Remberences of Lyon, Past and Future
Tina Kesting
Lyon is historically famous for its creativity, as evinced by figures from Rabelais to the Lumière brothers. However, from September 13 through December 31, 2005 the august French city will be opening its doors to works from all over the world at La Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.
What’s it?
La Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon was firstly established in 1991 by Thierry Raspail, who is still its managing director. The dominant theme of this year’s installment is temporality. What does the awareness of time imply? How do we experience duration? This year’s Biennale will showcase works dealing with time by emerging artists as well as old standbys
Expérience de la durée/Experiencing Duration
"Time has always been a real issue," observes guest curator Jérôme Sans, "socially, politically and culturally. Each generation has developped their own perception of time. (…) Moreover, the exhibition challenges the idea of obligation time in front of an art work." But what is time? Sans’ colleague Nicolas Bourriaud asks himself, "How is it possible to look at our times through the ‘lens’ of a past period? How is our culture related to the ‘counter-culture’? For the artists of the ’90s, time is more a building material than a mere medium, and controlling the duration and the time protocols of exhibition has, like the controlling of space, become a major aesthetic issue." The curators explain that an art work is first an event before it can be situated as a monument. "Look at all the problematics developed by today’s artists," says Bourriaud. "They all come from this period–ecology, relational experiments, even globalization. In our very materialistic world, it also is quite refreshing to think back about social experiments like communes, exploring the doors of perception, fighting for a better society, it is a mirror, in a way. And we should look at ourselves in it."
Sans adds that "the 60s/70s are the roots of our today’s vocabulary with the difference that it was a collective and an experimental time, and now we are more in an individual approach to time and life. Individual not doesn’t mean obligatory single but small groups. Our interest here is not in the "Seventies" in general but in the hippie experience as an attempt at a counter-culture, a laboratory of new forms of living."
The curators believe that people continue to question the status quo, but in new and differing forms. From zero growth to the return to nature, today’s artists are still aspiring to "subversion through happiness", though they are travelling other paths and proving to be less optimistic and more complex than their elders’ dialogue. But the Lyon Biennale is not a historical review. The energy of the heady countercultural days and the spirit of revolution have been transferred to the present. "It is not an exhibition about time, but within the notion of time." It embraces real time and simultaneity.
What’s in? What’s new? What’s old?
According to Sans, "The 60s/70s are the roots of our today vocabulary with the difference that it was a collective and a experimental time and now we are more in an individual approach to time and life." Thus the multigenerational dynamic of the Lyon Biennale. Sans explains further: "At the very beginning, we did a first selection of artists, mainly from the nineties: then, a new idea of art came out, art as a kind of alternative editing table for social forms." Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, or Melik Ohanian, who are exploring the "iconography of shared times", are representative of these ideas. Höller’s works for example are strongly influenced by his scientific studies on human reactions caused by physiological changes of varying suddenness which he explored by studying insect behaviour. By including the viewer in his pieces he evokes special physical and mental mechanisms, which turn out to be mirrors of civil structures.
"Then we started being interested in the notion of duration, as a resistant form at the age of speed." Sans continues. "Not slowness as a value judgment, but long term as a process." Wim Delvoye’s art is underlines this notion–particularly his work On the origin of species, which took him more than ten years to create. It will be shown at the Rectangle, the alternative space at l’Art sur Place. Meanwhile, La Monte Young’s love of Indian zen philosophy encouraged the curators to think about and to include art from the Hippie era, too.
Bourriaud adds that "We also had to look back at the Fluxus movement, or conceptual art, as tools to assert our vision of art: a duration you have to experience, more than a simple object or a commodity." Works by artists like Dieter Roth and Yoko Ono or Erwin Wurm and Tom Marioni embody this question of art as a necessarily transitory experience. Roth, an influential figure within the Fluxus movement, worked as sculptor, poet, performer, musician and publisher. His striking installation, "Reykjavik Slides" (1973-75 and 1990-93), will be again exihibted in Lyon. It consits of 30,000 slides documenting every building in Reijkjavik. Ono, also an important member of Fluxus, has always tried to include the audience in her installations and performances. At the Biennale she will show her famous film "Smile" (1969), which she made with her husband John Lennon. Wurm refers with his work to one of the most important and famous statements of Postmodernism.
Theodore Adorno’s text "The Culture Industry: Enlightment as Mass Deception," deals with the influence of media and art within a capitalist society. His installation Adorno was wrong with his ideas about art places the audience in an active role, allowing spectators to create fragile components out of the installation’s wood pieces. Marioni, an important conceptual artist, will show his well-known "One-Second Sculpture" from 1969 and his striking and controversial performance "Drinking Beer with Friends is the highest form of art" (1970) at La Sucrière in Lyon.
What’s on? What is hot?
Five exhibition venues are transforming the city of food into the city of art. Shuttle busses and boats are connecting the individual art locations with eachother and are offering the opportunity to experience Lyon from an unusal perspective.
L’Art sur la Place
L’Art sur la Place, is a project mirroring the policies of the city: it is meant to unify different generations, cultures and diverse social groups. Amateurs and artsists are collaborating in order to pull the public into the process of art making, art loving. It is a platform for the exchange of artistc experiences, ideas and developments.
Besides the French center, Lyon Biennale is reaching out to other centers: CAC (Vilnius), Migros (Zuerich), PAC (Milan), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Portikus (Frankfurt) and Tramway (Glasgow). In addition to these five European art locations, l’Art sur la Place is taking place at five other Lyon hot spots. At Sucrière the mode of the day is sugar-sweet art (as the name suggests). This former sugar warehouse was built in the 1930s, closed, and subsequently reopened its doors as a completly renovated venue for the Biennale.
Art beside the fair: Résonance
The Biennale will show how active and creative the art scene around Lyon is. Résonance is meant to act as a platform for artists and art lovers, linking public spaces with various art-oriented events. Films, performances, dance, theater, and other events will take place all over the city.
Là Hors De offers platform events such as street performances and more than 100 invited guest artists have been encouraged to produce spontaneous acts throughout Lyon. Another art event is a fusion between intense contemporary dance and kathak, a traditional Indian dance.
Meanwhile, the Dance Conservatory of Lyon Classical will present spontaneous and creative performances inspired by art featured in the Biennale, and the Théâtre des Ateliers is showcasing its myth-of-Faust project.
Résonance is determined to include the public in its art projects. Only with their appearance, participation and experience of time can the Biennale be complete. "Particpation of viewer doesn’t change necessarely the notion of time, " explains curator Sans. "My time is not your time and vice versa. Each one has its own perception of time and duration. The idea is more to propose different proposition to live and experimenting. A process which is close to what life is about. Experiencing duration everyday." His colleague Bourriaud adds that "Today’s interest towards interactivity is related with this need for experience. The more our everyday lifes are dull and repetitive, the more we ask art to be an experience, an initiation to hidden aspects of reality[….]In the usual sense, an experience is a length of time, a moment lived outside the everyday routine. One enters the non-habitual, that which is the banality of that which is represented. An experience is equally a status of research, an act of knowledge, in the experimentation sense."
