Sao Paulo museum of contemporary art (miam!).

17th July. The Sao Paulo museum of contemporary art, the MAM, has two locations, one in the Parque do Ibirapuera and one in the University campus. Both quite far from where we live, so the trip is beleaguered with touristic perils: by the time we get to the University location, Miss Pill is peeing her brains out, while hordes of students are cycling, rolling, running and walking all over the place, making her usual bush guerrilla tactics inapplicable. As usual, she keeps her cool under such duress (I’m the annoying panicky/whingey type), but she seems unusually happy to find the museum building, even for such a lover of contemporary art . Both locations are free and we were utterly mesmerized by both: enlightening stuff, curated very intelligently, way beyond my scraggy words - so I'm posting some photos. First, above, some from the temporary exhibit of communist-era Polish posters. Beautifully designed, in the fairly particular aesthetic style of the time and place, they are even more remarkable in their lack of commercial purpose: their sole point was to be a metaphor for the symbolic content of the event advertised. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of the artists, I apologize for that...

We have become so unfamiliar with such a ‘devoid of financial goal’ approach to art: most museums in Toronto, where we find ourselves stranded at the moment - on the particular circumstances leading to this, later - do ‘blockbuster’ exhibits, boasting such avant-garde themes as ‘The Amazing World of the Pharaohs’, ‘Vanity Fair portraits of celebrities’, ‘Unusual dildos of the Middle Ages’ or ‘Contemporary Espresso Machine Designs'. I suppose contemporary art has to be wholesome family fun around here; without doubt, more risque stuff would cause enuresis in the bourgeois kids, curl the bourgeois mum’s uterus, inflame the bourgeois dad’s hemorrhoids, pervert the bourgeois family dog and not go so well with the art-themed bonbons purchased in the museum cafeteria.

The rest of the art in the photos is by a couple of French artists we found interesting, Jean Rustin and Herve Fischer (another temporary exhibit). Sorry for the poor quality of the photos, they are taken with a shitty point-and-shoot that cannot cope with dim light (a Sony actually, if we are to point fingers...).

tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.