Oui a la Biennale de S?o Paulo: Vilém Flusser’s Anti-Boycott ,

摘要

This was the question asked by Solveig .vsteb., Marieke van Hal and Elena Filipovic, the organi s ers of the Bergen Biennial Conference , in 2009. 2 The question refer red both to the plans of the city of Bergen to create a periodic exhibition and to the debate about the process of ' biennialization ' of the contemporary art world. Forty years earlier, the same issue – ' to b iennial or not to b iennial' – was the title of an a rticle on the boycott of the 10 th Bienal de S.o Paulo published in a n Argentine magazine. 3 This coincidence of titles points out that, s ince its creation in 1951 , the frame of reference underpinning the Bienal de S.o Paulo sought to question the opposition between centre and periphery . In so doing, it anticipat ed a political agenda that only emerged in the international art scene in the nineties with the proliferation of new biennials and postcolonial discourse. However, g iven the fact that most of the crit ical literature consulted in this field consists primarily of texts written in English , the biennial discourse tends to be rooted in an Anglo - Saxon theoretical framework. As a result, the work of Brazilian critics such as Mário Pedrosa and Aracy Amaral, wh o wrote extensively in the 1970s and 1980s about what we now call the 'biennial effect',is completely unknown to those participating in the current debates.