11th Biennale de Lyon: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here

Various venues, Lyon

15 September – 31 December

By Oliver Basciano

A key work in Victoria Noorthoorn’s curation of the Lyon Biennale is a performance of Samuel Beckett’s 25-second play Breath (1969/2011), directed by Daniela Thomas. No actors appear: instead, a recording of a birth-cry initiates a fade- up of the stage’s lights, revealing a tableau of rubbish. This is followed by the sound of an extended inhalation and then exhalation, a second faint cry, and just as suddenly the whole thing ends. The exhibition, staged under a title taken from W.B. Yeats’s reference to the Irish 1916 revolution, is likewise a poetic, frequently theatrical, if somewhat melancholic and nihilistic affair; in it, Noorthoorn posits life lived as a performance analogous to Beckett’s, in which the actors may act as they please within the temporal moment, but will always ultimately return to the deathly ending.

This is apparent on entering La Sucrière – a former industrial space and the most important of the exhibition’s four dispersed venues – through the wings of a slightly raised stage that, with its vast swathes of painted canvas hung in the fashion of curtains, proves to be Kulissen (2011), an installation by Ulla von Brandenburg. It’s a theatrical ‘backdrop’ onto which the visitor walks, in a sense, through various other lives: the anonymous people in a series of oil-on-canvas portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, for example. These are strangely prosaic in their subject matter (though Yiadom-Boakye’s paint handling is impressive) except for their subtle critique of the medium’s historical context: all the sitters are of African descent. Or Javier Téllez’s excellent, dreamlike performed documentary, Dürer’s Rhinoceros (2010), in which the current residents of a Portuguese psychiatric hospital act out the imagined personas of previous inmates from the confines of their own cells.

History stalks the marginalised characters of both Yiadom-Boakye’s and Téllez’s work, a pervading atmosphere hinting that these subjects are not determined by the culture of the present. Instead they posit a reference to ‘hauntology’ and Derrida’s currently voguish idea of timeless, intangible, but nonetheless identifiable spectres that exist outside dominant chronology, in this case race and mental illness.

Across the venues, a haunted aesthetic weaves itself in and out of Noorthoorn’s curatorial mix of painting, film, installation and sculpture. It is evident at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, in the depressive, craving faces among three decades of portraits on paper by Marlene Dumas, which square up to pencil sketches by Giacometti; in the chilling orchestral composition in 17 parts and muted shadows of John Cage and Henning Lohner’s collaborative 1992 ‘film with no plot’, One11 and 103; and in Alexander Schellow’s room of illustrations, Storyboard (2001–). These snapshots of prosaic scenes, created with felt tip applied to tracing paper in a vaguely pointillist style, render the everyday as a silhouetted remnant of itself. The ghosts of possible but unrealised utopian futures appear, meanwhile, in a display of letters, diagrams and notes by Buckminster Fuller at Fondation Bullukian, coupled with architect Yona Friedman’s sculptural display of various films that play on a similar theme of languishing idealism.

Near the outskirts of the city, at a half- demolished set of concrete flats that serves as the final exhibition venue, Jorge Macchi recreates – among the rubble – a replica of the formal gardens from Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Alain Resnais’s film charted time in flux and characters uncertain of the chronology of their own lives: here the central material aspect of the film, the garden, appears itself as a ghost from another time. Noorthoorn’s apparent hauntological approach similarly presents a fluctuation between material empiricisms of life and the dematerialised, transcendent qualities that so often qualify them, with the former presented as a largely inconsequential condition, when considered against the greater uncanny possibilities that surround it. Walking through the exhibition that results from such a position, an odd narrative fusion – existential depression and progressive, superlative liberation from materialism – ultimately, and expertly, comes to the fore.