Event at the Bluecoat tomorrow

Politics with a small p

It may not be apparent but the "2008 Liverpool Biennial" of contemporary art shares the city's artistic stage for 2008 with the "Liverpool '08 Capital of Culture". Both are funded differently, although mainly by the council tax payer and neither benefit 'local' artists to any significant extent. Collectively it is agreed they have boosted attendance at the city's museums, galleries and art institutions, but are there any long term benefits?

While the objective of both organisations is to bring tourist money to the city, the politics is that they behave like opposition parties. This was brought home to me the other night at a "Liverpool '08 Capital of Culture" opening, to which I had not been invited, for one of their high profile (large funds alocated) artist. Sipping decent champagne and nibbling on expensive canapes while waiting for Sir Bob to show up as scheduled, he failed to show and so the long boring speeches by ego maniacs went on without him, but looking around the assembled minor celebrities I noticed that apart from Bryan Biggs the indefatigable director of the Bluecoat there were no representatives from the 2008 Biennial caucus. Witnessing this the politics of the situation became immediately apparent, neither of these organisations talk to each other.

There is of course a third strand to the art exhibitions the "Independents Biennial" - aka the fringe, presentations by local artists who continue doing what they have always done making art for no pay . Consequently we have two organisations with lots of money while the real cultural workers in the city, who will remain once the circus has left town, have only been allocated sufficient funds to keep a basic administration afloat. Let's ignore the artists for the time being, it's always a difficult problem being analytical and diplomatic when you are in poverty and truffles are being served next door, but hey we just party.

It should come as no surpised that the local artists are completely ignored by both of the high rolling organisations, but Sir Bob Scott's '08 circus and Lewis Biggs Bienniale brigade don't seem to have much to say to each other either. There is no collective approach to publicity and to the onlooking artists it is a spectacle of minor politicians carving out their own turf. The Biennial curators have a strictly "international" approach which precludes "local artists" who are de facto "not international", which in truth is simply a policy which circumvents potentially difficult decisions.

The approach taken by the Capital of Culture mandarins is less easily defined, but as with most local council initiatives it is riddled with highly paid consultants brought in for the fest when there is already more than enough curatorial talent in the city to do the job, and nepotism is rife. Typically when you are in conversation with these arts administrators they are looking over your shoulder checking that there isn't someone more important that they should be networking with; thankfully most of these culture vultures will be gone by the new year having already booked their next desk with the 2012 olympic organisers.

There is currently a document being prepared looking at the long term benefits to the arts of the '08 Capital of Culture, long term? infrastucture? none. Two independent developments have however taken place, both of which have been ignored by the swinging dicks. The "A Foundation" massively funded by James Moores and currently showing the best art in the city, the other a less lavish privately funded initiative "The Ceri Hands Gallery" which looks to selling contemporary art to a disinterested public, I wish her well, she'll need it.

So come 2009 the long term benefit will be two privately funded projects, the independent artists will continuing to engage in their social work while the ring master Scott and his circus will have moved on. Which finally leaves the City Counci funding of the International Biennial. Art has always been a dirty word in this city where football is the only culture in town (so lets not confuse culture with art) and come Dec 31st the council will have had their expensive party, failed to sell much real estate and now approaching bankrupcy will not be funding an International Biennial in 2010.

peter hagerty
liverpool

The power of symbols

Philip and Hangfeng have been in regular contact since the launch of the e-space lab international project on 04.10.2008 in the hub at the Bluecoat.

There are a number of collaborative art projects under way. One in particular has generated some video work. In English you can say that something is a something else. This is not just saying something is like something else, it is saying that one thing (that is not like another) is that other! So this is a complex juxtaposition that is the stuff of symbolism. This is not juxtaposition as things side by side, although the editing process works with apposition, it is exploring something by making it something other!

We chose songbirds in cages and birds in an aviary.



The songbirds in cages were video recorded by Hangfeng in a park in Shanghai. Parks in Shanghai are full of social and public discourse, people playing games, dancing, exercising, singing opera, and including people bringing their songbirds to a place where the songbirds can also engage in conversation and exchange. What if an art festival was organised in such a way that artwork could sing to artwork? The work of curators, looking after the artworks, would bring the artworks together, but the singing as discourse between artworks is something else. The gap might be as big as the difference in interests and understandings between birds and ornithologists, but crossing gaps is what our brains do best, and with symbols.



In the UK we don't take our birds to the park, but we like to see and hear them in situations like an aviary. We document the difference between China and the UK, and we make-up the scenario that the aviary is like the museum, situated in an international art world with artists networking, but they are not able to leave this particular environment. They are cooped up, literally! Nevertheless, as long as there is food and water provided, it is a life of song making.

Posted by Philip Courtenay

The Fear Factor

I just found the answer to my own question about whether Hirst's shark was a metaphor?

"With its jaws gaping, poised to swallow its prey, Damien Hirst's tiger shark in formaldehyde takes pride of place in the $700 million art collection of the hedge fund manager Steven A Cohen.

Until now, it had served as a symbol of the killer instincts which made Mr Cohen and his fund SAC Capital one of the biggest predators in the world's financial markets, earning him a personal fortune estimated at $8 billion.

"I liked the whole fear factor," he said cheerily when explaining what had attracted him to the Hirst shark which he bought for $8 million four years ago.

The fear factor is something Mr Cohen, and around 100 other hedge fund managers, are experiencing, like never before, as SAC Capital and others collectively lost a staggering £24 billion with a doomed gamble on Volkswagen shares, according to the Wall Street Journal."(Ref)

So gone is beauty, empathy and compassion the contemporary artistic value most in demand is fear, by comparison Rodrigo Borgia seemed to have had good taste.

Peter Hagerty

arklo.com

Liverpool

This Animal business

The animal business in art struck a chord with me, I've been writing about Georgian Poetry for a lecture I am giving on 20thC landscape photography, a brief description of the Georgian style would be that it was a pre World War One movement characterised by the use of plain language with strong pastoral elements - this type of poetry was stylistically ousted by the arrival of modernism (Eliot et al). The Georgians (named after George V) are usually dismissed by critics as "lark loving" (the bird that is) although others more positively describe the movement as representing "the crisis of lost subjectivity of the individual in the emerging confusion of modernism".

But the emerging confusion of modernism was merely the last stage in our dissociation from the animals. In the distant past when animal husbandry was time consuming and demanding of domestic resources we accepted murdering the beast for food was a ritual sacrifice. Because over their year(s) of nurture, the animals had become part of the family - the children had most probably given them pet names. This was the time when animals were frequently represented in art, although the zenith of this activity had been the paleolithic even up until the seventeenth century animals were as much a part of domestic life as the people. Perhaps the big shift came with the industrial revolution, when in consequence of abandoning the land for the city we also lost our association with the animals which we had been domesticating for the previous six thousand years. Interestingly the movement to the cities also saw the growth of "landscape painting" which did include animals as scaled motifs, but most of these landscape paintings were a romanticised description which ignored the harshness of an agricultural life; where for the peasant a harsh winter was often a life or death affair.

Apart from the great animal painters such as the scouser Stubbs who honourably painted the fine specimens owned by his patrons, by the end of the eighteenth century the portrayal of animals had almost entirely disappeared from visual art, the trend from Goya/Velasquez onwards would be that only pets (usually dogs) would appear in a picture with their master/mistress. I guess the heroic Victorian stags by Landseer deserve mention but which of us has actually seen a stag these paintings seem to presage the saccaharine school of African "wild life" painting, for the rest, in England at least, we have paintings of goats as christian metaphor or decorative pretty baa lambs. Apart from the horse depicted as a means of transport animals have ceased to be a part of the human landscape.

There was a brief artistic return with Picasso when he plundered motifs from Etruscan art. But Picasso's bulls are not cows, they are more Freudian symbols of Spanish machismo than anything Thomas Bewick may have etched. Nonetheless there is something admirable in the paleolithic shamanism of this period in Picasso's work, an evocation of the power and vitality of the beast which contrasts nicely with the libido of the rising class of civil servants and bankers of the era.

Finally we come to our own era where an artist employs fishermen to pull sharks out of the sea, not for food but as ..... and here I am lost for words - the spectacle of a species which has roamed the seas since the Jurassic meeting it's end pickled in formaldehyde for "art lovers"; if there is a metaphor here please explain it to me?

By contrast the Georgians of the early twentieth century seem eminnetly human in their attempt to reintegrate human life in a wider ecology, but as with today it's a marginal interest when compared to lifestyle shopping. No I am afraid that we are not only dissociated from any empathy with the animals, but increasingly with other members of our own species. How daily we hear the words "It's a matter of survival" and in consequence poverty in Africa or the outcome for the poorest countries of rising sea levels are now of marginal concern when asset prices are falling and our ill gotten good life is threatened. Gee yesterday I even found myself buying "Caged" hens eggs in Tesco's 82p per half dozen against my usual £1.52p for the free range (whatever that means) product.

Peter Hagerty
arklo.com
Liverpool

Four Legged Animals

Animals in our care often work really hard. One of the things I miss in contemporary art is the representation of the cow or cows. In times past some of the great paintings of Europe have a cow in the foreground, huge in scale, with a tiny cityscape perched on the horizon in the far distance. A different scale of values. I bet this is possibly true in Chinese art too, where the fact that the texture of everyday life for people is interwoven with the lives of animals, domestic and wild, and therefore means they are worthy of representation in the arts.



Another thing missing a lot in art these days is any sense that labour is involved, for subject and audience. Whilst it is obviously an issue for those artists who are makers, even then the way work registers in the experience of art is weakened by some of the institutional contexts we find the art. In this Liverpool Biennial you can see labour as part of what is going on, for you as an observant participant, with the work of Sarah Sze at the Bluecoat and the two channel video by Omer Fast, called Take a Deep Breath, a powerful, multi-levelled piece of work on show at Tate Liverpool.

Posted by Philip Courtenay

The Silence of the Sheep

Here is an anecdote about the Liverpool 2006 Bienniale when the artist Santiago Sierra was asked to contribute a piece. The theme in 2006 was affiliated to the genre of documentary, when artists were asked to explore aspects of the culture and history of Liverpool and incorporate aspects of this research in their work. I can imagine that the impetus for this approach would have found favour from City Council bureaucrats, uncomfortable with the freedom of artists, when everybody else on their payroll is engaged in purposful instrumental activity.

Sierra, an artist whose work I greatly admire has always engaged with politics in his work which often results in outrage from the middle classes of the art circuit eg. paying prostitutes in Brazil to be tattooed, or employing illegal Mexican migrants - at above the minimum wage, in a project about illegal migrants .

Sierra's ehibition proposal to the 2006 Liverpool Bienniale was to "release a flock of sheep into a Liverpool City Council meeting Chamber". The Council officials objected and Sierra refused to submit another proposal and so was represented in the 2006 exhibition by old work. Sierra's proposal seemed an amusing situationist metaphor for the behaviour of elected politicians and in keeping with the values of his earlier work an example of how contemporary art can comment on official hypocrisy and the values of our society.

The fact that Sierra's proposal was rejected should perhaps not surprise us, I'm sure the council saw it as "insulting" or worse, but for me it was a work that succeeded without being made. Sierra is a rare contemprary artist who manages to produce highly provocative and targeted political art work while also becoming very wealthy, I was told the other day that Sierra now lives a reclusive life behind high walls in Rio.

But how rare these "clash of civilisations" contributions are, most contemporary Biennial artworks seem to share more with the feel good values of advertising and marketing than any awareness of the dire social, economic and spiritual values of contemporary society.

Peter Hagerty
arklo.com
Liverpool

Alphaville or Biennialville?

A guided art tour or a search for Alpha 60?

Alphaville is a brilliant film by Jean-Luc Godard (1965 B&W). A cross between dystopian science fiction and film noir. I paraphrase the Wikipedia account of the plot:

Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Caution is an agent from "the Outlands". He poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson. His overcoat stores various items. He carries a camera with him and photographs everything he sees, particularly the things that would ordinarily be unimportant to a journalist.

• First, he must search for missing agent Henry Dickson;
• second, he must capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor Von Braun;
• lastly, he must destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60.

Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by Von Braun which is in complete control of all of Alphaville. Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'." People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed.

For the e-space lab international art trail in Liverpool:

• First, I must find the artworks;
• second, I must record them;
• lastly, I must post my findings.

The Liverpool Biennial has an open relationship to the cityscape, in that artists are invited to make art that occupies spaces outside the gallery, museum or event space as well as intervene within those spaces. Their publication "liverpool biennial - the Guide" reflects this approach, organized around locations linked in a walking route through Liverpool city centre. The Guide map shows the locations of everything judged relevant to the interested audience for the biennial. They are identified by number and colour. This post goes with the "red" numbers 1 to 10.



Number 1. is in the Liverpool Biennial Visitor Centre, the former ABC Cinema on Lime Street, an important Art-Deco building in terms of architectural design, and a place that harbours the memories of the many people who came to see films here up until 1998. Its' new purpose is to become a "New York style Supper Club and Boutique Hotel". Let's see!

Architects Pollard, Thomas, Edwards have designed the Visitor Centre space to be inviting, fun and adventurous (like cinema used to be) and to help visitors navigate through the city and the art. Annette Messager has made a work for the old cinema auditorium called La Derniere Seance. The space is very dark and where you would expect to see the cinema screen there's a theatrical tableau with a fabricated hanging skeleton, and the seats are covered with a dark gauze. Spooky, but cute! Is cute good?



Outside on Lime Street, there is one of the signs designed by Otto Karvonen, part of what he calls Wobbly Prospects. The Guide says:"Karvonen's signs mix the instructional with the emotional". A big pile of shit to shift? Very apposite, and something we all feel at some time or another. Not at the moment though! Time now to dive into a pub to see Number 2. by Gabriel Lester, a DVD projection called The Last Smoking Flight. Not working! When you make art, leaving it in the care of others, or hoping the technology is robust enough for when you aren't around, is a worry. But it is a great atmosphere in this classic Liverpool pub - The Vines. I am glad that the art has led me here.



Stepping out on the street again there's Lewis's department store, a Liverpool landmark, and adorned with the sculpture by the modernist sculptor Epstein nicknamed "the cock 'o the north"! Going past the window displays, one of the windows shows art from the Liverpool Independents, and there's a piece that uses a whole window space and frame stuffed with shoes. Looking around inside the biennial trail is vaguely interrupted by art left over from 2007 when Liverpool celebrated 800 years of its city charter, including these portraits of local people, Liverpool personalities (including some celebrities) considered worthy of recognition. This store is just so different from those in Liverpool 1, the new shopping centre built around Paradise Street. It is definitely old Liverpool, practical and real. The art, by Liverpool Independents artists fits in, but display at Lewis's is not cool, and the quality of the intervention somehow falls between the showing of objects and the provoking of thoughts. Not such a good place!



Number 3. is the old Rapid Paint Shop building, part of the Rapid DIY business that has helped us make the world a better place, another Liverpool Institution, but at the moment it is an empty building with the work of two of the artists in the biennial now! Richard Woods, in his innovation-investment-progress, as the Guide has it;

".... transforms the interior of a former DIY shop into a powerful statement of positive thinking. Like a visual mantra, the work saturates our field of vision with its repeated pattern of 'feel good' logos, playfully reworking the precise language of graphic print into something distinctly home-made."

Anyone who has cleared out buildings for a wage will relate to the gloomy irony that this art possesses. The credit crunch makes it more poignant. We can't even afford to do it ourselves. Damned up creativity all round!

I must confess that whilst I acknowledge that art processes can be/are playful, when I encounter the idea/word in texts that support an understanding of art, it irritates. Playful can = serious = an alternative to rational madness. I need another word!

On the 1st floor the Jesper Just 3 channel film installation Romantic Delusions is well 'made-up'! The premise is far fetched, but the execution has great effect in terms of the way film does this thing, as Pasolini has it, showing the world, whilst telling a story.

Back outside, this is a great corner of Liverpool!. You can see some of the work of the Stockholm based collective A-APE, with their "interventions" on the walls hereabouts. Their work is commissioned by the Liverpool £*&%!$£ Company. Art is business in '08, and there are many trying to get on the bandwagon, but it is a smallish vehicle, and already occupied.



Number 4. is further down Renshaw Street, where there's a boarded up window used for posters, most of which have their own strategies for grabbing our attention and fueling desire. SEX and VIOLENCE. It is the same in some great art collections of the world. Aristocratic European taste since the beginning of the idea of such collections of art, includes lots of references to ancient mythology, via texts by Ovid, Virgil etc, which provide the collector (and the artists) with lots of scope for indulging in scenes of sex and violence, hunting and fishing, livestock and war. And lots of it is great art, but how can you separate the content and form in the mono-manic celebration of power?

Manfredi Beninati occupies the space behind this hoarding with two glazed apertures for looking in to some messy world of the artists making. It reminds me of living with teenagers. Cool!

Next along the street we find Number 5. by Atelier Bow-Wow and their installation Rockscape, dedicated, apparently "to the practice of lively space". Good for them, in creating a space with the potential of some use value rather than having just another empty urban plot. What happens when I am not here? At the weekend there are performances promised. I'll try and catch up with some.

Yoko Ono and her project Liverpool Skyladders is Number 6. Installed in what everyone I know calls the "bombed out church" (St. Luke's Church is a much loved Liverpool landmark and the site of some amazing work in recent years) is her intervention. Installation-intervention, intervention-installation, but what is great is having access to inside this ruin. Curiosity is good! There, I have said it!



Next it is down Wood Street to Liverpool FACT, Number 7. Is this where I must capture the creator of Alphaville, Professor Von Braun? The artists here are working to destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60 from within. Then past the Open Eye Gallery, Number 8. Nancy Davenport has a work called Workers (leaving the factory) on show here that suggests that there might be a view of social realities and industrial production, but, hey, is this the next cultural stage in our Alphaville? The aestheticization of industry in the context of the fetishization of production itself, rendering people as neither actors or producers?

Number 9. at the Bluecoat, our home from home.

Then a longer trek to Number 10. Web of Light by Ai Weiwei (as previously discussed in our post 05.10.08). So, down to Church Street, where the finishing off process of the installation of retail spaces creates a theatre of production more surreal, and not interesting to journalists, so I have to take pictures. Signs, semiotics and arrows pointing to the sky, the way ahead. An advert inviting us to buy art from local artists! Exchange Flags is occupied! Fencing cuts across the space. The sculptured figures of people in chains forms a dark silhouette against the bright stonework of these offices. The spider twinkles (what is it about spiders and spectacle these days?). Heading down now to the Tate on Albert Dock, but past the old Martins Bank building where there is another Liverpool Independents installation. A great opportunity to see the once sumptuous surroundings that exude power, wealth, security and stability. We know better now. The art looks out of place. Reality is the untidy empty room next to the old public concourse.

"Keep on trucking" as Mr Natural used to say.

Posted by Philip Courtenay

E-Space @ Bluecoat Arts Liverpool & Shanghai 5th October 2008

You wrote
When in 1973 Joseph Beuys wrote:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Was he right? Or mistranslated?
Was he proposing rather than announcing?"


I think many have held out the hope of this possibility, I recollect Marcuse also espoused this as the only hope for our future. In truth I think it requires such a tremendous shift in consciousness that few will attempt to realise the potential of " EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST". For most of the world daily life is a struggle, and here I refer not to the privileged minority of europeans and the americas, but to the vast majority of the earth's population (which includes the other four legged animals as well I guess:) for whom the concern remains one of daily survival.

I have noticed in recent writings about the current upheavals and soon to be devastating outcome of the decadent economic life of the privileged minority articles such as "The Rules Are Set in Stone For the Rabble" (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21080.htm) which make the case for a "return" to a simpler way of living, but nowhere in this short essay does the word "art" appear. I'm afraid that art in the sense that Beuys refers to is a minority concern. Respect to Beuys but this idea of art is a legacy concept, more germane to the lives of the privileged people is the explosion of "popular art" which started sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century and has now come to dominate our cultural landscape. But again the production of this work (novels, song, music, photography, film and latterly TV, video etc) is still a minority activity - but the consumption of this popular art is massive, it's hallmark is one of consumption not creation.

The work that appears in the International Bienfests shares little intellectually or aesthetically with the concerns of popular art (except perhaps big budgets and the wealth accrued by the "big stars"). However I'm not sure this separation in values was always the case? While some of the so called "high arts" eg. opera, have some real difficulties associated with their appreciation by a lay audience and consequently the appreciative audience is small, with regard to most of the history of artistic production - the great canon of "old artists" (usually dead), there is massive appreciation albeit largely based on craft skills but also a perceived understanding of the philosophical "life"(aesthetic) lived by the artist and described in their art. This "life" is I think what Philip was referring to as [possibly]"missing" from contemporary art. In consequence we have an industry (yes that's what they call it) given to producing cultural artefacts which have little meaning to the majority of even the most privileged observers. Increasingly losing it's audience and in an attempt to retain their economic hegemony the artists and their agents increasingly turn to shock, massiveness and extravagance, in work which is all surface - more like a fairground side show than an art of content and contemplation. Distinguish also the modern artist's mindset from their predecessors, whose mantra "epater les bourgeois" - has today been replaced by "it's the economy stupid" perhaps a society get's the art it deserves?

I would be the first to recognise that it's a difficult line for any artist to walk, having to choose between a commitment to art/craft/history and the contemporary alternative of shock product marketing. The former - what I think Beuys was referring to, a "life aesthetic" is beyond being taught nobody can explain. it, at best it can only be seen in the work of the artists who have gone before us, far easier for the cadre of contemporary artists manque is to service a "cultural industry" ( a pejorative term) of curators, and aesthetically inclined civil servants all funded by large budgets, salaries and pensions. While most of the artists receive scant financial remuneration this beurocratic class of arts administrators carve out a nice living for themselves while creating the new hegemony of modern art.

Today there is too much money involved in this trade for any "avant garde" art movement to create a revolutionary new wave, at best it will be local, but that is good enough for me; as Lao Tzu said - and I paraphrase the sage "when we hear the bell in another village we should ignore it"



Peter Hagerty
arklo.com
Liverpool

Journey in the cities 5th Oct 08

It was great to meet Jam, Lam and Irina and to catch up with Shaw in the am space. Well done to Jam and Lam for setting up such an exciting space. Thank you Shaw for the introductions.

Having attempted to view the Shanghai Biennale via their website Hangfeng’s interesting question as to why the Biennial in Liverpool chose venues that were public spaces (does the audience appreciate those venues?), made me wonder why the Shanghai Biennale curators had placed the artist’s work inside of the institution (and the grounds of the institution – the train) when the curators were proposing that an examination of Peoples Square was a means to engage with “translocalmotion”. There is always the most interesting gap between a curator’s intention and that of the artist’s.
Shaw’s recording of a number of videos in the Biennale did show that a performance had taken place in the square, the live event would have had a different audience than the video in the exhibition, the performance being relatively unmediated by either the medium or institution.
As a practitioner I am more interested in making work that intervenes in the public realm (www.teaweb.org) and I was intrigued by the Shanghai Biennale question “can cities make our lives better?” I assumed that the artists selected for the Biennale were to interrogate this question through their work. Which probably leads to the question raised by Philip “does art make our lives better?” If art is put in the city does it automatically make the city a better place to be?

After the live link on October 5th, Jay Yung and I took a walk through Liverpool to visit two of the more “public” spaces where Biennial projects were being presented.



Above is the warehouse in Sparling Street, this is an industrial warehouse being used by the Bienniel, it is in a few streets between the Dock Rd. and the massive Liverpool 1 regeneration site. Inside the first piece was "Carousel - The task of being in the right place at the right time"



After walking through this piece in the next room was work by Tomas Saraceno "Air-Port-City"



At the end of the room there was a queue of people waiting to enter Yayoi Kusama's "Gleaming Light of the Souls", a white cube with the door hidden around the back. Jay and I joined the queue. The image below shows the interior of the work.



We left the warehouse and walked along the Dock Road to the Albert Dock and saw a performance by Ben Parry and Jaques ? A traditional narrow boat transformed into a fountain.



An interesting journey through the city and the artworks, a journey directed by the artworks and immensely enjoyable. The artworks were available to passersby and to the art seekers, there were elements of entertainment and serious questions being asked by the artists. There was a different "feel" to the work in the warehouse compared to the major institutions, the Tate and the Bluecoat. The work was immersive, it was material, it wasn't suffocated by the institution.

Peter Hatton

Perfect Intervention

I accidentally saw 2 kids were playing shadow games in front of the artwork from the Shanghai Biennial, which was a slide projection, and their parents were taking photos. I thought this was such a perfect intervention!

- Hangfeng

Can not see the video below, please click the link

You say biennial, I say biennale!

Below, is a photo of Sean Halligan (on left) and Philip Courtenay, stepping out of the Bluecoat on Sunday 5th October 2008 after the Jay Yung Show.



What's it all about art world?

Philip Courtenay writes:

At the moment I am thinking about the audience for art, and obviously in relation to the Liverpool Biennial, and the current context of Liverpool being the European Capital of Culture in 2008. Hanfeng asked us all some questions at the outset of this project, including:

What's the visitors reaction towards the Biennial?

The audience of art is potentially everyone who sees the art (a bit like Beuys' idea that potentially every human being is capable of becoming an artist), but it is the human beings who see the art, and also understand the art, they are the public for that art! It might be just one other person, but that is not just OK, it is fantastic. If millions understand then that is good as well, and maybe better? The term "public" needs a bit of space for thought as well, as it is a term that can be used in contradictory and confusing ways!

Below you can see a videowork by Shaw showing the lines of people waiting to enter the Shanghai Art Museum to see the 7th Shanghai Biennale.

Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds

Philip Courtenay writes:

Working collaboratively, thinking collaboratively, translating and exploring, is fun! But, so far, it just seems to be me jotting stuff down on the blog. Anyone interested in adding stuff just e-mail me and I can give you details for editing this blog.

Barnett Newman (Abstract Expressionist, New York School) provides the quotation that titles this post. Interpreting this idea could, but not exclusively, include the following:

• Is this statement about the qualitative difference between the knowledge, awareness or awakeness, produced in a process of making art, as distinct from the reproduction and consumption of art?
• Has the reception of art, the experience of the audience of art, punters and experts alike, been drowned out by the accompanying noise of the "consciousness" industries (as discussed by Hans Haacke and others involved in Institutional Critique all those years ago) to an extent where it is sleepfulness that now reigns supreme?

In exhibitions of artworks, like the Biennial at the Liverpool Tate at the moment, I often experience a profound sense of emptiness, and this feeling is amplified by a sense of aloneness whilst walking through the galleries. Glimpses of the River Mersey from the few windows on this the top floor are a reminder of a beautiful world "out there". I then go "looking for the artists" , obviously as a mental quest, and even though the work is there, and the artists are not, the context that I need to find them seems to have been blown away by all this "noise" or "whiteness" (white noise?) . How to search for and find what is missing? Why am I looking and not finding?

The Wikipedia page on aesthetics includes the following questions:

• What is the value of art?
• Is art a means of gaining knowledge of some special kind?
• Does it give insight into the human condition?
• Is art perhaps a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation?
• Does art make us more moral?
• Can it uplift us spiritually?
• Is art perhaps politics by other means?
• Is there some value to sharing or expressing emotions?
• Might the value of art for the artist be quite different from its value for the audience?

Considering this last question I wonder; can this difference be bridged? Is it worth bridging? Is there a way in art, a style of art that is about bridging? Bridge building is a job for engineers, but is art, the process of making art, potentially a part of a wider engineering of the communication structure that shapes our experience of the world?

When in 1973 Joseph Beuys wrote:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Was he right? Or mistranslated?
Was he proposing rather than announcing?

Conversation

Philip Courtenay writes:

Today I had a great conversation with Hangfeng.

We were catching up with ourselves after the weekend, reflecting on some of the topics of conversation. Hangfeng had heard how fascinating the discussion had been on Sunday, especially the discussion between the am space group and Jay Yung. Topics for us could include:

• wondering about the function of the spectacular type of art, in both the Biennial, Biennale and Liverpool '08 context.
• talking about working through process in a context where the fact of 'art as object' still seems to have a status that overides the value of 'things happening'.
• valuing collaborative processes.
• wondering about 'international art'! Is it international, or in fact, art world parochial?
• connections between people in different locations may be international, but they are also local.
• How are we going to make a different art for the e-space lab international?

What do you think?

Hangfeng speaks such good English. I feel embarrassed at my lack of a reciprocity in the language department. He speaks English in his everyday life as a matter of course, and this suggests a cultural environment of the exchange of concepts, and the interpretation of ideas that I do not have access to here in the UK. Translation as a process will always produce new consciousness, the discovery of other ways of thinking. My best hope is that visual material can contribute to communications in a non verbal, but nevertheless in a linguistic way. Connectedness in meaning is an ambition that continues to have appeal, along with the idea that at some points along the journey I can stir myself awake through the struggle.

We love the support we are getting from the Bluecoat and everyone involved in Shanghai and for those of us on the UK side I think it is worth pointing to something Hangfeng said in passing about the fact that in China there is no equivalent as yet to public institutions like the Arts Council in England supporting the arts and artists. There are issues to explore in this territory. I would like to suggest a project dedicated to Jin Shan and Hangfeng called "we still gonna do it too, plan still on..."

We were talking about songbirds in birdcages, and songbirds that fly away. The green ring necked parakeets of Esher in southwest London. The parrot as the proof that there are miracles (see green ring necked parakeet in picture by Jan Van Eyck). The sounds of the city and laughter as a sound. The richness in these topics will come through in the art we make. Of this I am convinced.

Hangfeng is going to take some video for me of the people in Shanghai who take their songbirds in cages to the park which are then placed near other caged songbirds, so they can sing together.

Ideas swimming like fish in a pool

This photo by the artist Sean Halligan was made during our discusion on the morning of 5th October 2008 using a pinhole camera.


So much stimulation from the weekend connections and conversations. Such an exciting beginning!

Philip Courtenay writes:

Sean sent us this fantastic image from our event on Sunday.

We have lots to think about now

Letting some of the ideas generated whizz around in front of our eyes is what is going on right now, and getting mixed in with our everyday lives. It is a good feeling!

Philip Courtenay writes:

Jay Yung had an amazing discussion with Irina, Shaw, Lam and Jam in the am space, that went on for hours. Part of these hours were documented beautifully by Sean, using his pinhole camera technology. "Low tech" said Shaw, but with that magic that comes out of slow culture, time itself being recorded, and planned with an exposure rating for the way things were, grey! But then sunshine floods in to the space in the Bluecoat hub, sunshine that brightens a Shanghai evening with Jay as our lodestar.

The discussion continues

Today we are continuing our discussions and making plans for the creation of new work.

Philip Courtenay writes:

We posted an image of the work commisioned by Liverpool Biennial International 08 from Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. It is called Web of Light, and is placed in the Liverpool city square known as Exchange Flags (I always get confused by this placename, as it sounds more like an order!). In daylight you can see the engineering. At night you see the work as an illumination hanging in space. It is one of the spectacular works for Biennial. Bryan was wondering if the am space group looked to artists like Ai Weiwei as a role model. They, in turn, wondered why they hadn't seen much of his work for a while.

The work is large scale, in a large scale urban setting, right by Liverpool Town Hall. Untangling the impact of scale from the first impression is difficult. Production values have a public meaning. Is the primary function to dazzle, despite the merits of the individual work involved? Is dazzle diversion? Looking at something big usually makes me feel small, which could be good in some ways, but I also feel left out of this game! I compare this feeling with the inspiration that came from seeing a small cardboard construction in the Picasso Museum in Paris, and realizing how fantastic it was to see how such ordinary (poor) materials could be a part of the making of an artwork rich in its making and in its transformative potential for me and anyone else who cares about such stuff.

There is a work here in the Bluecoat by Sarah Sze that provokes similar thoughts and feelings.


e-space international in Liverpool and Shanghai

Today we are beginning our live video links.

Philip Courtenay writes:

Wow! What an exciting beginning. All of you in Shanghai, Shaw and co in the am space were just so full of energy and engagement with the questions that the e-space lab international is exploring. Hangfeng says things about the Shanghai Biennale that Peter Hagerty and I were just saying to each other. It sounds like the scale of some of the artworks in the Shanghai Biennale seems to drown out the smaller voices of artworks that deal with the really valid issues. Can marginalization occur, even within a big international art show?

So the younger group strongly value the fact and scale of a large scale international art show. It re-affirms the attitude of an outward looking Shanghai and an outward looking China, something that brings a benefit to everyone in China. Translocalmotion has been embraced by many tourists and citizens of Shanghai in the wake of the Olympics, and the lines of people waiting to enter the Art Museum wind around the building and the park. What are the works that ordinary people take pictures of? The Train! The Running Dinosaurs! Spectacle!

Hangfeng and I talk about the value of international misunderstandings between people and how such misunderstandings can, brilliantly, lead to the creation of new ideas. I ask Hangfeng if in Shanghai people take their songbirds from home to somewhere in the city where the songbirds can sing together in their individual cages, and he tells me that people do, and that they take them to the park. I say that this could be a model for another kind of art show, where different art is brought together so that the artworks can sing together and to each other. Later on, after the end of the link-up Peter Hagerty and I wonder if the caged songbird is an image that has a profound and analagous affinity to the plight of creative people everywhere we look.