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The Liverpool Biennial
The UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art, opened in early July, continues its role as a platform for research, part of a much larger project that addresses the very future of our cities.
A Needle Walks into an Haystack. The title, spelled out in a pile of fat and friendly letters, gives little away, apart from what might be alluded to by its apparent incomprehensibility, a suggestion perhaps of something that is hard to define.
It is further introduced as an exhibition about our habits, our habitats and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. Without the kind of concept that starts to construct thoughts and images before we have even seen anything, the venues themselves become the points on which to anchor our vision of what this Biennial has to offer. And perhaps this is rightly so, embedding it more into the city, making it about things in particular places not things in the abstract.
Old Blind School, Liverpool
The Old Blind School is the central venue and houses a group show of works by international artists. It is hard to decide whether the protagonist of the show is the context or the content, whether it is the works of art that enrich the context or vice versa. Or whether indeed the works of art would be at all interesting displayed in a more conventional gallery space. Without the white cube to detach the art from its surroundings, the surroundings are drawn in to become part of a whole and we provide the detachment ourselves by looking at things we know with new eyes. Among other things, we see decay and dilapidation in another way, appreciate its beauty. Liverpool is full of examples of this kind of patina, peeling paint and quirky sights constructed from remnants of the past. Walking down the hill towards the city’s Chinatown area after the show feels like a seamless experience.
Old Blind School, Liverpool
The other exhibitions are solo shows, described as featuring practitioners who challenged the accepted conventions and parameters that define the territory of their work. The Bluecoat, a listed building in the city centre and the oldest arts centre in the country, hosts an exhibition of the work of American painter James McNeill Whistler. A somewhat eccentric public figure, Whistler is considered the ‘original’ contemporary artist, involved in active debate about the role of art and artists and extending his practice to include the creation of special environments for displaying his art.
James McNeill Whistler, Bluecoat, Liverpool
While Whistler was stirring up debate in London, in Liverpool a more modest and retiring man called Henry Tate was making money producing sugar and using it to purchase paintings. In 1889 he donated his collection to the nation and the Tate Gallery was born. For the Biennial, Tate Liverpool have drawn on their collection to put together an exhibition that explores the concept of domesticity and its influence on art. Also showing at the Tate is an installation by Claude Parent, an architect now in his nineties who has devoted his life to pursuing his theories related to the “fonction oblique”. Sloping floors and ramps create a stimulating environment for viewing artworks. It also looks like an inviting space for children to play in, a mark of a good building, according to one of my university lecturers.
Children “effortlessly invent their own spaces of play within the existing architecture” in a film entitled Podwórka by Sharon Lockhart, showing at FACT. Although I find myself wondering what has happened to our lives that has resulted in footage of children playing spontaneously in decrepit courtyards has become contemporary art, I do start to sense a pattern somewhere.
The Open Eye Gallery presents an exhibition entitled “Not all Documents Are Records” curated by Lorenzo Fusi. It offers a moment to consider the Biennial in a larger context, reinterpreting the history of the Liverpool Biennial and presenting two important series of photographs - Documenta 2 by Hans Haacke from 1959 and Ugo Mulas’s images of the 1968 Venice Biennale.
More echoes of the 1960s can be seen in the exhibition Adrian Henri - Total art that aims to capture the excitement and dynamics of the art scene at a time when Liverpool was, according to Allan Ginsberg, "at the centre of consciousness of the human universe”. Adrian Henri (1932-2000) was a painter, poet, musician and pioneer of happenings and the exhibition explores his total art philosophy as a template for interdisciplinary art practice.
Adrian Henri, Entry of Christ into Liverpool
There is more, Jef Cornelis, the Dazzle ship by Carlos Cruz-Diez, a Hillsborough memorial concert, the John Moore’s Painting Prize and the recently-opened Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Earlier in the year though, when the critics raced to make their opinions heard as soon after the opening as possible, this Biennial was accused of being a platform for curatorial pretension rather than public delight.
Sharon Lockhart, Podwórka
It is true that it isn’t big on major “spectacles” and since they always go down so well in Liverpool, some might consider that a wasted opportunity, however dismissing it as curatorial pretension could be missing the point. The Liverpool Biennial is part of a larger, ongoing conversation, one about the future of cities. Sally Tallant, the director, has a plan, indeed a ten year plan based on integrated research into architecture, urbanism and artistic practice. This year's Biennial was born as the previous one drew to a close with a seminar entitled “Changing the World from Here”, addressing the development of biennial models that rethink the relationship between art, urbanism and value. This year, artists, curators, designers and writers gather to consider the framework for the next one, again focussing on interrelationships between education, art and the urban environment while the International Biennial Association Summit taking place on 11 October at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, further explores these issues in an international context.
Liverpool is exactly the right city for this kind of discussion: it is run-down yet full of life, grand old buildings and cultural institutions are mixed with areas of decay and dereliction. There is also a great sense of openness, not to mention a history of global connections and using it as an incubator for new ideas and practices is an exciting prospect. So looking back at the shows in the 8th Liverpool Biennial and reconsidering them in the light of this research rather than just measuring them according to today’s standards and interpretations of contemporary art, it may be that each could be seen to point to something.
The exhibition at the Old Blind School may induce us to look at decay with a new eye, perhaps not everything has to be pulled down or undergo pristine refurbishment; patina and imperfection can be cherished. Whistler could inspire us to care deeply about the beauty of our surroundings while the children in Sharon Lockhart’s film remind us to inhabit spaces with playfulness.
Claude Parent teaches us to think differently, to challenge norms. The Tate’s collection around the domestic theme reminds us that “home is where we start from” and these are the spaces we can influence. The Open Eye’s look through the archives highlights the transient nature of things, that places hold layers of people and movement. Finally Adrian Henri teaches us to “work with what we’ve got”, embrace life with vigour and energy. Make total art.
