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Sunday, 14 October 2012
The Unexpected Guest: LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2012 .(scribbled at 15:49 )
Photo Heavy Post!
As I fear I'm falling into an assuetude of having every blog post filled with ridiculously long ramblings, I'm trying to keep this post on the Biennial visual heavy and fairly generic. Which is fairly useful as my trip to the Biennial was ages ago and so a few memories of artworks are becoming a little hazy.
My original Biennial master plan was to travel straight from dOCUMENTA to the Biennial, which in hindsight has been the wisest decision of 2012 yet. Just embarking on a flight back from Hannover is exhausting enough, so laying an additional 3 hour train journey onto that would have been somewhat hell-ish. I admit, I didn't want to throw away my launch party and private view invitations for the opening, but I guess no matter how I wanted to dash around the city with an air of Adrian Searle esque panache, it's pretty difficult to maintain an essence of the art critic lifestyle and not be living in a constant state of fatigue. Even now, as I'm typing this out I am very much still hungover from four too many glasses of Chablis I had with a gallerist I met at the last Private View I went to. Oh Networking, what a fickle friend you are.
Anyway, so let's start with The Bluecoat, Britain's finest eighteenth century building. Undoubtedly it's my first place to pay a visit to on arrival to the city. I spent 12 months volunteering in their galleries and archives years ago so I might appear a little biased, but their work that's there as part of The Unexpected Guest is actually brilliant. Just in front of its grade I listed gates, (pictured above) the space is consumed by Dan Graham's large cylindrical installation. On stepping through one of the stainless steel entrances, you become a voyeur of those also in the courtyard and its immediate surroundings. I found myself immersed in his installation for longer than I anticipated, but let's move on before I exceed the 500 word limit I've allowed myself for this post...
The Bluecoat is host to one of the city's regular vintage fairs, so before wandering the galleries, I picked up a couple of beautiful oversize jumpers that will get me through the long chilly nights ahead in gritty London. That said, I live in North London and work in South Kensington, so I'm not entirely sure what I define as 'gritty'. Anyway-
Above, are photographs of Sun Xun and Jakob Kolding's work, which both dominate the main gallery spaces. Xun's work is beautifully executed, making repeat references to eleventh century Eastern style. Large scale drawings take over the gallery/corridor that lies adjacent to The Bluecoat's garden, and through all its repetition in this space, each and every element is so intricately put together.
Likewise, Kolding's work is a fine example for intricacy. The image above is just one of the many mixed media collage that Kolding has created for The Unexpected Guest. It's quite easy to lose yourself in the three dimensional cut out images that have been assembled and then re-assembled again. Black and white images are set against the black backdrop of the gallery space, and I soon found myself sketching one of his assemblages illustrating a man talking to an ear. It sounds a bit absurd, but I really do like how bizarre all of it is. The placement of each image reminded me a little of Geoffrey Farmer's work for dOCUMENTA, but I'll discuss that in the following blog post.
Now, the only direct way to get to the Albert Dock from School Lane is via the vast amount of shops in Liverpool One, so before I'd even reached Tate Liverpool I found myself cradling a bag of clothes from Zara that I didn't need, I think I actually have no willpower whatsoever when I enter that shop. Directly outside Tate Liverpool is The Source by the multimedia artist Doug Aitken, which is part of the Sky Arts Ignition series. Inside this vast cinema space, Aitken explores the source of creativity, devised with a programme of films featuring Tilda Swinton, James Murphy amongst numerous other cultural figures. The interior is split across sections, each with its own unique film. Incredibly impressive still, is the pavilion the work is situated in which was conceived and designed by David Adjaye, the British architect who designed the Idea Store in Whitechapel (and Ewan McGregor's house!). At night, the films project outside the complex wooden structure out onto the perforated exterior walls.
The remainder of the Biennial works at Tate are a few floors up in its sculpture gallery. There's a wide variety of work here, but for the first time ever, I took an immediate liking to a few works by Gilbert and George (it usually takes a little perseverance...), but both 'England' (1980) and 'CuntScum' (1977) are really impressive. There should be a space in the title of that last work, but Blogger will resist my attempts to publish this post otherwise.
I've also became increasingly fond of Pak Sheung Chuen (b. 1977), his 'A travel without visual experience' installation was pretty amazing (see below), and a great paradigm for the theme of hospitality. The photograph won't justify the experience of it at all, there's an incredible backlog of a story to the work where Chuen recounts a tale of a trip to Malaysia he took in October 2008. Basically, during his 4 days there he explored the country either blindfolded, or with his eyes closed. Nonetheless, Chuen still documented his visit through photographs, and it was only on his arrival back home that he could finally look through the photographed foreign landscapes and reflect on a visit that essentially, he never saw. I'm not sure if that quite explains it well, but the photographs from his trip to Malaysia are then wallpapered into a single small gallery space. Before entering, there's a gallery assistant placed outside with a dozen small digital cameras. As the space where the photographs are in is pitch black, you can only navigate your way through with some form of external light, and this can only be in the form of a camera. I guess it's like a counter balance to Cheun's epic visit in a way. With only a handful of people allowed in the room at any one time (I imagine the risk assessment they conducted for letting people wander into a room with no light was pretty tough), you revisit Cheun's voyage through relying on the flash of your camera to guide you.
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| A Travel Without Visual Experience (2008) |
Also worth seeing if you have time, is the Kader Attia's film entitled 'Oil and Sugar #2' (2007), which is a short 4.5 minute looped video projection of a mound of perfectly formed sugar cubes. Oil is slowly trickled onto the sugar, and the sugar cubes only retain form momentarily before they collapse into a grainy rubble. Attia explores food and the notion of decaying quite frequently through recent works, I'm pretty sure there was another work of his at Tate which was a large sculpture of cous cous but I can't quite remember now.
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| Oil and Sugar #2 (2007) |
With a limited budget (trains between London and Liverpool are extortionate), I wanted somewhere relatively inexpensive to scoff my face at that evening, so through a recommendation we ended up at Egg Café, which is just off Bold Street. I ate for less than a fiver, and the side dish of salad is not only tasty but also absolutely enormous! The vegetarian burgers were delish, and off the top of my head I think you may be able to take your own drinks in. Always an added bonus, which I guess is why they aim Egg at Liverpool's ever expanding student population.
I've just started laughing to myself at the hilarity if that last sentence were to be taken out of context. Oh dear.
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| If my laptop had photoshop I'd have edited that dead lightbulb out in an instant. |
Walking back afterwards, we managed to slightly avoid the masses of the underdressed in Concert Square by taking a detour via the Anglican Cathedral, which is always a serene way to end an evening in Liverpool...
Travelling between Liverpool and London is a mission altogether, so my time in Livers was somewhat brief the following morning. I somehow managed to visit The Open Eye Gallery, FACT, The Cunard Building and still have a spare 20 minutes to grab something from American Pizza Slice before doing the usual dash to Lime Street.
At FACT, there's a huge interactive work, where the visitor is invited to partake in a number of games (pretty sure snakes and ladders was part of it...) in order to acquire one of many exhibition posters (seen on the walls below). The posters are really well designed, so next time I'm in Liverpool I am most definitely acquiring some before they run out of stock.
Oh, and not to forget Oded Hirsch's lift, plonked right behind Topshop smack bang into the middle of Liverpool One. Possibly the most well known piece in this year's Biennial, it really invites reaction from the unsuspecting public- I overheard a bunch of prepubescent boys talking about it for ages!
I must have been listening to their conversation on what contemporary sculpture was for a while, because I ended up 5 minutes late for a tour I'd planned to go on at The Cunard Building, lead by Lorenzo Fusi, Liverpool Biennial curator. Having the Cunard building open to the public for this exhibition is a brilliant addition to the Biennial this year, as the chance of getting to wander through this dramatic building is pretty slim at other times. The interiors are amazing! Throughout Fusi's tour, he discussed why and how The Unexpected Guest came to be for the 2012 Biennial. Learning more about how Liverpool fits into this overall theme of hospitality was really interesting, and seeing how this ties in with so many works exhibited throughout the city really was fascinating. These tours occur every Sunday, alternating between the Cunard Building and The Open Eye Gallery and lead by a wide range of Biennial contributors.
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Trevor Paglen's 'Prototype for a Non-functional Satellite'
AMAZING. |
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| (Detail of above) |
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| Pamela Rosenkranz's 'Bow Human' sculpture series. |
Mark Morrisroe's work in the Open Eye Gallery is brilliant as well, but I was on the verge of missing my train from Lime Street, so I didn't spend more than half an hour in there unfortunately. In retrospect, I had a particularly productive weekend, although I am about to splurge on another set of train tickets to head up to Liverpool again in the next few weeks, I've been waiting to see the John Moores painting prize for ages now so I'm deeply regretting not popping into the Walker Art Gallery. The Biennial guidebook this year is fairly succinct and useful too, but I did prefer the previous one that you had to pay a fiver for, as it contained a wealth of information about the Biennial's history and the artists involved, which is always handy I guess.
Also, the dOCUMENTA entry is on its way, albeit rather slowly. Give me about a week and you'll soon be stalking my Germanic adventures! x
Liverpool Biennial runs until November 25
www.eggcafe.co.uk
www.biennial.comLabels: Adrian Searle, ART DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE, Biennial 2012, Curators Tour, Dan Graham, Doug Aitken Tate Liverpool, Gilbert and George, Liverpool, The Bluecoat, The Cunard Building, The Unexpected Guest
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