Pixacao Intervention

Yesterday I attended conference at the Bienal titled 'bienals, bienals, bienals.' The culminating debate on what had been an interesting day of discussion resulted in discussion of the tagging by kids on the opening day of the show. It is a shame to only concentrate on this aspect when so many fascinating things were discussed during the day, but I don't have long and this needs to be said... A lady made a comparison between this act the political acts and works made in the difficult period of the Sao Paulo Bienal during the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s and 80s. It was not a straight comparison, and I will not go into the depths of what I now realise is an incredibly complex issue that is amplified by the difficult relationship Paulistanos have with Pixacao (the hieroglyphic style tagging language that is unique to Sao Paulo) but I feel its important that I expand on a few things I wrote in my earlier blog, Sera Marginal Sera Heroi, now that I know a bit more about the specific act and the general context.

Example of Pixacao on Sao Paulo building

Ana Paula Cohen, one of the curators of the Bienal was clearly very angry and upset by what happened on Sunday and by the reaction it received in the press. She argued very strongly against the comparison with the work made during the 70s stating that the kids were in fact the ones making an 'authoritarian' and violent act, not reacting against a regime. She also raised an issue I had been thinking about, that the kids were not respecting the unwritten rule in grafitti that you don't tag over other people's work. The kids had not only sprayed the void, but had tried to vandalise much of the work on the third floor and had broken a security guard's nose and injured other people.

I had wondered if there had been someone else pulling the strings and persuading the taggers to spray the void, but had thought that it was perhaps someone from a gang or something. It turns out however, that there have been a series of incidents like this, organised by an ex student of belles artes who paid the kids to spray the space. The papers even knew it was going to happen and had their cameras ready. Unfortunately, his intervention has received so much press and has been discussed in many serious contexts giving him the attention he desired.

I was really shocked to find out from my friend Amanda who works in Choque Cultural (the graphic and street art gallery I visited last week) that the same intervention had happened in their gallery. I think Amanda found it very hard to talk about , she was reluctant to talk from the opinion of the gallery and was still trying to work out how this issue fit with the ethic of what they try to do. After it had happened in Choque Cultural the press were very aggressive in trying to get feedback and wrote articles in the papers attacking the gallery as if it belonged to the same institutional framework as other spaces.

Even I don't know the complexities surrounding Pixacao, it is important to stress that these interventions do not represent all of the Pixacao taggers- it is a small minority. It is particularly important to emphasise this in the context of the fact that the 'artist' manipulating these kids does not come from a graffiti background, he is reportedly a middle class ex art student who neither respects rules within the art world nor rules in street art. Ana Paula Cohen compared this to the burning of books in Nazi Germany, the debate rolls on...