THE 00s – THE HISTORY OF A DECADE
THAT HAS NOT YET BEEN NAMED
Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Notes from a continuous conversation between Stéphanie Moisdon
and Hans-Ulrich Obrist
THE 00s
The next Lyon Biennial will open on 17 September 2007 as part of an ongoing
attempt – more than ten years now – to home in on the vital questions
regarding creativity in its most up-to-date forms. The objective of this
Biennial is a history book written by several hands. The history of a
decade not yet named.
THE BIENNIAL
Our era has done with the movements and the ideological, national,
stylistic and generational rallyings that structured the preceding decades.
The profusion of artistic currents, the extraordinary diversity they
represent in terms of styles, media and ambitions, and the coexistence on
the same stage of artists from so many different backgrounds and speaking
so many different languages: all this makes any attempt to sum up the
current scene more complex. At the same time the biennial phenomenon has
continued to grow and shift, generating a debate about formats, procedures
and local and international implications: a debate that goes hand in hand
with a dislocation of reality and its representation and forces us to
rethink our relationship with the forms taken by art and exhibitions, to
experiment with new methods and to produce new alliances.
THE GAME
How to write a history of this period, of the clash of opposites? How to
reinvent a way of speaking, creating, laying oneself bare and thinking
one’s way through the non-linear space in which art emerges? This
biennial’s method uses the structure of an enormous game, with rules for
choosing and allotting roles. And the game is binding: it can only be
played once. It takes the form of an investigation involving 60 players:
curators from all over the world, bringing their personal experience to
bear on producing the living materials of an archaeology of the present.
THE RULES
The players form two circles. The first is a community of critics and
curators who are asked a single question: “In your opinion which artist or
which work has a vital place in this decade?” This question functions as a
rule. The second circle is a group of artists, each entrusted with the
creation of an entire sequence which, according to the individual method,
defines the decade. The montage of these different sequences results in a
vision like that of the chapters of a history book.
THE CHOICE
The structure of this progress does not lie in delegating choice; rather it
allows for a shift in the criteria of appearance, authorship, collaboration
and the hierarchy of knowledge, for a reconsideration of the notion of the
list that has become one of the forces shaping the relationship to art in
the mechanism of biennials and reflects that universal passion for thinking
in categories. The accumulation of all these propositions – divergent and
coincident – gradually gives rise to a single landscape, the portrait of an
immediate present and its passengers.
THE COLLECTIVE APPROACH
In structural terms the game is as much a space for reflection on the
notion of the collective at the turning of this new century as a way of
producing arborescences – a proliferation of potential histories. Each part
of the exhibition retains the imprint of the initial, arbitrary rule; and
thus relieved of the burden of thematisation, of the habitual conventions
of allotting roles and territories, the exhibition becomes the factual
image of all the combinations, choices, constraints, fortuities and
necessities that integrate the programme of the period, with all its
lasting or ephemeral passions.
Nor is it a matter of creating another fame barometer, and even less of
setting up a ranking according to the aesthetic, economic or symbolic value
of the works. Thus the formulation of the question – and the use of the
word “vital” – is intended to include the two strands that determine the
players’ judgement, which simultaneously reflects historical objectivity and
the subjectivity of each of them.
THE PLOT
“To construct history is the atheist equivalent of a prayer,” says
historian Paul Veyne, who conceives of the writing of history not as a
scientific exercise but as a modelling of the explosive satellisation of
knowledge, as the constructing of plots, as a method of investigation
drawing on traces, facts, clues, accidents and anecdotes. Here this
methodical approach serves as a road map, with the players’ different
proposals forming a mass of plots, directions and unanticipated adventures.
The resultant multiplicity of stories and characters produces an exploded
time frame, a series of interruptions in which chance endlessly changes the
destiny and countenance of an exhibition transformed into an enormous
machination, the locus of a secret conversation. However, the randomness
this implies is neither the throw-of-the-dice kind nor the “psychological”
variety cultivated by the Surrealists, but one generated by a system when
the system taps into and takes over the creators’ intentions. For in the
historical novel of the art of today, the question of the creator keeps
coming up, and embracing other modalities of representation and of
distribution of subjectivities.
THE ARCHIPELAGO
For writer Edouard Glissant, biennials are closer in shape to continents –
solid, imposing masses – than to the archipelago model of receptiveness,
sharing and exchange. In his view, “The idea or the concept of a non-linear
temporality implies the coexistence of several time zones, and at the same
time leaves scope for a great range of contacts between these zones.” Seen
as a zone of reciprocal contacts, then, the biennial can oscillate between
the museum and the city, and between the city, its periphery and the world.
It grows like a dynamic force field, radiating out through the whole city
and beyond, embracing all sorts of organised partnerships at local,
national and international level – the House of Chaos just outside Lyon,
the Bullukian Foundation, the Institute of Contemporary Art in
Villeurbanne, Le Magasin in Grenoble, the Athens and Istanbul biennials,
and so on – and even the territories of a Wikipedia-style Everyware community. Giving rise to self-run events, subsidiary exhibitions, and
undreamed-of extensions, these joint ventures are also the opportunity to
add new centres: let us not forget that the quest for an absolute centre
that permeated and dominated a large part of the 20th century ultimately
resulted in a polyphony of centres in the 21st – a phenomenon not unrelated
to the emergence and the power of biennials around the world.
Glissant reminds us, too, that the homogenising forces of globalisation
were countered in the 1990s by a proliferation of biennials – whose own
homogenising impact led to the disappearance of difference. For despite
their urge to breathe new life into the system, the curators of these
biennials often did no more than reproduce obsolete models of visibility
and geopolitical representation in a balancing act that reinforced the
underpinnings of the global market.
THE MECHANISM
This project is a mechanism as defined by Giorgio Agamben: “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.”
Within such mechanisms – on which our existences sometimes depend – the
question thus becomes: what strategies must we adopt in the daily struggle
that links us to them? At a time when we are all faced with the need to get
back to the possibilities of appropriate usage, the practicality of play –
that purposeless children’s play that allows for the renewal of the
function of every object – becomes the instrument for new ways of doing
things. The game space – with the exhibition space – is that of the
proliferation of stories and usages, in which the rules ineluctably lead
the participants to make choices. The game is never gratuitous, for it
makes truly available that which was previously only accessible. To player
and viewer alike it makes available the usage of the rules – the means of
inventing a mythology of the present. “Each time,” says Agamben, “we have
to wrench back from the mechanisms the possibility of usage they have taken
captive. The profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the
coming generation.”
______________________________
STÉPHANIE MOISDON
born 1967, lives and works in Paris
After studies in semiology and cinema research, Stéphanie Moisdon began
working at the Centre Pompidou in 1990. In 1994 she and Nicolas Trembley
set up BDV (Bureau des Vidéos), a production, publication and distribution
agency for artists’ videos.
She now enjoys a solid reputation as an art critic and the freelance
curator of such acclaimed exhibitions as “Présumés Innocents” at CAPCBordeaux
(2000), “Manifesta 4” in Frankfurt (2002), “Genesis Sculpture” in
Reims (2004) and “L’Ecole de Stéphanie” for “La Force de l’Art” in Paris
(2006).
She also teaches at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art in Lausanne and is art editor
at “Self Service” magazine. Since 2005 she and Eric Troncy have been
editing the magazine “Frog”. She is a regular contributor to "Purple” and“Beaux Arts”, and has published a number of monographs, including one on
Dominique Gonzales-Foerster in 2002. A collection of her writing is soon to
be published by Presses du Réel.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
born 1968, lives and works in London
In 1993 Hans Ulrich Obrist founded the Robert Walser Museum and was in
charge of the “Migrateur” programme at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville
de Paris, where he was contemporary art curator until 2005. He is currently
co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international
projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since 1991 he has organised
or co-organised numerous exhibitions including “Do it” (more than 30
versions since 1994), “Cities on the Move” (with Hou Hanru, 1997), the
first Berlin Biennial (1998), “Mutations” (Bordeaux, 2000) and “Utopia
Station” for the 50th Venice Biennale. He was also curator for the Dakar
Biennial in 2004 and for many monographic exhibitions devoted to such
artists as Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, Jonas Mekas, Pierre Huyghe,
Anri Sala and Doug Aitken. Since moving to London he has co-organised a
number of exhibitions including “Uncertain States of America” (Serpentine
Gallery, 2006) and “China Power Station: Part I” (Battersea Power Station,
2006). In tandem with his curatorial work, he publishes the writings of
Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois and Gilbert & George and is the publisher
of a series of artist’s books by, among others, John Baldessari, Matthew
Barney, Christian Boltanski and Douglas Gordon. A selection of his
interviews appeared in 2003 as “Hans Ulrich Obrist Interview” (Charta,
2003) and 2006 saw the publication of “...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop”,
a collection of his writings from 1990 to 2006.v
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