Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

Introduction
Luis Camnitzer
At some unfortunate moment in history some
philistine or group of philistines in a position
of power decided to separate art from education
and relegate it from its position in the
metadiscipline of knowledge to the discipline
and craft where it is today. In this way they
gradually managed to concentrate the emphasis
of art activity into the production of objects,
which society would divide between some few
makers and many buyers, and lead art in schools
to be considered as an expendable luxury
entertainment instead of remaining as a way of
thinking.
The “biennial” format, together with the art
salon and the more recent and less hypocritical
“art fair” have grown out of these changes. They
are places of national and individual competition
and stimulation of the relative positions of artists
in the marketplace. It is therefore paradoxical
that one of these biennials, the Mercosul
Biennial, should turn its back on this
configuration and appear on the map as an
“educational biennial”, as a biennial that claims
to concentrate on the educational function of
art above the idea of some kind of commercial
championship. It is thus the first time that an
international art biennial has tried to transcend
its own vocation for exhibition and transform
itself into an instrument radically dedicated to
cultural change.
Aligned with this decision, the curators have
redesigned the structure of the Biennial to
highlight the relationship between the artist and
the public, to involve the visitor in the artist’s
creative process, to allow the consumer to be
equipped as a creator; in other words, to return to
restoring art as a methodology of knowledge. We
want the emphasis of the exhibition not to stop
at displaying the abilities of the artist, but rather
to stimulate the abilities of the visitor. This task in
turn stimulates our abilities as artists much more
than the traditional self-obsession could.
However, it would be ingenuous and
presumptuous to imagine that one 6 th Mercosul
Biennial could achieve all this. We can only hope
to create a model that will slowly fertilise the
ground so that, many generations later, a deep
revision in the social function of art is achieved.
We do not presently know whether the model
we are suggesting has any possibility of the
slightest success in what it proposes. It will
probably result in not being the appropriate
model and will end up as nothing more than a
small exploratory experiment with possible
models. At present we only know that a problem
exists that is apparent in several fields and which
it is necessary to try to resolve.
The model for the first five Mercosul Biennials
was the same as all traditional biennials. A chief
curator was contracted with a team of assistants,
and together they shaped a curatorial vision, a
selection of works and their distribution through
the exhibition spaces. Thus they fulfilled the
objective considered the most important, creating
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