The Biennial Under Contestation: Local Perspectives on the Tenth São Paulo Biennial (1969)

In August 1969, an article by the French critic Pierre Restany was published in the Brazilian newspaper Correio da Manhã, reporting a bleak cultural landscape marked by protest, boycott and intervention.1 He observed how artists, no longer interested in progressing their careers or exhibiting in galleries, were building ‘anti-careers’ by challenging conservative institutions and establishing an ‘anti-art’. For Restany, the anti-career was consonant with ‘anti-form’: rather than producing objects, artists defined situations that required active participation. In this reversal of the pleasures of contemplation inherent to a conventional cultural code, an ‘anti-code’ was established: ‘from the illegible book to the music of silence or the painting of the void’.2

Restany understood the post-war international art circuit to revolve around two axes, the biennials of Venice and São Paulo, which had become ‘the ultimate aspiration for artists worldwide’.3 But the biennial formula had started to collapse. Anti-artists adopted a marginal position by refusing exploitation and resisting social pressure. For these artists, ‘the ultimate consecration of an anti-career was to refuse to participate in one of the system’s biennials’.4 With the publication of this letter, Restany both declared his support for a proposed boycott of the tenth São Paulo Biennial (1969) and revealed his own shift to an anti-career by cancelling the thematic Art and Technology exhibition he had been preparing for that edition, due to open in late September.5

In Brazil, as elsewhere, violent contradictions were accelerating the shift towards anti-careers. It was widely acknowledged that mega-exhibitions were more than contemporary art spectacles. They began to be perceived as stages and tools in an international political game. The Venice Biennale was questioned and occupied by students; the Milan Triennial was only allowed to move forwards after extensive negotiation.6 In a climate of contestation, the boycott against the São Paulo Biennial gained momentum in Europe, and especially in Paris, which was home to an active Latin American community.

In recent years, the 1969 boycott of the São Paulo Biennial has been addressed both within and outside Brazil.7 In a 2009 article addressing the boycott’s international impact and the ephemeral and collective strategies of the artists who participated in the biennial, Isobel Whitelegg argued that ‘a history of Brazilian art written from the perspective of the international visibility of the Bienal allows for this lack of knowledge to be read as lack of activity’.8 Research has also addressed artists who lived under censorship and repression in Brazil while continuing to produce art within alternative spaces and circuits, often at risk to their lives. Claudia Calirman has discussed the events surrounding the boycott in relation to the work of three artists based in Rio de Janeiro: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio and Cildo Meireles.9 Elena Shtromberg has noted the boycott’s continued impact during the 1970s, the most repressive years of Brazil’s civic-military regime. Shtromberg highlights work that engages with symbols of the state – currency, television, newspapers and maps – as a device to relate art to the social, economic and political context of the 1970s.10

This article considers the moment at which the boycott was triggered and addresses how it was propagated within Brazil via the circulation of the Paris-originated ‘Non a la Biennale’ manifesto. As such, it brings to light an intense debate, without consensus, around the Brazilian artists’ participation in the tenth São Paulo biennial. Archival research reveals the uncertainties involved for artists and art critics in Brazil who took a stand against political authoritarianism, as well as their desire to resist, to make art despite censorship.

‘No’ to the São Paulo Biennial

On 16 June 1969, a meeting was convened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAM) (fig.1) in order to debate the participation of the second French delegation in the tenth São Paulo Biennial, after the first delegation had withdrawn.11 The meeting became a general assembly, attended by artists and intellectuals. Brazilian artists gave testimonies and read from a dossier entitled Non a la Biennale de São Paulo, which contained information on cultural repression in Brazil, letters of protest and a manifesto with the reasons for the protest.12 After hearing these arguments, it was reported that ‘the assembly came out strongly, apart from three exceptions, for an international boycott’.13 A petition was signed and added to the dossier. The provisional list of those participating in the protest included commissioners and artists representing France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain, as well as individual artists such as Pol Bury (Belgium), Hans Haacke (United States) and Julio Le Parc (who had been invited as part of Restany’s Art and Technology exhibition).14 Of the artists invited to represent Brazil who were resident abroad, those who joined the boycott included Sérgio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Frans Krajcberg, Rossini Perez, Arthur Luiz Piza and Flávio Shiró in France; Antonio Dias in Italy; Rubens Gerchman in the USA; and Hélio Oiticica in the UK.15

A statement in the dossier by Oiticica addressed the artists and commissary who had been selected as substitutes for the withdrawn French delegation.16 The artist declared his position as a ‘live witness’ against participating in a biennial that he argued was ‘entirely subject to preposterous regulations imposed by the Brazilian fascist regime’.17 The dossier’s central manifesto, also entitled ‘Non a la Biennale de São Paulo’, stated that its signatories were no longer willing to collaborate with an ‘official culture’ reflected by the São Paulo Biennial, where ‘obscure and mysterious’ processes of selection were led by only a few ‘official characters’.18 The organising institution, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (FBSP), was seen to be supportive of the regime, to play an active role in censoring ‘immoral or subversive’ artworks and to ratify the regime’s policies through a system of national representation.19 Following the MAM meeting in Paris, the dossier circulated in several countries, and Non a la Biennale de São Paulo ultimately secured the signatures of 321 artists and intellectuals.

The debate within Brazil over the international boycott emerged in part through the actions of the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who was at that time President of the Rio de Janeiro branch of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA-RJ). The ABCA-RJ’s collective response, written by Pedrosa, and the dissemination of the Non a la Biennale dossier initiated a wide-ranging discussion, condensed within professional associations local to Rio and São Paulo, centred on the role of artists, critics, institutions and art within a context defined by repression.

The Pre-Biennale de Paris

In the years following the coup-d’état of 31 March 1964, Brazil’s civic-military dictatorship strengthened its repressive apparatus by instituting a succession of legal instruments and norms. Coming into force in December 1968, the Institutional Act No.5 (AI-5) inaugurated the regime’s most violent phase. The measures it enforced provided tools to intimidate, repress and demobilise any opposition. The right of habeas corpus (protection against illegal detention) and freedoms of expression and assembly were suspended and peremptory dismissals permitted; mandates and citizens’ rights could be annulled and political trials were to be conducted by military courts with no right of appeal.20 The existing use of surveillance and censorship was bolstered and the use of torture became systemic. Within the cultural sphere, references to the political context or questioning of social and behavioural norms were repressed.

The closure of an exhibition hosted by the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ) was a tipping point in the censorship of the visual arts and a catalyst for the boycott of the biennial. The exhibition, which featured artists selected to take part in the sixth Biennale de Paris (1969), was ordered to be closed before its opening night by the government department that had commissioned it.21 Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt, the owner of the Correio da Manhã newspaper and Director of the MAM-RJ, later reported on the cohesiveness of the group of artists selected to represent Brazil in Paris: ‘a beautiful and kindred team, united by a strong Brazilian accent’.22 It was precisely this accent, however, that precipitated the exhibition’s end. Antonio Manuel exhibited one of his most recognisable works of this period, Repression Again: Here is the Consequence (Repressão outra vez: eis o saldo) 1968 (fig.2), which includes five red-panelled silk screens of police violence against students, each covered by a black cloth that could be raised by the public, revealing the images. Evandro Teixeira showed The Fall of the FAB Motorcyclist 1965 (fig.3), a photograph depicting the moment when a Brazilian Air Force official fell from his motorbike while escorting Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to Brazil. The image, taken by Teixeira when he was working as a photojournalist, had not been censored when it was published on the front page of the Jornal do Brasil in 1965. Three years later, however, it seemed overtly offensive in the eyes of the military. The Minister of Foreign Relations, José de Magalhães Pinto, attempted to justify the censorship by stating that MAM-RJ should have advised his Ministry of the works selected for the exhibition and avoided the inclusion of any ideological or political content.

In the wake of AI-5, the inventive and intellectual abilities of art were constrained at a moment when artists and critics were pushing for a greater understanding of its potential for social transformation. In 1967, on the occasion of the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) at the MAM-RJ, Oiticica had articulated a new vanguard: a critical position characterised by participatory forms of experimentation and challenge to the status quo.23 Informed by his reading of political theorist Herbert Marcuse, Oiticica understood participation as a ‘dis-repression’, which he defined as the refusal of passivity and the adoption of a socially marginal position.24 The following year, Pedrosa translated and published an excerpt from Restany’s 1967 manifesto ‘Against an International Mediocrity, Towards Generalised Aesthetics’ (Contro l’Internazionale della mediocrità, verso l’estetica generalizzata).25 Describing ‘total art’ as ‘a generalised popular aesthetics’, Restany’s manifesto argued that art had changed its purpose and must now be ‘a collective metamorphosis that works in favour of all’.26 In the commentary that follows his translation, Pedrosa outlines one of his most widely cited concepts: ‘Today, the conscious artist is making something unprecedented: the experimental exercise of freedom’.27

Over the course of the 1950s, and during the first five editions of the São Paulo Biennial, Pedrosa had promoted concrete and constructivist art in tandem with his democratic and socialist politics. Following the civic-military coup, he took a stand against the regime’s authoritarian actions by publishing articles in the national press and engaging in meetings and marches. On 21 June, following the closure of the MAM-RJ exhibition and subsequent prohibition of the artists’ participation in the sixth Biennale de Paris, the ABCA-RJ met to define a series of resolutions. Pedrosa’s passionate protest, written on behalf of the association, was published as a manifesto the following day, and sent to state authorities and to the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in Paris.28 As well as referencing the censored MAM-RJ exhibition, the manifesto cited two cases of censorship that had occurred in 1968 – the closure of the second Bienal da Bahia, where artworks had been removed and organisers arrested, and the removal of works from the third Salao de Ouro Preto.29 Less than a week before the manifesto was published, details of the same cases had been presented at the Paris meeting and included within the Non a la Biennale de São Paulo dossier. With information concerning repression and censorship crossing borders, efforts in Brazil and France started to come together.

The obligations of the art critic

The ABCA-RJ’s manifesto of 22 June was articulated as a defence of art criticism, a profession whose work was being constrained and interrupted by the regime. Its resolutions included refusing to participate in juries or accept positions in salons and other ‘official or officious art exhibitions’ in Brazil, whether publicly or privately funded, and refusing to select artists to represent the nation abroad.30 The manifesto called for the abolition of visual arts censorship, which – unlike theatre and cinema – was being carried out ‘in an unorganised and deregulated fashion’.31 This position was reiterated by Pedrosa’s article ‘The Obligations of an Art Critic in Society’, which was published by Correio da Manhã under the pseudonym Luiz Rodolpho on 10 July 1969.

Written in response to the official justification for censoring the MAM-RJ exhibition given by Pinto, Pedrosa’s article asserted that art could neither be judged according to ideological criteria nor understood as illustration or propaganda, because any apparent moral or political content was inseparable from its form.32 The visual arts, Pedrosa argued, did not play a clandestine role requiring control and surveillance by secretive government departments; and neither were visual arts exhibitions comparable to live events, which were subject to censorship under the Brazilian constitution. Pedrosa also reminded readers of AICA’s mission, of which the ABCA was a member organisation, to ‘fight for consensus on the role of art critics’ as ‘qualified technical professionals’.33

In Brazil, two professional associations – the ABCA and the International Artists Association (AIAP) – became key networks for sharing documents and debating a proposed boycott of the tenth São Paulo Biennial. The ‘official or officious’ exhibitions that the ABCA-RJ had agreed to boycott included the São Paulo Biennial. The manifesto also agreed, however, that withdrawing from previously agreed commitments should be optional, a clause permitting those already engaged by the FBSP to retain their roles. The São Paulo branch of the ABCA agreed to remove their representative from the biennial’s Visual Arts Commission and published a statement expressing their willingness to join the ‘combat against censorship and the struggle for creative freedom, in defence of the free exercise of art criticism’.34 The resolutions published within the ABCA-RJ manifesto were contested by four local critics.35 This led the ABCA-SP to criticise a ‘lack of unity’ that would, as Aracy Amaral noted, ‘provoke greater confusion among artists’.36

Withdrawing from the biennial was a point of contention and uncertainty for artists, both those invited to take part in the exhibition and those planning to submit works for selection by the jury. AIAP members shared the ABCA’s repudiation of censorship, but the association decided against issuing any collective response to the call for a boycott. In late June, the Rio de Janeiro branch of the AIAP (AIAP-RJ) published a declaration defending creative freedom from judgements ‘enforced by officials who are not trained to assess the global values of an artwork’, which would threaten ‘any chance of legitimacy, stunting or limiting the professional practice itself’.37 The statement referenced earlier cases of censorship, noting that ‘already in the eighth and ninth São Paulo Biennials, censorship had removed works by several Brazilian artists from the exhibiton’.38 The AIAP-RJ urged artists to examine the facts and base their decisions over whether or not to participate in the biennial on ‘the solidarity necessary to achieve our nation’s cultural development’.39

A letter from the artist Antônio Henrique Amaral in São Paulo to the critic Frederico Morais in Rio provides rare insight into the discussions taking place among AIAP members.40 Recounting a meeting during which documents including the ABCA manifesto, AIAP-RJ declaration and the Non a la Biennale dossier were read to fifty artist members, Amaral describes a dynamic debate: ‘things change every minute. I am writing to put my ideas together and to inform you in Rio what is happening here. Reply, share, have your say!’.41 Amaral predicted that artists registering for selection by jury would ultimately take the same stance as those rumoured to be declining invitations to take part. But he also reported that some artists believed that exhibiting was the more effective weapon against government censorship. Even under repressive conditions, they argued, artists should not stop producing, but instead maintain the struggle to ensure a ‘constant and challenging presence within areas to which they are assigned, such as biennials, galleries, museums, etc’:

Amaral reported that critics of the boycott also considered its implications for other exhibitions within Brazil’s circuit of contemporary art salons. He questioned the focus on the São Paulo Biennial alone, since censorship is ‘an imposition that reaches the whole national territory’, and asked where the line should be drawn: ‘If the artist does not send an artwork to the biennial, does that mean he won’t take part in any salons, ad infinitum?’.43

From this perspective, taking part in the biennial can be understood as a local tactic, distinct from the methods of the international boycott. Rather than regarding the São Paulo Biennial as an extension of the regime, certain artists viewed its international stage – with delegations from other nations – as a potential site for mass critical participation. These artists believed that their absence would have little impact beyond their immediate milieu of artists, while large-scale critical participation would resonate further. Launching an attack from ‘the inside’ would be the ‘Brazilian way’ of contributing to a proposal ‘made by artists from abroad’.44 Any written protest was likely to be restricted by press censorship, and therefore ineffective. Moreover, in the absence of a unanimous decision by Brazilian artists to boycott the biennial, the idea of rendering the exhibition empty would fail.

Others viewed the rising tide of protest initiated by Non a la Biennale as a force to which Brazilian artists could contribute. Some cited the FBSP as a reason to join the boycott. According to the artist Waldemar Cordeiro, it was ‘a senile and feudal institution’ unworthy of celebration, whose selection criteria did not meet the ‘real needs of current Brazilian art’.45 Although at first he considered taking part in the biennial, Amaral was uncertain which direction to take. His fellow painters Arcangelo Ianelli, Alfredo Volpi and Samson Flexor were likewise undecided. All four, individually and at different times, eventually decided not to exhibit. But at the time of Amaral’s letter, July 1969, nothing was set in stone.

With the biennial scheduled to open in late September, discussions continued and art critics began to state their positions in the national press. Jacob Klintowitz viewed the boycott as a proposal ‘detached from the Brazilian and human cultural context’ and argued that the biennial’s relevance and achievements to date should be carefully considered before shutting this ‘door to culture’.46 Geraldo Ferraz agreed, arguing that ‘passive abstention’ would have a significant impact on the biennial itself but no effect at all on the problem of censorship.47 The artist and critic Arnaldo Pedrosa d’Horta took a balanced view, lamenting the fact that the boycott would deprive the public of knowledge of important works while empathising with the artists choosing to boycott:

New values

With no collectively agreed position, artists were left to make their own decisions, and the FBSP received notices of withdrawal on an individual basis. Amaral reports that the reasons artists gave for refusing to participate included pride or ‘other personal feelings (for example, not having been invited)’; opposition to ‘the well-known paternalism of [FBSP President] Matarazzo Sobrinho’; and the view that ‘the biennial had very low standards’.49 ‘If this crisis was a test to confirm the unity among the artistic class’, she concluded, ‘the outcome was decisively negative’.50 Of the invited artists, those adhering to the boycott formed a sizable majority that included prominent members of the Rio avant-garde such as Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman and Hélio Oiticica, who were in exile abroad. Those who chose to take part included left-wing activists and artists previously subject to state censorship.

The art critic and physicist Mário Schenberg, who had been nominated to the biennial’s jury by the AIAP, chose to maintain his involvement in the selection process and to propose an additional special exhibition, Novos Valores (New Values), featuring young, experimental Brazilian artists. The FBSP had initially resisted AIAP’s nomination of Schenberg, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party who had been arrested and detained for fifty days following the 1964 coup. Following AI-5’s legalisation of peremptory dismissal in 1968, Schenberg had been forcibly removed from his position as Professor of Physics at the University of São Paulo.51 Choosing to stay in Brazil, his parallel work as an art critic became his main occupation. Schenberg had been involved in previous São Paulo Biennial juries as an artist-nominated member.52 He was trusted by certain artists who felt that he ‘could uphold their interests inside the Bienal de São Paulo’ despite ‘always experiencing some level of resistance from the biennial itself’.53 The young artists featured in Novos Valores shared a ‘basic premise of merging art and life, both in terms of theme and execution’ and ‘a concern with a marked Brazilian national character’.54 He understood their new forms of expression and communication to open ‘fundamentally broader horizons’ and diminish the importance of prolonged medium-based training.55

Prior to his career as a writer and curator, Ivo Mesquita worked as a visitor guide at the tenth São Paulo Biennial. He later recalled how certain Brazilian artists, such as José Roberto Aguilar, Carmela Gross and Marcello Nitsche, brought ‘something from the streets – scale and content – into the biennial’.56 Aguilar and Gross were shown in Novos Valores and Nitsche in the general section. Aguilar, whose work had been censored at the fourth Salão da Brasília (1967), exhibited White and Sweet Latin America in Bloom (Branca e Doce América Latina em Flor), a figurative drawing made with a blowtorch on a three-metre wide sheet of metal.57 Gross, then at the start of her career, showed a group of objects made using commonly found materials. She later described these objects as being ‘at their core ... very violent and aggressive’ in response to ‘the impossibility of expressing yourself in an extremely closed and harsh political environment, in which people were persecuted and friends disappeared as part of daily life’.58 Among Gross’s works was Ham (Presunto) 1968 (fig.4), a soft, amorphous form made from a tarpaulin sheet sewn into an ovoid and stuffed with wood pulp. The work’s Portuguese title is a slang term for corpse, commonly used to refer to the victims of the regime’s violence. The gestures of hiding and covering, which were associated with death and disappearance in the context of the dictatorship, were also present in the form of a pointed wooded structure sheeted with tarpaulin entitled The Load (A Carga) 1968.

Nitsche occupied a large area of the ground floor with a series of enormous inflatable sculptures. One of these, entitled The Bubble (A Bolha) 1969 (fig.5), formed a huge ‘X’ extending up to the first floor. The pavilion, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, has a multi-storey central atrium dotted with pillars that support spiralling ramps. The nylon bodies of the Bolhas were inflated during the exhibition, pushing the public out of their way as they filled the pavilion with the deafening noise of the industrial engine used to pump them up.

The general section organised by the critic Marc Berkowitz combined artists selected for now-cancelled special exhibitions with others invited at a later stage. The large number of withdrawals and absences, however, compromised the coherence of Brazilian representation. The section showed very different works under the broad criterion of ‘maximum contemporaneity’. Claudio Tozzi exhibited works from the series Multitudes (Multidões) 1968, a group of paintings based on photographic records of anti-dictatorship protests. The images, appropriated from the printed media were reworked, contrasted and enlarged to highlight social engagement and police violence during the street marches. Some of the paintings, such as The Prison (A Prisão) (fig.6), ‘disappeared’ from the walls of the pavilion when authorities visited the exhibition. In order to circumvent surveillance and possible acts of censorship, it is likely that the institution censored its own display.

The artist and critic Fábio Magalhães has noted that Tozzi’s work is inextricable from the artist’s politics.59 Involved in student activism and aligned with the politician Carlos Marighella’s Action for National Liberation (ALN), Tozzi understood artistic production as ‘part of our resistance’.60 Schenberg’s support of those choosing to participate was also aligned with his understanding of the social role of art. He believed in the ‘new humanist’ conception of art as revolution, and the artist as agent of transformation, who played a role in awakening an individual awareness that might converge into concrete action in the social field.61

Among Schenberg’s close interlocutors was Mira Schendel, who realised a new work for the biennial, Still Waves of Probability (Old Testament, 1 Kings 19) 1969 (fig.7). Displayed within the general Brazilian section, the work comprised thin nylon threads, suspended by a wood and wire structure attached to the ceiling. Appearing and disappearing according to the viewer’s angle of vision, this rain of threads suggests a certain spirituality. In a letter to another of her regular correspondents, the Swiss philosopher and poet Jean Gebser, Schendel explained her decision to take part in the edition:

As Whitelegg has noted, the terms that Schendel used to explain her decision derive from Gebser’s book The Ever Present Origin (1949), in which he describes ‘the unfolding of different ways of experiencing and knowing reality over the long course of the history of human consciousness’.63 Each of these modes of experience, Gebser argues, has become dominant (‘in the foreground’) at different times. Whereas the ‘perspectival’ relates to a rational and logical mindset, the ‘aperspectival’ points towards a nascent structure of consciousness which, as Whitelegg explains, ‘may be grasped as a capacity to see one’s own motives in the context of the motives of others or to acknowledge other conceptions of time and history’.64

Schendel left the meaning of Still Waves of Probability to be deduced by those who encountered it and was uncharacteristically open to the prospect of physical participation. ‘I do not care if they destroy it’, she wrote. ‘It depends – on the possibility of seeing something in it or of there being nothing to detect. If someone leaves these thin strands of nylon intact – or cuts them in anger – or kicks them to the ground, deep down (in the background!) it would not have the slightest importance’.65 As Geraldo de Souza Dias observes, in deciding to take part in the biennial Schendel ‘fully adopted the position of the artist: someone that projects his or her dreams onto reality in order to transform it and believes that, as such, he or she can create new realities’.66 In a biennial co-opted by the regime, however, experimental and critical works were forced to share space with promotional stands publicising government bodies.

‘Sad and insignificant’

Written in the aftermath of the boycott, Pedrosa’s 1970 article ‘The Biennial from Here to There’ offered a clear verdict on the result. Whereas previous editions had proved able to bring artists together and present the major movements of the century to the public, the tenth São Paulo Biennial was ‘a parody of other editions, sad and insignificant’.67 Shortly before the opening, Pedrosa had written to Restany about his efforts to secure the boycott in Brazil:

In July 1970, having been indicted in a military investigation for attempted defamation of the Brazilian government abroad, Pedrosa took refuge at the Chilean Embassy for three months before escaping into exile – in Chile and subsequently in Mexico and France.69 His prediction that dark days were ahead was soon confirmed. Under the rule of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici from October 1969 to March 1974, Brazil descended further into censorship and violent repression. With the shifting adhesions and refusals of subsequent editions, the international boycott of the São Paulo Biennial continued to draw support, dissolving only in the process of Walter Zanini’s organisation of the sixteenth São Paulo Biennial of 1981.70 For that edition, Zanini abolished the model of national representation and was also responsible for resuming contact with artists and intellectuals who had withdrawn from the exhibition.

Despite the continued questioning of its role within a country subject to a violent dictatorial regime, the São Paulo Biennial survived. If the events of 1969 took the FBSP by surprise, by 1971 it was better prepared to deflect protest. Structural reforms were proposed and enacted; the organisation of a roundtable discussion helped to secure the presence of international delegations and – as addressed by Renata Zago elsewhere in this issue – the introduction of a national biennial supported a geographically broader representation of Brazilian artists.71

While some artists continued to reject the São Paulo Biennial throughout the 1970s, others adopted it as a site for exhibiting their works. As the campaign Non a la Biennale insisted, the exhibition was to some degree co-opted by the civic-military regime’s promotion of a nation subject to dictatorship, so presenting critical work in the context of the Biennial was difficult. Although there was no consensus with regards to the boycott in Brazil, the refusals by so many prominent artists and critics forced the FBSP to review its plans for Brazilian representation. The debates ensuing from the call for boycott reveal not only the challenges faced by artists and critics working under dictatorship, but also the contradictions and unstable positions held by many in regards to participation in the tenth São Paulo Biennial.

Caroline Saut Schroeder is an art historian and independent researcher based in Brazil.