To analyze the photography exhibition at the second São Paulo Bienal (São Paulo Biennial), held in 1953–54, is to necessarily enter the realm of speculation. The Sala de Fotografia (Gallery of Photography) was a last-minute, hastily assembled addition organized by the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (Bandeirante Photo-Cinema Club; FCCB), an amateur photography and film club in São Paulo that held regular salons. There is no trace of the display in the textual and photographic documentation held in the institution’s archive. The club’s bulletin contains a few installation views, but a checklist has not been located (fig. 1). This dearth of records brings into relief the selective, interpretative nature of the historical record of the Bienal as a whole. The organizer of the event, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo; MAM-SP), did not photographically document the majority of the exhibition, meaning there are no known visual records in the biennial’s archive of the installations of the representations from Asia, Canada, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, with the exception of a few peopled snapshots at the opening. This practice extended to the Brazilian contributions: there seem to have been no installation views commissioned by the museum of the special exhibitions or of the general section.¹ Instead MAM-SP focused its photographic documentation on those exhibitions it deemed the most important, namely those from the United States and Western European nations (fig. 2).

The second Bienal inaugurated the yearlong quadricentennial celebration of the founding of the city of São Paulo, and constituted a veritable temporary museum of modern art, with more than three thousand artworks from thirty-three countries mounted in two newly constructed buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer. The displays of historical modernism, including Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Pablo Picasso’s Still-Life with Chair Caning (1912) and Guernica (1937), and Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), were featured in exhibitions dedicated to Cubism, Futurism, and de Stijl, and in tandem with retrospectives of the work of Alexander Calder, James Ensor, Paul Klee, Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, and Picasso. These exhibitions rivaled and often surpassed those at the postwar iterations of the Venice Biennale.

The Sala de Fotografia was organized in the days before the event opened to the public to fill gallery spaces left vacant by cancelled and delayed representations. The regulations of the second Bienal excluded photography from the exhibition; the only place photography was to have appeared in the event was as documentation in the architectural section.² FCCB leaders and members took full advantage of the late-breaking decision to include photography in the prestigious event and an opportunity to exhibit the works of its São Paulo–based members outside the club’s annual salons. Three installation views and a dozen object views were published in periodicals, allowing for speculative identification of some of the sixty or so photographs exhibited (fig. 3).³ The selection foregrounded geometric abstract and experimental modernist styles, as photography historian Helouise Costa has noted, and the picturesque and realist practices common among club members were excluded.⁴ Among the known works in the exhibition are Frederico S. Camargo’s Ventoinha (Little Fan), Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoforma no. 12, Thomaz Farkas’s Movimento na praia (Movement on the Beach), Marcel Giró’s Estudo de sombras (Study of Shadows), Tuffy Kanji’s Baixo relêvo (Low Relief), Ademar Manarini’s Composição (Composition), Plínio S. Mendes’s Malabarista (Juggler), Eduardo Salvatore’s Pegadas (Footprints) and Composição (Composition), Rubens Teixeira Scavone’s Abstração 5 (Abstraction 5), and José Yalenti’s Estudo (Study) and Dansa (Dance), as well as untitled works by Francisco Albuquerque, Eduardo Ayrosa, and Manarini.⁵ The photography exhibition was the subject of only four known dedicated texts, two of which appear in Boletim Foto-Cine, published by the FCCB.⁶ The journal’s readership did not reach far beyond the club’s membership, making the Sala de Fotografia a virtually undiscussed entity in the deluge of local and international art criticism surrounding the Bienal.⁷

In a firsthand account of the photography exhibition, published soon after the Bienal closed in February 1954, Geraldo de Barros was at pains to address what he viewed as the emerging misconception about his curatorship of the exhibition.⁸ Instead he underscored that the selection and installation were executed by the FCCB with no input from MAM-SP, identifying a large community of artists and art professionals as responsible for conceiving, realizing, and advocating for the project.⁹ He wrote that he and Aldemir Martins, both employed as hand handlers, proposed the idea to Wolfgang Pfeiffer, the director of MAM-SP, when the Haitian and Nicaraguan representations were cancelled and delayed, respectively.¹⁰ Leaders and members of the photography club went through the drawers at the FCCB and made a selection from the works on hand with an eye, as Barros explained, toward cohesion.¹¹ Within FCCB ranks, Barros attributed the original idea of pushing the Bienal to include photography to Albuquerque and Manarini—and described that he, Manarini, Salvatore, and Yalenti selected and installed the works with the help of Mário Fiori, Alfio Trovato, Renato Francesconi, and Kanji. Further, Barros credited Pfeiffer and MAM-SP’s artistic director Sérgio Milliet with persuading the museum’s leadership, and French curator Bernard Dorival and British sculptor Henry Moore, both of whom were on-site installing exhibitions, with winning the crucial support of Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho, MAM-SP’s president.

This type of artistic activism defined the art scene in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1950s. The year before, in December 1952, Waldemar Cordeiro, Barros, and five other São Paulo–based abstract artists launched the Grupo Ruptura. In February 1953, artists organized the Exposição Nacional de Arte Abstrata (National Exhibition of Abstract Art) in Petrópolis, near Rio. I argue elsewhere that the stakes of these inaugural group exhibitions of Concrete-oriented abstraction went beyond conceptual positions to extend to the consolidation of collective identities enmeshed with political commitments and institutional critique.¹² Like those initiatives, the FCCB created spaces—exhibitionary, pedagogical, and social—for its members who collaborated with and criticized Brazil’s modern art institutions. Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a vocal faction of the FCCB, Barros included, also aligned with vanguard abstraction, successfully advocated for shedding some of the club’s earlier conservatism and affording prominence to modernist experimentation, efforts evident in its intervention at the second Bienal.¹³

Cordeiro did not participate in the FCCB, but his theorization of the collective life of the artist in texts and talks of the early 1950s framed critical and artistic discourse, and informed the institutional gambits by artist groups. In a 1952 essay titled “The Return of the Artist to Collective Life,” he declared the innovation in Brazil’s abstract painting as comparable to the collaboration between groundbreaking artists during the Italian Renaissance, exceeding aesthetic gains and engendering societal change.¹⁴ Cordeiro further argued that this renewal relied on robust institutions.¹⁵ He credited the Bienal, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, and MAM-SP for their roles in this flourishing scene, but insisted on the crucial function of artist-run organizations and on the responsibility of the state-run and private art institutions to support artists.¹⁶ Moreover, Cordeiro and Barros were in active, dynamic dialogue, and had previously deployed the tactic of a coordinated display within a large event, namely the display of the work of Grupo Ruptura and other abstract artists together at the II Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna (2nd Paulista Salon of Modern Art) in 1952. They would later unsuccessfully attempt to persuade MAM-SP to exhibit all of the Grupo Ruptura members at the twenty-seventh Venice Biennale in 1954.

At the second Bienal, the Sala de Fotografia functioned as a threshold between geographies and genres. It was located on the second floor of the Pavilhão dos Estados (Pavilion of States), which displayed the architectural section, or II Exposição Internacional de Arquitetura (2nd International Exhibition of Architecture) composed of documentation of more than two hundred projects, occupying a third of the floor. The remainder of the floor held representations of varying sizes dedicated to nations of the Americas, dominated by painting, and culminating in a special exhibition by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. The ground floor and sunken atrium below boasted special exhibitions dedicated to Calder, Brazilian impressionist painter Eliseu Visconti, and Brazilian landscape paintings of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, as well as the US and Brazilian representations. Based on textual accounts and the FCCB’s photographic documentation of the installation, it is possible to conclude that the Sala de Fotografia was located in the first of a series of rooms in the middle section of the second floor, near the central ramp, among representations by Caribbean and South and Central American nations (Cuba, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Venezuela). On the floor plan in the event’s catalogue, the Sala de Fotografia is unmentioned, but it was installed in the spaces numbered 22 and 23 (fig. 4). The first wall of the special exhibition dedicated to architect Walter Gropius is captured in the background of one installation view of the photography exhibition (see fig. 1). A visitor would have walked by the entrance to the Sala de Fotografia when entering the architectural section.

Thus, the Sala de Fotografia was positioned in between documentation of architectural projects and fine art (predominantly paintings), namely displays dedicated to Canada and Latin America and the architectural section dominated by Brazilian, European, Japanese, and US contributions. It is telling that the photography exhibition occupied a space intended to present the only Caribbean nation (Haiti) and was prompted in part by the uncertain arrival of the representation from a Central American nation (Nicaragua). Bienal organizers replicated colonial relations in the lack of priority they granted Latin American nations they deemed minor. José Goméz Sicre, head of the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, served as an influential informal advisor, organizing the impressive Cuban representation and steering the exhibitions of other Latin American nations. Privately, he criticized MAM-SP for dedicating its financial and staff resources to Euro-American displays while neglecting to secure a wider array of displays from the Americas.¹⁷ The medium of photography was ultimately included in the Bienal partially thanks to the organization’s lack of cultivation and management of participation from all Latin American nations.

The photography exhibition’s in-between status—Barros described it as an “annex”—was amplified by its design and signage.¹⁸ The partitions used in the exhibition were the same double-depth ones used in the architectural section—not the single panels deployed elsewhere (fig. 5). This decision conveyed a skepticism, in Brazil and beyond, toward photography’s status as a fine art and instead encoded it, like architecture, as a technically oriented design practice. This was further underscored by the absence of signage standard elsewhere in the Bienal, where plaques printed in uniform, sans-serif modernist typefaces announced the name of a given country or, for special exhibitions, the country name with the addition of a style or artist name, such as “France: Picasso” and “Italy: Futurism.” Instead, a pennant bearing the logo and name of the FCCB appeared outside the gallery (see fig. 1).

Historian Barbara Weinstein has argued that the larger quadricentennial celebration, which the Bienal inaugurated, consolidated the identity of the city and state of São Paulo as a righteous innovator, racially coded as white, leading a backward nation, racially coded as black, forward.¹⁹ The name Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante invokes a central figure of that regional identity, the bandeirante, a colonial raider reconceived in mid-century São Paulo as an emblem of the disruptive character of the city and state as a national leader. The FCCB pennant—present as an afterthought in the massive event—makes legible a racialized and neocolonial discourse of progress, and underscores the explicitly Western cultural imaginary mapped in the biennial event as a whole. At the second Bienal, Brazil, with an industrialized, European-descent São Paulo as its standard-bearer, was positioned as a central actor in the Euro-American world and as a privileged nation within Latin America.

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Pulmão (Lung) of 1987 is composed of eight sculptures and a multiple created from the disassembled parts of 1,200 soft packs of Marlboro cigarettes, which the artist, Jac Leirner (Brazilian, born 1961), smoked over the course of three years. MoMA’s collection holds two examples from the series: a span of precisely flattened and perforated soft packs, suspended on steel cable, which can measure from 14 1/2 feet long to more than 15 feet long, and a small plexiglass box, only 8 1/2 inches high, a multiple containing ten cellophane wrappers still flecked with bits of tobacco. Across the series, Leirner employed various techniques—knotting, sewing, gluing, folding, puncturing, overlapping, and stacking—to create pieces from her disparate materials: pull strips, price tags, laminated paper, cellophane, cigarette packs, and X-rays of her lungs. The physical qualities of the works range from the elusive heaviness of shiny and matte oblong forms to seemingly weightless transparent and translucent acrylic boxes, two-dimensional gridded assemblies, and a light box. In the largest work in the series, Marlboro’s graphic identity—the iconic red chevron atop a white carton emblazoned with a gold seal and black type—is both amplified and mutated, at once hyper-visible and illegible: a dynamic of negation in Leirner’s production noted early on by art historian Aracy Amaral but obscured in most discussions of the artist.

Leirner was the first Brazilian artist to rise to prominence with near simultaneity in her home country and abroad. Her best-known series—Os cem (The one hundreds) of 1986–87, Pulmão of 1987, and Nomes (Names) of 1989, as well as Corpus Delicti (1992–93) and Nice to Meet You (1997)—garnered attention in part because they demanded multiple knowledges (international and local, art historical and societal) at a moment when, as Leirner has said, the dominant artistic centers were “wanting new blood.”¹ In each group of works, Leirner drilled down into the material conduits of distinct social habits and experiences, from the Brazilian economy’s hyperinflation of the 1980s to art-world conventions to—as in the Pulmão series—addiction and the global reach of US brands. The pieces evoke both canonical and then-newly recognized art practices—from Minimalism and Pop art to Brazilian Neo-Concretism and Conceptual art—that were fertile templates for her organization of materials culled from the refuse and other unvalued stuff of consumer society. In her accumulation of cigarette soft packs, for example, Leirner found the tense figure-ground relations of Brazilian Concrete paintings by artists such as Geraldo de Barros and Willys de Castro while evoking the slumping forms of Robert Morris and the serial commercial identities of Andy Warhol.

Leirner was born to a family deeply involved in the art world (her parents, Adolpho and Fúlvia Leirner, are prominent collectors of postwar Brazilian abstraction). As a student at the private São Paulo university Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) from 1979 to 1984, her professors were renowned artists, educators, and thinkers, and she and her classmates—including Leda Catunda and José Leonilson—would go on to be among the most visible and best-regarded artists of their generation. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Nelson Leirner (the artist’s uncle), Julio Plaza, Regina Silveira, and Walter Zanini reformed FAAP’s curriculum, increasing the rigor of the technical and theoretical training and introducing first-year courses modeled on the Bauhaus preliminary course. That cornerstone of Bauhaus pedagogy made the experiential and abstract study of color, form, texture, and materials the foundation of visual expression. The emphasis on experimentation and an in-depth knowledge of materials would shape Leirner’s conceptual and technical approach. Her study of foreign languages, interest in poetry and music, and month-long trips to New York and Europe—and frequent hemispheric and transatlantic travel after graduating—contributed to a multilingual historiographic artistic practice.

Through analysis of the shifting titling of the Pulmão series, the stakes of Leirner’s production come into new focus, distanced from the sometimes self-congratulatory rhetoric with which US and European institutions in the early 1990s trumpeted a globalizing art world and Latin American art—positions that find echoes today. When MoMA acquired two Pulmão works in 1991, Leirner opted for the English-language title Lung and removed the subtitle she originally assigned to the larger work: Plumária, às duras penas. (Plumária refers to indigenous Brazilian featherwork, and a duras penas is an expression meaning “with difficulty,” though pena can also mean “feather” and dura pena can be translated as “hard feather.” There is also the alliteration, and euphony, of pulmão and plumária, and the evocation of plumage as a lens to understand the sculpture.)

At the time, Leirner said the change was due to the subtitle’s untranslatability and orientation toward a domestic Portuguese-speaking audience, and has since shared that she thought the subtitle foolish—a joke that fell flat. I am not suggesting the subtitle be resuscitated—the English-language title Leirner adopted is consistent with her generative embrace of English, French, and Portuguese words and their combinations in her production as a whole—but the issue of untranslatability provides a necessary pause. Are there facets of Pulmão/Lung unaccounted for in the social, formal, historiographic, and pedagogical narratives traced above? 

Plumária, às duras penas points to other transformations—the bombardment of advertising language and consumer products become hard feathers, or the material culture of late capitalist civilization—and conjures a bodily adornment composed of the detritus of addictive consumption. Neither a celebration nor a condemnation, the work, for all its societal knowledge, formal beauty, and art-historical intelligence, hangs on the wall in tension, with difficulty. Leirner has said that “what I do in all the works is to create a place for things that don’t have one.”² The places she fashions are marked by the friction of translation, by an addition that also negates. Leirner’s turning over of things in her hands—and mind, and tongue—and her laborious care for the materiality and rituals of consumption create encounters that oscillate between humor and sobriety, homage and fever dream, taxonomy and eschatology.

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