In a landscape of exhausted formats, the Lyon Biennial has built a reputation for curatorial innovation. Led by Thierry Raspail, Director of Lyon’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the 2007 Biennial was no exception. For the final instalment in his trilogy as Artistic Director, Raspail appointed über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and critic-curator Stéphanie Moisdon to deliver ‘The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named’. Their show was premised on big historicising questions: How will we write history in the 21st century? How can we look back and forward at the same time as accounting for our own present?
Obrist and Moisdon’s novel response was to formulate the show as a ‘game’. They selected forty-nine ‘Players’, largely from their own milieu and from the history of the Biennial. The First Group—the curators—selected artists in response to the question: ‘In your opinion, which artist or which work has a vital place in this decade?’, and penned short manifesto-like justifications for the catalogue. The Second Group—the artists and authors—produced a show-within-the-show or text to define and comment on the decade more generally. Players also contributed to an ‘image journal’ and provided definitions of the latest buzzwords. This made the catalogue an essential element in the project.
In the catalogue, French archaeologist and historian Paul Veyne argues that there is no such thing as the spirit of an era. His advice for young historians is to ‘be pluralist, pluralist and pluralist again, recognising the specificity of everything—religion, art, ambition, whatever—without looking for global explanations or global style…’.1 Okwui Enwezor’s essay warns of the false autonomy of contemporary art, and maintains that postcolonialism and its ‘transnational enunciations’ are at the very