Art The pavement outside the headquarters for Liverpool Biennial is an unlikely setting for an attack of the collywobbles and yet just before I stepped through the glass front in order to pick up a gratefully received review copy of Touched – the book, I had to take several deep nervous breaths. Regular readers will remember that I spent almost the whole of the 2010 festival visiting and writing about the experience on the blog and during that time I’d often wondered what was at the nucleus of all the activity.
I knew that it had to be just a plain, simple administrative office, yet it felt like I was crossing a cultural line of demarcation, revealing something which we’re not meant to see in case it punctures the enigmatic façade which is constructed in the years between the festival bursting out across the city’s venues, exciting and confounding the population. I needn’t have worried; because this is a plain, simple administrative office the enigma was retained.
The book (available online here) is similarly enigmatic, largely ignoring, give or take an interview, the creation of the festival and detailing too strongly the curatorial aims in favour of photographically recording the artwork and essays based on the series of Touched Talks held before and during the festival. If the Biennial catalogue was the introduction to an experiment outlining the aims and research methods, this explains the results and suggests areas for further study.
Like the visual arts section of the festival, the Touched Talks transcribed here are a heady mix of the accessible and the impenetrable. A Philosophy of Fidgets wouldn’t be out of place filling the interval of a live concert on Radio 3, as Steven Connor investigates in minute detail the various forms of fidgeting from hair twirling to doodling, with literary allusions when necessary. I’m an inveterate fidgeter participating in most of the displacement activities described.
Coco Fusco’s Defiant Abjection is a useful investigation into the growing protest movement in Cuba, a country which the writer correctly indicated tends to be viewed through an anglophile prism based on its relationship with the US. Bloggers have been branded cyberterrorists and it’s a much needed reminder that for all free health care and the political reforms announced by the other Catro brother in the past few days, it remains a dictatorship in which free expression is quelled.
Ziauddin Sarder suggests (I think) in his essay on art and religion in the twenty-first century that both are part of an eco-system of intellectual thought and that to marginalize either at the expense of the other, through the encroaching element of modernity in society, “limits our critical faculties”. He’s fighting against plurality of thought; if everyone had the same opinion we’d have nothing to argue about. The problem is, of course, when that argument descends into violence.
When you buy the book, my advice is to approach these essays in much the same way as you probably approached the festival, in short bursts, then consume, then contemplate. They perfectly capture the spirit of the Biennial and the hours I spent with them took me straight back to the golden days of exploring the venues never quite sure what I’d find behind the next corner, at the top of the next set of stairs. I wish now that sometimes the artworks also included as many useful footnotes.
Between the Touched Talks, photographer Mishka Henner has been asked, as Paul Domela explains in his introduction, “to focus on the responses of visitors the exhibition and give us glimpses of how art touched the city”. These are usually faces locked in concentration either on the artwork or their mobile phone photographing the artwork, human and digital memory capturing the installations and paintings for later recall which is apt considering the aims of the book.
Humanity still sneaks into the exhibition section which inhabits the larger proportion of the pagination usually in the public realm or to demonstrate the reaction to interactive elements. The experience of flicking through these photographs by Thierry Bal is rather like finding holiday photos from a distant holiday, a flood of memories with each turn of the page and because many have been taken at night there’s also a sense of still being an interloper into private moments.
The Biennial space at Rapid Hardware no longer exists in actuality and yet here it’s remembered and to some extent mourned now that it’s becoming integrated into the usual mass of urban renewal, a Sainsbury’s opening were once stood a garden shed containing a rather good café and shop. The A Foundation has also sadly gone now too of course, but if we close our eyes we can probably still hear the sound of scissors cutting which resonated between its echoing walls.
Even after visiting and writing about the experience on the blog for all of those weeks, I never did quite feel as though I’d completely taken advantage of everything that was on offer having missed most of the talks, and though they’re available on the Biennial website, these transcripts have allowed me to give them due attention with photographs which perfectly capture everything else. Touched – the book is a much needed full stop on the Liverpool Biennial 2010 experience.
Touched - the book is published by Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.£22.50. ISBN: 978-0-9536761-9-4. Review copy supplied.
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