Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

306
the first political or philosophical articulations.
So there are very many different roles artists have
occupied – from craftsmen to illustrators and court
decorators, you name it. My commitment,
however, as well as most of my peers and probably
this whole contemporary art circuit we operate
in, is to a kind of art practice that is based on an
extremely sovereign figure of the artist and the
idea that an artwork does have agency and can
transform society.
Naturally biennials, being simply large-scale art
exhibitions, are very much a part of this historical
trajectory.
However something has changed, and this is
maybe why there has such an enormous
proliferation of talks, panels and symposiums on
the public function of art, on whether Biennials
are worthwhile, how can they be better or mean
more. It seems to me that something got lost in
this entire project and I think this has to do with
the disappearance of the public. Martha Rosler
in 1980’s observed that the public, in a sense of
groups of engaged citizen-subjects with political
agency, was being replaced by audiences. If I
understand her correctly, the difference lies in
the nature of engagement and the kind of
possibilities it creates. In this sense, audiences are
perhaps groups of consumers of leisure and
spectacle; they have no political agency and no
means or particular interest in affecting social
change (does my vote really matter?). My feeling
is that what Rosler started to observe in the 80’s is
now fait accompli: while the audiences for art
became enormous, there is no public among
them. Of course many will disagree with this
opinion, however just recently while walking
through the Frieze art fair in London, I could not
help but notice how this new situation became
the norm: thousands of art objects being
presented to thousands of people moving by
them with absolutely no traction in-between: no
idea how or why these objects got here, what
brings them together, what is this display, why
are we here – a situation no different then what
happens at the Tate Modern or any other
exhibitions of art today.
Furthermore, from the position of an artist this
poses a very serious problem: artistic practice today
is largely predicated on an operative model where
an artist is someone capable of producing an art
object, an image or a situation, that works upon
groups of individuals who, in turn, can affect
how their communities are organized through
exercising their political agency. While this does
not happen every time with every artwork, the
potentiality of this transformative effect is, in my
opinion, what defines the logic underlying
modern and contemporary art practice. What
happens if the public ceases to exist, and the
transformative cycle can never be completed even
potentially? Does the artist then revert to some
earlier historical role of an entertainer or a producer
of luxury goods? I, for one, would have a great
difficulty reverting to such a role. There has to be
a certain loyalty to the knowledge that a far less
vapid position has been possible for a couple of
hundred years… Yet how does one recuperate
artistic agency in the absence of public? I believe
aspects of the unitednationsplaza project may