“The spectacle of the everyday.” This is the title of the tenth edition of the Lyon Biennial, which has just opened only a few weeks ago. Recently, Photoespaña’09 in Madrid, dedicated to “The everyday,” also closed. If, as Harald Szeeman said, artists are the seismographs of the changes that occur in society, there is no doubt that the interest of artists (and of curators, exhibitions/biennials and other events) in daily life can be a reflection of the concerns, interests, dynamics and needs of the present moment.
CHANGES IN PARADIGM. The curator of “The spectacle of the everyday,” Hou Hanru, starts from the premise that we live in a world in which everything is a spectacle, from an image to a magazine, including an exhibition, and that, in parallel, there is what we call “daily life,” in which we try not to be irremediably dragged by the logic of consumption that accompanies the spectacle. The idea of the biennial is to draw the context of this “society of the spectacle” to highlight precisely the less visible world of everyday life, with all its potential for autonomy and creation. With all due respect, these are premises that are not so far removed from Bertold Brecht’s poem Questions of a Worker before a Book “(…) A victory on every page. Who cooked the banquets of victory? / A great man every ten years. Who pays his expenses? (…)”.
We live in a paradigm shift in which the individual appears again at the centre. Cities are nodes of relationships. Communication is in real time and also bidirectional. We can all be transmitters and receivers at the same time. (Another question is how the accumulation of information makes it very difficult to select, develop criteria and create one’s own opinion.)
MINIMAL GESTURES, GREAT IMPACT. The new ways we relate to each other today mean that the “I”s who speak are almost as many as individuals and that their discourse refers to their closest environment. Sometimes, the idea of the everyday, omnipresent on Facebook, YouTube and blogs, is identified with the innocuous and inconsequential, in the 15 minutes of fame advocated by Andy Warhol, in reality shows or in the yellow press. On other occasions, the closest and most personal, the smallest gestures, can become actions of greater impact capable of changing things, even if only minimally. In this sense, and returning to the Lyon Biennial, the critical and ironic look of Dan Perjovski’s drawings, Dora García’s performances that merge with reality, Eulàlia Valldosera’s street lamp invading an interior space or Leopold Kessler’s minimal actions in public space are nothing more than low-intensity gestures, whose potential is based on their ability to recognize certain mechanisms and make us change our perception and conception of things. And that may only be the first step that leads to other, more profound changes.
[Article published in Bonart, 2009]
