Where cars dangle and patrons flock

Going for a spin in a Volkswagen Beetle is just a pleasant diversion in most parts of the world. Here it’s art.

Hoisted into the air by straps dangling from a sturdy metal frame, a red VW Bug whirls around like a top before a crowd of bemused spectators. A wry comment on technology and speed, the installation by Austrian artist Leo Schatzl is one of the most talked-about works at this year’s Sao Paulo Biennale, along with an edible map of the world, a life-size sculpture pairing an elephant and tiger, and works by painters such as Luc Tuymans of Belgium and Beatriz Milhazes of Brazil.

Now in its 26th incarnation, the biennale is the Southern Hemisphere’s oldest recurring art showcase and the biggest art event in all of Latin America in terms of size, attendance and importance.

Works by more than 100 artists from 60-odd countries fill three floors of an enormous exhibition hall designed by Oscar Niemeyer, set in this city’s leafy Ibirapuera Park.

With admission free for the first time, organizers say that total attendance could close in on nearly 1 million people when the biennale ends Dec. 19, a testament to its drawing power despite a recent history fraught with internal political battles, budget woes, negative reviews, dire predictions of depredations by the show’s first foreign curator and various contretemps that forced the event to go dark in 2000.

This year’s version is in some ways a return to basics, particularly painting, which many complained was neglected in the 2002 show in favor of video and other installations. Although the current exhibition still features plenty of those, curator Alfons Hug, directing his second biennale, acknowledged an attempt to hark back to some traditional aesthetics.

“The first biennale stressed the ruptures of urban life,” he said. “It was more drastic or maybe crass. More, let’s say, direct, raw and cruel.”

To prepare for this one, Hug delved into the philosophies of his native Germany, studying Kant and Heidegger and slowly returning to the idea of the sublime in art.

“The present edition has more poetry. It has great moments of reflection ... and beauty, simple beauty, which is not very fashionable in contemporary art,” he said. “It’s fallen into disgrace in modernism, but I think it’s returning.”

Even the title of this year’s event, “Free Territory,” seems a direct response to the focus on the city in 2002’s “Metropolitan Iconographies.”

The idea this time was to unleash the imagination “outside the constraints of politics and economy,” Hug said, although some critics have called the theme too vague or diffuse to impose any coherence on such a massive collection of works from all over the world.

On the ground floor are a score of large installations, such as Schatzl’s spinning VW Bug and British artist David Batchelor’s towering ladder of boxes of colored light, rising all the way up to the ceiling of the top floor. Right inside the pavilion’s entrance is Huang Yong Ping’s sculpture of a snarling tiger atop a broken-tusked elephant, a somewhat cryptic critique of colonialism titled “11 June 2002 Nightmare of George V.”

The second and third floors are given over to a disparate set of paintings, drawings and photography, such as American Alec Soth’s images from a journey along the Mississippi River. An entire corridor is devoted to video installations, including “Corrections 2” by Bulgarian artist Rassim, a video of his own circumcision that induced much giggling among teenage girls and horrified leg-crossing among male viewers of all ages.

Missing, for critic Jacob Klintowitz, is a sense of continuity.

“We went through the biennale and couldn’t find a connection between the works. It was an atomized biennale,” said Klintowitz, who is vice president of the Brazilian Art Critics Assn. “To talk about ‘free territory,’ you have to explain whether you’re referring to psychic or philosophical [space]. I read the curator’s interview but didn’t understand what he meant.”

Hug is used to criticism, having endured plenty when he was chosen to head the 2002 event. Opponents of the appointment warned that Hug would push the exhibition in a Eurocentric direction and cause it to lose its distinctive sub-equatorial, developing-country flavor.

But those predictions did not materialize -- this year’s biennale features dozens of artists from developing nations, including several from China -- and the cultural complaints are now more muted. Hug, who looks like a German Kelsey Grammer, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is married to a Brazilian and speaks fluent Portuguese. But his artistic choices still receive mixed, sometimes scathing, reviews.

“The curator of the biennale has to have a lot of resistance,” he said with a shrug. “You’re a favorite target.”

Hug also had to deal with glitches on opening day, Sept. 26. Someone defaced a work by Cuban-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jorge Pardo, scribbling “No” in Portuguese on an interior wall of a cabin he had installed. Song Dong’s “Eating the World,” a floor map made out of biscuits to be eaten by spectators, was gobbled up within hours, leaving behind only a forlorn blue tarp and a video. And noise from mechanized installations nearby drown out the gentle splashing sound that forms part of an exhibit of basins set up to catch water dripping from tubes overhead.

In recent years, controversy has been a constant companion to the biennale, which was founded in 1951 by Francisco Matarazzo in conscious emulation of its better-known counterpart in Venice.

Its very future appeared in jeopardy in 2000, when the show was pushed out from its home in Ibirapuera Park in favor of a one-off blockbuster exhibit of Brazilian art to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil. The 25th biennale was postponed to 2001, then got put off yet again, to 2002, because of renovation work on Niemeyer’s 300,000-square-foot pavilion.

A nasty dispute over the delays resulted in the walkout of some board members and the curator; Hug was brought in.

This year’s budget of $6 million has been met through a combination of government subsidies and corporate sponsorships, most notably from the Banco do Brasil and oil giant Petrobras.

A key part of the fundraising plan was to make free admission possible, which appealed to the left-leaning outlook of Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party.

“Initially I thought of it as a present to Sao Paulo for its 450th anniversary,” said Manoel Francisco Pires da Costa, president of the biennale. “Then we broached the idea with the Ministry of Culture, and we both understood the need to democratize art as a form of social inclusion.”

That decision has helped boost attendance past 400,000 within six weeks of the show’s opening. Organizers hope to double that figure in the time remaining.

“Contemporary art is not elitist,” said Hug. But “people have to be able to come see it.”