Chris Burden
The Flying Steamroller
1991-96
All photos B. Adilon
unless otherwise noted.
Harald Szeemann
Photo:
Christoph Keller
La Halle Tony Garnier
Photo:
Dominique Barrier
Serge Spitzer
Re-Search, Bread and Butter...
1995-97
Chen Zhen
Round Table (SIde by Side)
1997
Jason Rhoades
For my caprice, uno momento......
1996
Wang Xingwei
Poor Old Hamilton
1996
Rebecca Bournigault
Self-Portrait
1996
Henry Ughetto
Mannequins Imputressibles
1997
Emery Blagdon
The Healing Machines
1997
Le Machine Kafka
Richard Jackson
Painting with Two Balls
1996-97
Bul Lee
Majestic Splendor
1997
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The fourth Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, organized by famed
Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, has been up and running all
summer, though overshadowed by the extensive hype surrounding
its more distinguished elder siblings -- Documenta X, the Venice
Biennale and the Münster Sculpture Project. What pre-opening press
Lyon's Biennale received generally reflected a tone of skepticism and
standoffishness about Szeemann's unpredictable vision (see, for
example, Le Journal Des Arts, Apr. 18, 1997, and art press, 226, July-
Aug. 1997).
Neither did two interviews with the famed curator of such
landmarks as "When Attitudes Become Form" (1969) and Documenta
V (1972) give much reassurance about the point or coherence of the
upcoming Lyon show (see the Hans-Ulrich Obrist interview in
Artforum, Nov. 1996, and that with Cecilia Lavelli and Franklin
Sirmans in Flash Art, Summer 1997). What these interviews do give
is a picture of Szeemann's mind at work and a snapshot in words of
the Lyon Biennale's organizing principle -- scattered though it often
seemed.
The show's title, "L'Autre" (The Other), which was chosen not by
Szeemann but by the show's organizers, shackled the curator with a
vague, supposedly catchy concept -- one that was to this viewer
rather stale. Szeemann left himself an out to "author" the show (his verb, not mine) any which way by declaring, "Art is always alterity, the artist always the creator of an Other" (art press, 226, p. 28-29). So much, one would imagine, for visual and thematic coherence.
But despite all of the criticisms with which the curator will inevitably
be showered, the result of Szeemann's efforts holds together well
enough and is surprisingly thought-provoking and, in some cases,
delightful -- a welcome relief in this time of heavy-handed curatorial
bombast. I chose to tour through the Hall Tony Garnier with an open
mind's eye -- saving the quibbling over the whos and whats for later.
As a cavernous, unarticulated, proto-modernist steel structure, the
hall itself played a large role in the show, and Szeemann has divided
it into numerous gallery-like white cubes of varying size. Serving as
hanging walls on their exteriors, the interiors of many of these
spaces showcase the work of a single artist, while a fewer number
feature thematic groupings of works by different artists. Larger
sculptural pieces, such as Richard Serra's Olson (1985-86) and
American Serge Spitzer's Re-Search, Bread and Butter with the Ever-
present Question of How to Define the Difference between a Baguette
and a Croissant (1995-97), were given their own independent
breathing room. Too much room, perhaps, as I've never seen Serra's
work look so dinky (even out of doors), and Spitzer's improbable
spiraling bread machine was straining to fill the voluminous space.
The combination of new and old, known and unknown was to be
expected from Szeemann, whose path-breaking work in Conceptual
and Postminimal art of c. 1970 made his name and defined his
esthetic interests. In addition to Serra, the show's other
heavyweights from this "heroic generation" are Bruce Nauman
(Model for Trench and Four Buried Passages, 1977), Joseph Beuys
(Olivestone, 1984) and Hannah Darboven (Rutherford/Niels Bohr
Arbeit, 1988/92), with all of whom Szeemann has had long-standing
relationships.
Upon entering the exhibition space, one was immediately confronted
with a left-to-right trinity of Beuys, Serra and Nauman that neatly
presented the historical legacy of "otherness" that interested
Szeemann, an otherness of monumental but subtle physicality and
tactility which, in fact, did reappear in various guises throughout the
show. Interestingly, Darboven's mind-numbingly dull work (saved in
this context of bells and whistles only by intermittent musical
outbursts) was relegated to the very back corner of the hall and was
too delicate to hold its own against the impressive neighboring Flying
Steamroller (1991-96) by Chris Burden, another '70s veteran.
Directly following the introductory trio was Gary Hill's Viewer
(1996), which provided a nice transition to the contemporary
medium of video installation that gave the show many of its most
refreshing works (others included pieces by Mariko Mori, the French
team of Philippe Parreno and Pierre Joseph, and Pierrick Sorin). Hill's
wall-length video projection, similar to the Serra in scale, showed a
row of workmen of various ethnic backgrounds. It fit the exhibition
title exactly, as one would expect. A similar formal resonance was
found between the nearby Nauman trench piece (consisting of five large circular
forms) and Chen Zhen's adjacent Round Table (Side by Side) that was
an elegant amalgamation of various eastern and western chairs stuck
into the surfaces of two large, overlapping, and similarly worldly
round tables. Again, while formal similarities were obvious, the
cultural context and thematic thrust were different indeed.
Elsewhere thematic similarities seemed to have happily dictated the
placement of works: Wolfgang Laib's vibrant square of pollen on the
floor was just adjacent to Yukinori Yanagi's loony ant-farm pieces
and a beautiful, large floor drawing made by tracing the aimless path
of an ant. Serge Comte's delightful film I wanna be your favorite bee,
in which the viewer is taken on a bee's-eye-view flight from flower
to flower to windowpane, was another in this apiary/insect theme
and one of several videos playing in a nearby Franz West-furnished
space.
Such attention to detail in the placement of works was sensed
throughout the exhibition, prompting a search for relational poetics
-- be they formal, thematic, or otherwise -- among pieces of diverse
media and tone.
Speaking of the ground plan, all but two of the 30-some white-cube
galleries were arranged along the vertical and horizontal axes. The
ubiquitous Jason Rhoades and Pipilotti Rist (one of Szeemann's
favorites) were the two young artists that stood out in this grid-like
context. As such, their works suggested an aspect of recent art that
Szeemann perhaps wished to emphasize, i.e. its defiance of total or
whole consumption -- a legacy of Conceptualism, here turned
Baroque. As an installation, Rist's fanciful, oversized room (Das
Zimmer, 1994) was manageable, but with hours of Pipi-programming
(user definable with an oversized, "Pipi-channel" remote control), one
simply can't take it all in meaningfully. The experience is always
fragmentary, suggesting equally that the whole presentation, as a
potential manifestation of a selfhood (of a reified "other," if one
must), can never accurately convey a totality.
Rhoades' installation, For my caprice, uno momento / the theatre in
my dick / a look to the physical / ephemeral was equally difficult to
absorb. This vast layout of stuff that, with some imagination,
resembled the biological workings of a penis goes way beyond
Duchampian sexual mechanics in its junky, over-the-top assortment.
Perhaps you viewers of the Whitney Biennale (where it was also
installed) weren't as lucky as I was to witness the climactic moment.
That is, when one of several attendants loaded the skeet machine at
one end of the room-filling installation and fired a couple of clay
pigeons down the length of the central conveyor belt; these smashed
into pieces on the far opposite wall, much to the delight of a
bewildered older couple near the entrance. The installation was
introduced by several videos about the work shown on small
monitors whose electrical cords and assorted gadgetry were left
visible; one could sit and watch these clips on overturned buckets
and other paraphernalia taken from a site that seemed still under
construction (or, more likely, repair).
I watched Rhoades talking about a small piece of the installation that
he defined as a "snot sculpture." The work as a whole, he said, was
"about glands," and of his snot sculpture, he said it captured "the
ephemeralness of snot.... When you're a kid, you think you're going to
run out." I could imagine that any one of the other monitors featured
an equally Warholian Rhoades at that moment, explaining the
identity or genesis of another of the thousand peculiar objects
included there and defining the whole piece in its terms. If it were
possible at all, seeing and experiencing the totality of such a work
would tax the patience and attention of even the most sympathetic
viewer. (Appropriately hanging just outside the Rhoades installation
was Wang Xingwei's 1996 painting Poor Old Hamilton depicting the
British painter and Duchamp aficionado watching on as a Chinese
father scolds his child for breaking Duchamp's Large Glass.)
While the length of Rist's video programming and the sprawl of
Rhoades installation made them more than an eye-full, other artists
used different strategies to make a similarly confounding experience
for the viewer. Stan Douglas' beautiful and exacting Nut'Ka, in which
two different aural narratives overlap, diverge and reunite in time
with seemingly stereoscopic panoramic landscape videos, took the
viewer on a sine-wave roller-coaster of intelligibility and
incoherence (i.e. difference, and again, "otherness"). Similarly
disorienting was the video self-portrait by French artist Rebecca
Bournigault (b. 1970) in which only part of her face was visible,
projected wall-size in a hall-like, claustrophobic room; one was put
too-close-for-comfort to this intimate portrait of various emotional
states.
While such esthetic currents were interesting to observe along with
(and as part of) the dominance of video and installation art, what
made the biggest impression in the show was a concept of
"otherness" born of obsessional tendencies. One could include
Rhoades' moment of phallic self-glorification here, but his was only
one of many manifestations of the peculiar and personal that filled
the giant space.
Lyon artist Henry Ughetto's squadron of strange, life-size
"mannequins," each made of hundreds of eggs painted with several
thousand drops of blood (his only painting medium), climbed a
staircase near the entrance. Equally odd and "other" were Emery
Blagdon's peculiar Healing Machines and Elisàr Von Kupffer's kitchy,
utopian paintings of all-male Edenic landscapes. Blagdon's would-be
cancer-curing concoctions had a definite beauty (even crowded as
they were into the stereo-typing Nebraska shed), as did the
geometric, talismanic paintings and drawings of Emma Kunz installed
in the same room; but whether these curious works merited their
place in such a contemporary art event is debatable.
Ditto for autodidact John D. Monteith's nostalgic collages of old
yearbook photos and Lene Reckenfelder's obsessive Lenes
Kammermuseum (Lene's Museum Room, 1970-90), a tiny room
crammed with materials that a young girl of a bygone age might
have collected. Many of these unfamiliar works were, however,
installed to their advantage: Reckenfelder's was in the same space as
Louise Bourgeois' engaging and dreamy Red Room (My Parents), and
the Kupffer-kitsch was viewed in terms of Jeff Koons' crystal self-portrait.
To each his personal fetish, I suppose, but the inclusion of so many
Viennese artists of the past (Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Herman
Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Valie Export) -- even in a show
foregrounding otherness in the form of personal obsession -- was a
bit much. It was indeed interesting to see a construction of the
torture device from Franz Kafka's The Penal Colony in this Viennese
context, but the latter-day legacy of such esthetics in the work of
artists like Frenchman Vincent Corpet hardly justified the large
Actionist presence (for which Szeemann must have a soft spot).
Similarly, while the inclusion of a late Francis Bacon triptych
alongside Yan Pei-Ming's multi-panel portrait of his father made
sense visually, the spatial limitations (even here) made me wonder
about alternatives for the British mega-star's work.
As expected, painting was in short supply, and for those of us who
continue to look for it, Paul McCarthy's amusing video assault
entitled The Painter didn't count. Neither did the clever Johnsian joke
Painting with Two Balls (1996) by Richard Jackson. Here, a puke-yellow Ford Pinto turned on its side sports two giant balls as the
would-be wheels of its right side; a canvas that can rotate about its
central axis is connected to these orbs by a large fan belt. Once the
Pinto is started and shifted into gear, the wheels would turn, the
canvas would spin, and dropping paint in from above would be the
shit hitting the fan.
Such had clearly been the in situ performance, leaving the walls,
floor, and sculptural-object itself a mess of already hardened, drippy
ejaculations. Perhaps it was a "Painting Stinks!" philosophy that put
these aggressive, painting-inspired installations adjacent to Korean
artist Bul Lee's rotting fish sculptures. Thanks to their stench, Lee's
works saw only a few viewers when displayed in MoMA's project
gallery near the café; here they were safely at the absolute furthest
remove from the restaurant.
With a huge space and 86 artists to fill it (including the Kafka
contraption and several Messerschmidt sculptures from the 18th
century, grimacing portrait busts that are a drum-roll for Arnulf Rainer's photos of himself making faces), the Lyon show is an
interesting alternative view by an inspired veteran in this summer
of blockbusters. As the man credited with doing the most to define
the ego of the curator-cum-artist, it is surprising that more
comparisons have not been made between Szeemann and other
curators of the season -- particularly given Szeemann's contributions
to these events (the introduction of Aperto at Venice and the still-remarked upon fifth edition of Documenta 25 years ago).
Szeemann's attempts at inclusiveness may not be for everyone, but
his vision is generous, provocative and in many ways, uplifting. "I
wanted to do a show that really amuses me because I've had enough
of all these kinds of shows where you don't have any fun . . . . I
wanted to make an optimistic exhibition" (Flash Art, Summer 1997,
89). As I wondered through the hall, the smiles and wonder on
people's faces convinced me that Szeemann had succeeded. And at
the same time, I was reminded that, thankfully, such spectacles are
not just for critics, curators, and connoisseurs.
(The show is on through September 24th and can be accessed on the
net: www.biennale-de-lyon.org.)
J. MARTIN HILL is a Rousseau Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts.
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