Franco techno art.

Displayed in the spanking new, Renzo Piano-designed building of the Musee d'Art Contemporain, and in the scheduled-for-demolition Palais de Congres, the Third Lyon Biennial proposed an ambitious stock-taking of artistic use of the moving image. In part celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere brothers' first cinematograph in Lyon, the Biennial, which included the work of 63 artists, provided a massive survey of film, video, virtual reality and "computer informatics." Yet the organizers' broad definition included artists who in some way dealt with the influence of cinematic or television images in the wider social culture, highlighting the theme of artistic creativity in a world saturated with "infotainment."

Curated by Thierry Prat, Thierry Raspail and Georges Rey, this exhibition followed the path laid out in the second Biennial, that Prat and Raspail curated with Dada historian Marc Dachy, which took its theme from a poem by the Living Theater anarchist impresario Julian Beck - "Et tous ils changent le monde (and they do change the world)." With a judicious selection of works, that second Biennial examined the artistic evolution of the modernist style - from Duchamp and Malevich, to Beuys and Cage, to Boltanski, Kruger and Kawabata - proposing an unbroken if extremely complex line of structural developments of artistic creativity (seemingly unbeholden to any notion of postmodern breaks), with a distinct bow to movements like Dada and Fluxus, that at the same time at least implicitly argued for the innovative force of contemporary art as a powerful social corrective. The claim that artists can provide "democratic" responses, as well as creative form, to advances in new technologies cropped up in many of the essays in the accompanying 575-page catalog for this third Biennial, although arguably it was less evident in the works themselves.

For all the considerable critical acumen and historical knowledge of the curators, this comprehensive media-dedicated Biennial seemed to provide less analysis of specific forms of media and uses of the moving image than say, the 1990-91 "Passages de l'image" (organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou), and less inquiry into the new technologies and their technical effects than the 1995 Kwanju Biennial in Korea (dubbed with the similar theme "InfoART"). To peruse such an large scale exhibition (the largest since the 1986 "Les Immateriaux" exhibition at the Pompidou), primarily filled with video art and video or virtual reality installations, may sound like a hopeless task for the viewer, yet perhaps due to the constraints or possibilities of this "megashow" museum format, the curators took perhaps too much care in selecting works that spectators could quickly view and understand.(1) Even crowd-pleasers like Paul Sermon's interactive virtual-reality installation Telematic Vision (1993), where viewers in two locations share space and exchange gestures on a couch via video technology, acutely posed questions about the body, the role of the "informatic" artist in a media age and what artist Gary Hill has called video technology's peculiar property of "the simultaneous production of presence and distance."(2) Issues such as these served to churn up what Rey termed "the existentialist orientation" of the Biennial.(3)

The various new technologies have especially challenged and made urgent both personal and social conceptions of the body. Dilemmas of hybridization and the challenges offered to orthodox notions of the body were starkly illumined by Stelarc's video Psycho/Cyber (1992-93), documenting a bizarre choreography that was triggered by Stelarc's body being hooked up with a pre-programmed medical robot and a virtual third arm, moving or dancing either to steps motivated by his heartbeat or from robotics, surrounded by an electronic network of sound, light and cameras all connected to the artist's involuntary/hybrid body-as-"video mixer." In his most recent performances, Stelarc's movements are motivated by Internet users connected via computer to sensors located on his body. Stelarc's enthusiasm for electronic body modification was complemented by the far darker, virulent vision of Orlan, whose in a while . . . you won't see me anymore in a while . . . you'll see me again . . . . (1992-95), an extensive fashion "make-over" dictated by art historical conventions of feminine beauty, was displayed on the ceiling in a manner intended to recall the Sistine Chapel. Catherine Ikam's "virtual portraits" featured empty, revolving, digitally formed, lacquered casts of faces with voices stripped of their usual human inflections, echoing Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of "faciality": "The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start . . . if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible . . ."(4)

This exploration of subjecthood, as the Biennial amply demonstrated, was present from the earliest days of what used to be called "video art." Although concentrating all the historic pioneers of video or "informatic" art in one location, the Musee d'Art Contemporain, had the inevitable effect of making the emerging, younger artists in the Palais de Congres look more tentative or less significant, it did provide a pedagogical, genealogical basis for looking at artistic work in the new genres. Beginning with Nam June Paik's 10 Pieces Shown in Wuppertal in 1963 and Wolf Vostell's 6 TV De-collages (1963) the exhibition showed the two complementary directions artists would take: Paik's deconstruction and manipulation of the electronic image as means toward a new kind of painting or visual art; and Vostell's aggressive "anti-television" that produced a strong social critique of the new technology. How these concerns were easily melded with those of the new socius (or changes in social relationships), interactivity, and body-perception, was shown in the '60s and early '70s by artists like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Dan Graham, or in the extraordinary performances documented by Marina and Ulay Abramovic, while more formalistic experimentation with the capability of video technologies was the hallmark of artists such as Michael Snow, Piotr Kowalski and Woody and Steina Vasulka. It is one of the great achievements of this Biennial to have collected so many of these influential works in one locale. Nevertheless, the exhibition was symptomatic of the curators' concern for validating various works as "art," to demonstrate a modernist continuity - all at the expense, ironically, of pursuing experimentation (in the end, the number of computer-assisted works presented was relatively small).

Whether presenting Toshio Imai's Piano-as image media (1995), designed at ZKM, the Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, or Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Bon Voyage, M. Ackerman, 1995), the Biennial seemed to advance the idea of what French critic Nicolas Bourriaud terms "de-localization": that artists can best heighten awareness of the changes in technical modes of production and the social relationships they engender through displacement and indirection. "Thus," Bourriaud argues,

the major effects of the computer revolution are only visible today in the works of artists who do not use computers. On the contrary, those who produce "computer graphics," who juggle with fractals or who synthesize images, most often fall into the trap of illustration: at best their work is only a symptom or a gimmick of the revolution, while at worst it represents a symbolic alienation to the computer medium, and the artist's own alienation within the reigning modes of production.(5)

The "avant-garde" of the '60s, Bourriaud points out, whether George Brecht and Robert Filiou's games, or Joseph Beuys's "actions," were already less "autonomous realities than as programs to be run, models to be reproduced." In the works of artists such as Tiravanija (with his "canteens," for instance), Henry Bond and Philippe Parreno, or computer sites like the Le Cafe Electronique International, there is the reinvention of a non-commerical social space within the conditions of the time. What Marx called "social pockets" are an integral part of their "model" or relational "program."

Given its theme of relation to the "moving image" this Biennial included many works that reflected the surrounding media culture or showed artists' interest in the cultural influence of cinematic images, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto's majestic, sublime photographs of cinematiques or Cindy Bernard's series "Ask the Dust" (1989-92), which consisted of photographs of vacant location shots (emptied out of action, fictional or otherwise) from usually famous Hollywood films - The Searchers, Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather - or cult films like Faster Pussycat . . . Kill! Kill! Eric Rondepierre's rephotographed, deteriorated film stills, with their uncanny protuberances, is yet another attempt at gaining a fresh perspective on auratic images, while Douglas Gordon's Proposal for Public Art Work: Reconstituting John Ford and the Searchers (1995), a video installation that projects the classic Western in the real time of the narrative, takes on the vagaries of the image. Other reflections upon the "moving image" include Pierre Huyghe's 1995 video remake of Pasolini's Uccellaci et Uccellini; Patrick Corillon's humorous video installation, Three Suites for Piano (1995) as well as his slide installation with cinema chairs, The Revelations of Oskar Serti (1995), which in its treatment of hysteria or return of the repressed froze cinematic narrative. Often the viewing situation itself was addressed, as with Rainer Oldendorf's Marco (1995), a mirrored film of reenacted, fragmented scenes from feature films that viewers could watch while laying on their backs, or the discreet oriental chairs in Catherine Beaugrand's bluntly-titled video installation, America is a Mistake (1995).

The Biennial managed to strike a good balance between the works of artists that deal with social issues (Paul Garrin, Klaus von Bruch, Tony Oursler, Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart) and formal concerns (Diana Thater, Toshio Iwai), and at the same time present memorable works by Teiji Furuhashi (his 1995 interactive installation Lovers) and Bill Viola, as well as other works that highlight perspective and point of view, from Gary Hill's Corners of the World (1995) to Cheryl Donegan's Tent (1995). The note of "magic" or poetry that the curators were seeking may have been most directly struck by Mike and Doug Starn's installation Amaterasu (1994), their evocation of the ultimate incomprehensibility of the sun, and by correlation - light, knowledge, consciousness, measurement - in their halogen-lighted vitrines of myriad NASA photos and Petrus von Christ's Portrait of a Young Woman. With its near-nostalgic "calling of the artist" in an era when artistic production is increasingly collaborative and workshop-oriented (as the curators fully realize, indeed stress), this work exemplified all that was problematic about the exhibition.

In this ever-accelerating period of globalization and interactivity, digital technology has made it already possible to assess and map, if not historicize, "video art." The hard-won artistic medium of "video" has become broadly accepted precisely at the moment it has been swallowed up in stronger, wider technical currents. Video is so widely used by artists and advocates of all stripes that "video artist" is now a misnomer rarely claimed. The Lyon Biennial marks this moment, right on the precipice of the dystopian/utopian possibilities of a new, necessarily brave, era.

NOTES

1 See the interview with Thierry Raspail and Georges Rey by Annick Bureaud: "Subject-Body-Society," art press 208 (December 1995), p 36.

2. Gary Hill, "Interview Interviewed," World Wide Video Art & Design Profile No. 31, John Pijnappel, ed., (London: Academy Group, 1993), p. 67.

3 Rey in Bureaud, art press, p. 35.

4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi, trans., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 171.

5. Nicolas Bourriaud, "Screen Relations: The Art of the Nineties and its Technological Models," 3rd biennale de lyon d'art contemporain, (Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux/Biennale d'Art Contemporain, 1995), pp. 488-89.

JAY MURPHY is a writer and critic living in New York City.