectations and intentions of contemporary art. Above all, those that we have launched as spectators and actors on the artistic production. 

“Dominant ego”. In an institutional¹ text about one of the Biennial ramifications, the Musicircus – John Cage’s proposal (1967) experienced by a large group of artists and public in October 2009, in the context of the event –, it is said that the main concern in performing the work was to demonstrate a collective and democratic production process and music experience, which could not be “ruled by a dominant ego”. 

Maybe something very similar can be said about the Biennial as a whole: the absence of a dominant ego. 

Incorporating multiple egos-curators (mostly artists), whose curatorial autonomy seems to have been maintained through exhibitions / independent activities, from effectively different concerns and formats, what could be another – and stronger – “dominant ego” of the Biennial , a theme, didn’t exist: “as a whole, the 7th Biennial proposes a methodological shift: a system focused on the creation processes – rather than on specific themes”. 

Although usually in “traditional” biennials, the proposed themes are rarely in fact strictly tread – serving mainly as an excuse to validate the views of their respective “dominant egos” about the art and its space-time – constructing a Biennial without such “external” thematic arguments, seems to take a deflection at the looking focus that thinks / produces art, now. 

Instead of the weak tendency toward an art that comments the world because it has understood it and could not represent it (hence may emerge with vehemence, the themes of the Biennial which have close connection with issues of contemporary philosophy), the 7^th Biennial of Mercosul, protecting a relative autonomy of artistic production, focuses on its “creative processes” as “method” to relate the art to the world. Bringing language issues at the heart of the debate of the Biennial – design, instability, transformation, etc. – renounce the still persistent attachment to the systems of meaning (as key production and reading of art) in order to make room for investigations and language experimentations that are beyond the predetermined senses and nexus. As Hélio Oiticica would say: “these are all old stuff: the interpretation, the attempt to find meaning and to experience significant structures (…), in fact, what remains is only the proposition of the great invention”. ² And the invention, in its multiple forms of existence, can be considered “absurd” – is by definition extra-ordinary. 

As the curatorial text of the exhibition called Absurdo (Absurd), curated by the artist Laura Lima and perhaps one of the most controversial of the 7th Biennial, “the exhibition operates on the strangeness and the instability idea. (…) Creating a new place or another place for what is to come or what was not codified yet”. “The art is presented on the exhibition as a possibility to go beyond language that makes us communicating daily: since it is another language, art does not need to talk, speak, argue. It can be Scream and yelling, communicate in its own way. There is, however, the “social responsibility”.  

Dominant “Benefits”. In the introductory text of its 7th edition, the Biennial of Mercosul Foundation lists its goals. Before the point that mentions the goal of maintaining a “continuous approach with the contemporary artistic creation and its critical discourse” in the first place is one that says about the “focus on social contribution, seeking real benefits to its public, partners and supporters”. The “relative autonomy” guarded to the artistic production in the absence of an ego-theme of the Biennial, becomes into a demand for social dialogue that needs to be taken into account in the “absurdity” of its experiments in language. The Scream cannot be sharp enough to derail the Listening: “for the Biennial of Mercosul Foundation, this Biennial will promote thought actions to involve the public in a continuous process of approaching and dialogue”.  

Although “social responsibility” demanded by the Foundation can be a dominant ego of the 7th Biennial, it does not seem entirely going against contemporary art, which has been incorporating into their interests and “methods”, inherited references and desires from the field of responsibility.  As the text of the Biennial educational project says, there are many artists who have sought to “restore social ties, expanding its working area, rethinking their own practice and addressing the needs of both the artistic community and the society in general.”   

Response and Responsability. The artist Vitor César cites “the American author Rosalind Deutsche, in a text that addresses issues of art and the public sphere”³, to refer to the idea of responsibility and ability to answer – from the English language: response + ability. For Rosalind, it is a way to stand before the world. For Victor, the responsibility of art is not social commitments, but a critical position against society.

For Yuri Firmeza, another artist, the idea of an “ability to answer seems a matter of production efficiency, marketing, administration, mainly because of the immediacy explicit in response + ability.” Yuri, differently from the Vitor César’s speech, says: “I always wished my works betray the public to which it may – one day – have been intended. I always longed to erase any connection from the transmitter to the receiver that this matter of defined public a priori seems to lead me. Because I know that art has nothing to do with communication.“⁴  

Vitor and Yuri are not participating of the 7th Biennial of Mercosul. But they are referring to a clash that, I believe, permeates and transcends it. Among the Absurd and the Texto Publico (Public Text); how to articulate the need to scream with the desire to be understood? How to carry on a high degree of experimentation in art without making themselves socially? If “every creative effort has a marginal side” in its appearance of not coding, how to keep alive the marginalization of what is established by the Biennial of Mercosul Foundation? In what extent do artists- curators make a difference in this process?  

Coincidence? Strictly, nothing guarantees that, being curated by artists, the 7th Biennial of Mercosul has an differentiated ethics from that common to ego-dominated by curators biennials.  However, when Oi was invited to sponsor this edition of the event and felt uncomfortable with the title Ao Vivo, Cristiano Lenhardt, who “left” was not the artist, but the company. The Biennial of Mercosul Foundation, which listed first the desire for “real benefits for their partners and supporters (…)” has put the commitment to art in the first place. It was not Cildo Meireles who resigned of the participation in the Biennial.  

“Anarchy is the true order among men, the rest is mere trade”⁵. Finally, I suspect that the dominant ego of the 7th Biennial, which continues to demand consistency and regularity, tends to present in us – the audience of curators, artists and critics, perhaps less and less familiar with the “marginal side” of invention. That is, despite the 10 alterations proposed / imposed on works of the exhibition Árvore Magnética (Magnetic Tree) the intention shown by the curators of it – to make “the critics, the press and public” rethink their roles as “determinant actors in the contemporary field of art – I believe it was somehow reached by the 7th Biennial of Mercosul .   

However, in my case, it was not by what it said / dialogue / proposed that this “rethink” happened. Were its gaps, silences, scatterbrained, the abiding sense that something is wrong, incomplete, and clumsy: ultimately, the lack of communication skills? All that was demanded from the audience a position as experimental as that expected of the art.