/ 18 September 2005

The art of fear

Behind a high, protective wire fence, brightly dressed schoolchildren play amid a flock of pigeons, a tableau of joyful innocence. But then a spectator notices the birds pecking violently at the kids, two of whom have already fallen, their guts spilling on to the floor.

The pigeons (which are real) and the children (crafted by French artist Kader Attia from modelling clay mixed with bird seed) are part of the Eighth Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon, one of Europe’s major showcases of late 20th- and 21st-century art.

The dominant theme of the 2005 edition — curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans, directors of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris — is Experiencing Duration. The concept, explains Bourriaud, is less about representing time than the belief that “art is first and foremost an event”.

But another undercurrent runs through the exhibit: experiencing fear. Indeed, Kader’s is only one of several scary works at the Biennale, which opened this week and runs until the end of the year.

In Ecarlate, by Virginie Barre of France, the event has already happened.

Blending the hyper-realism of clothed wax figurines and the melodrama of a Hollywood murder movie, Barre creates what could be a crime scene: a red, resin blood stain spills out across the floor and a corpse dangles from one of the lights, with ballroom music from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining wafting in the background.

She leaves viewers to piece together the story.

The fear factor at the exhibit emerges along several axes. There is the subject matter. Then there is the fear of making a fool of oneself in situations where viewers are not permitted to remain passive, forced to act or react in relation to what they experience.

Finally, there is the physical fear of claustrophobia, enclosure and sensory confusion.

Take British artist Martin Creed’s pink balloons. Imagine pushing your way through hundreds of them crammed into a small, closed room with a glass door at either end. A feeling of suffocation is allayed only by the knowledge that this is just an art exhibition, after all.

There’s more fear around the bend in the peculiar wood-and-steel construction by John Bock of Germany. His rudimentary apartment contains a massive wheel, waiting to be turned by some foolhardy human hamster once the door has been firmly shut.

And in Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’s dense, Day-Glo-green, artificial fog, the oppressive silence and loss of sense of space remind us that duration can mean distance too.

Mixing generations, new works and historic pieces, Bourriaud and Sans pay homage to the legacy of 1960s and 1970s conceptual art, whether reverentially in the paintings by Frenchman Robert Malaval, or referentially in the text-and-photo works by American Douglas Huebler.

Yet what emerges clearly throughout is how different the vibe is in 2005.

Experimental composer La Monte Young’s Dream House, first produced in 1962, is a sort of meditation room where one is invited to lie down and lose track of time against vibrating minimalist electronic music.

The contrast with the recent works could not be sharper. It is as if the easygoing optimism of 1960s counter-culture has been replaced by the cultural anarchy of today: pluralism, loss of references, end of ideology.

As in years past, the Lyon Biennale is dispersed over several sites. Most of the 60 artists are exhibited at a former sugar warehouse in the old docks district, but over at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, works by two French artists, Daniel Buren and Melik Ohanian, neatly splice the different threads of temporality.

Buren’s installation of coloured acrylic panels — which occupy the whole second floor — is about both space and time. Each day, certain panels will be removed or inserted, making a complex art work that is never finished.

Ohanian’s seven-screen film is an extraordinarily accomplished assemblage in its constant changes of speed, focus and scale, combining poetic imagery with the suspense of an impending drama, an explosion about to happen.

And when it does, each viewpoint is different: seven possible narratives, experienced all at once. — Sapa-AFP

On the net

Eighth Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon