Review 2012: The Projects: Liverpool Biennial 2012

Art When the Liverpool Biennial closed on 25th November, I was full of cold. Not the flu as such, but I was certainly miserable enough not to work that weekend. But I did ponder briefly what it must have been like on those remaining few days as, if social media offered any indication, people who’d not been able to attend in the previous two months rushed around the Biennial and attempted to see as much as they could. Busy presumably. Very busy. Exhibitions tend to have their highest visitor figures at the beginning and end of their existence. Imagine that across a dozen or so venues.

Looking back at my own approach to the Biennial, originally outlined oh so long ago in this introduction, I’m not entirely sure it helped my appreciation. Visiting the venues in numerical order as per the address list in the official booklet, did slow down my approach to the main exhibitions as predicted, but it also threw up a fair few incongruities, not least seeing Everton Park before the contextual exhibition at the World Museum with all of its helpful travel leaflets and maps which would have been really helpful when attempting to find and then understand the work at hand.

Seeing the Cunard Building first also meant that my favourite artwork of the whole Biennial, Suzanne Lacy’s Storying Rape, was also the first artwork I saw. A filmed discussion in which councillors, law makers and writers shared experiences of how the narrative of rape develops and changes across their relative contexts, it ticked the box of being a piece of artistic expression because the speakers were guided by Lacy’s decisions (not being able to discuss their personal experiences) and both creating an emotional reaction in the viewer and making them think.

But it also meant that I didn’t visit by favourite overall venue, LJMU Copperas Hill until some weeks into the festival period and was able to dedicate a whole day to its delights. If the contents of City States in particular had been unpacked and spread across the other Biennial venues it would have been seen as a job well done, such was the variety and depth of the work on offer. This was the Biennial as I remember it at the beginning and as I’d hope it should always aspire to be, bringing the best international artists to Liverpool, working at the zenith of their abilities.

You see, for me at least, the remainder of the Biennial ranked as a rather disappointing year, something I take no pleasure in saying, which is presumably why I’ve waited until after its closed to say it. Friends have described how, while following my venue reviews that part of the fun was in reading between the lines, that the more interesting elements were in what wasn’t being said, that I reviewed the façade of the Open Eye Gallery. In that case, it’s true that I genuinely preferred Sinta Tantra’s installation to the repetitive work inside.

As you might imagine, especially if you’ve met me, I’ve thought long and hard about why I was so underwhelmed in the main, hello December, but unlike some previous festivals, this one didn’t seem to quite gel and after dedicating the best part of six weeks visiting everything, it feels important to put those thoughts into writing. Of course, I don’t need to do this. I could just talk about the things I did like, or say nothing at all, but that could offer its own meanings and it seems important to be honest, because I dedicated the best part of six weeks visiting everything.

The problem wasn’t the overall theme. “Hospitality” like “Touched” in 2010, was a broad enough topic that it should have been able to encompass a wide variety of work and an excellent choice in a year when thanks to the Olympics and surrounding events, the UK welcomed people from across the world, offering them our hospitality. Ideal examples of work which confronted these themes head on? Marcus Kahre’s in(n)stallation at The Monroe or Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s community project as artistic expression at Mitchell’s Bakery both worked brilliantly.

No, the problem, at least for me, was that some of the work on display too often fell into the format of either containing clever ideas but not enough of a budget to execute them, or no ideas and plenty of resources. That’s true of contemporary art in general but something about this particular Biennial magnified that dichotomy, especially in The Cunard Building where one was left standing in front of Runo Lagomarsino’s An Offensive Object in the Least Offensive Way and having an irony bypass. Found art is always a gamble, isn’t it?

How best to describe this? Perhaps it’s best to say that there was a lot of “tut” or “cuh” artwork, artwork in which once a visitor or viewer has gathered what it’s about leading to a “tut” or “cuh” sound, there’s not much reason to stick around. Once the artist has made their point, there’s nothing to aesthetically distinguish the work. It’s probably unfair to invoke the Baroque here, which also has a lot of “tut” or “cuh” artwork, but much of it is also extremely beautiful. There’s a reason Waldemar Januszczak made a whole series about it.

As I write this, I wonder if I’m simply breaking off into a whinge about contemporary art in general and my general enmity towards it applied it to this Biennial, but I genuinely don’t think that’s the case. In previous Biennials, the quality ratio seems have been extremely high, where the sheer level of ideas and construction overshadowed the disappointments. I’m biased, but there were few genuinely awful works at the AFoundation when I worked there in 2006 and that’s been true across the festival ever since.

All of which suggests I had an awful time. I didn’t. But I’d say I liked roughly one third of the work on display, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the two thirds I couldn’t stand or at the very least couldn't ultimately be bothered to spend much time with even though I had hours of it. Perhaps if I had rushed around and seen everything in a couple of days my appreciation would have been higher, or hadn’t had to think about it for those blog posts looking for something interesting to say, but I didn’t and I did and so now we have this catharsis.

But there’s no doubt that one of this Biennial’s successes seemed to be in community outreach. The work in Anfield at the old Mitchell’s Bakery and at Everton Park have potential to bring great benefits to those areas and further afield. You might wonder why it’s up to the Biennial to be the leader on such things, why they aren’t simply happening anyway. Perhaps they are. But what we have here is the Biennial’s unique approach to them and that’s all to the good. The morning I spent at Mitchells was one of the happiest of the whole festival.

Indeed there were plenty of happy moments. Getting lost amongst the offices inside Copperas Hill, enjoying the building for its architectural and social aspects as much as the artwork, everything almost frozen in time since the post office workers left (see photo). My bemusement at events unfolding at Agency in The Royal Standard. Eating cheesecake at the Camp & Furnace. Accidentally speaking to Jiri Kovanda. Hiding under the display boards during a rainstorm at Exchange Flags. Writing a blog post at METAL. Playing games at FACT. End montage.

Of course a huge part of the project was simply accessing the artwork, finding the venues, reading the information, process, process, process. In writing those blog posts, I found my initial intention simply to write about each venue at first was quickly becoming bogged down in describing these processes, of this becoming a blog rather than simply some kind of cultural review thingy. But as was a topic of heated debate under one of The Guardian’s restaurant reviews recently, the process of getting to do a thing is often important when discussing that thing.

I’ve already gone on at some length about the problems with the official booklet.  From personal experience at least, even as someone whose familiar with the city, I found it obtuse, frustrating and often misleading. As ever for the Biennial, the map was incorrect in places with a disconnect between that and the way the information was formatted within the booklet. To properly untangle all of this would make the screen look like one of the Russell Crowe’s office walls in A Beautiful Mind, even though most of the mistakes might have been caught with a couple of hours more proof reading / beta testing.

Apart from some of the blobs being in the wrong place on the map and neither Wolstenholme Creative Space and the Static Gallery being given an address, a few of the venues weren’t given their own entries in the main body of the booklet. This seemed strange to me. If I was designing the thing, I would have given all the venues on the map their own entries in the main body of the booklet, explaining exactly what could be found there and in the same order.  Smaller entries pointing to larger entries seemed messy to me.

A typical example is Lime Street Station. The work, “I Love You” was listed with the artist’s “Kissing Through Glass” under The Cunard Building. This created confusion. The Network Rail man I spoke to at the station said that he’d had many people approaching him asking where “Kissing Through Glass” was on the concourse and he and his colleagues had been waiting for it show up and for information about stewarding. In truth, that’s where I thought it was or at least a repeat. Simply giving “I Love You” its own entry with a number (24) and an explanation would have saved much time.

I should add that I would also have given entries to venues which only appeared on the map due to there being an event there at some point, which would have been an excellent way of increasing publicity for said events and also underscored there not being an actual exhibition there. Instead, all events were in the back of the booklet. Of course, my project forced me to visit venues which I knew wouldn’t have anything there at this late stage, but wonder how many people walked to Liverpool Cathedral only to find nothing there other than, well, Liverpool Cathedral.

Bizarrely too, none of the venues listed individual opening hours. At the back of the booklet it said “Open daily from 13 September (sic), 10am-6pm” but that seemed to be just the venues specially created for the festival. The Bluecoat, FACT, Open Eye Gallery, Tate Liverpool and others all kept their own opening hours, which are roughly similar except that some of them close on odd days. I wonder how many visitors turned up at the Open Eye on a Monday as I did only to find the place closed. Including the alternative opening hours in the booklet would have been a great help.

Such information is available elsewhere on the internet. The Biennial had an app too. But for those of us without a smart phone, the booklet was the primary information source and should have been as accurate as possible and even small things, like the numbers within the booklet going out of sequence with the ones on the map might have been a source of confusion. Arguably one should just have been able to pick it up at Lime Street and then head off into the city, safe in the knowledge that you’d be able to find everything you need, the art being the primary objective.

But information in general was minimal this year. Most of the text boards around the city had a repeated explanation for what the Biennial's overall theme meant, with little space to describe what the piece in question was about. Although there’s an argument for allowing the visitor to make their own interpretation, there’s also an assumption that we have a breadth of knowledge of everything in the world to call up and unfortunately that’s not always true, especially for me. Unlike film trailers, providing more information about an artwork, and clear information, can't be classed as a spoiler.

Even in venues the material provided was often poor. Once again, for example, Bloomberg New Contemporaries was impenetrable in places thanks to there being no information about anything, the intentions of artists, especially in the more abstract pieces were difficult to fathom. We should not have to buy a catalogue or do extensive internet research, however fun, in order to gain the most from an exhibition, though if the catalogue’s anything like the website, we’ll still be none the wiser since all that has is the skeleton of an artist’s CV.

Admittedly, that’s not within the Biennial’s control, it’s a separate organisation, but if its being presented together, we don’t necessarily know the difference, and we’d hope that there would be a consistency of experience across the venues. I could go on, but I’m aware that this stream of negativity isn’t going to get us anywhere. It just felt like, sometimes, I was expending more brain power on planning to see the art than seeing the art and enjoying it. But to have an individual entry for Hotel Indigo, refer back to The Cunard Building then not have any linking explanation is just … no. Stop now.

Perhaps it's just me.  Perhaps I took all of this too seriously.  Perhaps you're reading this and thinking I've gone out of my way to pick holes in an event which entertained many, many people across the two months, especially through the events programme.  But not having been able to attend any of the events because of work and other things, all I had to was the exhibitions and, well, see above.  But believe me, I still adore the Biennial ideal and adored parts of this one, for all of the process, process, process.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Static Gallery (30)

Art  This is it.  The end.  Or at least the end of the venues listed in the official Liverpool Biennial booklet.  Thirty venues in numerical order.  There are more on the website and the Independents, so I don’t expect this is really the end of the Biennial for me, but for the purposes of this particular project the Static Gallery signals the end.  I feel like Michael Palin at the end of his Around The World In Eighty Days documentary, where he wants to tell everyone about the things he’s seen.  Luckily for him he’s had a film crew with him.  Luckily for me I have this blog.  I hope it’s been fun.  For you I mean reading about it.  It’s obviously been fun for me.  Obviously.

The Static Gallery is a gallery/office space on Roscoe Lane between St Luke’s Church and Liverpool Cathedral up the road from Chinatown (which is a nice bookend to seeing the other Chinatown near the beginning of the project).  To complicate matters, I did visit the space the night before for Social Media Café which arguably means I failed to do the venues in numerical order but since I didn’t actually see the artwork that night, I’m putting it in the same bracket as Lime Street Station of not having "officially seen", so just as Palin, Phileas Fogg and Willie Fogg managed to reach their destinations on time thanks to the international date line and repeating a day, I've grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat.

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In Just Another Unexpected Guest, artists Adriana Galuppo and Sascha Mikloweit have intersected the gallery space diagonally with a giant solar mirror film wall with a ring of barbed wire across the top in such a way that it's impossible to walk all of the way around it internally.  To walk from one side to the other, the visitor must leave the gallery through one entrance and pass through the other, through the café and down some stairs.  One of the gallery managers noted that’s also true of anyone who happens to have hired the office space on the wrong side of the “wall” and wants refreshment or to go to the toilet.

There’s a questioning verse in the accompanying literature which asks us to question if we know which side of the wall we’re meant to be standing on.  The evocation is of course of great walls in history notably Berlin, though because the reflective surface also distorts our image we could just as well be seeing ourselves in some alternative dimension shimmering due to the transduction barrier.  Move around and the breeze makes the wall quiver and shift about.  This is artwork in which there’s not much to see but tasks us with considering the thematic implications.  I imagine that it changes somewhat when a larger group is in the space.

Of course, because of the way my brain’s wired, beyond the expected allusions, I was reminded of the divide in Big Brother 3, back when it was still a somewhat social experiment and not simply about watching people failing to have sex.  The unexpected twist in that series was a set of prison bars struck across the house creating a class system in which one group of housemates had to live on basic rations while the lucky few were allowed luxury products.  Straight away resentment brewed, with desperation for vices reaching epic emotional proportions as some housemates found themselves perpetually “stuck” in the less privileged partition.

But that’s the problem with walls.  They’re purposefully divisive.  They might provide protection, but if you’re not careful, as is the case with gated communities, they can also divorce a person from the wider population and an understanding thereof.  But this iron curtain is of course perfectly impregnable.  A little too much force and you could fall right through.  Not that we would because this is an artwork and etiquette dictates that we don’t destroy the artwork.  So instead we stand before it and try to imagine what’s on the other side.  Which luckily for me did mean a toilet, a result of once again drinking too much coffee.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Wolstenholme Projects (29)

Art  Wolstenholme Creative Space is a not-for-profit contemporary gallery, venue and artist studios and has always been one of the highlights of festivals past.  It’s in the odd position of being listed in both the official Biennial booklet and the Independents.  Is it an official venue?  For the purposes of the this project I’ve assumed it is because it’s on the map key but there isn’t anything more about it in the official booklet and they haven’t been given one of the red a-boards, having created their own with a large computer printed (29) on both sides.  Oh and it’s described as Wolstenholme Projects, which is I think what it was called years ago, but not now.  Other than that, I was convinced I should be visiting.  So I did.

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Step into the main entrance, past the leaflets, say hello to the volunteer on duty, walk behind the black curtain and then let your sense of reality fall away.  That’s the experience of visiting the WCS’s Inhospitable Landscapes exhibition because behind the curtain is a forest.  The bottom floor of the building has been turned into a forest.  Trees and branches fill the space, the ground is covered in leaves and woodchip and the smell, the smell is just as a forest smells not long after a storm, damp but fragrant.  Initially when I stepped in, I had to step out again because of everything I’d expected to find behind that curtain it wasn’t that.

This must be what it’s like to step through the wardrobe into Narnia or indeed out of the TARDIS when the randomiser’s on full but the scanner’s on the fritz.  It’s probably worth nothing that I was experiencing this after the discombobulating of unexpectedly meeting an old friend outside the building (a friend who I coincidentally worked with at the Biennial in 2006).  Step about a bit and notice towards the back there is a kitchen dining table or to the left into a more typical gallery space and we find a large video screen (which sticking to Doctor Who analogies is like stepping from the wood into the control room in Flesh and Stone).

As the literature describes, the piece is “visually focusing on the physical landscape with a large-scale installation that literally brings 'the outside, inside', Inhospitable Landscape toys with concepts of social and cultural landscapes; the uncomfortable and inhospitable aspects of humanity.”  Not only is the space unexpected, but we’re the unexpected guest within it.  Unless it’s for the The Inhospitable Supper Club, a joint venture with the Leaf Café in which a limited number of participants can pay £20 for a three course meal within the space which unless its in the room at the side, must be a picnic on the floor.  That's quite something.

Dotted throughout the forest are portable televisions presenting unusual images like parts of the body and mysterious landscapes.  Arguably these disrupt the illusion somewhat, but again they’re a reminder that we’re in a constructed space and we have simply wandered into a recreation of what might happen if the forests were to reclaim the cities ala I Am Legend or A Sound of Thunder.  Zombies or mutant dinosaurs are unlikely to step out from shadows though a couple of people did randomly appear from seemingly nowhere and gave me a fright.  It turned out they’d been upstairs.  “We’re not ghosts.”  They said.  I wasn’t so sure.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: East Float, Wirral Waters (28)

Art  Over the flap in the booklet and into the key, or as is the case here, up to the quay.  Not knowing how to photograph the place where a freestanding public art piece is without actually showing the freestanding art piece, I decided to offer this shot of my feet in the spot indicated on the booklet map, or as near as possible.  I could have photographed a different part of the Mersey I suppose.

Or indeed, the spot where the work is supposed to be.  Anthony McCall’s Column is “a vertical, spinning, ascending column of cloud rising into the sky from the surface” of the water, in my imagination like the smoke which descends from the heavens in biblical epics when God is taking direct action.  There’s a photograph of the artist in the Biennial booklet crouching next to a smaller simulation.

I couldn’t see it.  I thought initially that I was simply standing in the wrong place, that perhaps part of its make up is a trick of the light, that you have to be looking in a particular direction as indicated by the eyeball diagram on the booklet map to see the work at its best advantage if at all.  The accompanying description does say that is “disappears and reappears, in response to weather and light conditions.”

Other visitors also seemed to.  I saw a few people carrying the booklet walking about the waterfront looking backwards and forwards.  I overheard a family in the shadow of the Museum of Liverpool wondering if they shouldn’t stroll further up, just in case.  This is probably the longest most of us have spent looking across the Mersey towards the Wirral, a landscape we’ve probably become quite complacent about.

I rang the Biennial office to ask.  We weren’t missing anything, at time of visiting (last Tuesday), McCall’s piece, beset by delays and malfunctions, wasn’t working yet.  As the volunteer I spoke to explained, the column is supposed to shoot a mile in the air and so should be entirely visible from most points along the waterfront, which means when it is working it should be an amazing sight.

I wondered if the Biennial could possibly put a sign up on the railings explaining the situation because of all the people aimless wondering around looking for it and the volunteer said she’d pass on the message, which is good.  I also asked if we could be advised through social media when it is working.  Perhaps they will.  I expect she was happy to get rid of me in the end.  Sorry, again.  Again, sorry.

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Watch this space.

Updated 16/04/2013:

Today the BBC reported that after fifteen months of attempting to make this work, the project has been abandoned.  There's actually much more in the article than was available from the Biennial leaflet, for example that 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, also that:

"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.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Liverpool John Moores University Art & Design Academy (27)

Art The Liverpool John Moores University Art and Design Academy is being utilised on the closing weekend for a conference, “Changing the World from Here” in which interested parties, curators, artists, thinkers and writers will investigate the future of the Biennial as well as a “series of focused gatherings that will explore possibilities for a post-industrial ecology, rethinking the relationship between art, urbanism and value for the 21st Century” (booklet text).

“Hello.” I said as I approach the reception. The glazed entrance hall was filled with students waiting for a lecture and I had to be shout to be heard. “Do you have any Biennial related exhibitions on right now?”
“No.” He said. He told me about Copperas Hill and how he’d heard there was almost going to be something there but there wasn’t in the end. He asked me if I’d been to Copperas Hill.
“Yes.” I said, and told him about the project, about visiting the venues in numerical order and how this was a pretty big moment because I’d reached the last of the venues on the flap covering page two of the booklet.
“Tick!” He said, making a ticking gesture.
“Tick!” I said, repeating the gesture.
“There is an exhibition.” He said pointing.  I turned around.

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Although it’s not a Biennial exhibition, Saving The Century, a display from The Victorian Society has a number of tangential connections. The Victorian Society was formed in February 1958 to fight for Britain’s architectural heritage, which was being demolished at a grand scale to make way for the modernist onslaught. As the exhibition explains, before 1958, we lost what should now be some of our most iconic buildings from the Imperial Institute in South Kensington by TE Colcutt which was cleared to make way for an extension to Imperial College of Science (which probably could have successfully simply moved in) to Dawpool, the residence of Thomas Ismay, owner of the White Star Line and passenger on the Titanic.

On a grander scale, figures like Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Betjeman  who’d long campaign for the preservation of the country’s heritage gathered together fight against the onslaught of town planning in a similar way to the Biennial projects in Anfield and Everton. They experienced some early failures. The Euston Arch, the original entrance to Euston Station was lost in the 60s as was the Coal Exchange in the City of London. On both occasions the society offered viable alternatives and re-utilisations of the spaces which have become commonplace now, but were defeated by town planners and in the case of the Arch by the MacMillan government who could have intervened by chose not to.

But slowly, the Society’s reputation developed and although the exhibition and accompanying brochure are filled with photographs of gorgeous buildings now lost, look carefully and we find successes closer to home, either due to the signalling of “concern” or direct action. In 1966 a redevelopment of the Liverpool Waterfront almost led to the demolition of the Albert Dock and it wasn’t until 1983 that the Merseyside Development Corporation began the restoration that led to habitation by Tate Liverpool. In 1983, when the law courts moved out of St George’s Hall, it became functionally redundant, after lobbying from the Victorian Society it was put on the World Monument Fund’s watch list which ultimately led to its restoration.

The exhibition’s brochure actually contains the contents of the displays so if you don’t have the time to spend in the space, the exhibition closes at end of October, you can read it instead in the comfort of your home. It’s a black and white celebration of a force of will working to preserve the country’s heritage and also a tribute to Victorian engineering. Many of the buildings which replaced some of that period’s architecture have already been replaced themselves, either because of safety concerns or because tastes have changed again. Luckily, there’s a 20th Century Society to fight for that period in our history too, a period which also had its fair share of architectural achievements. The Kingsway Tunnel Vents are their building of the month.

Obviously, just as various periods of art history are reflected in our art galleries, there’s room for just the same variety in our cities. The film Blade Runner might hint towards a dystopian future, but architecturally it’s fascinating and as with the various human cultures living on top of one another, buildings from a range of historical periods can be seen from the windows of Deckard’s hover car as he flies across the city. One of the most impressive images I’ve seen this Biennial is how the “Three Graces” on the waterfront are reflected in the dark, marble surface of the Mann Island project which shows that new, cutting edge buildings can still be aware of and complement the historic buildings which surround them.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: The James Monroe (26)

Art  Before the Biennial, I wonder how many of us knew there were two gastropubs in town called Monro.  Certainly during the Biennial, when I’ve mentioned The James Monro on Tithebarne Street, some people have assumed I’ve meant the The Monro on Duke Street and described their love of the Markus Kahre piece.  But no, there are two and if you show the Biennial booklet at either for the duration of the festival you can save a £5 when you spend £25 or more (T&C’s apply).  What is a surprise is that The James Monro is also hosting a Biennial artwork, something that goes unmentioned in the booklet even on The Monro Group’s own advertising.

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The above establishing photo inadvertently contravenes one of this project’s rules of not including any artwork, because it’s attached to the windows.  Jacob Kolding's Perspectives is a set of fifteen window vinyls, each 45x126 cm as indicated by separate informational window vinyl.  They’re spread across all of the windows of The James Monro, attached to the outside across the existing glass engravings.  In collage they depict elements of what looks like governmental literature, cut along various edges and mixed and matched so that none of it is entirely readable from either inside or outside the building.

Kolding is interested in the distribution of culture and as the Biennial’s website says: "is also influenced by city life and pop-cultural sources such as music, football and underground cultural movements. The resulting mix of images is collaged and reconfigured by the artist into posters, maquettes or large billboards. His references are re-worked to cause a shift in meaning and a challenge to how the history of each may be understood in relation to the other."

This is artwork mimicking the elements of advertising, spreading the artist’s ideas and techniques into various spaces, reflecting marketing and cultural imagery back on itself.  These vinyls are a version of a piece that stretches from floor to ceiling at The Bluecoat and available as a poster to take away.  Does our attitude to art change depending upon the setting.  Do we treat it as less ephemeral if it's in a gallery setting than adhered to the windows of a restaurant?  Is it about expectation?

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Camp and Furnace (25)

Food  The Camp and Furnace is one of the hubs of the Biennial 2012’s weekend activities, especially the family programme.  It’s also the first year when this building hasn’t featured an exhibition, AFoundation having inhabited its shell for much of the past decade before its closure.  I invigilated here in 2006.  In 2010 it was the site of Sachiko Abe’s Cut Paper performance/installation piece.  Earlier this year it hosted the launch party for Biennial partner The Double Negative.  I mention these to demonstrate how the cities and spaces change but how the memories remain.

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On entering Camp and Furnace and after taking care of some private business, I realised this was the perfect moment and with its many corner, cushions and wood fires, the perfect place to have a break from, well, everything.  This impression only deepened when I glanced along the bar and saw this sign:

I did ask the barperson if they had any other cakes.  She introduced me to some flapjacks sitting on the other end of the bar, but said that the cheesecake looked gorgeous.  I ordered the cheesecake and went and sat in a corner amid the cushions and after reading my book for a bit the food arrived.

No, I didn’t photograph it.  Because it didn’t occur to me at the time, I expect because on these Biennial visits I’m out of the habit of photographing the artistic endeavours themselves and if this cheesecake was anything it was visually artistic, a creamy concoction spread across a biscuit base which was crunchy without being hard or granular.

Most of this Biennial, most art, is about servicing only four of the senses.  Always sight.  Perhaps hearing.  Sometimes, there’s touch.  Sometimes, even, smell.  It’s very rarely taste.  And although art is all about intent, art only becomes art if the creator says it is, even if they’re wrong.  This cheesecake is art.

When Greek physician Aegimus wrote a book on the art of making cheesecakes he must have had something like this cheesecake in mind.  With each bite I rolled its nuttiness around in my mouth, its cold creaminess populating the corners of my cheeks.  Afterwards, I ran my tongue across my teeth and tasebuds, preparing them for the next sensory onslaught.

More hyperbole:  when the empty plate came it was with a feeling of loss and regret.  Last week, I bought some Muller cheesecakes in the supermarket.  I thought they were nice, as it goes.  But I now know they’re a blasphemy in the face of what a cheesecake can and should taste like, what can be achieved.

As I left I took my plate and glass back to the bar and thanked the barperson and took the photo above as a reminder.  Sometimes restaurants can work too hard for our favour.  Sometimes all that’s required is a lovely slice of cheese cake.  I’ll be back.  I want to know what else is on the menu.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Lime Street Station (24)

Art On entering Lime Street Station, I approached a Network Rail employee and asked him where the Biennial “stuff” was. Having been through the station a couple of times since the 15 September (which is ok under my secret public art rule) I’d failed to notice the Jiri Kovanda piece which was mentioned under Cunard Building in the booklet.

He explained that it was on the wall adjacent to the clock above WH Smiths. Then he suggested I give feedback to the Biennial (at this point I presume you’re sick of me) because the other piece, “something to do with people kissing” hasn’t been there, and they’ve been watching out for it from dawn until dusk and “loads of people have asked”.

Glancing at the booklet, I think I see what the problem is. The “Kissing Through Glass” piece is at the Cunard Building. The Lime Street piece is listed underneath with its location printed next to it in brackets and if you weren’t paying attention you could assume they were both in the station, as many people evidently have.

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Jiri Kovanda's piece provokes. It provokes me to pondered when the last time someone who isn’t a relative said “I Love You” to me. Never, I think. Not in a romantic way, not in the Hugh Grant at the Southbank or Billy Crystal at a New Year’s Eve party way. Or even in passing. Never.

That’s quite an admission, I’m sure. Probably not what you were expecting to read and not what I was expecting to type here. But after looking at Kovanda’s piece, “I Love You”, two giant piece of plastic sheeting with the words “I Love You” on them in English and Czech, I couldn’t help thinking back. No, never been said.

There might have been one occasion when it was said platonically, I think, in a sisterly way, not that I have a sister, but I think you know what I mean. I expect there are some life experiences some people are not meant to have, or at least not meant to have early in their lives. For me, pushing thirty-eight, this is one of mine.

The booklet text suggests it's meant to offer “psychological comfort and emotional shelter for the viewer, unconditionally”. You might argue that in my case, given what you’ve just read, the opposite is true, that it’s just been a reminder of what I haven’t had and that there’s not much comfort in that.

But here’s something that did happen.

At the bottom of each of the sheets is the artist’s name and a set of numbers with a plus sign in front of them. I quickly deduced this was a phone number, each digit about a foot tall.

I phoned it.

Now, in my defence of the following, I assumed that since it was one of the most public places in Liverpool it would be a recorded message, an extension of the work into a more private setting. At first, because of the structure, I even thought it was a London landline, until I realised the plus sign meant an international dialing code.

First time, it rang with no answer, and with a long drawn out ringtone I didn’t recognise. The second time, someone picked up. The following paraphrases a bit.

“Hello.” They said.
Oh, um. I thought.  Um.
“Oh, hello.” I said.
“Hello.” They repeated.
I didn’t know quite what to say, so I asked the most obvious question:
“Is that Jiri Kovanda?”
“Yes.” They said.
Oh, um, urr. I thought.
“Oh, um, urr.” I said.
There was a pause. I was speaking to the artist. What could I possibly …
“Hello! I’m standing in Lime Street Station in front of your art piece.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m standing in Lime Street Station in front of a sign with your name and telephone number on it which says I love you. I just wanted to say that I love you too.” I shouted. I may have gesticulated.
“I’m sorry” he said, “My English is …”
“Oh. Right, um.” I continued, I was in the moment. “That is Jiri Kovanda?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in Liverpool. I’m standing in front of your …”
“Oh, yes, hahahaha.” He laughed.
“Yes! How are you?”
”I’m ok. I’m in Madrid installing an new installation.”
“Excellent.” I was babbling a bit by this point. I may have told him I loved him again.
Then I asked:
”Have many people have phoned you?”
“I’m sorry, I …” He repeated that he didn’t understand me. Which was probably for the best.
“Oh, ok. Well you take care. Bye.”  I said abruptly.
“Bye.” He said.

Was I really speaking to the artist? I don’t know. It does seem strange that if he is Jiri Kovanda, that what must be his mobile phone number is up in such a public place.  Perhaps its his office number.  I wonder if anyone else has phoned him? I wonder if it was supposed to be part of the work? I’m presuming not on both counts.

I also expect he’d become a bit pissed off if we all phoned him on mass which is why I’m not printing his phone number here. But honestly I thought it was either going to be fake telephone number or a link to a recorded message. I didn’t think I’d end up harassing the gentleman. If you’re reading this and know Kovanda, do apologise for me. Please.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: The Kazimier (23)

Art Like Liverpool Cathedral, The Kazimier was utilised by the Biennial for a single event, and perhaps only someone with a collector mentality would understand why I’d still seek it out knowing that fact. Perhaps. As you can see there isn’t a sign on the front, which because of the ambiguousness of the red spot on the Biennial’s map meant I walked around the block twice looking for it, eventually asking for directions at the Liverpool Academy of Arts and the Cream office next door, or at least the intercom. There it is hidden behind Jorge Pardo’s Penelope sculpture.

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The club’s website has details of what I missed. Simon Munnery (also known by his stage names of Alan Parker: Urban Warrior and The League Against Tedium) devised new material especially for the Biennial event that was run in conjunction with the Liverpool Comedy Festival. My favourite fact about Munnery is that early in his career he wrote computer games for 8-bit computers, especially the VIC-20, ZX81 and the Spectrum. I also love that when Stewart Lee put that in one of his books, some readers thought that was one of his lies or exaggerations.

The other performer that night was Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams, who the booklet says told the story of “Emlyn from North Wales who visits Liverpool to research a branch of his family tree and how things turn nasty for him at the microfiche machine. We will hear about the cousins who hold their breath whilst travelling through the Mersey tunnels, the melancholy Ellen and a thuggish man who insists on being called ‘Half Uncle’.” He’s a performance artist whose stage identities include the Grim Reaper, a windswept Welsh bard, a Lithuanian woodsman and a rubber dinghy (source).

Lord knows what I would have made of this. I’ve been considering lately, or at least for the purposes of filling a few paragraphs I have, what it is I find funny. I recently watched the film Superbad and sat stony-faced throughout, yet some people think it’s the funniest film of that year, even that decade. I laughed right through Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress and wanted to be Greta Gerwig’s character by the end even though I’m a boy. You could look at that and think that I’ve developed a more sophisticated sense of humour.

But that also makes me sound smug and I don’t think I am, at least not in that way. I suppose I like wordplay, situational wordplay. With slapstick I tend to laugh less at the pratfall than the reactions. But a sense of reality also seems to be important. If someone’s telling a humorous story, it needs a grain of truth to it. I love David Sedaris’s biographical anecdotes. I can’t stand David Sedaris’s allegorical animals. I like self-deprecating humour and embarrassment but I’m less comfortable if it’s happening to fictional characters.

Which is inconsistent, but I’m an inconsistent person. I’ve seen all of Friends but not Frasier. Some drama series can be funnier than sitcoms, The West Wing, The Wire even Fringe when Walter Bishop is himself at his most inconsistent. I like the surprise switch between comedy and tragedy, and I like subversive humour so long as, apparently it doesn’t tip over into sick. But I think the Marvin moment in Pulp Fiction is hilarious so that doesn’t make sense either. So really, I’m not sure which way my sense of humour compass is pointing.

Updated! 14/11/2013 Disappearing into the depths of Vimeo, I've found that Liverpool Biennial have uploaded a video of the gig. Here it is.


Simon Munnery & Bedwyr Williams from Liverpool Biennial on Vimeo.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Mitchell's Bakery (22)

Art Mitchell’s Bakery, now Homebaked, is very easy to find, especially if you’ve seen the cake version at the Museum of Liverpool which is amazingly accurate considering it’s made of icing. Just as Carl’s voice-over on that exhibit indicated, it’s within walking distance of Liverpool Football Club, indeed it’s possible to see the stadium from inside the shop. After glancing through the explanatory display in the windows, I tried the door which I entirely failed to open but luckily someone was on-hand inside to let me in and I somehow managed to inadvertently ingratiate myself by asking if there was coffee available which I thought was for sale but turned out to be for something else entirely.

This unexpected guest (sorry) was made entirely welcome by the inhabitants, who explained their motives for being there, and everything I’d need to know about the project. The interior is now completely different to the photograph on the wall at the Museum of Liverpool. That suggests something akin to an independent bakers in the style of a chain like Greggs. Blue paint has been stripped from the walls to reveal the original white tiling and the deco counters have temporarily been replaced with rough wooden tables and chests of drawers giving it a country bakery feel or a hipster coffee shop. It’s cosy, welcoming.

The bakery was opening this morning because The Reader organisation, a group which seeks to gather people together to enjoy literature, were having their meeting. I know them well. I have the first issue of their journal around here somewhere having been handed it during a poetry course at the continuing education school at Liverpool University. The idea is that people can develop their confidence by reading to the group their favourite passages and discuss them, to enjoy literature and indeed promote literature as not being as intimidating as it sometimes appears. As a Shakespeare fan, this is something I can entirely endorse.

This is just the sort of initiative the Homebaked hopes will be at the centre of its operation going forward. The rooms at the back of the ground floor will hopefully be converted so that groups like this can have meetings there, attempt to re-ignite the sense of community which could dwindle further as the remodelling of the area proceeds. The bakery has already been the site of the planning consultations on what the ultimate use of the building will be, how the building and the connected terrace will be best utilised. At time of visiting all of the plans are pretty much set.

The ground floor will mostly continue to be a bakery. According to their website the building will “house a production and training kitchen, a traditional bakery shop front, a couple of tables to sit and have a coffee with your cake, and a hatch to serve food straight onto the street on match days.” There are already taster days, but the process it rightly proceeding slowly. They hope to open properly next year but will have the odd trial day here and there so that they can get the operation just right. But the multi-purpose use is clever. It means at least as a business, the bakery already has a potentially large audience.

The rest of the building will be turned into a flats for young people transitioning into their own homes, somewhere to live if they’re not getting on with their parents, and a professional whose work may be connected to the project in some way. The interiors of the other houses in the terrace will be remodelled to fit with the specific needs of various society groups, pensioners on the ground floor, for example. The internal architecture of the building reminds me of the student houses I’ve lived in and the change in use is a huge undertaking. But the right amount of thought has gone into the choices being made and again, nothing is being rushed into.

As it stands all of the aspects of the old bakery are still being stored in one room or other and Kealey, the volunteer who was patient enough to help explain all this to me, says that nothing is being wasted. The original counters will be cleaned and put back into use. The glass sign that hung in the window will be turned into a coffee table. There are still dozens of the original baking tins and although they’re too far gone for their original purpose, they’re to be turned into planters for a garden round the back and donated to other groups in the community. They might even be built into an entirely new structure.

All of which means that when the bakery opens, I’ll be back. As I was leaving I made sure I’d signed up to the relevant mailing lists, became a supporter. The Homebaked Community Bakery, which is what the site is going to become has a clear, practical plan with, and although I hate the phrase I’m going to use it anyway because it fits so well, “blue sky thinking”. When asked the question “What does living well mean to you?” on the 2up2down website, Kealey says “Living well is being happy and having your family and friends around you and being safe and secure in the area that you live in. It’s that simple.” I couldn’t agree more.

* * * * *

But how does Mitchell’s Bakery fit within the structure of the Biennial? Apparently it’s been one of the most popular aspects of the festival with the weekend Anfield Home tours which end there having to increase their frequency due to over-subscription and that’s presumably because it's of interest to a wide spectrum of people, both Biennial tourists and local residents from all over the city (and those of us who sit within the central slice of that venn diagram). Certainly if I wasn’t working at the weekend I would have taken the tour too. As I mentioned to the people I met, coming from South Liverpool, the north of the city is like unknown territory.

It’s also worth noting that this is not an unusual project for Jeanne Van Heeswijk, whose work tends to be about transforming social spaces and increasing community involvement. The Blue House (Het Blauwe Huis) in IJburg, Amsterdam invites artists from throughout the world to visit and interact with the local community in a “housing association for the mind”. Her original idea was apparently to simply create a temporary installation of some kind but she decided that rather than simply creating discussion, something practical and physical needed to be achieved with the help of core participants from the area.

In other words, if this is art, it's art as co-operative community project. Like Suzanne Lacy’s happenings, it’s about the engagement of ideas and participation rather than simply creating an object that can simply be looked at before the visitor moves on to the next thing. Like the Everton Park project and the work enunciated by Hsieh Ying-Chun at Exchange Flags, it’s about revealing to those communities that they needn’t accept the control which being passed down to them through local governance or natural disaster or both. They can take their own control of their lives. Few artworks at this Biennial are as thematically rich.

Yet what’s most impressive is the sense of hope. Living in this country at this time, there’s not a lot of hope around. I don’t feel like a very hopeful person. But sitting around that table this morning, listening to everything which is planned for that building and its adjoining properties and, all being well, how many people could potentially be touched by what they’re doing, from the young people given respite in the flats or trained in the bakery right down to the football supporters who’ll have something tasty to eat on match day, I actually felt very hopeful for the first time in ages. The coffee was nice too.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Liverpool Cathedral (21)

Art Last Biennial when I visited Liverpool Cathedral, it was prepared for some kind of social evening with tables and chairs filling the main section of the floor space, and in a strange coincidence they were out again on Friday with additional candelabras. They somehow have the ability to make a massive space seem intimate.

*     *     *     *     *

Regrets, sigh, oh the regrets.

When I decided not to volunteer, not to attend the private views, to approach the Biennial slowly, some might say lazily over a few months, I’d entirely forgotten that one of its greatest achievements would be on a single night at Liverpool Cathedral and an experience in which you really, really had to be there.

On the opening night, composer Rhys Chatham gathered a hundred guitarists in the cathedral for a performance of his work A Crimson Grail, a three movement volume, experienced by about four hundred public humans and VIPs. Seven Streets has an excellent eyewitness account with tantalising photographs that somehow manages to tread the line between art and music review (assuming they’re mutually exclusive).

I forgot. I did. It wasn’t until I idiotically glanced at Twitter that night and saw someone had uploaded a photo of themselves in the cathedral expectantly waiting for the event to start (smiling!) that I remembered, or at least the fact I was missing it was unconsciously pointed out to me. Too late. So when I trudged up to the Cathedral on Friday, I sort of already knew I was on a fool’s errand.

Firstly I have a question. I wonder how many city visitors will have made the same trek? The Cathedral is marked as a venue in the Biennial booklet just like all of the others on the map. Chatham’s name is listed with the rest of the artists in the back of the booklet. Someone simply visiting venues might not necessarily think to look in the “Weekends” section halfway through and know to look for this missed event.

Secondly, a suggestion (though it’s probably too late now). If the event was recorded, either on video or audio, why not set up a media device in the cathedral showing the performance?  That way visitors can see what they missed, perhaps in the unobtrusive space that housed the Danica Dakic piece in 2010 or somewhere else which might not necessarily require a volunteer invigilating.

It need not be anything spectacular, indeed a photograph and some headphones can be just as effective in giving an idea of the experiences as anyone who's stood on the bridge overlooking the naïve of the Cathedral and listened to the cathedral choir through the headphones can attest.

 The human imagination has an amazing capacity to fill in sensory gaps.

Oh fudge.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Victoria Gallery & Museum (20)

Art  This is the first occasion the University of Liverpool’s art venue, Victoria Gallery & Museum has been an official venue of the Liverpool Biennial and a demonstration that for all the spaces which have closed in the past couple of years there are still plenty of excellent places for them to inhabit. Not that it should be seen in any way as a new departure for the gallery which since opening in 2008 has been a venue for plenty of contemporary art exhibitions often inspired by their own collections, but not always. One of the highlights of the art that was in the city on the fringe of the 2010 festival was their retrospective of photographs by Astrid Kirchherr.

* * * * *

For the Biennial, they’ve welcomed Paul Rooney, whose solo exhibition, Here Comes Franz, He Was Afraid includes a new acquisition for the gallery, The Futurist, a twenty-five minute surrealist video piece filmed within the fabric of the disused cinema on Lime Street, originally commissioned in 2008 by Tate Liverpool and which I’m sure I had the pleasure of seeing at roughly the same time. That’s the problem with being interested in culture; you end up experiencing so much that now and then you’ll greet a piece for what should be the first time but always have a nagging feeling you’ve seen them somewhere before. It’s often the same with people.

The piece I’ve definitely not seen before but I’m most impressed by is Small Talk, projected across a corner opposite the entrance to the first gallery space. On first glance it seems like shots of two different petrol stations, but sit for long enough on one of the supplied stools and it becomes apparent that we’re looking at the same petrol station in two different time periods, and that subtitles which appear on both screens are having a conversation with one another, explaining that the two shots, or rather groups of shots were taken with nine years between and that one of the stations is now a car valet service.

Safe to say that it’s a work which works best if you’ve little knowledge of anything else which transpires with its eight minutes. Like Daniel Lichtman’s Powerpoint presentation at the 2010 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, it spins a simple idea and construction into a very rich work full of nostalgia and regret and in this case metatextual areas, entirely aware of its position as an art piece even to the point of explaining its own themes and influences including Jacques Demy’s film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s also smart and funny; I laughed at least a dozen times throughout partly because the humour’s so unexpected but mostly because of its wit.

It’s also a reminder that good art is never abandoned. When Rooney shot the 2001 footage, it was because he liked the way the garage sat isolated against the wilderness and tried to intensify that with various choices of music but recognised that it simply didn’t work. So he sat on the footage for years, only later deciding to try and copy the footage again shot for shot. As Gus Van Sant jokes the spoof Simon & Simon recreation documentary, such things are impossible, you’ll never get things quite right. But as Rooney’s avatar says in the video, he’s made the imperfections a strength, demonstrating that you can never return to the past.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Walker Art Gallery (19)

Art My final brush with National Museums Liverpool is the Walker Art Gallery and a reminder of projects otherwise ongoing. It hasn’t escaped by noticed that the last Public Art Collections in North West England I’ve visited was Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum in the Summer 2010 (written up in 2011), and it must seem doubly strange to attentive readers that I haven’t yet approached what’s arguably the most local of the venue in Edward Morris’s book, especially since it’s not as though I’m out of the place. That’s because I’m purposefully leaving it to last, making it the finale, because it has such resonance for me and because frankly I know, or at least I think I know the collection so well, it seems fairer to regard the other venues first. Their time will come. Soon. Soon.

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Of the Biennial themed works at the Walker, the most accessible, certainly the most iconic in marketing terms is Patrick Murphy’s Belonging. From glancing through his website, we can see that Murphy trades in a large scale interventions and installations in bright colours, sometimes applying new architectural features to buildings or else creating massive projections of simplistic images. His Strata illuminated the windows of a disused council headquarters, perhaps the soberest of architecture in its modernist utility now with all the colours of the rainbow turning it into a cathedral of light both night and day. He's producing a design via web voting.  In promoting Barnsley’s bid to host the 2013 city of culture, he projected an animation of a whippet, a symbol of working class culture to the side of Cannon Hall.

Belonging looks to be a continuation of that and a series of works begun in 2008 featuring birds. For the Biennial, Murphy has produced a hundred and fifty brightly coloured plastic pigeons, which have been distributed across the exterior and interior of the building, most visibly near the main entrance and in the café and shop. Passing through the main entrance you can also hear them hilariously cooing, but just quiet enough that unless it’s pointed out to you, your sensibilities just turn them into part of the audio landscape. Like his whippets, pigeons are another stereotype of northern life, which is odd, because there are just as many in Trafalgar Square as there are anywhere else. But the title is obviously meant to indicate that these are homing pigeons, given sanctuary on this occasion by one of the houses of art.

* * * * *

My love and hate relationship with the John Moores Painting Prize continues this year’s exhibition. I think I can admit now, with two year’s distance I didn’t think much of the previous edition, which is why it ended up being slipped in at the end of the infamous Day One post, apart from it genuinely being the last exhibition I saw that day. This year’s selection is better. There’s certainly more work which seems to have some original thought behind it rather than found its inspiration in the canonical painters, presumably because as one of the judges Alan Yentob explains in an accompanying video at the venue about the selection process, they were looking for work with some original thought behind it rather than found its inspiration in the canonical painters.

Becoming a one man judging panel, the piece I’ve chosen for the people’s vote is Bernat Daviu’s Overall Paintings. It’s displayed near the entrance to the exhibition, presumably because it looks like nothing else in the exhibition and like seeing an amazing actor in a first audition then realising you have three weeks of other candidates who you know won’t be as surprising, I knew it would be my favourite right through until the end. That’s why the whole process of art in competition is unfair. One person’s sensibilities may be a photo realistic imagine of a war zone or another’s the silhouettes of a police riot team painted on the side of a coke can or another person might love the reproduction on canvas of a typed letter from an artist to himself commission the creation of the work for the competition.

But none of them have the bare faced cheek of submitting what amounts to a sculptural work to a painting price which has traditionally, predominantly been two dimensional. Liz Elton’s Twisted could equally be put in that bracket, but as the artist explains in her notes (an edited version of the catalogue is available as a pdf), that’s the remains of what was really a performance piece utilising what we must assume was a relatively traditional work. Daviu has created something which has to be hung from a clothing rail on the wall of the gallery, making it an installation too. It might not be my favourite John Moores selection ever, but it’s certainly one of the most perverse. As I stood in front of it, I imagined Yentob grinning and stroking his beard and considering if he could convince the BBC to let him have an hour of imagine... to justify their decision.

What we have here is three brightly coloured painted boiler suits hanging from wooden coat hangers. There’s a yellow one, a red one and a blue one and they’re arrange in a haphazard way as though they've been left behind by workers at the end of a day. At first I thought they really were boiler suits, but the information card indicates we’re “simply” looking at acrylic on canvas which indicates they’re unwearable clothing created using an artist’s traditional trade tools. There’s not much more to them other than the choice of colours which bespeak of old posters and old printing methods which were incapable of producing realistic shades. This is rather a dirty yellow of the kind which would appear when inks from darker colours had accidentally bled in on a newspaper advertisement.

The artist explains in his statement that in his paintings, he reduces everything to their most abstract forms which he sometimes later turns into garments. Daviu’s chosen this form because “both the Monochrome and the boiler suit are emblems of the Modernist utopian project in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (1917), in which art was to become a functional and practical tool for the construction of a new democratic society. The Overall Paintings represent historical relics of a previous era, as well as pictorial symbols open to performative interpretations.”  In other words, contrary to the prevailing mood, the artist has chosen a historical perspective. Another artist might have taken the easier to decode option of simply painting them all bright orange, but instead it’s an abstract painting glancing back a hundred years for its inspiration.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: World Museum (18)

Art To the Horseshoe Gallery at Liverpool’s World Museum (so called because internally it’s shaped like a horseshoe) (it even has curvy walls), where an abbreviated version of Liverpool’s Central Library has taken up temporary residence during the refurbishment of its usual building next door. With so many other books to read at home and, yes, with the ubiquitousness of texts in general it’s quite some time since even I’ve visited a local authority library, despite have a BA in the profession. Yes, I’m one of those people who champions the importance of libraries but rarely borrows books from them. Nevertheless, I made use of it yesterday, finally reading the afterword to Gareth Robert’s adaptation of Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story Shada, which was inexplicable missing from the audio reading.

*     *     *     *     *

The exhibition housed in the small exhibition space just before the library begins is an example of the broken narrative, which has crept out of visiting these venues in numerical order. Seeing the cake version of Mitchell’s Bakery before visiting its bricks and mortar counterpart is probably the correct order. Visiting Everton Park and trekking to Fritz Haeg’s Foraging Spiral before seeing the introductory exhibition would be the wrong order, though in truth the video about Haeg’s piece is just one small portion of a larger display by New York's James Corner Field Operations about the past and future of Everton Park, a Park for the People. This mainly consists of freestanding display boards with conceptual designs for future utility of the park.

The project shares some of the same aims as the work being done in Anfield, or wrestling back into community choice a change in the area applied through outside forces, in this case the militant tendency in the Liverpool City Council of the 1980s demolishing a part of the area to make way for a city park. As with Haeg’s landscaping endeavours, there’s an overall aim of providing, through the park, to quote the Biennial booklet, “a destination for residents and tourists alike”. The display boards break this down into a series of concepts for turning the park into a cultural meeting place, a place for festivals and most extraordinarily, tying in somewhat to the Spiral, a kind of incubator for the city, for introducing virulent plant life which can go on to populate the rest of Liverpool.

As with Hsieh Ying-Chun’s Re-Live at Exchange Flags, it’s an exhibition which will be of most interest to people who’re directly involved urban architects and Everton residents, but it should at least increase awareness amongst others, especially if they’re passing through on their way to the library. It’s worth noting that when I was travelling out to visit the park itself, the couple of bus drivers I spoke in trying to establish if their route passed by the park denied all knowledge of its existence. One even shrugged “there isn’t an Everton Park”. When I was thinking of the park beforehand I had in mind Stanley Park, which I visited in 2008 in search of a Superlambanana (another project I notice I attempted in numerical order). It has a wikipedia page, but it’s a bit barren, only really noting its location and that is has a “nature garden”.

If nothing else, the exhibition's worth visiting for the panoramic image in the top wall of the view from the park, the rubbish version of which I included in my report the other day. That so many of the city’s landmarks are visible from the park is one of the inspirations for the project. That even if it is in the north of the city it has the potential to be adopted as its central point, its heart. Of course living next to my own perfectly good park with a history which stretches back far longer and with so much important architecture around its circumference, and which influenced the designs of parks elsewhere, I’d mount a solid argument against that. Perhaps if Everton’s park does ascend, it could take responsibility for some of Sefton Park’s louder events. But we’re keeping the food and drink festival.  They’re not having that.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Museum of Liverpool (17)

Art Goodness know what the attendant at the Museum of Liverpool thought as I approached him this morning with my hands around either side of my face, jumper cuffs wrapped around my fingers. He certainly didn’t seem to react. Indeed it seemed as though it was something he saw everyday. When I asked him where the Biennial “thing” was, he simply smiled, walked me to the end of the display area and pointed: “Next to those lads” he said. I thanked him and carried on walking forward, the cuffs enclosed as far across my face as was possible for me to see where I was going through the slit.

This bizarre behaviour was prompted by the fact that despite it having been open for a year or two, despite it being the newest iteration of what was one of my favourite museums (of Liverpool Life), despite it being about my city, I hadn’t visited yet. Because permanent displays can only be visited once, I’ve been putting it off, then putting it off, then putting it off again, my future plan to visit the venue slowly, one display at a time. That will happen. It’s still to come. Once the Biennial’s over, I’m hoping to complete this other project and then to approach the museums not in Edwards book. It’ll be like Ian Visits for the North West.

This project meant I’d need to visit now and I didn’t want to see too much, hence my attempt to only see what I’d come to see. I think I mostly succeeded, though the methodology must have looked very strange indeed, mostly otherwise consisting of looking at the floor, furtive glances and at one point, a random dart to the left as I realised was going to be slap bang in the middle of something amazing, accompanied by me squawking “Not yet, not yet, not yet.” Unfortunately, the “thing” I’d come to see was in the middle of a much larger display but I just about managed to keep my attention on it, despite the many distractions.

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The “thing” is a cake. Well, no to be more specific it’s A Piece of Cake - 2 Up 2 Down/Homebaked, an architectural model with icing which makes it look like a cake, presumably because a real cake would be difficult to preserve in the warm atmosphere of the warm gallery over the extended display period of the Biennial and beyond. Unless it is a real cake. I’m not sure. Either way it’s an impressive sculptural work, even if, as it’s displayed here, against a wall in a perspex box, it’s difficult to see properly without crouching and craning. While I was there, most people didn’t pay it much mind, more interested in the giant heat pad on the wall next door were people can temporarily leave their hand print.

The model recreates the plans for the refurbishment of Mitchell’s Bakery, the soon to re-open business in Anfield. The artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk, was commissioned to work with the local community whose lives have been blighted by well meaning urban renewal which ignored their needs in favour of a government run programme. The 2Up 2Down project has been about putting the future of the neighbourhood back in the hands of the people who live in that neighbourhood, with architects like Urbed designing an alternative to the demolition projects of recent years, with affordable housing and the remodelling of this shop and terrace.

I’ll probably have an even better idea of what they’ve achieved when I visit the bakery next week (hopefully). Accompanying the “cake” is pair of headphones and an audio introduction to the history of the project offered by someone called Carl (“That’s Carl with a C not with a K”). He’s an affable presence, simplistically but clearly putting the wilful lack of interest from those outside the area as to what the people within that area actually wanted (based on a range of assumptions of the kind we Liverpudlians are becoming used to) in the jovial style of the kinds of audio guide that used to appear in the old Museum of Liverpool Life.

The audio is a version of a tour that is being offered to Biennial visitors to Anfield at weekends (which I’m sadly going to have to miss due to working every weekend) (I’m missing all of the Biennial weekend events for the same reason) (sigh). Laura Davies talks about the experience in today’s Daily Post and offers plenty of information about who Carl is, the source of his script and a few things I actually wish I didn’t know now. I certainly wouldn’t read it before visiting and listening to what he has to say because you’ll hear it with different ears and I was quite happy with the romance.

As a piece of art, I really like Heeswijk's synecdoche-like model.  There aren't many artworks which represent place where its made, which evokes the very "things" which are created inside.  It's a self-portrait of sorts but in which its a business and all of its underlying beliefs represented in an example of what it manufactures which also expresses physically what it is, can be or will be.  Presumably there are other examples of factories creating models of themselves, but there's also something poignant about seeing a symbol of renewal within a museum which has also regenerated itself.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Some notes at this mid-point.

Art  With Exchange Flags I've reached the mid-point of this project or adventure of visiting all the Biennial venues in numerical order.  Well one over, but as we'll see it's a bit of a grey area anyway.  I wasn't going to break into the flow of simply posting venue reviews, but there are a few explanatory things which don't really fit into the structure of those posts and I also wanted an excuse to publish this photo of the interior of Lewis's as it is now.  I had wondered why the old department store hadn't been utilised as the Biennial's base venue, despite its perfect location.  This view of the gutted interior explains everything.

It was taken with my lofi camera phone and that's one of the other rules which has organically developed along the way, that I'd use this lofi camera phone for the illustrative pictures.  No reason really other than convenience.  I always forget to bring my proper camera and it seems easier to have a reason not to be bothered.  In taking these pictures I've also decided not to, as best I can, include images of the work itself.  I like surprises and during the opening weekend had much fun (or not) avoiding rss feeds and Facebook streams filled with photographs of art I hadn't seen yet.

The other rule is, as best I can, to rely on the Biennial booklet as my primary source of information about the work and how to get there.  Which explains why I turned up at the Open Eye Gallery when it was closed, somewhat how I got lost on the way to The Royal Standard and why the Everton Park trip was touch and go.  I think that if you're a tourist visiting the Biennial but who don't know the city, and you don't have an app-enhanced smartphone, the booklet would be your primary source and if the information therein is ambiguous, that's an issue.

The booklet has created a couple of small problems for the project.  Firstly, the "map numbers" don;'t correspond to the numbers on the inside pages.  On the address list and map key, (17) is supposed to be the Museum of Liverpool, but inside it's designated to the World Museum and there's no text to accompany whatever is at the Museum of Liverpool.  On the map, (18) is the World Museum, but inside it's the Walker and so on.  It's a typo probably due to some late editing, but nevertheless.  I've decided to stick to the numbers accompanying the map.

But I'm also in a quandry as to how many official venues there are, how many I need to visit.  The address list offers (27), completing with the Liverpool John Moores University Art and Design Academy, whereas the key on the reverse page concludes with the Static Gallery (30).  Plus the website lists a couple more without numbers, like Headspace @ Eggspace, and many of them are listed because they're hosting an event rather than an exhibition and when they are hosting an exhibition it's not necessarily part of the "official" Biennial, following the Unexpected Guest / hospitality theme.

Most of which shouldn't be seen as a criticism of the Biennial per se, they're simply the vagueries of deciding to attempt another one of these loony, self-defeating projects or adventures.  I expect I'll haunt all the venues up to the (30) and see what's there, then have a look at whatever's left on the website if I've any time left before the close of business on the 25th November.  I am enjoying myself and as in 2010, visiting places like Everton Park I wouldn't otherwise necessarily have a reason to see.  The Museum of Liverpool's next.  Whatever is there, I'm sure it'll be fascinating.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Exchange Flags (16)

Art Apart from Wyatt and Westmacott’s horrific and glorious Nelson Monument at the centre, Exchange Flags will always be synonymous, at least for me, with the magazine programme with the same name broadcast by Granada television in the early 80s, co-hosted by Tony Wilson (so called becase this was the location of regional broadcaster's base of operations).  My memory of the programme is dim, I’d only just entered junior school, but it was one of the few television programmes from which I got a sense of the place where I lived rather than alien worlds like London and Texas. There are odd snatches of it on YouTube. Here’s Dead or Alive being absolutely awful, but worth it for the audience cutaways:

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On a rainy day, Hsieh Ying-Chun’s Re-Live offers welcome shade.  Scattered across Exchange Flags are a number of A-frame shelters designed for use in disaster zones where they can be easily constructed by unskilled people.  They’re not permanent structures, but with their solid metal frames and rigid fabrics, they’re more durable than the average tent and would seem to be capable of withstanding horrors more terrifying than what’s probably a light shower in comparison.  Nevertheless, I can imagine office workers rushing for them in lunch times and breaks when they inevitably become caught in an unexpected downpour.

What they’ll find inside is an exhibition about the artist’s work in areas which have been hit with such disasters, some natural but often political or financial.  He co-operates with the local community to create homes that are biocompatible, sustainable and self-sufficient even to point of training the local people to be able to construct the properties themselves though often there is already a tradition of house-building. On one of the boards, I think it says that 70% of all the housing in the world is created in this way to some degree. Some are grander designs than others, but all share the element of having been built by their owners.

Wandering from frame to frame, there is the potential for information overload as we’re confronted with dozens of photographs of different types of building and short explanations of the kinds of projects being undertaken.  Perhaps the most receptive audience would be an architecture student.  But it’s impossible not be impressed by the demonstration of sheer force of will being exhibited by these disparate peoples not to accept the lot they've been given. Perhaps the most interesting is how in China in areas where concrete has overtaken soil as the main property of the ground beneath people’s feet, they’re making plant life part of the fabric of the buildings instead.