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