Biennial in Lyon: Art on Wheels
We have all seen the many advertising slogans on lorries. It works another way, too, though: tattooed bodies, starvation statistics, unsettling scrawls – since 2006 the trucks in the art action Move for Life, designed by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jochen Gerz, offer food for thought. Eventually, the eight trucks will grow to a fleet of twenty.
Anyone attending the opening of the art biennial in Lyon couldn’t miss them: eight lorries with 15-metre long trailers. They weren’t used to transport paintings or sculptures to the exhibition, though. The trailers are the art works. Where one otherwise sees advertising displayed are now political messages against hunger, violence, racism, the dominance of money, against AIDS and pollution.
Artists such as the American Pop Art icon Robert Rauschenberg, the German action artist Jochen Gerz and Daniele Buetti of Switzerland, who reflects on the aggressive media machine and pressure to consume with his brio tattoos, designed the trucks for the art action Move for Life.
Trade associations conjecture that one lorry traverses approximately 250,000 kilometres of Europe per year, producing up to 25 million instances of visual contact. This is an ideal canvas for art in public spaces. Art leaves the museums and galleries and goes where people live, work and travel.
It is not always simple. Enabling the trucks to access their places in Lyon required countless telephone calls, negotiations with city administration representatives and partners and the procurement of many permits. The trouble was worth it, though: for three days, the vehicles stood on the kerbside forming an entrance portal to the art biennial in Lyon before going their separate ways to transport their goods – and their messages – on Europe’s highways.
