Introduction: Biennials as Models for Cultural Encounters

In the burgeoning discipline of curatorial studies, biennials play a central if complicated role, as the increasing importance of exhibition histories constructed from fragile and ephemeral archives shows.¹ But more specifically, biennials have come to exemplify the significance of cultural translation for contemporary art, a situation relevant to the biennials in this chapter. Biennials bring artists and works from one culture or region to another, ideally to establish dialogues, tensions, and resonances between different cultural products, and all through an exhibition medium transposed from its nationalist foundations at the Venice Biennale in 1895 into a leviathan of international proportions and inflated profiles today. Yet, this globalized over-reach can reveal the less salubrious aspect to these exhibitions: their reduction to an easily identifiable trope, an already ossified readymade enabling a struggling locality (often, though not always, a second- or third-tier post-industrial city like Liverpool or Gwangju) to aspire to the attention of international art audiences, markets, and magazines. In each city's yearning for new-found global relevance, notions of cultural translation have thus come to function in two directions at once. By absorbing the structures and methods most indicative of globalized exhibition making, a local art scene can project its practices and discursive debates into a much broader canon of contemporary art – or, rather, believe it can project the local into global legitimacy.²

That, at least, was the narrative that dominated the perception of biennials and their international proliferation from the mid-to-late 1990s to the present, and which subtends this chapter. Biennials are almost invariably presumed to be a cultural symptom of globalized neoliberalism, such that the openness of North Atlantic art to those worlds beyond its shores becomes another strategy of colonization and self-promotion.³ However, such views forget that biennials are not simply a phenomenon imported worldwide from the capitalist West in recent years. During the nearly four decades of the Cold War, especially from the early-to-mid 1950s to the end of the 1980s, biennials were among the foremost models for bringing together artists and exhibiting art works from myriad cultures outside the West, and thus for establishing the exhibition as a paramount venue for cultural encounters.

This was especially true of what we call in this book the “second wave” of biennials, which emerged along the art world's so-called “peripheries” – in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1951, for instance, and in Alexandria, Egypt and Ljubljana, Yugoslavia in 1955 – long after the inauguration of the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International in the mid-1890s. A number of these biennials sought an often self-conscious rejection of the cultural pretensions – and certainly the cultural hegemony – of the North Atlantic. Others linked their biennials to the civic project of cultural modernization and internationalization.

The Bienal de São Paulo, which was founded in 1951, and the Biennale of Sydney, which began in 1973, stand as the most durable and prominent of the biennials established during this second wave, and fit the latter description. However, the Sydney Biennale did not follow São Paulo's adoption of the Venice model (that is, a biennial dividing its artists by national representation, while granting awards to individual artists). It was not the first biennial to dispense with this template. The Bienal de Arte Coltejer (which began in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968) had been presenting sprawling group shows, with international and local artists' works placed alongside each other regardless of nation or medium, since its founding. But the format invented by Sydney and Coltejer was to become the path taken by most newer biennials, in part because it was empowered by a ready and increasing cadre of freelance auteur curators who were to a great extent modeling themselves on personalities such as the influential chief curator of documenta 5 in 1972, Harald Szeemann.⁴

Szeemann had helped shape the expectations of the Biennale of Sydney's early organizers about what an ambitious survey of contemporary art might be, for he had visited Australia, just before the first Biennale in 1973, to curate a survey of local art, I want to leave a nice well-done child here (staged at the Bonython Gallery in Sydney and then at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne) in 1971, in the lead-up to documenta 5. His thematically organized, not survey-based, model for documenta 5 (and specifically his organizing conceit of “Individual Mythologies,” that exhibition's slogan) would prove especially important for the 1979 Biennale of Sydney, as would the figure of the roving, itinerant biennial director exemplified by Szeemann.

Most studies of biennials posit 1989 as Year Zero in the formation of a global complex of exhibition making – including all the near-pathological competitiveness, paranoia, and desire for recognition that came with that complex – but the Biennale of Sydney and the Bienal de São Paulo remind us that we need to look much earlier than 1989 to find the roots of both globalization and biennialization in contemporary art. The Cold War period was not a dead-zone for major international group shows like biennials. Instead, we can pinpoint the decades just after the Second World War for the birth pangs of a new internationalism – perhaps even an emergent globalism, and the desire to be recognizably, expansively global – interwoven with civic self-doubt. To be more precise, the dialectics of contemporaneity and provincialism, the ambitions to be “contemporary” and the fear of being “provincial,” lie at the heart of such cultural globalism and in the minds of local artists, wherever biennials are staged, as we shall see throughout both this chapter and this book.⁵

There is a second reason to focus on these biennials. At stake in this early phase of globalism was the struggle to articulate modes of world-making very different from the antinomies of capitalism and communism, East and West, that still dominate Cold War cultural histories. Instead, both São Paulo and Sydney provide concrete evidence of a more complicated set of aspirations between the local, the regional, and the international – part of a broader desire for culture to function in an “age of three worlds,” as historian Michael Denning has argued, rather than two.⁶ This is not to say that we should forget Cold War adversarial hostilities altogether. We clearly cannot, for the production and reception of biennials outside the North Atlantic was still very much informed by the broader political and social contexts of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, worldwide anti-American feeling of the 1960s and 1970s, and the use of culture as a weapon of soft power by governments of all stripes during this time. Both Brazil and Australia, like many other countries outside the North Atlantic, were targets of the US cultural sponsorship program aimed at projecting the prestige and power of American art in international group exhibitions and biennials. This was the program of soft power promoted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the US International Service and the Museum of Modern Art's International Council, and thoroughly analyzed by Serge Guilbaut, Frances Stonor Saunders, and others.⁷ Exhibitions including The Family of Man and Two Decades of American Painting anchored briefly in Melbourne and Sydney on their international, CIA-sponsored world tours.⁸ However, this patronage had trailed off by the time of the 1979 Biennale of Sydney, and the USIS had little involvement with art by then. By contrast, the 15th Bienal de São Paulo, which was presented from October 3 to December 9, 1979, occurred very much in the Cold War shadow of the United States's interventions in South America and its conflicted sponsorship of brutal, authoritarian, military régimes.

The 1970s marked a period of significant cultural, economic, and geopolitical change, and biennials were potent bellwethers of these transitions because they lay at the very nexus of local ambition, regional traction, and new internationalism that were the cornerstones of cultural politics at the time. The development of São Paulo's and Sydney's biennials thus provide us with crucial examples of artistic, curatorial, and bureaucratic responses to these politics. How did an art scene and a biennial as geographically distant from the “center” as theirs engage with international cultural and political transformation? How did they translate, or even endogenize, the models of cultural encounter promoted by the structure of large group exhibitions? And how did the local and the international entwine? As this chapter shows, while notions of encounter and translation were very much central to both cities' ambitions, it was ultimately difficult to separate them from worries about exclusivity, and especially the exclusion of the local at the expense of international prestige.

Founding the Sydney Biennale

By the end of the 1970s, the arrival of relatively affordable international flights had pushed Australian artists, along with their peers from Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Korea, and other long-established “peripheries” of art, into closer contact with North Atlantic art centers. The result was the beginning of a fracturing and opening up of art circles beyond New York and Western Europe and within each art center, a division into two overlapping art worlds: a provincial ghetto represented by one set of art galleries or an international art world enclave represented by another, usually smaller and more exclusive, number of galleries and, increasingly, some artist-run spaces.

This was as true in Tokyo and Seoul as it was in Sydney or São Paulo. The two art worlds did not overlap but the latter world – that which saw itself as part of an international contemporary art community – did not at that time or later necessarily renew itself from the former's talent-pool of the best and brightest. When it did, it did so only reluctantly or in such a way as to reinforce North Atlantic primacy over the image of what was contemporary art. Many scholars' recent work, particularly that of John Clark, has shown that this remained true even of the huge Asian biennials that flourished from the 1990s onwards though, increasingly, many younger artists moved easily from international artist residency to residency and from biennial to biennial.⁹ But as well, by the late 1970s, Sydney's art world seemed to have reached a respectable if small critical mass in terms of self-sustaining size. This shift coincided with the third Biennale of Sydney, held in 1979, that launched the Australian city's biennial as an international event seeking to be an image of the world of contemporary art as it then stood.

Both the São Paulo and Sydney Biennales were founded by immigrants from postwar Europe – in São Paulo, Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho; in Sydney, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis.¹⁰ Their motivations were similar, and they shared the stark life-experiences of the post-World War Two diaspora. They were European migrants who established themselves as important industrialists, proudly participating in their chosen city's civic and national desires for international recognition as nascent global cities and as nodes of business and capital in their respective regions in the Southern Hemisphere. Needless to say, civic and national aspirations were never identical nor necessarily in harmony, nor was the balance between the two always equal. Australia's new, government-sponsored arts funding organization, the Australia Council for the Arts (which had been established by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1973, the same year that Belgiorno-Nettis established the Biennale of Sydney), wished primarily to support art-making nationwide and far less to project Australian art internationally. Its aim was to maximize direct support to Australian artists in the form of grants. Belgiorno-Nettis, on the other hand, wanted to replicate and import the cultural institutions of his homeland to his beloved Sydney, and in particular the venerable institution of the Venice Biennale:

My love affair with Venice, where I have been a frequent visitor for years, is the source of inspiration for the Biennale. How do you break the isolation of Australia, which I felt strongly myself in the early 50s? How do you inject that flavor of international extravaganza, originality and explosive vision that you see at gatherings in Venice, in the Giardini, in the Corderia, in the Arsenale, with their centuries of tradition?¹¹

Other biennial models than that of Venice were already available, principally the idea of a biennial of the South, current from 1955 onwards, that we will encounter in the next chapter. These ideas might just as easily have been adopted but there is no evidence that they were discussed and Belgiorno-Nettis's civic-minded boosterism, nostalgia, and philanthropy prevailed. He invented, developed, and financially supported the new biennial with the organizational and curatorial resources provided by his family conglomerate, the powerful Transfield Corporation, which built bridges, railways, and major infrastructure projects throughout the Sydney region. Belgiorno-Nettis wanted to move beyond his previous sponsorship of a major national competition of contemporary art, the Transfield Prize, which he had started in 1961. But the prize relied on an exhibition model that, focused on traditional media such as paintings or sculptures, was on the wane by the early 1970s.

The first, humble 1973 Biennale of Sydney was selected by the curator of the University of Sydney's Power Institute collection, Elwyn Lynn, and then organized by staff from Belgiorno-Nettis's corporation. It was a simple survey exhibition. In fact, it was not much more than part of the opening celebrations at the spectacular, new, Jørn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House (the foyer of which was the Biennale's main venue). Most of the artists were Australian and the selection was insular and conservative, especially considering the number of local exhibitions and artists already working in conceptualist or new, post-object forms and the exhibitions of relatively recent international art that had already been seen in Australia. Instead, a much larger and far more innovative exhibition, Recent Australian Art 1973, a Biennale satellite event held simultaneously in the newly upgraded Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney's state art museum, presented those new forms – installation, performance, film, and video – to the Sydney public. Many of the Australian artists working in the new art forms had already established international connections through survey exhibitions or biennials. For instance, minimalist Robert Hunter represented Australia in the 1970 Triennale-India of “Contemporary World Art” in New Delhi, with austere, stenciled wall drawings. In Delhi, Hunter met Carl Andre, with whom he became good friends and who facilitated Hunter's participation in other international exhibitions including an early exhibition of minimalist and conceptualist art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Biennale of Sydney had been founded with the mission of engaging two separate groups – on the one hand, local artists, students, and intellectuals; on the other, the general public – with the latest forms of contemporary art. But it was now faced with the contradictions inherent in taking on that self-appointed mission in a relatively small art center. For its founders, the Biennale initially appeared to be Australia's lifeline to the outside art world, just as the Bienal de São Paulo seemed in Brazil, two decades earlier. But even at that time, for many artists, it was simply one forum amongst many. For some – even in 1979 for the local artists who were most likely to be invited into these biennials – Australia, like Brazil and Argentina, possessed a more complex and cosmopolitan art scene than simply that of a collection of small, parochial, provincial cities. These nations' own art scenes had already been enmeshed for a decade or more in the very real 1970s global appearance of contemporary art – or at least conceptualist art – which had from the start flourished beyond New York or London in several far-flung cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Sydney, and Melbourne. But this was not on display in the 1973 Biennale of Sydney. For visiting artists and curators, all of these cities boasted respectable venues for avant-garde art as it touched down by mail delivery or in curators' suitcases. Just as Lucy Lippard in 1969 easily transported to Seattle her major conceptualist survey, 557,087 (titled after the population of Seattle at the time, it included John Baldessari, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Walter De Maria, and Adrian Piper), so, also in 1969, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth had commissioned adventurous Melbourne gallerist and patron, Bruce Pollard, to place advertisements in Melbourne newspapers as part of his work, The Second Investigation, 1969, coinciding with similar appearances in London and New York papers.¹² Pollard paid for the advertisements (even though one newspaper, Melbourne's weekly tabloid, the trashy, prurient Truth, refused to accept them, on the grounds that they were so mysterious that they might somehow be subversive), enabling Kosuth to create a work by remote control at long distance.¹³

The second Biennale of Sydney, staged in 1976, saw the synthesis of two different models of support. The Biennale received an even greater, and now dominant, portion of its sponsorship through the Australia Council and less from the continuing but smaller support of private donors of whom Transfield was by far the largest. With the clout provided by its substantial funding, the Australia Council steered the Biennale into a new, mega-exhibition structure. This time, though, instead of participating directly in artist selection as it had in 1973, the Council delegated the task to a director who it knew would seek out new types of art. In effect, this was an early phase in the evolution of a preference for what only partly in jest became known as “biennial art.” The Biennale was to be governed by a powerful, quasi-autonomous board and curated by a director whose position was independent of host venues. It was to be exhibited in the city's largest and most venerable art museum, the recently refurbished Art Gallery of New South Wales, offering the Biennale temporary access to the museum-quality, climate-controlled spaces and experienced technical staff that a large-scale exhibition with international loans needed. Without doubt, the cosmopolitan, outward-looking members of the Australian federal government agency that channeled money to the visual arts, led by curator Leon Paroissien (who was later to direct the 1984 Biennale of Sydney and then become inaugural director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art) wished to set in course a new format: the carefully orchestrated narrative of center/periphery relations and artist choices that would draw supportive international responses and interest in Australia. However, it would also create negative, frustrated Australian criticism.

The Biennale's organizers had taken careful account of the initiative of one of their close friends, Sydney-based collector and philanthropist John Kaldor's series of Art Projects. In 1969, Kaldor had commenced a biennial series of invitations to artists to realize a major artistic project in Sydney, beginning with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1969. He followed this with an invitation to auteur curator Harald Szeemann, as we noted in chapter 1, to assemble a survey exhibition of contemporary Australian art during his lightning-fast visit in 1971 (this did not result in the inclusion of any Australian artists in documenta 5, however), and then to Gilbert & George to present their Singing Sculpture in 1973. Veteran curator Daniel Thomas remembered that the grandeur of Wrapped Coast shifted contemporary art sympathetically into the minds of Australians and, just as important, suggested to a new generation of local artists that they were not geoculturally isolated. Thomas, then an adventurous young curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, wrote the key, urbane catalogue essay for the first Sydney Biennale; it was to be his vision of the 1979 Biennale that eventually prevailed over others. Wrapped Coast's supporters, who included Belgiorno-Nettis, were also, later, board members of the Biennale of Sydney. Kaldor had demonstrated two things: that there was considerable public interest in contemporary art that moved outside the boundaries of paintings on museum walls; and that the international art world's attention could be focused on a distant event given the right, adventurous programming.

To achieve this double ambition, in 1975 the Sydney Biennale Board poached maverick curator Tom McCullough from his position as director of the Mildura Sculpturescape – a dramatically successful, spectacular triennial survey in a distant, rural township in arid inland Australia on the Murray River – to direct the 1976 Biennale of Sydney.¹⁴ Despite Mildura's huge distance from anywhere – it is nominally located between the three major population centers of Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne, but only in the sense that Santa Fe is between New York and Los Angeles – McCullough had established the Mildura Sculpturescape as the key exhibition of advanced art in Australia through an astute combination of insider word-of-mouth, inveterate travel, sheer energy, a close-knit group of artist advisers who talent spotted for him, and a core group of dedicated assistants. His 1976 Biennale of Sydney, titled Recent International Forms in Art, was curated according to a capacious theme rather than a national typology and, further, it largely focused its rhetoric, though not in fact any genuine critical focus, on artists from the Pacific Rim (Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, and the Bay Area of the United States). This was dictated as much by the small budget for the inventive curator's travel as by his ambition; biennial artist selection was, and often remains, opportunistic and dictated by the limitations of time and money, even if the results might be sometimes revelatory. McCullough recalled that, “In 1976 I visited only two countries while preparing for the Biennale, as we didn't have much money. I was only allowed two weeks overseas so I decided to focus on a Pacific triangle.”¹⁵

More recent directors of biennials have, by contrast, become famous for their itinerancy, but the cash-strapped McCullough relied on a small group of advisers from each region, including expatriate curator John Stringer, based in New York, and Tommaso Trini from the Italian art magazine, Data, to help select the inclusions.¹⁶ Such curatorial delegation was also common in later biennials and large-scale exhibitions (most notably, Magiciens de la terre in Paris in 1989). The exhibition catalogue was equally frugal: the cheapest, one-color printing on the cardboard cover, spiral-bound, brown paper pages, and dull monochrome illustrations. It looked like a down-market instruction manual. The conceptualist look was partly deliberate, not unmodish (it very consciously recalled the bureaucratic appearance of Szeemann's documenta 5 catalogue) and partly unavoidable, but the austere publication was, as with the absence of curatorial travel, a contrast with the future direction of biennials. For McCullough at the time, the poor publication seemed adequate, looked appropriately austere, and saved a lot of scant money.

White Elephant or Red Herring? Selecting the 1979 Biennale of Sydney

The Third Biennale of Sydney in 1979 preserved the innovations of 1976, in particular the notion of a biennial shaped by a director, and it was in reality the first Sydney Biennale to grab any degree of international attention. At the same time, its audience numbers – almost exclusively local – also grew considerably. Both successes were the result of considerable calculation; the double-guessing was typical of this phase of regional biennials, and followed a series of symposia, meetings, and public consultations that began at the conclusion of the 1976 Biennale and continued over the next year or so, in part as a way of road-testing the way forward, in part as an opportunity to audition the shortlist of prospective directors for 1979, and in part in conformity to the 1970s penchant for consultation and collective processes and consensus, even if (as turned out) this was window-dressing. Englishman Nick Waterlow was one of those who presented a proposal for the next Biennale at a public meeting at Paddington Town Hall, in inner-city Sydney. A candidate for the Biennale directorship, he gave the impression that his Biennale would involve a substantial amount of community consultation and local artist selection: “it is important the coordinator is in a real position to respond to ideas and suggestions and to ensure they are implemented where feasible. Unlike Venice or Sao Paulo [sic], this could then make for a Creative Peoples Biennale.”¹⁷ In effect, Waterlow wanted to create a Biennale that would be a popular exhibition for a regional public as well as the expression of local artists groups' wishes for a fuller representation of Australians and women artists. It was to be a dialogue with living artists.¹⁸ This intention was potentially far more exclusive and expensive than local art activists realized at that moment.

Waterlow had curated no major exhibitions before his appointment as artistic director of the Third Sydney Biennale. He had been resident in Australia for a period in the 1960s, had moved back to London, where he worked with community arts organizations and their art spaces in Milton Keynes, a postwar project city outside London, before returning to Australia to teach curatorial studies in Paddington at one of Sydney's three major art schools (a position he was to hold until his death in 2009). His directorship of the Biennale was shadowed by an often-intense hostility felt by many local artists towards the Biennale's organization and its directorship. The surprisingly cursory inclusion of Australian artists in McCullough's previous Biennale, given his almost unique rapport with adventurous local artists with whom he had closely consulted whilst at the same time steering his own course through the minefield of artist selection, had resulted in vocal public claims of an international bias against Australian artists. It slowly became evident, as Waterlow's selections and Biennale press releases gradually became public, that the under-representation of women had continued. As Biennale director, Waterlow was soon negotiating a maze of meetings and angry letters. Two groups of well-organized, vocal Sydney and Melbourne artists and critics threatened an artist boycott if demands for a 50 percent representation of women, and a substantial representation of local artists and community arts, were not met.¹⁹ The artist groups convened public meetings, lobbied funding bodies, and frenetically agitated amongst and often against their interstate peers, publishing an illustrated, book-length manifesto against the biennial, Sydney Biennale: White Elephant or Red Herring. Comments from the Art Community 1979.²⁰ This strongly resembled earlier Art & Language publications, which was no surprise since a key member of the New York chapter of Art & Language, Ian Burn, had returned to Australia a few years before and created a publishing collective with other artist-activists including Ian Milliss. Burn and Milliss contributed an essay, “Don't Moan, Organize! (with apologies to Joe Hill),” writing, “Because artists are powerless, structures like that of the Biennale, which assume to define the situation in which we all work, can be imposed on us.”²¹ They wrote to Waterlow, “We cannot stress too strongly our concern that while a major international exhibition is to be held in Sydney, Australian artists are to appear in an ancillary, complementary way to an exhibition that should be highlighting and not downgrading their talents.”²² The activist groups felt that the significant amount of public money spent – by Australian standards at the time the Biennale was a lavish event – underscored the lack of an Australian version of a Whitney Biennial, a national survey of artists. The Biennale Board disingenuously agreed. In a prompt reply to the Melbourne artist group, board chairman, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, urged the group to lobby for an Australian biennial that, he suggested, might be held in Australia's other large city and artistic hub, Melbourne, in alternate years to the Sydney Biennale.²³

In the end, after discussions, remonstrations, and reassurance, of the sixty-two individual artists that the activists counted in the 1979 Sydney Biennale, there were only nineteen Australians. Of the nineteen Australians, only five were women. There were only five women amongst the international artists. In all, as the Sydney activists angrily noted, there were only ten women included in the list of sixty-two artists received from the Biennale Board. The focus was now firmly on ephemeral and easily transported or assembled new art forms: on performances and installations rather than paintings. Significantly, the Australian representation included artists from regional and rural locations including, for the first time in a major survey exhibition of contemporary art, paintings by Aboriginal artists from northeast Arnhem Land in Australia's distant “Top End.” European Dialogue was thus, despite its myriad problems, a watershed exhibition not only for its series of hitherto-unexpected meetings, but for its inclusion of Aboriginal artists' paintings as contemporary rather than so-called “primitive” or “traditional” art (the first time this happened in a major international exhibition like a biennial).

The Biennale's vain struggle to mediate between local and international spheres was almost invisible to the audiences who arrived at the exhibition itself. They saw a continuum of new art forms, local and international: Marina Abramović and Ulay's collaborative action, The Brink (1979), appeared in the company of Mike Parr's installation that incorporated performance documentation and photographs involving his whole extended family.²⁴ Parr's own, widely read commentary on the exhibition, “Parallel Fictions,” appeared in the country's leading art magazine, Art and Australia. He focused on the emergence of a new, global language of post-studio contemporary art rather than on the statistics of artists' inclusions and exclusions. The exhibition catalogue that accompanied the 1979 Biennale was not nearly as spartan as that of 1976, since biennial curators and artists alike were coming to feel that biennials deserved commemorating and that artists deserved better representation. Just as important were the other two publications launched alongside the Biennale, documenting and debating its lifespan, from the initial competition to curate the exhibition through to reflections on the Biennale after its closure.²⁵ These documents included installation shots, all of the exhibition's press clippings, audience commentaries (both critical and supportive), as well as transcripts of the numerous town hall meetings held between incoming Biennale director Nick Waterlow and Sydney audiences in the year before the Biennale opened – meetings which were intended to provide open engagement with, and commentary from, local artists about the Biennale's focus, context, and direction, but which often resulted in a hostile reception from an art scene that felt excluded from the Biennale's pro-European agenda.

Waterlow pointedly titled his biennial European Dialogue, including almost no American artists and focusing on Europe. He was introducing Australians to a messier, more political, definitively post-1960s Europe, rather than the neat Parisian modernism and tachiste abstraction of postwar French painting, a large exhibition of which had toured Australia in 1953. In effect, European Dialogue recycled Harald Szeemann's curatorial rhetoric of “individual mythologies” from the 1972 documenta 5. But both this new biennial and the large survey shows now appearing in Europe, such as the 1980 Venice Biennale, the 1981 London Royal Academy survey, A New Spirit in Painting, and the 1982 Berlin mega-exhibition, Zeitgeist, all excluded the outsider artists and the atlases of objects culled from mass culture that the maverick Swiss curator had included in documenta 5. European Dialogue was no different. Szeemann's capacious, catch-all, curatorial label, “individual mythologies,” was now beginning to be repackaged by biennial curators, especially in Europe, as a new direction in painting – as hyper-expressive, allegorical paintings that were about to be labeled neoexpressionist or transavantgarde. This label occluded the degree to which the new painting had grown out of the second generation of conceptualist art, just beginning to appear in Szeemann's documenta 5 and much of which was now shown in Sydney in 1979. But there was relatively little of the so-called new painting in the 1979 Biennale apart from the scrawled symbols of German artist A.R. Penck: instead, much diaristic, semi-fictional, and narrative photo-documentation was on view, alongside other works such as the Australian Aboriginal paintings. Waterlow did include, though, several of the European transavantgarde's putative grandfather figures, including School of London survivor Howard Hodgkin, and German painter Gerhard Richter, active since the mid-1950s and already claimed by many art movements as a precursor.²⁶

The idea of a “European Dialogue” reflected more than the conceit of a surfeit of American art. In his catalogue essay, Waterlow was reflecting the widespread doubt that New York remained the center of the international contemporary art world, for this was the deepest period of the Cold War, a phase in which American economic and political power seemed both ascendant yet in decline. Jimmy Carter's presidency and the Iranian Revolution were the backdrop to the 1979 Biennale. A few months later, the Iran Hostage Crisis unfolded. This was a period of pervasive anti-Americanism in the largely left-leaning worlds of both European and Australian contemporary art. Waterlow referred in his catalogue essay and in later recollections to the sequence of American exhibitions that had arrived in Sydney, Melbourne, and other cities around the world and to his sense that a shift had occurred, one that Australia should take account of.²⁷ Exhibitions of recent American painting had, by now, toured Australia in 1958, 1964 and, most memorably, in 1967, courtesy of the Circulating Exhibitions Program of the quasi-autonomous International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibitions included Two Decades of American Painting (1967), Some Recent American Art (1974), and Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse (1975). Some Recent American Art focused on American minimalist and conceptualist sculptures and installations. Despite the relative contemporaneity of the latter exhibition, it was time, felt Waterlow, to shift attention away from America. He wrote, “The most persuasive argument in favor of a European Dialogue is that it does at this time represent a genuine shift in creative emphasis. It is now accepted that remarkable work is likely to arise in Cracow [sic], Turin, Düsseldorf, Vienna, Paris, London or Amsterdam as in New York.”²⁸ He was, in effect, attempting to revise art history much as many of his Sydney and Melbourne critics would have liked, though his version was stripped of their Marxism and, more surprisingly, his own egalitarian, community arts, non-curatorial background. He was reflecting the surprisingly generous take-up of conceptualist art forms in Europe. After all, many American artists were finding more interest and recognition in their work in Europe than in the United States. After a couple of decades of intense American influence upon Australian art, Waterlow wished to revalue the direct links between Europe and Australia.²⁹

This was evident in the show's installation rather than in its catalogue, for its essays were very cursory: no longer than three pages in length (though this brevity also, in part, replicated Szeemann's short text introducing the documenta 5 catalogue). Waterlow's own, well-intentioned but very hasty one-page essay was no exception, and his claims about the overweening shadow of American art were not completely true, nor did a turn from the United States to Europe exactly capture the wave of the future or correctly encapsulate the recent past. An important solo exhibition of art by Marcel Duchamp, the grandfather of conceptualism, had toured Australia's art museums in 1967–1968; this had been initiated in New Zealand. Australian expatriate conceptual artists such as Ian Burn had long argued that a wider and more inclusive perspective should inflect the understanding of influence. And for the 1988 Biennale of Sydney – actually titled the Australian Biennale, to celebrate the bicentenary of Australia's settlement/ invasion by the British – that Nick Waterlow curated a mere decade later, Burn (who had been one of the ringleaders of the agitation against Waterlow in the lead-up to the 1979 Biennale) contributed a new major essay on internationalism as determined from “peripheral” perspectives. Here Burn set out a different and highly significant geocultural theory – different both to the Museum of Modern Art's and Harald Szeemann's atlases of international art – for imagining Australian art's participation in a global history of art, and thus that of any art center of the South, whether that be Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, or Brazil.³⁰

The 1979 Biennale, in effect, began the process of self-consciously garnering to itself the role of international gatekeeper, a process initiated by its important predecessor of 1976. This intention – as much as showing local audiences a smaller simulacrum of the Venice Biennale or documenta – was to underpin many regional biennials from this time on. The Sydney Biennale's board was self-consciously setting its biennial and its curator up as the meet-and-greet mediator between the international and national art worlds, as the point where the very different and separate international and national art worlds intersected. This was significant. The aim was to actually intervene in both international and Australian art: to represent each to the other; and to push to be part of a nascent network of globalized artist movements in which international artists would create new work in a “peripheral” location (the concept that John Kaldor's Art Projects had fostered) and to create the networks that would allow Australian artists to participate in European biennials as something other than national exemplars. By 1979, the Sydney Biennale sought a more ambitious transcultural exchange than simply a curatorial selection of artists from around the world (familiar from the Venice model). Drawing together artists from across the globe (rather than from a particular idea of the central metropolis) was meant to spark new artistic dialogues between practitioners from hitherto disparate or even isolated contexts, rather than just to represent what was happening elsewhere to local audiences. Waterlow emphasized this in his short curatorial statement and, later, in retrospective interviews. He wrote, “It is to be hoped various artists and exhibitions exchange programmes [sic], as well as other avenues of interaction, will become more complex, as indeed they should,” and concluded his essay by reemphasizing the idea of artists' “intercontinental dialogue.”³¹ It is in this context that we can approach one of the starkest and most complex images from European Dialogue which is not of art works or their installation in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It is instead an informal meeting between two respected elders of art, the cosmopolitan French critic Pierre Restany and the Aboriginal artist and activist David Malangi, engaged in a conversation that would most likely not have been possible without the opportunities offered by the Biennale and which were not at that time possible in most other parts of the world, whether that be New York or São Paulo, as we will see.

Waterlow invited many artists to Australia – including Jürgen Klauke, Klaus Rinke, Anne and Patrick Poirier, and Marina Abramović/Ulay – hoping they would make new works for the occasion. The Biennale flew the artists into Sydney, connected them with local hosts – with curators, artists, or writers – and to local institutions such as art schools and their eager students. Abramović and Ulay, for instance, made a tantalizing but frustrating tour to the Outback as well as to Melbourne, returning for a much longer stay in 1981 with an Outback visit that changed the course of their art. The meditative work that resulted, Nightsea Crossing: Gold Found by the Artists (1981), featured the pair sitting opposite each other for eight hours each day at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, staring at each other. Two years later, in 1983, in a later iteration of Nightsea Crossing (subtitled Conjunction), at Amsterdam's Sonesta Koepelzaal, the artists sat for seven hours over four days with two friends: one a Tibetan lama, Ngawang Soepa Lueyar; the other a Pintupi elder and artist, Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi, with whom Abramović and Ulay had become very close during their second visit to the Australian desert and who flew willingly to Amsterdam for the performance.³²

Beyond the aspiration that artists would make important works in Australia, the Biennale's international visitor program predicated a substantial dialogue with local artists, students, and curators that extended beyond Sydney. With Biennale-supplied air tickets that routinely specified one Australian destination in addition to Sydney, artists often made at least one extra stop in another Australian city, speaking in local studio art schools or universities. Later Sydney Biennales continued to prioritize flying the participating international artists to art schools and universities beyond Sydney. Other visiting artists took time out to sun themselves on white, sandy beaches, at least until the arrival of more harassed schedules during the 1990s, from which point it became normal for artists to fly in, install their works, and quickly fly out for the install at the next biennial. But at this point, and amidst the financial uncertainty that afflicted the Sydney Biennale during the mid-1990s, such highly organized expectations of substantial artist dialogue petered out and visits to other art centers – if they occurred, which were less and less – were not organized or funded by the Biennale.

Import/Export: Sydney and São Paulo

The situation in Sydney by the late 1970s bears substantial contrasts and surprising parallels with other city-hosts of biennials in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps most notably São Paulo. This was not least because both of these second-wave biennials were founded by recent and ambitious Italian migrants, yearning for ongoing international connection and the prospects of importing the Venice Biennale model to the entrepreneurs' new homes. Yet the São Paulo Bienal's powerful founder, Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho, died in 1977. The Bienal's 15th edition, the XV Bienal de São Paulo (1979), which opened a few months after The Third Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue, was the first after his death. At the Bienal's inaugural ceremonies, São Paulo state governor Paulo Maluf gave a speech that paid heartfelt and effusive homage to the recently deceased and much celebrated industrialist.³³

The XV Bienal was the last of the so-called “invisible” Bienals, for it occurred at the end of more than a decade of isolation caused by international revulsion at the brutal military dictatorships of Artur da Costa e Silva (1967–1969) and Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969–1974), which censored, arbitrarily arrested, and tortured their citizens.³⁴ During this period, with international boycotts and protests that commenced with its 1969 edition, Sobrinho's Bienal had itself become identified with the repressive state, which had insisted on a censor's approval of all works in the 1967 Bienal. The autocratic Sobrinho did not welcome curatorial advice, nor changes in the Bienal's exhibition methods and displays, nor questions about his links with the state.

The 10th Bienal de São Paulo of 1969 had been the occasion for a boycott by Brazilian artists and writers that then expanded to United States and European artists, with French critic Pierre Restany (a frequent visitor to many of the new biennials in the 1960s and 1970s, including that in Sydney) publicizing on behalf of the agitation. But the boycott had started at another Brazilian Bienal, the 2nd Bienal da Bahia, of December 1968, where the organizers unilaterally removed works of art from the exhibition and burned at least one. Censorship had now become standard government practice: an exhibition of Brazilian artists selected for the Biennale de Paris, which was to be held at Rio's Museum of Modern Art, was closed down. Renowned critic Aracy Amaral recounts the growing protests and boycotts by artists that, nevertheless, remained more or less invisible to the general public in Brazil.³⁵ In quick succession, she writes, 321 artists and intellectuals signed a petition, “Non à la Biennale,” at a famous public protest at the Musée d'art moderne in Paris. Brazilian artists living abroad, including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, refused to participate in the Bienal. Despite government pressure, the majority of Brazilian artists withdrew. In response, Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho convened a meeting to work out what could be done in response, but the event was crippled.³⁶ By 1971, as Isobel Whitelegg has written, “the boycott had successfully appropriated the exhibition's international prestige, or, rather, participating in the Bienal, co-sponsored by Brazil's right-wing military régime, had come to be seen as a dubious ambition for any politically engaged artists.”³⁷ As a result, the Bienals of the 1970s received little international press and an increasing number of nations withdrew their representation in the face of the régime's threats to imprison protestors and critics. The reputation of the Bienal only recovered during the early 1980s, once there was real political change.

But the year of Sobrinho's death was also the beginning of change, for in that 1977 edition the Bienal began for the first time to be (tentatively) ordered with a theme, even though it retained the familiar organization by geography as well, with a committee of organizers responsible for coordinating the artists selected by participating nations, rather than an artistic director or chief curator in charge of the selection. Over the following two years, President Ernesto Beckmann Geisel began to relax the régime's heavy-handed censorship laws. Geisel left office in December 1979, which was also the month that the XV Bienal closed. Even so, the 1979 edition was, in effect, an interim Bienal, suspended between two very different cultural moments and two very different stages of curatorial development. It showcased works presented at previous Bienals. The attendance was slight. Critic Walmir Ayala wrote that the “Bienal appears with a bobbled administration and a visible crisis.”³⁸ The need for change, and disgust with the régime's crude, self-interested nationalism, was as clear as it was obvious that the Bienal had lost any vanguard mission it had once aspired to, and was merely well-behaved. Several of the international visiting artists, who were beginning to return, entered that fray. During the XV Bienal, Joseph Beuys gave a speech, tellingly titled “Re-Public: Appeal for a Global Alternative.” And, as Erin Denise Aldana and others have recounted, an association of artist and theater collectives, including 3Nós3, Viajou Sem Passaporte, Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales (Theatrical Investigations Workshop), and Gextu, created “pre-events” to clash with the official events of the Bienal.³⁹ On October 3, 1979, one group gate-crashed the opening ceremonies of the XV Bienal. An artist led a blindfolded band of artist-performers through the Bienal at the end of a long rope that tied them all together. As the group shuffled past the works of art, which included a retrospective of older works that had been acquired from the prizewinners of previous Bienals, they sarcastically remarked, “How marvellous!” and “Brilliant!” As Aldana and Whitelegg separately explain, it is important to understand that these pre-events and the Evento Fim de Década, which occurred at the end of the Bienal, were part of a considerable Brazilian artistic narrative of political interventions and actions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.⁴⁰

According to Claire Bishop, these late-1970s collectives – emerging in Brazil and other parts of South America, such as Argentina – presaged later forms of social participation and public intervention that were to be bracketed under Nicolas Bourriaud's notion of relational aesthetics, and they pre-dated much similar activity in Europe and North America.⁴¹ The key point for us to note, though, is that Brazil, like Australia and Argentina, was not in fact ever dependant on any single biennial for cosmopolitan contacts with other artists. Artistic action was dispersed across several locations – including dealer spaces – rather than situated singularly in a Bienal, or a Biennale of Sydney. Thus Whitelegg describes the diminished status of the São Paulo Bienal during the 1970s, which could be attributed not just to boycotts and censorship. The Bienal was becoming, as in Sydney, merely “one exhibition amongst others … It had local competition.”⁴² The competitors included annual exhibitions like the Salão de Arte Contemporânea (1966–1975) at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea Campinas and Jovem Arte Contemporânea (1963–1974) at the University of São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP), which had been founded by Walter Zanini in 1963. His exhibitions there were far more experimental in nature than the Bienals. MAC-USP's location, right next to the Niemeyer-designed Bienal pavilion in the Parque do Ibirapuera, could not but highlight the Bienal's waning significance.⁴³

The following 16th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1981, directed by Zanini, marked a definitive break with the past and was therefore, perhaps not unsurprisingly, highly acclaimed. Zanini removed the nationality-based structure of the Bienal's main exhibition altogether, replacing it with themed sections and an open-invitation exhibition of mail art. Zanini's Bienal, like his exhibitions at MAC-USP, involved the same new art forms – mail art, videos, artists' books, installations, and actions – that Nick Waterlow had emphasized in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. Along with those new forms went artists' mobility and many works' relative portability, all of which, both in Sydney and São Paulo, conjured a world-picture of global interconnectivity, rather than the biennial lifeline to the outside world that both São Paulo's and Sydney's founders had imagined.

Inherent in the aspiration to international dialogue was the presumption that biennials have an affective, transformational power, not just for the careers of the invited artists, but also in the imagining, in the world picture, of what is both global art and national art. The 1979 Biennale of Sydney and the 1981 Bienal de São Paulo, like almost all important biennials from the mid-1970s onwards, sought to intervene in as well as to reflect on this national–global dialectic. The key to the success of a gatekeeper event would increasingly be the invited, auteur curator who owed little or nothing to the local host art museum or Kunsthalle, and who in fact was probably a complete outsider to local art museums but who would have access to international networks of artists, or who would know precisely who to ask for that advice. In other words, Tom McCullough in 1976 and now Nick Waterlow in 1979 and Walter Zanini in 1981 had thoroughly internalized the auteur curator model of Harald Szeemann, even if they were hindered by a lack of comparable resources. All three, however, had created their reputations outside the mainstream public art museums of their respective cities. All had successfully adapted Szeemann's improvisatory but highly centralized documenta 5 method, with a dedicated group of talent scouts and committed advisers rather than a team of professionals backed by proper resources. McCullough had recalled, “I had virtually no staff. It was Tom McCullough, full stop, for most of 1976 and one really had to get on with the professional staff of the gallery.”⁴⁴

Waterlow was forced to accept the same approach as McCullough to short-staffing and scant resources but, like McCullough, he was able to rely on the spaces – the white cubes – and the highly professional installation and security staff of a major art museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This was crucial, if in the future sometimes very reluctantly offered. For the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Biennale meant ceding control of its exhibition spaces during a peak period of the calendar to an external curator working beyond the museum's control. São Paulo's Bienal, by contrast, was almost from its outset housed in an expansive, late modernist Oscar Niemeyer-designed building adequate to its great ambitions and marked by vast sight-lines. The Biennale of Sydney's venues were, quite simply, less suitable for the often outsized, unconventional works that artists were increasingly planning and which biennial directors around the world wished to include. In this regard, São Paulo was clearly ahead of the game, anticipating the need for flexible space and other resources as art shifted from modernist traditions to the post-object flux of the contemporary.

The Biennale of Sydney's problems arose from its origins. Its chronic disorganization, sometimes erratic timing (in the 1970s, the Biennale was more often a triennial), lack of money, and a consistent record of secrecy and rationing of information to the public were the unintended results of a tiny, idealistic, semi-private operation operating in an ambiguous zone between public and private. Apart from Transfield Corporation's continuing sponsorship, the Biennale of Sydney was hindered by inadequate philanthropic and government funding as well as a precarious hold on its exhibition spaces. The former was alleviated by a dramatic increase in Federal Government funding in time for the 2006 Biennale; the latter was ameliorated by the Biennale's consolidation in the harbor-side Museum of Contemporary Art and the colonization from 2008 onwards of a spectacular and immensely popular new site, a derelict shipyard on Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbor itself. Freight costs also perpetually restricted the movement of large exhibitions into the Southern Hemisphere. For years, participating countries contributed a large part of the Biennale's operating costs by underwriting individual artists, usually without the control that national pavilions would have given them. 1982 Sydney Biennale director William Wright observed that Sydney's problem had always been that, “apart from more enlightened and courageous art critics in the public media, it needs money,” remembering that foreign government arts agencies' support often amounted to up to 60 percent of the Biennale's budget. He guessed that Sydney survived on between 5–10 percent of the operating budget of the Venice Biennale.⁴⁵ So, an exhibition of international impact and representation was put together on a very small budget, though that budget, as we have seen, seemed large and even recklessly spent to many local artists.

Waterlow went on to be sole artistic director of the Sydney Biennale two more times, in 1986 and 1988, as a co-director in 2000, and to serve on the Biennale's powerful board for decades. He was murdered in tragic circumstances in 2009. From the early 1990s on, the Biennale of Sydney was to move into a confusing and more contradictory place in both Australian and international art as an under-funded but spectacular event focused on the North Atlantic with a smattering of Australian artists, whereas the first Biennales of Sydney, two decades before, had aspired to a more generous Asian focus than their successors. The 1992 Biennale of Sydney – The Boundary Rider, directed by Anthony Bond, a chief curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – was the last Biennale of Sydney of any artistic significance to North Atlantic audiences until the substantial injection of government money that we noted before enabled more generous and serious exhibitions. Curator Charles Merewether's 2006 Biennale of Sydney, Zones of Contact, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's 2008 Biennale, Revolutions: Forms That Turn, were once again major biennials shaped by well-connected directors who could leverage important loans from European and North American collectors and the artists' galleries in order to mirror a world picture based decisively on the emerging contemporaneity that had come to define contemporary art.

Conclusion

By 1979, the Sydney Biennale had become Australia's principal (but far from only) mediator with the global – or more accurately the “global” art world of Europe and North America. There were no more extraordinary exhibitions from the Museum of Modern Art's International Council, nor would they have been received as such. But there was a certain lack of reciprocity in this development. The global did not actually need to come to Australia, even if the compensation was a trip to a balmy, subtropical, Southern Hemisphere city by the water, to a site as visually spectacular as Rio or the Biennale's original referent, Venice. Conspiratorial though it sounds, the Euro-American center just did not need to conduct a dialogue with the provincial even after the former's initially grudging but by 1979 increasingly avid admission of the international and the global. A biennial would never be an agent of change itself, for no clear consensus about political or community art in a period of change and upheaval such as 1979 was possible anyway, if biennials were dependent upon peak art museums such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which for better or worse were the bastions of entrenched local privilege as well as professionalism, or dependent upon local elites bound to government, as had been the Bienal de São Paulo. Art museums in relatively small art worlds were, it seemed to radical critics, bound to infantilize their audiences, shoe-horning them into one of two categories: either the capacious strait-jackets of the few, cosseted insiders at exclusive, invitation-only events in which global visitors encountered their peers; or else into the constricting, conservative demands of the imaginary common man or woman posited by populist and provincial newspaper reviewers, who obdurately refused the world picture of contemporaneity.

But artists in Sydney and São Paulo, at least aspired to escape this double bind through the developing image of a globalized artistic contemporaneity – manifest in the emergent concept of dialogue, in Waterlow's hope that invited artists would realize new works on the ground in Sydney in cooperation with locals. The third Bienal de La Habana, of 1989, is widely taken within the critical and rapidly-emerging area of exhibition histories to have inaugurated a new mode of exhibition-making in which the concept of artist dialogue was paramount.⁴⁶ We suggest that the Third Biennale of Sydney, in 1979, which pre-dated the Third Bienal de La Habana by a decade, deserves similar acknowledgment for its understanding that two of the images of contemporaneity which a biennial would henceforth embody – and which would become key tropes of global contemporary art – would be dialogue and collaboration in place of the image of a combative vanguard. Artist collaborations inevitably foreground the overarching field of world memory, and post-studio, cross-cultural artist collaborations have become a special – and symptomatic – case of this in the field of contemporary art. Regional dialogue is the third term that can mediate between the global/international and the provincial/local, although differentials of power and tension still saturated those dialogues, as we have traced in Sydney but also in São Paulo.

At a time when many artists were working in a cultural geography of destabilized but still crushingly hegemonic center/periphery relationships, the two main biennials of 1979 – in Sydney and São Paulo – offered a disruptive, contested, confusing, sometimes inspirational, and apparently contradictory place for local artists. For parochial art scenes, these exhibitions brought welcome news in the form of recent, major works by international artists. But the number of local artists was a small percentage of the exhibitors and the visitors were often carefully chaperoned or had set themselves over-optimistically tight schedules, oblivious to the long flight times from Europe or New York. The issue of artists and audiences for biennials in the South went further than artists' concerns about exclusion and lack of representation to the deeper question of whether something other than a token link between local and international art was possible. Local artist organizations and activist collectives had wondered in 1979, in both Sydney and São Paulo, if the picture of a globally focused biennial that avoided real change was worthwhile. If the Sydney Biennale continued to occupy its particular import/export niche, importing North Atlantic art and attempting to host a dialogue with that military-industrial complex, they had argued, such a small, under-funded Sydney Biennale was not going to do anything else other than passively conduct international fame, style, and art-world glamour. The Sydney Biennale's problems in 1979 were to be replicated in numerous other biennials and international group shows in subsequent decades (most infamously, the short-lived Johannesburg Biennale during the mid-1990s), because the struggles and uncertainties of international exhibitions in the 1970s were surprisingly little different from those apparent in the 1990s. The difficulties that the curators of biennials had in negotiating local relevance and international prestige hinged on the question of who, in truth, was a provincial biennial's real audience. The global and regional art economies, both of which each biennial of the South must cater to, have often proved to be intractably and mutually exclusive.