Column cancelled.

Art You might remember last year when I was writing about the Liverpool Biennial, my disappointment about not seeing Anthony McCall's Column from the Albert Dock. In the meantime, life intervened and I entirely forgot about it, until today when the BBC reported that after fifteen months of attempting to make it work, the project has been abandoned.

It was originally due to be working from December 2011 and run through the whole of 2012 and not just the period of the Biennial, but its been beset with problems:

"The Civil Aviation Authority was worried that it would interfere with aircraft and the Port Health Authority had concerns that it could cause Legionella.

"Even after those fears were allayed, the steam-generating mechanism did not work properly and the column still did not appear.

"Such vertical steam spirals occur occasionally in nature, when they are known as waterspouts, but nobody has managed to recreate one on this scale by man-made means."

It's worth noting that the Liverpool Biennial isn't mentioned at all in the BBC article, which talks about the piece as the production of the cultural Olympiad instead.  But at least one of the loose ends from my Biennial experience has some closure.