Franco techno art

Displayed in the spanking fresh Renzo Piano-designed building of the Musee d'Art Contemporain, and in the scheduled-for-demolition Palais de Congre the Third Lyon Biennial propos an ambitious stock-taking of artistic use of the moving image. In part celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere brothers' first cinematograph in Lyon the Biennial, which included the work of 63 artists, provided a massive overlook of film, video, virtual reality and "computer informatics." still the organizers' broad definition included artists who in a certain number of way dealt with the influence of cinematic or television images in the wider social tillage highlighting the theme of artistic creativity in a world saturated with "infotainment."

Curated by dint of Thierry Prat, Thierry Raspail and Georges Rey this exhibition followed the path laid without in the second Biennial, that Prat and Raspail curated with Dada historian Marc Dachy, which took its theme from a piece of poetry by the Living Theater anarchist impresario Julian Beck - "Et tous ils changent le world (and they do change the world)." With a judicious selection of works, that next to the first Biennial examined the artistic evolution of the modernist manner of writing - from Duchamp and Malevich, to Beuys and Cage, to Boltanski, Kruger and Kawabata - proposing an complete if extremely complex line of structural unfoldings of artistic creativity (seemingly unbeholden to any notion of postmodern breaks), with a distinct make crooked to movements like Dada and Fluxus, that at the same time at least implicitly argued for the innovative force of contemporary art as a powerful social corrective. The claim that artists can provide "democratic" rejoinders as well as creative form, to advances in fresh technologies cropped up in many of the essays in the accompanying 575-page catalog for this third Biennial, although arguably it was les evident in the works themselves.

For all the considerable critical acumen and historical knowledge of the curators, this comprehensive media-dedicated Biennial present the appearanceed to provide less analysis of specific forms of media and uses of the moving image than say, the 1990-91 "Passages de l'image" (organized by dint of the Centre Georges Pompidou), and les inquiry into the fresh technologies and their technical consequences than the 1995 Kwanju Biennial in Korea (dubbed with the similar theme "InfoART"). To peruse like an large scale exhibition (the largest since the 1986 "Le Immateriaux" exhibition at the Pompidou), primarily filled with video art and video or virtual reality installations, may unimpaired like a hopeless task for the viewer, still perhaps due to the constraints or possibilities of this "megashow" museum format, the curators took perhaps too abundant care in selecting works that spectators could quickly view and understand.(1) plane crowd-pleasers like Paul Sermon's interactive virtual-reality installation Telematic Vision (1993) where viewers in sum of two units locations share space and exchange gesturings on a couch via video technology, acutely pos questions about the material part the role of the "informatic" artist in a media age and what artist Gary Hill has called video technology's peculiar quality of "the simultaneous production of neighborhood and distance."(2) Issues such as these serv to agitate up what Rey termed "the existentialist orientation" of the Biennial.(3)

The various fresh technologies have especially challenged and made pressing both personal and social conceptions of the material part Dilemmas of hybridization and the challenges tendered to orthodox notions of the material part were starkly illumined by Stelarc's video Psycho/Cyber (1992-93) documenting a bizarre choreography that was triggered by means of Stelarc's body being hooked up with a pre-programmed medical robot and a virtual third arm, moving or dancing either to paces motivated by his heartbeat or from robotics, environed by an electronic network of entire light and cameras all coupleed to the artist's involuntary/hybrid body-as-"video mixer." In his greatest in quantity recent performances, Stelarc's movements are motivated by dint of Internet users connected via computer to sensors located upon his body. Stelarc's enthusiasm for electronic material substance modification was complemented by the far darker, virulent vision of Orlan, whose in a while . . you won't diocese me anymore in a while . . you'll see me again . . . (1992-95), an extensive fashion "make-over" dictated through art historical conventions of feminine beauty, was displayed upon the ceiling in a manner intended to recall the Sistine Chapel. Catherine Ikam's "virtual portraits" featured devoid of contents revolving, digitally formed, lacquered casts of faces with voices stripped of their usual human inflections, echoing Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of "faciality": "The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start . . if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible . ."(4)

This exploration of subjecthood as the Biennial amply demonstrated, was at hand from the earliest days of what used to be called "video art." Although concentrating all the historic pioneers of video or "informatic" art in individual location, the Musee d'Art Contemporain, had the inevitable result of making the emerging, younger artists in the Palais de Congre gaze more tentative or less significant, it did provide a pedagogical, genealogical basis for looking at artistic work in the novel genres. Beginning with Nam June Paik's 10 Pieces Shown in Wuppertal in 1963 and Wolf Vostell's 6 TV De-collages (1963) the exhibition showed the sum of two units complementary directions artists would take: Paik's deconstruction and manipulation of the electronic image as means toward a fresh kind of painting or visual art; and Vostell's aggressive "anti-television" that produc a brawny social critique of the novel technology. How these concerns were easily meld with those of the fresh socius (or changes in social relationships), interactivity, and body-perception, was shown in the '60 and early '70 through artists like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Dan Graham, or in the extraordinary performances documented by means of Marina and Ulay Abramovic, while more formalistic experimentation with the capability of video technologies was the hallmark of artists similar as Michael Snow, Piotr Kowalski and wooden and Steina Vasulka. It is individual of the great achievements of this Biennial to have mustered so many of these influential works in individual locale. Nevertheless, the exhibition was symptomatic of the curators' relate to for validating various works as "art," to demonstrate a modernist continuity - all at the cost ironically, of pursuing experimentation (in the extreme point the number of computer-assisted works neared was relatively small).