The Story of the Other

Since 1991 in the city of Lyon, Thierry Raspail and Thierry Prat, co-directors of the Musee d’art Contemporain, have hosted a biennial art exhibition which has attracted very little attention in the international art press. Each biennial has a theme and an invited curator who assumes the role of determining the substance of the exhibition. This year’s choice for the Fourth Biennial was Harald Szeemann, the Swiss curator who established his reputation in late sixties with such exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form. The theme chosen for Szeemann by Raspail and Prat for the exhibition in Lyon this past summer was based on the post-structuralist term l’autre (the other).

L’autre was held this past summer at L’Halle Tony Garnier, built on the outskirts of Lyon in the twenties and named for the architect, a descendant of Charles Garnier. The enormous interior represents a magnificent feat of engineering. Not only is there enormous floor space, but there is also a very high ceiling, making it suitable for showing large-scale works, such as those by Richard Serra or Serge Spitzer, which would normally be precluded from exhibitions in more conventional museums.

Figure 1.

Katharina Fritsch, Rattenkönig, 1993. Installation, Biennale de Lyon, 1997. Photo: B. Adilon, courtesy Biennale de Lyon.

In contrast to the more conceptual/cybernetic Biennial of two years ago, curated by French film and video historian Georges Rey, the current version was more like a Wagnerian opera in which the gamut of conventional media, multimedia, digital art, conceptual art, installation art, and expressionism was made available to art world tourists seeking an alternative to the far more publicized summer exhibitions in Kassel, Münster, and Venice. Szeemann’s choices were eclectic, but focused around the subject of the contemporary artist’s personal mythology. Large-scale sculpture by such artists as Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Chris Burden, Jessica Stockholder, Hanne Darboven, and Ute Schroder were seen in relation to video installations by Gary Hill, Mariko Mori, Zhang Peili, Paul McCarthy, and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. There were maximal “physical/ephemeral” pieces by younger artists, such as Jason Rhoades and Richard Jackson, and the famous large-scale black rats by Katharina Fritsch, shown earlier at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. In fact, the latter piece worked better in Lyon, given the lofty ceiling space. As an example of how the geographical context can influence interpretation of such symbolic works, I mused about how Fritsch’s circular configuration of rats with tails tied together might have something to do with the impending threat of the new European community—a conclusion I would not have reached in New York.

Szeemann included an historical section with a selection of bronze cast self-portraits by the eccentric eighteenth-century artist Frances Xavier Messerschmidt. Some art historians have recently claimed this legendary German artist as an important antecedent to contemporary performance art. Szeemann mounted the bronze heads—each representing a grotesque facial expression—in a circular arrangement, thereby seeming to assert their relationship to the closely proximate works by the Austrian Actionists of the 1960s. Surrounding the Messerschmidts were photographs, drawings, and relics by artists such as Rudolph Schwarzkogler, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muhl, Gunther Brus, and Arnulf Rainer.

Another portion of this “historical” section, though not fundamentally a work of art, was an entry in the exhibition catalogue by the French art historian and curator Jean Clair. This was a photograph of a harrowing machine, wired with electronic prods over a mattress, thus resembling the torture device described by Franz Kafka in “The Penal Colony.” Apparently this machine was built in the 1920s. It was first exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Bern in the mid-1970s, where it was eventually acquired as part of the permanent collection. It quickly became apparent that Szeemann’s L’autre was intended to situate the artist at the end of modernism within the context of a self-historifying mythos, a performance projection of a being larger-than-life in search of a persona—in other...