Yan Preston's Mother River at the Open Eye Gallery.

Photography While the eyes of the world are on Brazil, as the few of you who bothered to read my weekly film review posts will know my interest has been with China and this week I’ve had the pleasure of investigating two massive artistic projects which have happened in the country and which have involved a lot of walking. On Monday, at Southport’s The Atkinson gallery’s group show about walking, I enjoyed the six images that are almost, bar some film, the only record of Marina Abramović’s The Great Wall Walk in which she and her partner set off at either end of The Great Wall of China with the plan that they’d meet in the middle and marry. They met in the middle and decided to do nothing of the sort, presumably having had a chance to think, not that it didn’t stop a repeat performance twenty years later.

Then last night, at the Open Eye Gallery I attended a slide presentation by photographer Yan Preston whose Mother River project involves visiting the Yangtze River and taking pictures every hundred and fifty kilometres in an attempt to understand and to an extent discover the extent to which this waterway which stretches across and unifies much of China lives up to its mythic reputation. After coming to terms with the initial shock of just how immense an undertaking this really would be and attempting some other performance projects involving stones and swimming, Preston returned to her original idea, dug in, and set to work. Over the following months she collected the photographs and the results are as stunning as you might expect, even more so because having decided to work on film, not everything went to plan. See below.

I loved everything about this. I have a real affinity for these kinds of, as I tend to describe my own, mad fool missions, viewing projects, wanting to photograph genetically surreal objects and visiting all of those fine art collections. Throughout I noticed how Preston had experienced many of the familiar frustrations, of spending half the time dealing with logistics and geology and technological failures, which in her case manifested itself in films being ruined and having to return to landscapes in order to replicate photographs again. Her set-backs were rather more epic than mine though. Where I’d turn up at Carr Lane to find a superlambanana missing, she was bitten by wild dogs or arrested by authorities who simply couldn’t understand why someone would be searching for a spot on a map so they could photograph it.

One of the tensions Preston’s had to deal with is between artistry and reportage. Initially it seemed as though the artist was about to abandon the fixed point part of the project because the resulting photographs wouldn’t reflect the romantic vision of the river. But thankfully she realised that she was capable of finding beauty or at the very least human interest at each of the points and that there is real value in recording the status of the river at this moment in China’s history when, as she also described, it's in a state of industrialisation. Amongst the photographs and video record, we saw landscapes in which nature had given way to concrete, areas in which Le Corbusier’s uniform urban ideas were flourishing, but soullessly, Leonardo Di Caprio’s character’s limbo from the film Inception made real.

The final result is a book, a specimen of which was available for viewing tonight. I decided not to look yet. Partly because we’d already seen a version briefly as a pdf but mostly because the project continues, as these things often do, due to setbacks related to health and budgets, and I want to see the whole thing together. The ideal approach would have been to begin at one end of the river and continue through to the other side, but no one has an infinite budget or the time to complete that immense undertaking in one go. Even Michael Palin, once he’d been round the world in eighty(ish) days, broke up subsequent televisual challenges into recording blocks. Preston clearly has the tenacity to see this through to the end and it seems only fair to wait until that end before enjoying the results. I hope she us visits again to report back.

The Sunday Seven.Sinta Tantra. Artist.

Sinta Tantra created one of my favourite installations at last year's Biennial, which is still in place, the facade at the Open Eye Gallery.

How did you become an artist?

I don't think I was particularly interested in art when I was younger; I was much more of a musical kid. At school I played the piano, trumpet and sang. It was only until my late teens that my attitudes towards art developed. I preferred the more contemplative side of art making; the creative process seemed more private and I took refuge in the fact that you didn't necessarily need to 'perform' in front of an audience. Fast forward another 15 years and ironically, what we see now is a practice all about engaging with audiences and people - from the passerby who encounters the work on street level, to those I work closely with on production and pre production. There's a strong visual formalism too which is rooted in my learning about musical composition and four part harmony.

What was your inspiration for newest commission?

I am inspired by stories and the framework of narrative. Narrative (meta or grand) acts as a cultural wormhole that enables one to be completely submerged in another space or being. The title of my latest public art commission in Swansea is called, 'A Greater Reality of Elsewhere'. It is a quote taken from a Truman Capote travel sketch essay of New York City. I enjoy Capote’s sharp style of writing which lies somewhere in-between story telling and journalistic reportage. As an artist I am intrigued by the ‘fantasy / fiction’ duality - especially in the context of pop culture and the world of art. ‘Romantic truth’, as seen in the drip paintings of Pollock, has been replaced by the 'genuine fake' of Warhol – and it is this sense of hyperreality that I wanted to bring into my work in Swansea.



What was the trickiest element to achieve?

For me the trickiest part of any commission is engaging with the local context and site - creating a work which is both intriguing and challenging. Previously, the only facts I knew about Swansea were Dylan Thomas and beaches. When visiting Swansea I was struck by the cultural diversity as seen on St. Helen’s Road. Walking past you’ll see Welsh next to Ethiopian, next to Chinese, next to an Indian, next to Italian – and coming from Bali, I was particularly drawn to the unexpected presence of an little Indonesian restaurant called 'Garuda'. Although I am very used to towns and cities dividing themselves into cultural neighbourhoods such as ‘China Town’ or ‘Little India’, I have never seen such a crazy cultural mish-mash on such a small stretch of road. I wanted to create a piece of work that reflected this experience and challenged the stereotypes of Swansea – injecting a sense of exotica and tropical deco into the fabric of the town itself.

Of everything you've done what have you been most pleased with?

Most artists are very critical of everything they do. Its a game of highs and lows - figuring out what you want to say, how you are going to say it and whether what you have to say has any real significance to anyone, anywhere. To answer to your question, for me there is not one particular piece that highlights my career, rather its about developing a practice that's in it for the long haul. What I am most pleased about though, is the fact that I have somehow figured out a way of working which enables me to visit extraordinary places and meet the most interesting people.

I really love your Open Eye Gallery installation. How do you go about designing a composition when it's the facade of a building like that?

As you know, Open Eye Gallery sits within a new development on Liverpool's waterfront, Mann Island. One of my first tasks was to talk to the two architects involved with the development: Matt Brooks from Broadway Malyan (who designed Mann Island) and Tim Riley from RCKA (who designed Open Eye Gallery). I was intrigued to find out what types of buildings they wanted to create, the type of social and historical dialogues they wanted to engage in, their thoughts on art, architecture, community. On a very practical level though, I would say that I work very much like a designer but not like a designer. I draw on the computer, make models, animations, write e mails - but rather than pursuing a total concept from start to finish, I give myself much more of a licence to change direction whenever it feels necessary, exploring new tangents and avenues to the slight worry of my commissioners.

Who’s your favourite artist?

Can I cheat and mention a few? In my staple diet I have: Matisse, Sol le Witt, Paolozzi, anyone and everyone from the Bauhaus - a wonderful Balinese artist called Nyoman Lempad who made the most exquisite drawings - Duchamp, Beuys, Jorge Pardo, Polly Applebaum.

What stops you from feeling listless?

Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Dim Sum in China town, cocktails and conversations, Farrow and Ball paints, vintage hats, black and white films, swimming and sunbathing either by the beach or by the pool but with a pair of Italian sunglasses.

Sinta's new work, A Greater Reality of Elsewhere is part of Swansea's Art Across The City festival which runs at locations across Swansea from 28 March – 12 May 2013.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: The Open Eye Gallery (7)

Art Let’s begin with a warning. Contrary to the information in the Biennial booklet (“all exhibition venues will be open to the public from 10AM to 6PM, daily”) and some websites, the Open Eye Gallery is (so far) keeping its usual office opening hours of 10.30am to 5.30pm, Tuesday to Sunday. It’s closed Monday as I discovered when I wandered over there after visiting the Hotel Indigo at the beginning of the week and ended up having a conversation on the doorstep which I’m embarrassed to admit included phrases from me like “but I’ve come here specially” and “Sefton Park” and “well, there’s my bus fare” and “it’s because I’m visiting them in numerical order”.

Happily, it was open today (Friday). The new Mann Island berth has a different convenience than Wood Street; whereas that was an excellent stop off during a shopping trip, here it’s become part of the Albert Dock tourism run, along with Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Liverpool, Maratime Museum and Liverpool One which means it could benefit from increased visitor numbers. In 2010, the complex hosted Hector Zamora’s artificial birds dangling from the glass ceiling outside the gallery. This year those have been replaced with coloured banners advertising Mann Island itself as a place to live, thrive and survive.

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At this new site, the Open Eye Gallery has a rolling programme of commissioning artists to decorate the façade of the building in their own style which perfectly suits Sinta Tantra who creates wildly colourful decorations and structures of giant architectural sizes. She was responsible for the pastel patterns on the bridge at Canary Wharf (a piece entitled A Beautiful Sunset Mistaken for a Dawn) which appeared on some of the contextual footage during the television coverage of the London Olympics and her website also highlights a giant fibre glass egg produced to dangle outside the Royal Festival Hall.

Tantra has covered the façade of the gallery in diagonal blocks of florescent colour in various shades, golds, blues, pinks and white. She’s attempting to create “a spectacle of submergence and superabundance” and it's certainly a visually rich intervention.  I visited on a relatively cloudy day, but judging by this photo, the effect of the sun against these reflective walls is stunning. Rather like one of Christo’s wraps, it turns the building into an enticing gift waiting to be opened and also contrasts spectacularly against the dark, brooding monolithic marble of the rest of the edifice.

Liverpool Biennial 2012: 28-32 Wood Street (3)

Art  Much as we can agree that the new Open Eye Gallery at Mann Island has an infinitely superior display space, I’ve really missed its old haunt on Wood Street which was just in the right place for popping into during my weekly walk down Bold Street, especially since its programme tended to change with greater regularity than FACT up the road. So I’m very pleased Liverpool Biennial’s chosen to inhabit the old building for a few months and with a piece which is just the sort of thing which used to appear here, oddly covering similar themes to the Open Eye’s own official exhibit in 2010. But it is just a shell with the offices at the back turned into display spaces, fulfilling the same kind of display function as the Europleasure/Scandinavian Hotel or the Wood Street garage back then.

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In the visually complex video work Making Chinatown, artist Ming Wong remakes or “swedes” key scenes from Roman Polanski’s film with himself in all of the main roles as Jack Nicholson, Fay Dunaway, John Huston and Diane Ladd, all in costume in sets that recreate the original locations with some digital augmentation. Fans of the film will instant recognise these moments, but it’s worth adding that if you haven’t seen Chinatown yet (what is wrong with you?) that it’s best ignored until you have because Wong’s work is laced with plot spoilers and definitely gives away the ending. Happily because I’ve seen too many films, I was instantly absorbed and marvelling at Wong’s ingenuity in reproducing John A. Alonzo and Stanley Cortez’s camera work especially with the requirement of being in the same scene as himself.

Luckily for me, Wong has himself written a very lucid explanation as to the underlying themes of the work. As he explains, he’s reacting to the pulp fiction of the 1950s which utilised oriental settings for its detective stories, from the Fu Manchu novels through to screen portrayals in the likes of The Lady of Shanghai, The Big Sleep and Mysterious Mr Wong. But this kind of nod to “the other” stretches back even further than that to Edwardian fiction and the works of Conan Doyle amongst others (there an excellent Matthew Sweet documentary about the topic in relation to Limehouse in London on the newer dvd release of Doctor Who’s The Talons of Weng Chiang, itself a homage to these kinds of fictions). Of course it’s notable that the majority of the later neo-noir isn’t actually set in Chinatown, which has greater mystical significance.

But Wong’s homage works because he’s noticeably a very good actor himself and goes out of his way to provide decent performances throughout without direct impressions of the originals, he doesn’t offer us his Nicholson, preferring instead to supply his interpretation within certain limits. After a while it becomes apparent that he’s purposefully holding up a mirror to how Caucasian actors might have approached playing characters of oriental descent in 1950s albeit without the kinds of gross stereotyping committed by the producers of the film version of The Mask of Fu Manchu or later in the Mr Wong or Charlie Chan series (and arguably Michael Spice in the aforementioned Who story thankfully “explained away” because he’s playing an alien in disguise) (sorry, is that a spoiler?).

A display area at the back has original posters advertising some of these films and its impossible not to grimace at what used to be the norm in Hollywood. As the wikipedia’s thorough history demonstrates, there are still a few rare instances of similar tactics, but more regularly yellowing up tends to be utilised to comment on past stereotyping or most often a previously Asian character being written to accommodate a Caucasian actor perhaps most outrageously in 21, a true story of an incident which happened to an all Asian group of people all of whom were recast as other ethnicities. Wong’s work is a timely reminder that however much we might think our sensibilities have been enlightened, if we’re not careful we’ll simply create a different mistake by remove the Asian image out of the picture altogether.

Liverpool Biennial 2010: Lars Laumann at Open Eye Gallery.

Art A tiny two room space in the middle of one of the main night club areas of the city (just up the road from the Krazy House) I was disappointed when I first tried to gain access to the Open Eye Gallery in Wood Street during the Biennial preview night because of the queues. But as the single occupier (plus staff) during the duration of my hour long stay yesterday (before stumbling up to Liverpool Cathedral), my disappointment turned to pleasure at being able to give the work the requisite concentration, especially since both of the “main” pieces have strong narrative and thematic threads and ideas which can only be teased out with a lengthy engagement.

After my boring rant the other day about how it's up to the artist to communicate to the viewer/visitor/consumer what their work is about I was pleased to see Lars Laumann’s work ticks all of the boxes. Nice long titles, absolutely clear message. The brand new commission is Helen Keller (and the great purging bonfire of books and unpublished manuscripts illuminating the dark) a forty-five minute editing tour-de-force in which Laumman discusses censorship by primarily re-purposing footage of an Iranian adaptation of the self-censoring JD Salinger’s 1963 novelette Franny and Zooey to retell the story of Keller’s own suppressed works using reimagined translation.

In one especially surprising moment, a shot of the girl at the centre of the drama is intercut with the burning of Nazi materials and I think we’re meant to question at the point at which burning books might be acceptable. Is all ideology worth saving from the fire? Can we torch Mein Kampf? Well, of course not, if only so that we can learn from the past. The pieces loses its way a bit in the second half when it uses a contortionist and found footage to investigate the charges of racism surrounding Selma Lagerlof’s novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, but for the period in which we’re essentially watching an Iranian episode of My So-Called Life (probably The Substitute) it’s mesmerising.

Easily overlooked in the entrance room near reception is Duett (Med styrken I var tro I en sang, I en sang), in which a small beer mat sized image is broadcast through a plasma screen leaning against a wall and is essentially what would happen if Autotune The News entered a Beckettian phase employing this footage of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Known unknowns’ quote and Margaret Thatcher on the TV-AM sofa defending her decision to sink the Belgano. On a loop. I’ve always been rather a fan of that Rumsfeld speech. Nothing he says is incorrect. There are plenty of known unknowns and unknown, unknowns in life. It’s just a pity he was using it as a prescription for war.

As I write, I’m listening to The Smiths and the reason is the final and arguably best pieces in the exhibition Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana. Inspired by and quoting directly from this website, a speedy monotone voiceover proposes that Morrissey’s lyrics and some of the production on the record The Queen Is Dead prophesise the death of Princess Diana. The obvious and initial reaction is suitable scepticism, except the longer we watch the more persuasive the argument becomes as Laumann’s sweeps us through the similarities between the verse and the details of the crash.

Gosh yes, you find yourself thinking, “sometimes I’d feel more fulfilled / making Christmas cards with the mentally ill” in Frankly, Mr Shankley must be about Diana. There is a version of the same material on YouTube (see below), but Laumann’s addition is the inclusion of film clips to illustrate some points and create even more tangential connections to The L-Shaped Room, to Carry on Cleo, to the sci-fi film Contact. It’s impossible not to become swept up in the sheer invention, but before too long as the argument enters deliberate flights of fancy, excitement turns back to incredulity as it becomes apparent that most of what we’re seeing is smoke and mirrors.



Because this is a hymn to the particularly peculiar conspiracy theorists who without a shred of evidence find evil that isn’t there. Anyone who watched the BBC’s thorough debunking of 7/7 myths last year will know the territory, as they see the few odd coincidences as being significant amid the thousands contradictory facts. In other words, there are just as many words in The Queen is Dead and Morrissey’s back catalogue which have nothing to do with Diana and could just as easily be engaged to explain why Ed Milliband won or how my generation is seriously depressed and heading into an early mid-life crisis. Probably listening to too many Morrissey records in our youth.