With just over a month left to visit the Liverpool
Biennial 2016, here’s the ‘Spanner in the Workz’ review of what to expect...
Now in its tenth year, the biannual contemporary arts
festival,
integrated across communities and venues in the city of Liverpool, has become a
regular fixture on many an art calendar; least alone in part thanks to the
added draw of some of the city’s more or less salubrious pubs and bars! Its inclusion of both national and international artists have made it, in some way, the cultural 'acid-test' of what to expect from contemporary artists
working today; the most recent artistic practices, developments, thinking and
reaction to some of the current developments and challenges faced in the art
world at present.
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| Granby Street, Toxteth -Liverpool |
It should come as no surprise that Liverpool, like most
of the country, continues to struggle from cuts to arts funding over the last few
years (despite this it is reassuring that the festival is still running), but is
becoming increasingly reflective of the impacts that lack of funding may be
causing. This year’s Biennial feels like a befuddled lack of continuity or
criteria from direction of a clear theme or funds needed to bring in curators/artists
with this sort of experience OR artists hungry for the exposure that
participating in the Biennial would give. It has in fact been curated by
committee into a series of episodes titled, Monuments from the Future,
Flashbacks, Ancient Greece, Children’s Episodes, Software, and Chinatown. In
short it feels more confused, less defiant and as though it has slightly lost its
way in being clear in what message it wants to give; even the Student Protests from
1985, shown in a film and documentation in Open Eye Gallery do little to stir
cause for action today or ignite social change. They’re of the past and only
seek to act as a comparison at how un-politically motivated and disinterested
my generation are often guilty of portraying. I
am perhaps stubbornly of the belief that art can act as a platform for
self-expression and still have a social or ethical cause or at the very least
have some meaning or significance to the present (cinema, seems to do this better than most).
All of this is reflected in the choice of artists to display in
the Tate Liverpool, classical Greek sculptures amongst Ikea-style furniture and
random assorted half-hearted piles of rubbish on the floor (Half-hearted piles
of rubbish, as they are too small to have significance and slightly too
contrived to look natural). They are the, dare I say, ‘work’ of Jason Dodge who
calls the intervention ‘what the living do’ but it sounds like trite to me and
doesn’t say anything new about man’s relationship with his waste. I suppose the
fact that it annoys me by its being in an art gallery is the point he’s trying
to make though it still feels weak for being so subtle and failing to care whether it engages with its audience or not. This being the 2016
Biennial at its worst and many critics pointing out that viewers ‘have to sift
through the rubbish’ in this year’s Biennial is an accurate assessment.
Visually, Koenraad Deedibbeleer’s use of subtly altered Greek sculpture is
interesting but only because they are
Greek sculptures, the newly created modern plinths they stand on are somewhat superfluous
and don’t really add anything new. If ‘pointlessness is the point’ and that it
is in some way reflective of the throw-away, media heavy era we are currently
occupying then it feels lazy and somehow unhelpful as it is unclear if it is being critical or supportive. Generally speaking I think
I am leaning toward a contemporary art that challenges the status quo rather
than adopting it. Upstairs and not part of the Biennial programme of events is
the excellent Francis Bacon exhibition that only widens the cynical division
between the art of the past and that of contemporary. Why couldn’t the
contemporary exhibition have been the better of the two? I think art needs to
rise to the challenge rather than take such an apathetic approach.
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| Rita McBride at Toxteth Reservoir (2016) |
In almost all other arts, from music, to film and books
there is a much greater desire placed in the making of these mediums to engage
with their audiences, create excitement and progression of new ideas and intent
behind their making than much of the contemporary art offerings on display
here. There is a similar felling that filters into this year’s Bloomberg New
Contemporaries, apathy breeds apathy, with work that is so ‘self-aware’ or
trying to be too clever or self-referential of the art world within which it
resides that it often fails to communicate with its audience. I don’t think any
of this is reflective of contemporary art or graduate work as a whole; more
frustrating that the work selected does not portray enough of the breadth well.
Maybe it is a question of, “is this representative of the true direction that
the art of today is heading?” or more relevantly “If the work shown in this
year’s Biennial is representative of Contemporary Art today then is there still
a place within contemporary art for an art that is meaningful?”
There are
however a few glimmers of hope and in what the Liverpool Biennial has always
prided itself in doing so well, is opening up unusual or abandoned spaces to
artists and allowing the public access to some truly remarkable buildings. This
year is no exception and the ABC Cinema, Cains Brewery and Toxteth Reservoir
are a few of the gems worth investigating as buildings alone.
Next
year the Cains Brewery is being transformed into artists studios! This is great
news as its a spectacular space. Although the curation of the Biennial art show
currently occupying Cains Brewery fails to compete with its surroundings or
respond to the context it finds itself in. Visitors will be disappointed to
find that there are no references to the buildings interesting history that
beneath the brewery is a lake that is 40 feet deep; somewhat surprisingly given
the mention of it in the Biennial guide (why mention it if none of the work
responds to it?!) There is a video here by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, ‘Dogsy Ma’
Bone’ that uses locations in the Brewery and throughout Liverpool but isn’t
enough on its own to quell the disappointment of the exhibition as a whole.
Outside, is an un-open- able door as part of Lu Pingyuan’s ‘Do not Open it
Series’; a further confounding metaphor if needed that the future of art is
perhaps a locked door to nowhere or nowhere other than our perception of what
we believe is behind the door…
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| Lu Pingyuan 'Do Not Open Series', Cains Brewery, Liverpool |
The
greatest success of this year’s Biennial is the integration of the main
festival with its inner city areas. In and around Toxteth there are little signs as
to where the City’s European Capital of Culture funding in 2008 was spent and
even fewer signs of people or life compared with that of the bustling shopping
district of Liverpool One. Despite this however, the artists have moved in and
are beginning to make positive changes; on Granby Street, Turner Prize winning
Art Group, Assemble have been working since 2012 to save the area from
demolition through collaboration with the community. Granby Workshop is a social
enterprise based there which sees handmade products made and sold by the local
people. Elsewhere on Rhiwlas Street, Lara Favaretto has placed a 'Momentary
Monument- The Stone' in the middle of this abandoned terraced street that looks
like something more out of a dystopian horror than England, 2016. After the
Toxteth Riots in 1981 many people have been forced to move out of such areas to
allow for redevelopment. A redevelopment however that appears to be a long time
coming and as result has only led to further decay of much needed houses.
Painfully depressing, yet stunningly too, the area is a remarkable ghost-town
and is an important reality-check from the ‘pointlessness’ of much of the
Biennial art in the centre. Favaetto’s stone stands like a sentient monolith in
the middle of this street, part blockade, part gravestone, part Brutalist
sculpture, its appeal is in its context. In its unmovable, stubbornness it
signifies some of the resistance and confrontation matched by the people whose
lives were affected by events that happened here. On one side it has a small
postal slot for donations or notes when after the Biennial the stone will be
removed and cracked open; its contents distributed to local asylum seeking
charities.
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| Lara Favaretto 'Momentary Monument -The Stone' (2016) Rhiwlas Street |
Just
three-hundred metres down the road from this is the impressive Toxteth
Reservoir, no longer in use, its purpose in a modern-day Liverpool is yet to be
defined. The building slopes upwards with a flat turf lined top and inside is a
chamber of arches and steel columns befitting of an atmospheric scene from a
thriller or crime drama. Stepping inside this space viewers encounter Rita
McBride’s laser installation consisting of several straight green beams of
light, crossing in places, spanning the length of the reservoir. The affect is
one of the most visually striking spectacles in the entirety of the Biennial
and transforms as well as illuminating the space into something both dramatic
and unreal at the same time. The laser beams shimmer under the dampness of this
cavernous-like space and the whole thing feels temperate, fragile and
in-keeping with some of the uncertainty of what the future holds within this
building and area. McBride describes it as a wormhole and its use of green
light does give the whole atmosphere a sci-fi feel, but for me it’s the way it
works within the architecture of the reservoir that makes it so exciting; the
horizontal lines created by the beams in contrast the the verticals of the
supporting columns and curves of the bricked archways compositionally makes a
lot of very interesting shapes and shadows. This work was created for this space and it’s
that level of understanding or site-specific awareness that is missing in so
much of the Biennial elsewhere.
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| Ian Cheng 'Something Thinking Of You', Hondo Chinese Supermarket, Liverpool |
Back in
the City centre you’ll find more video art than you could ever hope to see in
one place, even along the shelves inside a Chinese Supermarket (pictured)! I could almost
write a whole piece about the video art in this year’s Biennial alone. Mark
Leckey ‘Dream English Kid’ shows a snapshot montage of the cultural events that
happened in the artist’s year’s growing-up between 1964-1999. The film has some
brilliant moments, amateur footage from an early Joy Division gig sourced from
YouTube and close-up, panning shots of vinyl record sleeve that resonate of
nostalgia that Leckey’s work tends to do usually quite well. This piece covers
so many ideas that it almost ends up saying nothing at all, but perhaps in that
way it is more representative in portraying the feeling of memory/memories as a
series of glimpses and fragmented layers thrown-together? Which would be
convenient for Leckey, but acts more like the work in the Tate and Bloomberg
tending to alienate its audiences.
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| Krzysztof Wodiczko 'Guests' (2011) FACT, Liverpool |
If you
only go see one film however go see Polish artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s
‘Guests’ (2011) at FACT gallery on Wood Street. Projected as a series of
life-size arched, illuminated doorways the silhouettes of legal and illegal
immigrants in Poland and Italy who animate these doorways in scenes of everyday
life in a public square; there is a window cleaner, leaf blower, umbrella
seller, parents, children and others. Conversations and actions
happen simultaneously with characters occupying and disappearing from their
framed windows as passers-by. So watching this film is to read (its
subtitled) fragments of conversations about immigration, debates about seeking
asylum and the situation of immigration policies and the affects it has on real
people and their lives. For projections they look like ghostly Marlene Dumas
paintings and is one of the few immersive video installations in the Biennial.
Each figure is anonymous so the viewer becomes devoid of any judgments they may
bring to the piece; these characters are all simply people. Wodiczko’s other
pieces in FACT are given smaller space but deal with some equally poignant
issues from homelessness to PTSD amongst American war veterans and is certainly
an artist to look out for.
Overall the Biennial may feel a bit muddled this year and
generally it hasn’t been as good as it was in perhaps its heyday as the Capital
of Culture year; though despite this people still keep visiting it and it
deserves to thrive if nothing other than for the city and its people who have
supported it for so long.
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