21 October 2015
What certainties does today’s society offer us? Ralph Rugoff has chosen a reassuring title for the 13th Lyon Biennale: the curator has called it La vie moderne and the poster could be an advertisement for a travel agency. The same brightly colored beach umbrellas have materialized at the entrance to the exhibition, in the refreshment area. They mark a boundary beyond which modernity, in all its aspects—philosophical, technological, economic—has been put in the dock. On the other side there are the artists: cynical, ironic, engaged, self-celebratory, victims and perpetrators of the social system of which they are a part. Rugoff has called on sixty of them, for a biennale in which 70% of the works have never been shown before, and nothing is banal or obscure. And if the attention is focused on the present, as Baudelaire suggested in The Painter of Modern Life to which Rugoff pays explicit homage in the title, it is not a present uprooted from the past. It is an ambiguous time, which rocks to the rhythm of “I was born a loser,” the refrain of Alton Ellis’s Black Man’s World, mixed in two versions in Cyprien Gaillard’s new 3D video; and which echoes in the work of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (French Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale), where a hail of cherry pits pours down onto a drum kit activated by the electromagnetic field of visitors’ cellphones. Artists and curator have chosen a pop aesthetic, a visual camouflage, and the exhibition is never abstract. David Shrigley, for example, has injected his dark humor into a video inspired by an old Sega game from 1986, Out Run, but the landscape is remote from the metropolitan idyll, studded with naked men crying out for help. While Marinella Senatore and Jeremy Deller have extended the creative process to the poorest communities of the city, making a claim to spaces and critical attention to the rhythm of rap and twerking. This Lyon Biennale is an exhibition for those who want to ask themselves questions, and—as Rugoff himself admits—“grasp fully the paradoxes of our modern life.”
13e Biennale de Lyon, La vie moderne
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
Lion
September 10-November 3, 2015
Anna Ostoya, Yellow Red Blue, 2015. Courtesy: Anna Ostoya, Tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Ed Ruscha, Psycho Spaghetti Western 10, 2010. Courtesy: Carol and Richard Feinstein. La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Simon Denny, The personnal effects of Kim Dotcom, 2014. Courtesy: Simon Denny, Galerie Buchholz (Berlin-Cologne) and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, Courtesy: La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Nina Canell. Courtesy: Galerie Wien Lukatsch (Berlin), Galerie Daniel Marzona (Berlin) Mother’s Tankstation (Dublin) and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Nguyen Trinh-Thi, Landscape Series #1, 2013. Courtesy: Nguyen Trinh-Thi and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Mike Nelson, A7 route du soleil, 2015. Courtesy: La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Marinella Senatore, The world community feels good, 2015. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Emmanuelle Lainé, Don’t cheat me out of the fullness of my capacity, 2014. Courtesy: Emmanuelle Lainé.
He Xiangyu, Cola Project Extraction, 2009. Courtesy: He Xiangyu, White Space Beijing and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Anthéa Hamilton, Kar-a-sutra, 2015. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Camille Henrot, No Battery; Hello & Thank You; Failed Dog Training v1, 2015. Courtesy: Camille Henrot, Kamel Mennour (Paris) and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Kader Attia, Les Oxymores de la Raison, 2015, Courtesy: Kader Attia, Galerie Nagel Draxler (Berlin), Lehmann Maupin Gallery (New York) and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Blazy Michel, Pull Over Time, 2015. Courtesy: Art Concept and La Biennale de Lyon. Photo: © Blaise Adilon.
Sol LeWitt, Upside Down – Structure with Three Towers, Expanded 23 Times, 2015.