disconcerting but brilliant

Liverpool Life Liverpool: The Souvenir is a new book of photographs published by the Liverpool Daily Post which perfectly captures the atmosphere in the city during this capital of culture year. The images were selected from their flickr group and every page is bursting with life and colour even when the shots are in black and white, and if you turn to page 53, you’ll notice this:



The original image is here. I am very pleased and honoured to be sitting alongside such talented company, and I can’t recommend the book highly enough. And yes, I would still be saying that even if I wasn’t in it.

It seems to be on-sale in all good bookshops and newsagents around the city, including the place were I buy my morning paper, which is disconcerting but brilliant.

How did we come to this?

Liverpool Biennial 2008 One of the most technically brilliant short films ever made is Claude Lelouche’s Rendezous in which a car careen through Paris’s many districts during one of the most exciting yet death defying eight minutes you’ll see (it was butchered recently to become a Snow Patrol video). Lelouche’s film was the starting point for Nancy Davenport’s Workers, a series of documentary videos flowing through the Open Eye Galleries. Employees are shown at a Jaguar car factory at work and rest, on the production line and in the canteen, lateral tracking shots almost creating the view from the window of one of the cars passing by. It’s an important work, because it demonstrates that in places like this, human beings and machines have become to a degree interchangeable, especially since these are the kinds of job in which break time is conducted in the premises which doesn’t seem to provide any respite at all. How did we come to this?

Similar apocalyptic visions at the Bluecoat and Tracey Moffat’s Doomed, a ten minute sequence of shots from disaster and action films, in which humanity loses against wave upon wave of destructive forces, natural and man-made and alien. I suspect someone whose seen less films than me will have a different reaction, since I spent most of the three times I watched this trying to guess where all of the scenes were from, to the point that the other people gathered around on Friday night were asking me. Doomed was originally created a few years ago, and since montage sequences just like it have proliferated on video sharing sites like YouTube, but there's a definite intensity to the sheer scale of carnage on view here, a chance to concentrate on those who buy it whilst the hero is dashing for higher ground or locking themselves in a bunker. Just why does that man keep reading his paper as water washes through New York in The Day After Tomorrow rather than dash for the library like everyone else? What’s the point in checking stock options if you’re not going to be around the spend the dividends?

At the Tate, Guy Ben-Nar’s Second Nature recreates Aesop’s fable of The Fox and the Crow, showing animal trainers attempting to coax the real life animals into giving a performance, for the bird to drop a piece of cheese to the predator on the ground. At the centre is a short section in which those trainers give a fairly good reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, even if this is rendered unintentionally funny because one of them mispronounces the name in the title to rhyme with ‘gobot’. In both cases we’re witness to repetitive, painfully fruitless acts – Didi and Gogo are never likely to see the man and there’s no way you’d expect the crow to give up the piece of cheese.

If there is a must see at the Biennial, especially if you are a film fan, it’s Omar Fast’s Take a Deep Breath, which blends aspects of Mike Figgis’s Timecode, Tom Dicillo’s Living in Oblivion and Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal in a work that experiments with the nature of reality in film and how our expectations of conflict, and in this case the story of a real world medic who attended the scene of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002. His narration and interview footage are intermixed with scenes featuring a fictional film crew as they recreate the scenes he witnessed and experienced, their narcissism dislocated from the grimness of the scene their art department has recreated.

What makes this work is the quality of the writing, its dark humour and characterisation better than some feature films can muster and performances, which hark back to the naturalistic heyday of indie productions. They’re unknowns, bit players from tv series and movies put in centre stage. I presume you’re not supposed to recognise any of them, and yet there I was on Friday night, blurting out ‘That’s Harry Von Gorkum!’ in the darkness. The suited man sitting next to be looked across and asked who and so I inevitably had to actually tell him. This English actor was the second choice to play the Doctor in the 1996 US tv movie. If Paul McGann hadn’t signed, the fate of the franchise would have been in Von Gorkum’s hands. He’s very good in this, and you can certainly see his timelord quality, as bluffs his way through asking one of the other extras out on a date.

Finally, if you’ve ever wondered how Harry Lime felt after going through the conditioning process in The Ipcress File (and if so, why?) pop along to FACT and try and sit for the duration of Ulf Langheinrich’s LAND. On entry you’re handed some 3D glasses and depending upon which end of the piece you are, you’ll either be lulled by the gentle waves across what looks like an ocean floor, or assaulted by the kind of sound and vision an average untuned analogue tv throws out, rendered in 3D with an extra layer of flashing strobes underneath. The effect creates particles which hang in the air, and though oddly captivating it’s also nerve and brain jangling, Langheinrich mission to leave you unsettled accomplished.

the bathroom of the country

Liverpool Biennial 2008 Liverpool has of course confirmed itself as the bathroom of the country. Just when we think we've gotten rid of one spider, another one comes along and makes its home. A bizarre co-incidence that just a couple of weeks after La Princess disappears into the Mersey tunnel, Al Weiwei strews a web across the buildings of Exchange Flags and drops a funnel web on top. This one lights up, though the artist can’t really say why he picked an arachnid and they are significantly different. This is called Web of Light and glows purple at night. La Princess also had bulk, but this is smaller and could make for swift competition. As Harry Hill might say, there’s only one way for find out which is better. Fight!

As ever, the Liverpool Biennial works best when its treats are unexpected, and they’re most unexpected in these public spaces. Look through a hole cut through flyposters in the old Kwik-Fit garage on Renshaw Street and there’s an apartment, of the kind you usually see on make-over programmes, middle class decor in slight disarray giving the impression of having been lived in. The experience of peering into this private world created by Mandfredi Beninati from a metropolitan thoroughfare is positively voyeuristic, though the experience shouldn’t be a million miles away from a visit MFI or flicking through an Ikea catalogue, since as in those examples this isn’t a real living space just the implication of one. You’d like to think you’re not the kind of person to fall for such soft furnishings, but would desperately like to have that couch in your living room.

Next door, at the bottom of Hardman Street next to Zorba’s Greek Restaurant, waste ground which I think has been vacant even longer than the cinema has been closed, architectural practice Atelier Bow-wow have created a small wooden ampitheatre tricked out in cedar wood (I think), which I really hope is kept in use once the Biennial has finished. I joined the audience on Friday night for a show of dancing and music and crap acting which as far as I can tell was the point and if the presentation wasn’t too good, the experience of sitting in that spot opposite St. Luke’s Church was breathtaking, the undercurrent of traffic on the outside not detracting at all, but enhancing a unique urban experience. There will apparently be a programme of different shows each weekend of the next two months at least and I’ll definitely be going back.

But my absolute highlight of the Biennial so far, for its sheer visceral experience, is Yayoi Kusama’s Gleaming Lights of the Souls at the fairly remote Pilkington’s factory. It’s difficult to put into words without spoiling the surprise (though the catalogue has a go). Um. Remember the Mike Nelson piece at last year’s Turner prize? The one with the mirrors and the lights and the sand and when you looked through the gap in the wall it seemed as though you were looking into infinity? Imagine being able to walk into it. That’s the experience Kusama has created. As I stood in the space with lights and copies of myself disappearing off into the distance, its one of the few times in life I’ve had a moment of total euphoria. I was giddy and kept giggling. The guide calls it ‘tardis-like’ and so it is, but when all of the lights turn green, it’s also what you envisage stepping in the The Matrix would be like. Well worth making the pilgrimage if you're in the area.

Next: It's all video, video, video ...

or is it three?

Liverpool Biennial 2008 Here then is the biannual Liverpool Biennial review. The theme for 2008’s International show is Made-Up which of course has the double meaning – the scouse term for being happy and the actual process of creating a piece of art. Artistic Director Lewis Biggs says it’s also “a celebration of the ways in which artists use imagination” and that he wanting to bring work which doesn’t just “traffic in information” but allows the artists to show their deep seated passion for what they do, and create something “totally new”. What is definitely new is that this definite structure has lent a coherence to proceedings so that everything feels unified and properly curated rather the individual venues doing their own thing under the Biennial banner.

So unlike previous years were the work has spread across the city and even with the help of leaflets it was difficult to get a fix on everything, this year a proper guide book come catalogue has been produced with an excellent clear map in the back and all of the different venues and public pieces placed on a trail, marked in pink and clearly signposted in the real world. I walked the trail today and it was a breeze if a bit of a slog by foot, the only times when I got lost having more to do with my lack of sense of direction than deficiencies in the map.

Unifying all of the venues in the one guide too means that even in the unofficial venues, information about the work is close at hand, the page on the right offering an excellent reproduction of each piece, and on the left a carefully judged explanation. Plus it's small enough to fit in the span of the hand and tactile enough to be flicked through. I quite enjoyed walking into each venue, guide in hand, the art lover's equivalent of a sword and shield, ready to do battle with whatever conceptualism the artist wanted to throw at me.

A new visitor centre has been installed at the old ABC cinema on Lime Street and though the Annette Messager piece in the old screen two (or is it three?) is interesting (a meditation on time and cinema with ghostly cloth flowing across seats and a sinister skeleton). There's a shop for refreshments and merchandise. Putting the Biennial’s embassy in such a central position is a great choice, somehow giving it a prominence lacking in previous years. It's also an excellent chance to enter the building for the first time since it closed ten years ago (has it really been that long?) and tut at the state its in.

Memories of seeing It's A Wonderful Life for the first time on the big screen and not wanting to see it on the small screen ever. Going on an almost date (neither of us seemed sure if it was one) to see Smilla's Feeling For Snow with a girl called Theresa who was on crutches after she'd fallen off a bollard one night when I was walking her home from night class. Spending most of The Lost World: Jurassic Park with a small child kicking me in the back trying to hear the thing over the din of the family sitting in front of me making sure they were all getting the same share of popcorn. Good times.

Next time: Art in public places

the sheer brace of strangers

Liverpool Biennial 2008 I've just got back from the preview evening for this year's Liverpool Biennial. I'll not talk about the art now since I want to go back and see some things again (all I'll say, and this is for the most hardcore of Doctor Who fans, Harry Van Gorkum!). I'm a bit out of practice with private views. They tend to be a bit cliquey around here so unless you're a regular (which I'm not, though not through want of trying) or with someone (I wasn't) it's difficult to really meet people because everyone's already met. There were a few familiar faces, people from the past, probably the last time I saw them was at the last Biennial preview, and it was nice to see them. But people are with people so, well, it's difficult to share more than a couple of words. In most other circumstance I'm not shy, at least not any more. Yet, here, the sheer brace of strangers was intimidating.