9th Biennial de Lyon
Suggestion of polyphonic flux
Kim Hong-gi

Currently about 110 international biennales exist around the world. That means that at least more than one biennale is opening somewhere in the world in any given week. Hence, it is not far-fetched to say that the world is overflowing with biennales. During the past twenty years, Asia, among other regions, has led this trend. China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan each have held more than one biennale, with their emerging economies behind such a surge. Each nation’s effort to raise its cultural status to match its economy has led to the establishment of numerous biennales. Thus, the overheated Asian art scene can be better understood through a geopolitical approach, rather than an esthetic or art historical approach.

In reality, however, these Asian biennales suffer from a lack of professional art critics and curators. For that reason, it is customary for Asian biennales to appoint American or European curators as their artistic directors to oversee them from conception to realization. To make matters worse, Asia has far fewer museums for modern art as compared to other parts of the world. In order to raise the status of their local culture over a short period of time, the Asian nations have chosen to support biennales,which require significantly less time and money and sometimes even make money, instead of building up their own cultural infrastructure. Such a choice is clearly a geopolitical decision if you consider that such Asian biennales particularly prefer the ‘Asian identity’ as their main exhibition theme. By adopting such a theme, they can secure their identity and even propagandize it.

Facing this unexpected competition from their Asian counterparts, many European biennales take pains for self-innovation. What does it mean to hold international biennales in a world that is already full of them? It is true that such events as the Venice Biennale or Kassel Documenta still hold sway as a result of their long history and worldwide recognition. So, such a question is more relevant to the smaller biennales of Torino, Berlin, Lyon and Liverpool, because those cities have not undergone such a rapid economic development as Asian cities nor have suffered from a suppressed/mistaken identity as various Third World cities have done. Are these smaller European biennales, then, an international opportunity to increase their cities’ revenue?

The fact that these small European biennales are free of geopolitical interests can be a ground on which to explore new possibilities. In other words, they can truly adopt a global perspective and experiment with various aspects of contemporary art. In that sense, these European biennales are more apt to realize esthetic, artistic and experimental exhibitions than are the Asian newcomers. One of the European cities that has utilized such an opportunity is Lyon, France. Opening in four venues (La Sucrière, Institut d'art Contemporain, Fondation Bullukian and Musée d'art Contemporain) from September 19, 2007, to January 6, 2008, this year’s (and its ninth) Lyon Biennale offered a refreshing look at contemporary art.
Here were the interesting rules of the game:

The Biennale is taking the form of a big game with players who have been asked to define this decade. There are two circles of players. The first comprises 49 exhibition curators from around the world, who answer one question: ‘In your opinion, who is the essential artist of this decade?’ The second circle consists of 14 artists, each invited to produce an exhibition sequence.

This is what the Lyon Biennale requested from participating artists. The main theme of the biennale, whose artistic direction was shared between Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, was "The 00s - The history of a decade that has not yet been named." The exhibition consisted of two main circles, as mentioned above: the “players” of the first circle were 49 international curators, who participated in the game by selecting an artist (or a team of artists) to represent this decade (2000 to 2010). The players of the second circle consisted of not only visual artists, but also of writers, philosophers and choreographers. This group of people planned their own exhibition sequence. Thus, a total of 68 players made up the “big game” of the Lyon Biennale.

Lyon’s experiment was a refreshing one, considering that most biennales usually appoint one or two artistic directors to decide the main theme and also participating artists. The plan, in essence, had a transversal and organic structure where parts of the exhibition were connected to each other without losing their autonomy. In most biennales, on the other hand, the artistic director(s) has total control of the exhibition; every element connects only to the center, making a vertical hierarchy of authority. As many biennales have this same structure, they do not really differ from one another, except for a handful of cases where the director’s exquisite taste makes a difference. Such an effort to avoid the overused and stereotypical exhibition model could give a small biennale its reason for existence.

The title of this year’s Lyon Biennale was also noteworthy. The historical period that the biennale tried to focus on was the 2000s—the decade that still has three years to go. By diagnosing the unnamed and unfinished decade, the exhibition could truly be contemporary, retrospective and prospective at the same time. Obrist and Moisdon say they planned the biennale as a history book written by multiple authors. The main scheme of the book must be the suggestion of polyphonic flux that is not submerged in the transcendent waves of big discourses.

Therefore, did Lyon succeed in meet expectations? Armed with innovative and ambitious conceptions, this biennale was a bit disappointing. First of all, there were too many mediocre works. It is highly doubtful that the selected artists can represent this decade. Of course, we have three years to go until the end of the decade and the artists could have been selected not because of their works of the past seven years, but because of the future works that they can accomplish in the next three years. The 49 curators of the first circle could have taken this view. Yet, it is not an easy job for viewers to spot the potential of young artists, especially when the selected artists are allowed only a limited number of works to exhibit and when one artist’s works cannot share a resonance with others’ (which was the rule of the Lyon Biennale). Moreover, any clear reason for selection was not suggested in the captions for the artists and their works. One can say that unclear future expectations engulfed the clarity of the past.

Also, the arrangement of the works in the exhibition space was rather desultory. Though the exhibition was intended as a book written by multiple authors, the book should have been coherent in its content. An exhibition space full of unrelated works can be called diversity, but not multiplicity. Obrist and Moisdon defined the nature of the exhibition by using Giorgio Agamben’s concept of mechanism (dispositivo). The Italian philosopher said:

The mechanism is a network of diverse elements embracing virtually all things, whether discursive or not: discourse, institutions, edifices and aesthetic and philosophical propositions. A mechanism always has a concrete strategic function and is always part of a relationship between power and knowledge.

In the biennale there were diverse elements, but not a network among them. When an exhibition lacks coherent networks, even the fresh rules of the game (where one curator picks one artist) works as a commercial rule that art fairs usually adopt (one artist per one gallery or booth). That is why this history book, which was based upon a special scheme, looked more like a collection of many articles rather than an organized book.

In short, it was not easy to find a ‘plot’ of the exhibition in this biennale. I believe it is a matter of responsibility. Because each player felt responsible for his or her selection, the responsibility for the big picture was lost. A history book without authorial responsibility is just a baseless expectation for the future, if not an arbitrary reconstruction of the past.

Still, it was pleasing to find some interesting artists. Urs Fisher (invited by Massimiliano Gioni) presented a witty sculpture that defied gravity; Shilpa Gupta (invited by Pooja Sood) showed technical mastery in her interactive video art; Brian Jungen (invited by Trevor Smith) created a contemporary totem of capitalism, using a golf bag. The video work of Omer Ali Kazma (invited by Hou Hanru) showed the dynamic aspect of everyday urban life with a little bit of a twist.

The work that best realized the conception of the biennale may have been the exhibition catalog designed by M/M. It meticulously showed images and keywords that the players chose to construct this decade and their rationales for the selected artists, as well as the articles that seven invited authors wrote for the exhibition. The catalog can double as a history book for the decade that is yet to be named.