Dublin Contemporary and Lyon Biennale both supply moments of wonder – and are linked also by a gratuitous Yeats reference
IS FRENCH beauty different from Irish beauty? Given that the Lyon Biennale and Dublin Contemporary both take the same line from Yeats's Easter 1916– "a terrible beauty is born" – what can a viewing of each let us know about the state of art, and of beauty in art today?
The Lyon Biennale, curated this year by Argentinean Victoria Noorthoorn, is longer-established, this being its 11th edition. It evidently has larger budgets, and even though fewer artists are involved (76 to Dublin Contemporary’s 114), the scale is far larger.
Similarities lie in the layouts of each: at La Sucrière, one of Lyon’s four main venues, the installation takes you from darkness on the ground floor to hope, three floors up. The same thing is going on at Earlsfort Terrace. Despite the words “terrible beauty”, neither exhibition concerns itself particularly with aesthetics, though both cite the Yeats poem as a rallying cry to explore, through the eyes of artists, the conditions of living today.
This, however, leads inexorably to the realisation that that is what most artists do anyway. So much for the ideologies of the curators. What about the works on show in Lyon? Noorthoom has included in her selection four Irish, or Irish-based artists: Garrett Phelan, Sarah Pierce, Aurélien Froment, and – in a wonderful installation – Sam Beckett. Beckett's Breathis a dark space, in which shapes are revealed as the light grows stronger to be composed of nothing more than piles of rubbish. There is a scream, a breath and the lights go out again. Nearby, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde's Escenariois a black and white animation of figures lining up to be blinded by a spotlight, to the sound of applause.
Across the way a pile of wooden coffins by Barthélémy Toguo, and a work by Laura Lima in which a naked performer (the artist insists on calling him part of the “sculpture”) strains against long black straps that wrap around the pillars of the building, each add to the sense of unmitigated misery.
Being able to experience one work in the light of its neighbours is an advantage of the layout at La Sucrière, a former sugar factory in Lyon's new Confluence Quarter. The nature of the Earlsfort Terrace building makes Dublin Contemporary an episodic affair, in which some pieces flourish – such as Mark Clare's For All Mankind, a room of gently ticking tinfoil sculptures – but others feel like snatched glimpses of an interrupted conversation.
The "hope" section in Lyon has a lightness of touch, though it still has its gritty moments. Michel Huisman's No 46 (The Secret Garden)invites visitors to lie on a dirty-looking scrap of fabric and put their heads under a bucket of scummy water. Inside, you are transported to a quiet world of wonder. Elsewhere, Ernesto Ballesteros makes flying machines that animate the space.
Huisman's work is also one of the best pieces in the other main Biennale space, Le Musée d'Art Contemporain, in another newish quarter of Lyon, the Cité Internationale. There, it seems, too many artists had the same idea of intervening on the architecture and fabric of the Jean Nouvel-designed building. Gabriel Sierra has taken up and suspended a large panel of the floor; Luciana Lamothe ripped out a wall and balanced a contraption of wood and metal from its remains; Garrett Phelan spray-painted the stairwell black; Diego Bianchi attacked more walls to make a Kienholz-meets- Mad Maxspace of chaos; and Cildo Meireles one-upped Marcel Duchamp's Mile of String, with 6,000km of black thread covering most of the top floor.
Perhaps this is what Nouvel's dominant architecture deserves, but cumulatively it's all a bit much. So much so that you have to make yourself pause to discover some of the gems. There are some Giacometti drawings, and Cristoph Keller's harrowing series of films, Retrograd, a reverse chronology of the medical films made at the Berlin hospital Charité that takes you on a trip back through time to see exactly how we used to think about those with mental and physical infirmities. It's heartbreakingly effective, as is Huisman's No 74 (Surrendering Birds), a series of tiny broken models of birds, each clasping a white flag. The text reads: not recommended for children under the age of three. The manufacturer accepts no responsibility in case the bird refuses to surrender. However, it is quite clear these birds have no hope.
Like Dublin Contemporary, the Lyon Biennale supplies many moments of wonder, and occasions in which art can transport your head and your heart. Ultimately though, it seems that Terrible Beauty is little more than an advertising slogan. A zeitgeisty-sounding line of poetry, meaningless out of context, which ultimately could be applied to pretty much anything.
Perhaps that’s all that any biennial theme is there for, as a rallying call and a selling point, while the artists just get on with doing what artists do: finding new ways to see, understand and explore the world around us. It is interesting to note that the Istanbul Biennial, also currently on show, is titled simply Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011. Perhaps the theme for the next blockbuster art event might be Unmarketed, or maybe that would be a bridge too far.
The Lyon Biennale runs until December 31. biennaledelyon.com Dublin Contemporary ends on October 31. dublincontemporary.com
