Lyon Biennial

Orchestrated by Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist, under the artistic direction of Thierry Raspail, the 2007 Lyon Biennial, ‘00s – The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named’, was conceived as a game with some 60-odd ‘players’, made up of an international roster of artists, critics and curators who were asked to adhere to a set of gaming rules. Forty-nine participants were invited to select a single artist they consider ‘vital’ to the present decade, and 14 were requested to produce an exhibition within the exhibition. These strategies, now considered hallmarks of Obrist’s experimental curatorial practice, were in part responses to Raspail’s over-arching framework for the past three Lyon Biennials, all of which explored questions of temporality in the context of globalization and the proliferation of biennials throughout the world (‘It Happened Tomorrow’ in 2003 and ‘Experiencing Duration’ in 2005 preceded the current version).

Moisdon and Obrist ally their ‘non-authoritarian’ conceptual approach to writing a history or an archaeology of the present to that of French historian Paul Veyne, who contests relations of causality and likens the historian’s task to the construction of a series of plots. Their published curatorial statements refuted from the outset the notion that artistic production can be explained by a Zeitgeist and pointed to the following paradigm shift: ‘Our era has finished with movements and the ideological, national, stylistic and generational rallyings that structured preceding decades. The profusion of artistic currents, the extraordinary diversity they represent in terms of style, media and ambitions, and the co-existence on the same stage of artists from so many different backgrounds and speaking so many different languages: all this makes any attempt to sum up the current scene more complex.’ And so, the game as method.

If I had a euro for every negative appraisal proffered about the curatorial conception from the moment it was announced until the opening of the festivities, I could have set up a mid-stakes poker game during the vernissage, but then I would have missed out on what proved to be a frequently satisfying and largely pleasurable exhibition experience. Critiques focused mainly on the game format and what, to my mind, was ill perceived as Moisdon’s and Obrist’s abdication of the biennial curator’s responsibility to choose, as though choosing to invite others to choose did not in itself imply making serious qualitative judgments determined by a host of factors that feed into the organization of exhibitions. For better or for worse, I had little difficulty bracketing out what some considered an oppressive curatorial scaffolding, except in the few instances when the artists and selectors deliberately chose to draw attention to it.

This was chiefly due to the fact that each pairing of artist and selector was provided with a more or less autonomous display zone in the Sucrière, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne or the Bullukian Foundation. While the succession of singular exhibition spaces tended not to generate the propitious chance encounters between works one might expect from a game, productive parallels between vastly dissimilar projects and installations occasionally emerged. On the ground floor of the Sucrière, several of Tomas Saraceno’s bulbous aerogel spheres were grounded with snaking cables in a theatrical chiaroscuro space reminiscent of a mysterious interior garden of celestial delights. Nearby, the door to Charles Avery’s hexagonal The Eternity Chamber from his mixed-media project ‘Islanders’ (2005–ongoing) was left ajar and beckoned the viewer to peer inside its glowing interior of colourful glass tiles and learn the secret of eternity once recounted to a madman by a seagull. The visionary cosmographies charted in these installations miraculously infused new life into hackneyed old questions about the nature/culture divide. Several live works, including Tino Sehgal’s strip-teasing museum guards, choreographers Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet’s X-Event 2 (2007), Ryan Gander’s Loose Association Lecture, Jérôme Bel’s musical The Show Must Go On (2001 )at the Lyon Opera House and Allora & Calzadilla’s military music tooting from inside a massive bunker (Clamor, 2006), enlivened what could have been a monotonous march through the venues on the opening days.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art the artist Saâdane Afif occupied the majority of the second floor with an exhibition devoted to artists who have shown in the Zoo Galerie in Nantes and to its founder, Patrice Joly, who also edits two free contemporary art magazines: Zérodeux and Zéroquatre. Given the sincerity behind this effort to pay homage to a vibrant local art scene, the opening room, with its portrait of Joly looming over a corrugated metal floor by Pierre Ardouvin, felt heavy-handed. Similarly, Una Szeemann and Bohdan Stehlik’s ironic wink at the cult of the curator, via a quasi-funerary marble sculpture of their selector, Yves Aupetitallot, tainted their otherwise funny and engaging Dark Movies (2007), in which scenes from well-known films are reconstructed out of images and little sculptures photographed in front of computer screen-savers. Tirdad Zolghadr’s ‘Museum of American Art’, which revisits the promotion of American art through travelling exhibitions of the 1950s and ’60s, is a much more successful meditation on the powers of display and cultural propaganda. Walking into the subdued space, replete with news-clippings, catalogues, photographs and black and white painted reproductions of works by some of the most esteemed painters of the New York School, was like stepping into a faded snapshot, which proved to be an apt vehicle for thinking about how images shape historical consciousness.

The question of historical consciousness is far from negligible here, as many of the artists included could be seen as investigating processes of historicization and the transmission of artistic legacies (the interventions of Mai-Thu Perret, Simon Starling and Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas are three that come immediately to mind). The Lyon Biennial’s pluralistic confrontation of myriad individual subjective choices, aesthetic criteria and media, as well as diverse ethical or political stances, sought to provide a non-linear and non-totalizing patchwork view of the artistic actuality of the Noughties. And, in that, it succeeded well. But what of this Biennial as a critical–historical project? If we historians know one thing after Michel Foucault, it is that writing a history of the present in the present means doing so within an inescapable force-field of power relations and socio-political struggles. A history of the present in this context would therefore imply self-consciously exposing how the biennial structures the experience of art works and of exhibitions for all its participants. This is a laudable aim. But by presenting what might be misconstrued as representative artists or works without probing the dialectical interactions or hazardous clashes they produce, and especially by using Veyne, who argues for art’s autonomy from socio-economic processes, as a theoretical touchstone, the Lyon Biennial runs the unfortunate risk of becoming just another sign of the times.