Inhotim

Inhotim, the arts complex and botanical garden built by Bernardo Paz in rural Minas Gerais, about an hour and a half south of Belo Horizonte, is both breathtaking and unsettling in its power and beauty.  Paz has built a contemporary, tropical version of Versailles, immanently thoughtful and hyper-modish in its every detail and at every scale in its design, landscaping, and architecture and boldly thrusting Brazilian art, again, into the most venerated ranks of the global avant-garde.  With its series of monumental galleries and gardens built among lush tropical vegetation (including the world's largest collection of palm species) to permanently house works by the superstars of Brazilian and international art worlds, Inhotim is a sensory bacchanal, brilliantly containing within its expansive form the imperative signs and contradictions of our times.  It is a monument to tropical nature and landscape created by the private fortune generated by iron mining and smelting.  It is a monument that successfully contains and displays the counter-cultural, and anti-art desires and trends that mark contemporary art (performance, earth art, arte povera, situationism, conceptualism, sound sculpture, etc.) in a sense signifying their capture and transformation into permanent acquisitions and objects of display (a couple of hyper-illustrative works in this sense are Yayoi Kusama's "Narcissus Garden Inhotim" and Chris Burden's "Samson", the first of which was meant to comment on the narcissism of the institutional art world and its spectators and the second of which a machine that if left activated -- which, I confirmed, it was not -- would, with the help of each individual spectator, eventually destroy the gallery structure from within).  I have felt this latter tension in other contemporary arts venues, but they were somehow heightened or refreshed here, as were those between the center's parallel progressive agenda of environmental research and preservation and regional development, citizenship and social inclusion (as noted on the center's website) and its aura of luxurious exclusivity. Perhaps I'm being cynical, or perhaps there is simply nothing new under the contemporary sun, and I would have responded with the same awe and ambivalence to the freshly inaugurated MASP or MAM-Rio.  And in fact, Mass-Moca, more recently built as a temple to the contemporary and cutting edge in the hollowed out factories of a deindustrialized New England town, is both thrilling in the art and ideas it houses and disconcerting in its aura of working class ruins.  In any case, check it out Inhotim if you can -- the art is amazing, the flora is amazing, the whole place is amazing, palaces and palatial grounds, open to the public six days a week, for R$20 (purchased online in advance), free on Tuesdays.  Stay in Brumadinho or surroundings and give yourself two days at least if you want to see everything. 

Images coming soon, when my internet connection is a little less finicky....

And in the meantime, check on the NYT's recent piece on the place and its founder:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/world/americas/bernardo-pazs-inhotim-is-vast-garden-of-art.html