Michael Phelan's party bears

There are no more than two flights out of Lisbon to the States a day, a fact I unhappily learn when my passport comes up missing from previous night’s surf and turf (and gulps of port) feast at the tiny upstairs restaurant in the Barrio Alto neighborhood of the Portuguese capital. I report back to my boss in Los Angeles that Murphy’s Law had struck, and there aren’t any open seats back to the US for two more days… But, well, to be truthful, Lisbon’s not so bad a place to be “stuck” in. Plus, it gives me a chance to reexamine the real reason I am here: a press junket to Portugal Arte 10, billed as Lisbon’s first art biennale (shouldn’t something not get called a “biennale” until it’s been done once every two years?), and something of a quagmire for the state of contemporary art in this part of Iberia.

Sterling Ruby's cube in the square

To be fair to the Portugal Arte 10 Artistic Director Stefan Simchovitz, there are many positive aspects to the exhibition. The public art portion of the “biennale,” backdropped by the charming squares and ornate architecture befitting one of the oldest cities in the world, is made predominantly by young people. This means the work is, to the casual observer, quite unusual, and from my observations is being met with curiosity by locals and tourists—which is the most important things these large scale exhibitions can do: open a discourse within a city to art, exposing the population to something extraordinary through art. Sterling Ruby’s massive Judd-like “Bronze Cannon” and twin orange Serra-evoking “Aluminum Box” works—paired with one of his signature Lincoln Log-esque modular stacks in the main square in Barrio Alto—create quite a cognitively dissonant hardcore minimalist tic-tac-toe with the decorative monuments of 16^th century poets in Camoes Square. It’s quite striking under a sliver of moonlight.

Robert Melee's drippy it creature

Wandering to another square up the street, I happen upon a group of young Portuguese women take drunken photos around a cluster of sardonic Rodins (“The Burghers of Calais” with animal masks modified onto the heads) by Los Angeles provocateur Nathan Mabry. Whether or not they understand these are Rodin-subversions is one matter, but the enjoyment of the silly pieces cannot be taken away. I wander further and notice that a “melee of Robert Melee’s” (as a fellow journalist who attended the press junket put it) drippy “It” sculptures seem to turn up everywhere. And the collapsed plaster igloo that is Brooklyn streetstyle duo Faile’s “Temple,” which is still having the finishing touches put on it during our tour, pleases the tourists to no end (street art, for some reason, has become the unpretentious symbol of “good art” by the international masses—perhaps its graphic qualities are ingrained virus-like into us by the ubiquity of graffiti all over the world).

Yoan Capote's stacked gold teeth

Outside the main exhibition, I meet with Cuban artist Yoan Capote, who’s gargantuan sculpture of concrete and gold teeth (“The biggest grill I’ve ever seen,” quips a journalist) hunkers below the swooping entranceway to the Portugal Pavilion. Cubans play a large role in Portugal Arte 10, their ever-political art tucked into a first floor gallery. Capote gives big hugs to journalists, and seems pleased to meet an American. We traded stories about the Howard Farber, an American collector of Cuban art, who I had interviewed several years prior. “Farber,” says Capote, “is great.” It’s all he’ll say, even when I press him about Farber’s history of losing interest in a country’s art and selling the works he procures at auction (Farber liquidated an entire major collection of Chinese art several years ago). Perhaps years of not being able to say anything bad about the government has made it difficult to speak about critical issues in public. Either way, the Cuban exhibition is interesting despite the monotony of the political statements (“this is the worker” here and “here is the pressure” there). The experiments with techniques are worth the look alone, and Capote’s sculptures, as well as a silver hippo in the middle of a park in the nearby town of Grandola, are spectacular aesthetically.

If you look closely Ry Rocklen's chair has fingernails

The show itself is hit-or-miss, which is usually the case with every ambitious biennial. Laid out in sub-exhibitions throughout the building, the most interesting curation prize goes to Johannes VanDerBeek, who brought along young artists Aaron King and Devon Costello (who are great fun) to install the broadest reaching and most eclectic mix of artists and ideas on the ground floor of the roomy and unnavigable Alvaro Siza Vieira-designed Portugal Pavilion. The co-founder of defunct gallery Guild & Greyshkul and an artist in his own right, VanDerBeek had the novel idea of including Portuguese artists into his “Personal Freedom” show, a conspicuous absence from the rest of the exhibition.

Katherine Bernhardt and Michael Mahalchick, together again

Upstairs, sub-exhibitions blur together: it’s hard to tell where “California Dreamin’,” curated by Fred Hoffman and Paul Young, and  “Insider/Outsider,” curated by Malmo’s Galerie Loyal folks Martin Lilja and Amy Giunta, start and begin, though once you’re subsumed in the respective wholes, the parts start to separate themselves. Hoffman and Young have taken the art world’s recent obsession with California and turned it on its head—the exhibition isn’t strictly California artists; rather, it’s the concept of the lazing, lolling, groovy state as conceived by international artists such as Till Gerhard and Michael Phelan. Paul Young was in charge of the videos and he brought in classic works from California artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Drain, as well as pieces such as Julika Rudelius’ video of preteen girls trashing a dressing room that obsess over California’s decadence and celebrity. Once inside “Insider/Outsider,” one recognizes the graphic/ artists often included in Loyal’s intermittently circulated art ‘zine (many of whom are also repped by the gallery), such as Misaki Kawai, Katherine Bernhardt, and Michael Mahalchick.

I love this Julika Rudelius video of 'tween girls going seriously wild

Outside the exhibition, Simchowitz and Lisbon officials treat the journalists to dinners and mirth while the seams bulge… Simchowitz disseminates the idea amongst the journalists that he plans to brand the project and take it to former Portugal colony Angola the next time the biennial comes around (which, according to all accounts, this one took an extra year to bring to fruition, so biennial may turn into trienniale may turn into…). The website is a mess and until the day the exhibition opened, it still contained the name of a curator who had previously dropped out of the project. But these are art world gripes, gossips—the sort of behind-the-scenes backstabbing that goes on at every biennial (there are tales of near-murder out there, folks). What can Simchowitz do, as a relative outsider (his parents are famous collectors, but Simchowitz has, until recently, mostly worked in film)? He convinced Lisbon to let him present the Lisbon to the world as a contemporary art voice. Or is it that he presented contemporary art to the Lisbon population? And therein lies the problem. To whom was this exhibition aimed?

Marnie Weber's ghost

*Portugal Arte 10 ran from July 16th - August 15th, 2010. This article, or some version of it, was going to run in the magazine, but for reasons, I decided not to. I was going to write about the right and wrong way to do a biennial, but I'm not sure there is one!