Last week marked the opening of yet another major "bi-annual" exhibition. While its organizers are reluctant to call it a biennial, Portugal Arte 10 is Lisbon's attempt to snag a place in the art world's summer calendar. (And why not -- the seaside city is a perfect summer destination.) While the first (and perhaps only) edition of this "survey" is overly ambitious, mostly unorganized, and confused... that's not to say that it doesn't have a lot of promise.
The "multi-platform international survey" presents art "interventions" in the cities of Lisbon, Grândola, Portimao and Vila Real de Santo António, but really the breadth of the show is in Lisbon, in the Portuguese Pavilion designed by Pritzker-winning architect Alvaro Siza Vieira for the 1998 World Expo, as well as public art pieces -- by Sterling Ruby, Robert Melee and street art collective Faile, among others -- dotting downtown Lisbon. The press materials claim that the exhibition, coinciding with the country's 100-year anniversary of Republicanism, reflects the historic occasion, but, where and how? It feels more like a survey of contemporary art in East Coast and West Coast U.S., with a few Portuguese artists sprinkled in and a side plate of Cuban art, undercooked and unseasoned.
"Personal Freedom," on the ground floor, is the best use of the gargantuan Pavilion space, and curator Johannes VanDerBeek (Read my interview with VanDerBeek below), who is also an artist, managed to finesse the large rooms just as elegantly as he did the small rooms. The 28-year-old artist-cum-curator's bent was artists born in the 1970s and '80s (with a few exceptions), including several of his Cooper Union peers (Aaron King, Ernesto Caivano, Max Galyon, Nancy Lupo), former Zach Feuer artists like Justin Lieberman, and artists he may have searched out at Columbia or Yale MFA degree shows. This exhibition was refreshing and engaging. Works that particularly stuck out were the elegant ink-on-paper pieces by Caivino, including Diptych Arbor Axis (Body of Leaves), 2006, which was hung solitary on a wall overlooking an atrium; Anya Kielar's visceral collage assemblages; Stephen G. Rhodes's historical un-coverings; Valerie Hegarty's warped, mutated, burned and/or slashed installations; David Kennedy-Cutler's magpie sculptures; Portuguese artist João Pedro Vale's ironically camp and crafty works; and of course, VanDerBeek's own monumental Ruins, 2007, made of Life, Time, and National Geographic magazines and which debuted at Zach Feuer Gallery in 2007.
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