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Twenty-two international biennales were mounted, worldwide, during 1997 and 1998, indicating the continuing value and vitality of such 'gatherings', or else a high degree of mimicry and duplication. After Venice and the Carnegie International, the Sao Paulo Bienal is the longest recurring of these international exhibitions. Significant changes were made for the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal, its twenty-fourth outing since 1951. The governing theme of anthropophagy and the history of cannibalism abandoned shop-worn vagaries, like the last biennale's proposition about the 'dematerialisation of art ', to declare its Brazilianness, peeling back colonial history (now approaching five hundred years duration) to reveal the deep connective tissue to modernism. It invited Europe to participate while maintaining a 'relative distance' from
Eurocentricity. All the more admirable was the intent to weave the theme throughout the Bienal. In all, two hundred and sixty-four artists, both living and dead, were represented; thirty-three curators participated; there were four distinct exhibition components, with the historical section being subdivided into twenty-seven subsections, and sixty-eight nations being represented in the 'nations ' section- all this for a budget of nine million US dollars and an expected attendance of five hundred thousand visitors during the two and a half month run.
Paulo Herkenhoff (based in Rio de Janeiro) is the first Sao Paulo Bienal Chief Curator without a Sao Paulo connection. In conversation he stated that the Bienal is an important symbol of this city of seventeen million inhabitants, a city which possess neither natural beauty nor historical monuments. (Sao Paulo is a maelstrom of chaotic urbanism, at least to European standards of urban built environment.) Herkenhoff also spoke of the Bienal 's importance as a 'civilising agent'- being well... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline