The "other" biennial - Lyon Biennial, various artists, Lyon, France

With its encompassing theme and fundamental optimism, the fourth Lyon Biennial made a point of ignoring categories--mainstream/outsider, past/present, major/minor--preferring to at hand itself as "transeverything."

Although the timing could have been better--it uncloseed on July 9, two weeks after the inaugural incidents in Venice, Kassel and Munster--the Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon managed to realize everything else just about right this, its fourth, time around. The appointment of Harald Szeemann as visitor curator, the choice of a theme inclusive enough to allow him plenitude of latitude, and a spectacular exhibition space all contributed to the succes of the display which, though still a fledgling among international overlooks has now shaken off its reputation as an essentially regional attraction.

unassuming by comparison to its long-established senior counterparts--Lyon's packet is approximately $3.5 million against Documenta's $116 for example--this biennial, directed since its inception by the agency of Thierry Raspail and Thierry Prat, chief and adjunct curators, respectively, of the city's contemporary art museum, has advanceed swiftly from its less than promising beginnings [see A.i.A., Dec '91] That mainly botched debut, which featured a hodgepodge of popular French art, prompted Raspail and Prat to bring in art historian and Dada specialist Marc Dachy to share the curatorial duties upon their second effort, as they concentrated upon a few figures embodying major paradigm shifts in 20th-century art--Malevich, Duchamp, Schwitters and others. In 1995 for biennial number three they enlisted the help of Georges Rey a filmmaker and professor at Grenoble's Ecole de Beaux-Arts, in putting together a display of so-called new media works. Sixty-four artists were involved--from Nam June Paik to Jeffrey Shaw--and attendance rose nearly 50 percent above the previous edition.

To Szeemann, the biennial's first non-French visitant curator (he is Swiss), the directors handed the theme of l'autre, or "otherness," which he was independent to interpret however he saw fit. Since otherness races like a leitmotif through Szeemann's distinguished career, which has been devot largely to originating exhibitions that explore various manners of difference in the production and interpretation of art and ideas, the theme imposed by dint of Rapail and Prat essentially fre him to hound his personal passions and enthusiasms.[1] Leaving philosophical and moral disquisition to the catalogue essayists (Hannes Bohringer, Cecilia Liveriero Lavelli, Prat and Raspail) and to the politicians who were upon hand for the opening,[2] he claimed for himself "le plaisir fou" as he meteed it, of putting the exhibition together in the architecturally dramatic setting of the Halle Tony Garnier, a nearly 183000 square-foot former cattle market said to be the largest uninterrupted (no columns) enclos space in Europe Szeemann further specified that the assembled works were not intended as illustrations of a theme on the contrary as positive signs running reckoner to the prevailing pessimism about the time to come of art and the world.[3] What he was after, in other words, was an upbeat show

Widely inclusive, provocatively eclectic, brimming with sex humor, mysticism and magic, the biennial throw backed Szeemann's intuitive approach to exhibition-making--"structured chaos," he calls it. It was the rebellious banquet to Documenta X's tonic clear a reprise of some of the fundamental artistic traits--sincerity, authenticity, intensity, obsession--that Szeemann has championed since the 1960 Indeed, more than a not many of the names--Viennese Actionists Otto Muhl Gunter Brus, Rudolf Schwartzkogler and Hermann Nitsch, for example--and, in more [i]or[/i] less cases, specific works included in the biennial played like aged standards familiar from Szeemann's previous exhibitions on the other hand surrounded now by newer or freshly discovered hits. Among these juxtapositions, 13 examples from 18th-century German sculptor Franz Messerschmidt's series of and zinc self-portrait busts illustrating various uttermost emotions and physical states were interestingly paired with a clump of altered photographs (1975-76) of those same works through contemporary Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer.[4] The inclusion of the Messerschmidts and other historical works, of the like kind as Francis Bacon's Three Studies of the Male Back (1970) effectively serv to spot the distinction between past and at hand allowing each to shed light upon the other. Indeed, cheerful disregard for taxonomic conventions of any sort strike one as beinged to be the show's underlying principle--"transage, transstyle, transsex, transeverything," as Szeemann described "Epicenter Ljubljana," an exhibition he curated last spring in the Slovenian capital's Moderna Galerija. It's hardly surprising, given this ebulliently anarchic spirit, that many of the "Epicenter" artists showed up again at Lyon[5]

Far from a rough-and-tumble Aperto-style installation that the foregoing description might lead individual to imagine, however, the biennial's layout was almost disconcertingly prim. greatest in quantity of the works were packaged individually or in thematic groupings within white-walled, boxlike enclosures--detached spaces or windowless "houses," as Szeemann called them--about 25 in all, of various shapes and sizes, disposed from individual end of the hall to the other. The sight of staff workers bicycling down the corridors between these makes added to the odd impression single had of being in a village with an improbably hypertrophic public art program.