Ahead of the Lyon Biennial, Harry Thorne looks at the trend for collaborative curating

United we stand: how collectives set out to change the biennial 

To curate a biennial is not to curate a biennial. It is to preside over budgets, initiate commercial partnerships, coordinate public programs and publishing projects, attend to media representatives, and so on, all while ensuring that what comes to pass is guided by something resembling an original ‘artistic vision.’ Simple time constraints notwithstanding, the likelihood that a sole figure is capable of excelling in each of these fields is slim and, given that biennials remain pivotal to city marketing campaigns, it follows that the ‘collective as curator’ should become an increasingly appealing prospect. A problem shared is a problem halved, as they say (and a problem further divided might alleviate responsibility even more).There is precedent: In 2009, the 11th Istanbul Biennial was curated by the Zagreb-based trio What, How &amp; for Whom (WHW), whose strategies echo those of the New York-based collective Group Material, while in 2010, Manifesta 8 was organized by three interdisciplinary collectives (Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Chamber of Public Secrets, and tranzit.org), each of whom developed an independent strand that played out concurrently across the cities of Murcia and Cartagena in southeast Spain. The near future will be co-authored also, with the forthcoming Lyon Biennale being organized by the curatorial team of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; next year’s Berlin Biennale 11 being led by the ‘four-voice constellation’ of María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, and Agustín Pérez Rubio; and the 2022 edition of documenta being entrusted to the Indonesian collective ruangrupa. (The name of the latter group loosely translates as ‘a space for art,’ a helpfully ambiguous delineation, given their numbers aren’t fixed.)

There are, undoubtedly, symbolic reasons for this recent lean toward the co-op. We live in a time afflicted by insularity and parochialism, in which communication is failing us, in spite of the fact that – theoretically at least – we are better connected than ever before. As we reckon with the fundamental shortcomings of a single-point perspective, it follows that the cultural realm should (be seen to) propose alternative models of coauthorship and coexistence, demonstrating how the accommodation of multiple vantage points might make us aware of our collective blind spots. As the Lyon curatorial team wrote ahead of their opening this month: ‘This edition – a reflection of our collective curatorial approach, based on discussion and collegiality – seeks to nurture chance encounters and unexpected connections.’ We, as a people, have always been a commons, a collective, a cacophony, our every interaction capable of both surprise and misfire. Our elected councils, artistic or otherwise, should be sensitive to that fact, if not physically representative of it.But one can be cynical about these developments. For while we work better together, we fail better, too. According to a certain logic, diversifying the voices at the table enables us to speak to a wider audience and, consequently, increases the likelihood that our eventual product will be fondly received. ruangrupa’s position at documenta is illustrative of this. In the words of Philippe Pirotte, curator and representative of the show’s 2022 search committee: ‘We have appointed ruangrupa because they have demonstrated the ability to appeal to various communities, including groups that go beyond pure art audiences.’ While the drive to diversify audiences and extend the contemporary art discourse beyond Western art centers is admirable and necessary (documenta, in particular, has a patchy record in this regard), what do we lose when widening appeal becomes the definitive goal? Is the forsaking of a singular artistic vision worthwhile if the collaboratively devised alternative risks a homogeneity of aesthetics and politics? We cannot, should not, hope to please everyone: Such an act risks the reaffirmation of the (already compromised) status quo. Meaning: Such an act risks nothing.

The Lyon Biennale takes its title from an appropriately gushy Raymond Carver poem, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985), a reference to the city’s positioning at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers and an idealistic, albeit touching, allusion to the manner in which we must find ways to exist as one in spite of our disparate points of origin. But a separate Carver short story offers a much-needed warning. At the close of So Much Water So Close to Home, published in 1981, a husband reaches a lustful arm around his wife and mutters something incomprehensible. ‘He says something else,’ the wife, Claire, narrates. ‘But I don’t need to listen. I can’t hear a thing with so much water going.’ In art, as in life, the challenge is not to bring individual voices together, it is to ensure that they amount to more than the sum of their parts. For while polyphony can produce moments of unrivalled beauty, so, too, can it fall into discord.Time will tell whether or not collective curatorial experiments will be successful in injecting a new lease on life into a biennial format increasingly written off as moribund. A camel is a horse designed by committee, they say. But a camel can survive where a horse cannot.&nbsp;The 15th Lyon Biennale opens September 18, 2019. Harry Thorne is a writer, editor, and critic based in London. He is former associate editor of frieze magazine and a contributing editor of The White Review.Top image: the members of&nbsp;ruangrupa, who will curate the next edition of Documenta in 2022. Photo by&nbsp;Gudskul Jin Panji,&nbsp;2019.

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