Coco Ho's Response to Biennials

In the Era of Art that has Not Yet Been Named

If we have to make review to the modernity, “Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold” epitomized in Yeat’s words which is often used for the modernist predicament, obviously describing the specific period. To move forward in order to make a review to the Lyon Biennial 2007, I’ll use a dialectical answer “Things fall together, and there is no centre, but connections.” Or to use E.M. Forster’s words “connect, only connect.”

As Clement Greenberg argues, there was a “dominant art form” in every historical age. However, in the contemporary art aspect which is affecting with postmodernism, it is in an immobile status, everything is unstable, moving in random ways, as the past coordination between spatial and temporal dimensions has all but fallen apart, disorderly ordered. Historian usually works in the future perfect tense to predict the art movement, however curator is responding to the present tense, to organize the current situation of art. Distinguishing the present from the topical is the critical issue in the here and now. What is the situation of the art in this moment? There’re almost 110 biennials in a year, therefore 110 lists of artists and 110 titles fall together every week, the biennial mechanism lives in and generates an infinitely extensible future. Rules are often seen as preconditions for creativity, seemingly by the advent of computer to help us presume a result. Looking into Lyon Biennial 2007, artworks are falling together, with the presumed center – A Game play by different curators and artistes. As the artistic director of the biennial Thierry Raspail discerns the situation, he tried to imitate the permutation between biennials and set two kinds of player for the biennial 2007, artists and curator to play a game, which is each of the curator is to commit an artwork of an artist to represent the art of the past decade.

To contribute the pros or cons to the Lyon Biennial is not my purpose in this essay. However, what I want to say is, although there’re any people disagree with the arrangement of the mentioned biennial, I would like to view it not only about its form & matters, but the purpose, as from Heidegger words “artworks are things”, it is the viewer’s responsibility to consider the variety of question about the exhibition, as I view an exhibition is also an artwork, it is an artwork created by curator with the sense of connecting different artwork. It is interesting for me to understand the purpose of the Lyon Biennial relatively rather than absolutely. Its purpose as I see is kind of long sight looking forwards to the movement of art, playing with possibilities provided by rules, experiments, focusing on individualism & the originality of the artwork itself, return the whole exhibition into the absent centre, instead of design a sounded “a la mode” topic, and formally or even conventionally arranged the artworks together, trying to push them surround the center with the given topic, e.g, Venice Biennial trying to focus on Global war, problem of globalization, & arranging the works into a narrative path, as a sense of building all the work as one whole, instead of viewing which artworks as itself.

Of course, both of them are using a kind of contemporary way to treat artworks in order to give a sense of the present tense. Besides discussing the succession or failure of the Lyon Biennial, it is trying to add some new elements to explore the possibilities of making exhibition. Game playing idea in this biennial referred to Roger Caillois, in Man, Play and Games, describes play as a free and voluntary activity that ceases to be a source of amusement as soon as any element of compulsion is introduced, the Lyon Biennial tries to open up the possibility of perception to the audience, which is special compare with other biennial those happen every week. Many postmodern critics have emphasized intertextuality, the Biennial contains several combination of discontinuous texts, producing a disharmonious harmony under the pluralism world, providing anamnesis recollection, and gradually lead the exhibition emphasize from form to content for the specific year/ period of certain artwork.

Different artworks by different artists committed by different curator construct a linkage about contemporary art in the past ten years, though the rule it self is abit loose, I emphasize the rule it use is a new way of exploration, in order to produce an hybrid whole, the audience mostly can’t connect the artworks as the problem they raised, nonetheless, on the other way, it is enhancing the singularity of the singular artwork, this is not a crime, but showing the director’s insight of trial and error, the positive mind of challenging the audience’s habit on seeing an exhibition and the question the future of curatorship.