Mike Pinnington reflects on the prolific Supermodernist architect who attempted to achieve the unimaginable: creating convention-defying spaces for climbing, reclining and sliding…

By the time he was approaching his 40s, the architect Claude Parent, who died on Saturday aged 93, had spent time at Le Corbusier’s studio and was becoming commercially successful in his own right. With a number of key commissions already to his name, notably artist André Bloc’s house (essentially a modernist arrangement of elegantly stacked boxes), Parent had demonstrated a flair for creating statement architecture; but, with what you could say was his eureka moment, his work was about to take on more radical proportions.

The writer and philosopher Paul Virilio mentioned to him Second World War bunkers, built by the German forces along the Atlantic Wall on a French beach, which had sunk into the ground and become lop-sided, sloping unnaturally. Parent visited the bunkers himself and from then on he rarely looked at, or imagined, architecture in quite the same way. His buildings began to incorporate inclines and slopes where none traditionally should or would be found. To say his work was beginning to defy the conventions of his craft is to put it mildly.

Rather than this resulting in his alienation from his peers and commissions drying up, what might sound to some like flights of fancy started to be found in Parent-designed homes, in industry, and even churches – there was and is a point in there; a method to what appears Parent’s madness.

He and Virilio, having decided that conventions of architecture – straight walls, flat surfaces, working with cubes and rectangles in an accepted fashion – no longer applied to them, founded Fonction Oblique. An architectural principle dominated by slopes and designed to suit the modernist world, it spawned the Architecture Principe manifesto.

But why these unusual inclines and gradients? What was it about them that so captivated Parent, who believed that post-war living necessitated a change from that which had sufficed down the centuries? Ultimately, it was about architecture’s potential to change our understanding and experience of the lived environment and relationship dynamics: speaking in 2010 to 032C magazine (who called him “the last Parisian Supermodernist”), he explained that:

“We’re completely overfurnished. What would it be like on the other hand, if space were understood more playfully, more free, if movement and being in a space also could mean climbing, reclining, sliding?”

For him, it was about changing the dynamic by which we relate with lived environments, other people and the wider world. Or as he put it: “Architecture becomes the medium for staging human relationships.”

In 2014, he was commissioned for Liverpool Biennial, and Parent applied the principles of Fonction Oblique to Tate Liverpool, changing the museum’s Wolfson Gallery into a ‘machine for viewing’ artworks selected from Tate’s collection. The slanted floors and ramps reconfigured the space, providing the audience with an opportunity to experience the gallery anew. His ripping up of the rule book was reflected strongly in works chosen to populate the space: Francis Picabia’s The Fig Leaf (1922), and work by Gustav Metzger, Naum Gabo, Paul Nash and Kurt Schwitters, among others, while his own visionary, often utopian, architectural drawings were selected to appear elsewhere in the gallery. His new vision for the space proved so successful that it was retained beyond the usual three month exhibition run.

His new realisation for the space at Tate Liverpool successfully translated modernism and a particular kind of abstraction in to the gallery, radically revisioning its aesthetic but, more crucially still, impacting on interactions within the space. He had truly delivered on his idea for installing a “machine for viewing” artworks differently, that previously might have seemed impossible, or even unimaginable.

Claude Parent, born 26 February 1923, died 27 February 2016, aged 93

Mike Pinnington

A version of this article appeared originally in Tate Liverpool’s new seasonal publication Compass. Available for £1, exclusively at Tate Liverpool, it features articles and essays exploring exhibitions on each floor of the gallery. Find out more information about Compass here

Read about Claude Parent’s reworking of Tate Liverpool’s ground floor gallery space into a playful mix of expressionistic ramps and ’60s sci-fi set: Biennial 2014: The Space In Between

We may not have a glitzy ceremony, but we do have an esteemed panel of judges. All year, our critics have been travelling the length and breadth of Britain, witnessing the best contemporary (and classic) culture on offer. Editor Laura Robertson asked them to name their winners of 2014: who will make the cut?

How to choose the best experiences from an entire 12 months? Looking back through the seemingly endless TDN archives, it struck me how much we’ve actually accomplished this year and how fantastic the standard of writing is from our growing team. One major highlight for me were 2014′s Big Interviews, including artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, a giant in the field of colour technology who’s no less feisty at 91 years of age, and David Bowie collaborator and ‘design provocateur’ Jonathan Barnbrook, in equal parts funny and searingly honest.

Over 2014, we said goodbye to H.R Giger and Tommy Ramone; we argued over whether Liverpool Biennial was political enough; we queued to see Martin Creed, Piet Mondrian and Anselm Kiefer. We dodged lobsters flying through the air, shivered in ice galleries and investigated the photography of Congolese slavery. We travelled to New Delhi, Skärhamn, Edinburgh, Pittsburgh, Paris and London. Some of us even voted for Scottish Independence.

Overall, it’s been an incredible year. I’d like to thank everyone who has supported us since our inception in December 2011, making The Double Negative a continuing, vital source of arts criticism and cultural commentary. And, for me, a pleasure to read.

SO NOW, THE AWARDS…

WINNER: BEST FILM

Nightcrawler

Nominated by Jack Roe

Quite simply, Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler is an excellent film. A film that comments on contemporary society and the media that fuels it, which provokes and even demands a reaction without relying on tired, romanticized perspectives and cliches. Come awards season Jake Gyllenhaal (above) will, rightly, receive plenty of attention for his haunting portrayal of Lou Bloom; but the power of this film was instilled by Gilroy’s fantastic, jet-black and subtly satirical script, and an approach to direction that leaves the viewer firmly detached from emotional attachment, allowing the themes and action to speak for itself.

WINNER: BEST ARTS FESTIVAL 

DaDaFest

Nominated by Jade French 

Disability art has been described as the last remaining avant garde movement. Not just through its intention to challenge social inequalities, but by forcing us to question our understanding of what it is to be an artist. This year’s DaDaFest exhibition, Art of the Lived Experiment, did exactly that and more. It showcased artists exploring the idea of how a disabling society cause disabled people to constantly change and adapt to the world, and in other words, to live life experimentally. What struck me most about Art of the Lived Experiment was DaDaFest’s intriguing transformation; from work simply by and for disabled artists, to artworks broadly exploring the experience of disability. This was reflected in that DaDaFest commissioned more non-disabled artists than ever before — a daring move but one which I believe paid off. I have no doubt this produced a more solid exhibition and has attracted bigger audiences.

As well as broadening the curatorial theme, DaDaFest also diversified its programme by the addition of an international conference exploring ‘art as a tool for social change’. Loaded with fierce debate and passion, it was truly engaging and a roaring success.

Art of the Lived Experiment couldn’t have come at a better time. With many disabled people in this country experiencing the most harsh austerity measures in recent history (look no further than the demise of the Independent Living Fund), DaDaFest 2014 through its exhibitions, performances and conference platformed important social issues, urging audiences to ask a vital question; is art a human right?

WINNER: BEST APP

npr Music’s Songs We Love 2014

Nominated by Stuart Burns

Perhaps it’s a bit meta to suggest that a website designed to gather together a radio station’s favourite music of the year should be included in a review of the year. But since it was published near the beginning of December it’s all I’ve been listening to. National Public Radio is the US equivalent of the BBC (indeed it often features the BBC’s news correspondents in reports) and this year, as well as presenting the experts and presenter’s choices, they’ve created a browser app which allows visitors to listen to the tracks, all 302 of them, randomly and for free, with short reviews by those experts and presenters justifying their choices with links to various shops and Spotify just in case we like what we hear.

The experience is the online equivalent of dawdling in a very good independent record shop and listening to whatever choices the experts behind the counter are making; a constant stream of weaponised delight and surprise. Og Maco’s vocabulary and musically challenged U Guessed It isn’t really my sort of thing, but TV On The Radio’s electronic wall of sound Seeds comes quickly on and after that Sam Hunt’s good natured House Party. Taylor Swift’s here too with two songs (you can guess which ones). With so many tracks to listen to, I haven’t reached the end yet, and I’m using the limited number of skips sparingly so I don’t know if this is a limited engagement. Until then, I’ll keep opening this page and pressing play.

Ooh, Leonard Cohen!

WINNER: BEST ART FAIR EXHIBITION

The Collector: Helly Nahmad Gallery at Frieze Masters, London 

SPECIAL MENTION: Giant Spectacular, Africa Oyé, LIMF, Liverpool Biennial

Nominated by Peter Goodbody

My pick for 2014 is going to Helly Nahmad Gallery’s exhibition at Frieze Masters in London. Called The Collector, it was an installation of an imaginary apartment in Paris dating from the late ’60s. There were Miros and Picassos on the walls. There was a Giacometti sculpture on a coffee table. There were piles of newspapers, books and magazines covering just about every available surface. There was a B&W TV playing in the corner of the bedroom, and the bed hadn’t been properly made. There was the general accumulation of stuff that most of us collect over time. It was a snapshot of a day in The Collector’s life, although he wasn’t there and we knew nothing about him nor where he had gone that day. Except we did know about him; here was his life, style, likes and taste all laid out in front of us to be picked over and wondered about. It was a portrait of a person with no person present. It was genius and I loved it.

In my hometown of Liverpool, there were also many highlights: the Giants were spectacular, Africa Oyé was typically good and Liverpool International Music Festival (LIMF) really appeared to have come of age. The Biennial, too, had its moments of brilliance; the Dazzle Ship and Claude Parent at Tate Liverpool were inspired.

JOINT WINNERS: BEST PERFORMANCE

Clifford Owens/Ira Brand

SPECIAL MENTION: Tate Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery

Nominated by C. James Fagan

Starting with Clifford Owens: Better the Rebel You Know at Cornerhouse, Manchester, an honestly exciting and involving way of presenting performance work. Staying in Manchester and with performance, another highlight was Ira Brand’s delicate and poetic mediation on growing old that was A Cure for Aging (at Word of Warning, Z-arts).

Tate Liverpool also had an impact by presenting the work of Piet Mondrian, highlighting the relevance of the artist to a contemporary world. Plus they brought the beautiful work of Indian modernist Nasreen Mohamedi to my attention.

Finally, I’d like to mention that over the year Open Eye Gallery has curated a number of strong exhibitions that have approached the nature of photography from a totally different perspective. Maybe starting the year with one of my art crushes Gordon Matta-Clark may have swayed me, but they have had a very successful year.

WINNER: BEST EXHIBITING ARTIST

Phyllida Barlow

SPECIAL MENTION: Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, Penny Davenport, Hockney, Serial

Nominated by Linda Pittwood

This is hard! Pleasingly, there have been a lot of highs. This list isn’t even exhaustive…  My favourite exhibition(s) of the year has to be Phyllida Barlow’s more-or-less concurrent solo presentations at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and Saville Row, and at Tate Britain. Her drawings and sculptures have a joyous soul.

Other shows that I loved were Ming: 50 Years that Changed China at the British Museum – simply because I can’t see enough Chinese scrolls — and a show that couldn’t be more different: Penny Davenport at the Galley, Liverpool. I interviewed Penny and between her work and her words my mind went off in lots of fascinating, dark, intriguing directions.

In the cinema, I found Randall Wright’s film Hockney nothing new, but it was an enjoyable opportunity to revisit an artist whose work I know well, with an added (and very-funny) live broadcast of Hockney speaking from his home in LA at the end. And lastly, I’ve just got into the podcast Serial, which is essentially a long-form audio whodunit, really sensitively and cleanly delivered by Sarah Köenig.

WINNER: BEST RETROSPECTIVE

Hannah Höch

SPECIAL MENTION: Trade Gallery, Poor But Sexy

Nominated by Wayne Burrows

If one exhibition this year had to be singled out, it would be Hannah Höch’s retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery. If there were initial worries that the tidy institutional display somewhat compromised the subversive energies of Hoch’s best-known Dada period, these were allayed by the expanded sense of her achievement made clear by the longer view offered by the substantial showing of later works, ranging from the post-war abstraction of the 1950s and ’60s to the Pop-inflected landscapes of the early 1970s.

Trade Gallery in Nottingham had a good 2014, too, with a selection of Rachel Maclean’s toxic sugar-rush videos gathered to good effect in in Quick, Child, Run! and Mimei Thompson’s hallucinatory still-life paintings among the highlights of a strong programme that ended, hopefully only temporarily, this month.

In a year that saw innumerable cliches about the former Eastern Bloc repeated to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was refreshing to read Agata Pyzik’s Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books), a personal re-evaluation of the things lost in that transition, written by a Polish woman born just before the seismic change. Revisiting post-punk’s obsession with trans-European trains, Soviet concrete and Constructivism, Pyzik highlights how the East’s dreams of the West were not a one-sided transaction, and explores the many ways in which in which ’80s Britain and ’70s New York were less distinct from the realities of ‘actually existing Socialism’ than is generally assumed. It’s scattershot, partial and digressive, but endlessly fascinating stuff.

WINNER: BEST ACTOR

Matthew McConaughey

WINNER: BEST NOVELIST

George Saunders

Nominated by Joshua Potts

What a year it’s been for the former mahogany pin-up Matthew McConaughey. Bagging an Oscar for Dallas Buyer’s Club was a mighty feat, considering the competition – Chiwetel Ejifor and an increasingly scruffy DiCaprio headed better films, but none could match McConaughey’s ascendancy as the definitive Method Man of our time. He’s got a real darkness to him, his Texan drawl practically dripping gravitas; basically the anti-Christopher Walken, who always got by on the art of overplaying his vocal ticks to the point of self-parody. Yes, Day-Lewis might still beat him for sheer commitment (if we can believe he did make people call him ‘Mr President’ on the Lincoln set), yet McConaughey has become box-office plutonium, managing to keep the critical advocacy that’s followed his success with equal amounts of hosannas and disbelief.

Interstellar showed the family man beneath his inspired run of anti-hero personas. Not even a wormhole could warp the connection we feel to a father watching his daughter grow up on a computer screen. The ace in the hole, though, was HBO’s True Detective. As Rust Cole, the actor completely embodied one of the most nihilistic characters in recent memory, which is saying hell of a lot these days. If time is indeed a flat circle, then long may the McConaissance fight for the whiplash of the unexpected, knocking the dials of a career in its prime.

Absurdity and tragedy are natural bedfellows in George Saunders’ bizarre portrayals of capitalism run amok. Nothing in our modern condition escapes him. Theme parks are arenas of professional suicide; families struggle to do the best thing under the worst circumstances; a boy rescues a man with Alzheimer’s; beating the fear of one’s moment of definition, and of seeing your life through another’s eyes. His short fiction is some of the greatest literary catnip to come out of America in the last decade. Superlatives are frankly a waste of type space. Just know that his latest collection, Tenth of December, lives up to and surpasses expectations, dissecting a climate of raging humanity and individualism in a way that leaves hope for the Little Guy at the bottom rung of the ladder. 2014 has seen a nascent alignment with Karen Russell, a Saunders protégée, come to the fore. The two of them could whip their country into shape faster than Obama drinks his morning coffee. Despite their inimitable style and narrative control, Saunders’ stories remind us of the power of the imagination above all else, never failing to take the reader by the throat. If you haven’t jumped on the band wagon, do so immediately.

WINNER: BEST NEW GALLERY

MODEL Liverpool 

Nominated by Heather Garner

This year saw Liverpool Biennial return for a multitude of art, performance and pedagogical events that enliven the city with healthy (and often heated) debate. But this year, amidst the Biennial hype, one collective stood out and apart from the crowd and for this reason deserves nominating.

MODEL Liverpool, the temporary art space set up through their own initiative by artists Fran Disley, Kevin Hunt and Dave Evans, provided an experimental and artist-led exhibition space that, in my opinion, rivalled some of Liverpool’s more established galleries in their inventiveness. Not to mention their mentoring of up and coming arts graduates through sessions that intended to give those in need of advice, inspiration, support and experience the all-important kick from behind.

As a recent Fine Art graduate, it can sometimes feel that the larger institutions dominate the creative industries and the DIY spirit has begun to dwindle, but MODEL has proved that all is not lost for the independent spirit.

WINNER: BEST NOVEL

W.G. Sebald’s The Rings Of Saturn 

Nominated by Adam Scovell

No, he isn’t a new name, and this isn’t a new novel, but Sebald floated across my pathway several times before I actually sat down and devoured a whole chunk of his work earlier this year, specifically diving headlong into The Rings Of Saturn (1995). The idea that a walk within a perfectly harmless landscape can be the groundwork to branch into such topics as the slave trade, Thomas Browne and the holocaust, is such a simple one, but also one that is extremely difficult to get right without falling into the offensively tawdry. Sebald, of course, balances the subjects with ease and his work is an absolute highpoint for almost any type of writing; his is a product that can fall quite easily into academia, prose, journalism etc.

This also lead to discovering Grant Gee’s beautiful film about the book, Patience (Waiting For Sebald) (2012) which is itself a visual palette of ideas and yet another highpoint of what is possible when using film to make images and discerning more from the landscape than simply what is on its surface.  Considering the sheer bombardment of the more urbane obsessions of inner city creativity that often lurched into the blandly abstract, especially locally, Sebald’s writing and rural misanthropy was a much needed breath of fresh air and a real life-saver this year.

And last, but not least…

WINNER: BEST EMERGING CRITIC

C. James Fagan

Nominated by Laura Robertson

Chris Fagan has been a live art critic for The Double Negative for three years, and since then has provided unconventional and entertaining personal reflections on a wide variety of art and performance, that also manage to be consistently considered and eloquent. Thank you Chris for always being honest, balanced, and for your particular knack of taking the reader along on the (occasionally hair-raising) ride, arm-in-arm. Long may you brandish the pen!

So that’s it! From all at The Double Negative, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a brilliant New Year.

See you in 2015! x

Laura Harris argues that Liverpool Biennial is unengaged with a political present — missing an opportunity to explore radical political alternatives and encourage dialogue between isolated communities…

It is a sad and much-discussed truth that contemporary arts institutions are suffering devastating funding cuts and staff losses right now. You need look no further than the ongoing difficulties facing National Museums Liverpool to see this political reality played out.

Even the most vital community resources — libraries, children centres (see Zoe Pilger’s article Misery on the Mersey for The Independent) — are being closed as decreasing public spending and austerity measures are seen as a ‘necessary evil’ in the face of sustaining a competitive money market.

As such, galleries and museums are increasingly being forced to justify their existence, centralising their educative, community building and pedagogical role. This informs the agenda of many national institutions; Tate Liverpool even has a Research Centre dedicated to answering questions concerning emancipatory potential (‘How can the museum develop empowered individuals, with increased historical consciousness… through engagement with art and artists?’).

Increasing historical consciousness as a method by which to empower individuals similarly informs some of the most widely seen exhibitions in the UK of the past year. From Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences to Jeremy Deller’s All That is Solid Melts into Air, a recent trend in the contemporary national art scene has involved an engagement with cultural and community histories; the political (class) overtones are unavoidable.

By being a site for the communal exploration of a shared history, the gallery or museum can place itself at the crux of a resistance to an alienated and culturally isolated community. But, if this is the role the contemporary gallery has found for itself, what does this mean for the contemporary biennial?

The biennial format varies in its political significance. The Venice Biennale, for example, is often proposed to be outdated, relying as it does on national distinctions. However, biennials have often been sites to explore radical political alternatives. Of particular importance to this history is Documenta V (1972), which saw German artist Joseph Beuys install Informationsbüro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung (Information Office of the Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum) and proceed to engage in a 100-day-long conversation with visitors. This was an attempt to encourage inter-subjective participation; an exploration of art as it comes into ‘conflict with society and its developments.’

More recently, Mai Abu ElDahab curated Manifesta 6 (2006) for the Cypriot capital of Nicosia, which was sadly unrealised due to serious political and funding issues. This was a re-imagining of the biennial as an art school, an attempt to encourage dialogues and facilitate discussions between isolated peoples.

This year, Nicolas Bourriaud is undertaking the curation of the Taipei Biennial. Bourriaud, champion of ‘relational aesthetics’, is setting out to explore human relationships with animals, the world and one another. Each of these biennials explores and exposes the way in which an arts festival can be a site of political action, an exploration of participatory alternatives that can develop and empower.

So what happened to this year’s Liverpool Biennial? With ElDahab at the helm as co-curator, many had hoped for an overtly political curatorial gesture with echoes of Manifesta 6. Whether or not Liverpool Biennial should, in fact, be overtly political has been the overarching critical fall-out of the exhibition (see also Richard Whitby on Peter Wächtler and Jackie Wullschlager for the Financial Times). Naturally, in a city with a history riddled with social struggle and inequality such as Liverpool, it may seem that to ignore socio-political identity is an oversight.

Against a backdrop of cuts and arts job losses, the need for curatorial politics is perceivably augmented. Moreover, I believe that the choice of The Old Blind School as the main festival venue — an explicitly politicised, evocative space, set up by philanthropist Edward Rushton and more recently used as a Trade Union headquarters – is a promise of a politics that is traitorously unfulfilled. In choosing The Old Blind School, and failing to develop a social and historical narrative, an unspoken politics goes so resolutely ignored as to be offensive.

The site’s exhibition, A Needle Walks Into a Haystack, declares itself to be about our habits and habitats. Incorporated in the theme is an engagement with spaces and their significance; yet a deconstruction of the contextual history of the building is palpable in its absence. Instead of confronting this history in a socio-politically engaged manner, the show confronts us with impenetrable works coupled with impenetrable texts; we must rely on the pretentious copy of the programme as our interpreter (including highlighting that funding support has come from the Israeli Embassy; controversial given the timing, and an issue that has failed to be adequately addressed in public by the organisation. It also, of course, leads onto further ethical debate about the private funding artists and arts organisations use to survive — see Liberate Tate).

As a Biennial that concerns itself with the relationship between ‘contemporary life and art’, works such as Chris Evan’s ring (main image) serve to entrench the notion that the two are increasingly polarised. The artist — who ‘deliberately confuses the roles of artist and patron’ — has made a hideously expensive ring in collaboration with Boodles, that sits in a vitrine to be watched over by a volunteer at all times. It is a monument to money, privilege on a pedestal. At best, this work is voyeuristic; at worst, it brings to the fore the social inequalities that bubble under the surface of this building and the festival at large. For me, it reflects a curatorial approach out-of-touch with the potentialities of the biennial format.

The Old Blind School site itself is a relic of a struggle that continues; a misused packhorse carrying the weight of vacuous rhetoric under the auspices of contemporary art. Once the Biennial has closed, the building is to become a boutique hotel and a restaurant with ‘Michelin aspirations’. This is gentrification worthy of the most ardent protest, and if ‘silence becomes a type of knowledge’ in the show, as claimed, the lack of protest from within the Biennial is certainly illuminating.

Peeling from a feature dome in the roof of the building is a mural from the space’s iteration as a Trade Union centre. Workers march together, fists in the air, to a backdrop of industry: a salient reminder of the lost art of protest. As visitors are herded around the Biennial, the mural flakes further and the true significance of the building flutters with it to the floor. The Old Blind School is offering us its own metaphor; as bit-by-bit, festival programme in hand, the people’s history is ignored, as habitats go ironically unchallenged.

It is not enough to rely on implicit politics. It is not enough to suggest a history and leave it unspoken. Unengaged with a political present and an important social history, the Liverpool Biennial fails a public and a city. It is a missed opportunity to explore radical political alternatives, and encourage dialogue between people who feel largely ignored.

Laura Harris

Liverpool Biennial continues until Sunday 26 October 2014

Interested in how UK arts organisations and the Arts Council view funding cuts? See also our recent feature: What FACT’s Staff Restructure Says About Working In The Arts

Main image courtesy Mark McNulty

Just who do artists make work for anyway? In an extension of his essay on visitor experience, Biennial 2014: The Space In Between, C James Fagan considers the impact of the white cube and whether it is dictating how art is made…

Lately, I’ve been questioning how we approach art; or rather, how artists expect us to approach art. Do artists think about how their work is seen and understood? 

It may seem a ridiculous question to ask, but it is an important one. Do they think about the people looking at and interacting with their art, and is it a major factor in the making of the work? This line of thought was prompted by the Sharon Lockhart Biennial exhibition I recently wrote about; whatever you think about the actual content of her show, it’s clear that she considers the space the work inhabits and has thought about how people interact with it. Other exhibitions I’ve visited in the recent past have presented a conceptual framework so dense and complete, it removed the need for me, as the viewer, to actually be there.

It makes me wonder if artists do think beyond the academic or material nature of their art; how the work, or works, act when they’re set loose amongst the public.

One key example is Castlefield Gallery’s last group exhibition, I Would Like To Join A Club And Hit Myself With It; a collaboration with Manchester Art Gallery to coincide with their much publicised Ryan Gander touring exhibition, Make Every Show Like It’s Your Last. At Castlefield, artists were asked to respond to Culturefield, Gander’s ‘imagined place with the perfect conditions for creativity’. One piece, called Structure For Reading Whilst Standing, by designer and curator Robert Carter, took the form of a chipboard frame with books by Barthes, Virilio and placed on it.

Well it does what it sets out to do, doesn’t it? A structure for reading, with things to read. As a viewer, I’m unsure how to approach this; as a whole, or its individual conceptual and physical elements. How is this different to the spaces in other galleries given over to collections of relevant texts or reading materials? Is it meant to be different?

Ultimately, I didn’t know how to interact with, or ‘read’, the piece. The same extended to most of the works in the show — it was as if the combination of the artists’ contextualisation and its placement within the gallery rendered my presence unnecessary. I spent much of my time clutching the interpretation which was printed on rice paper (because art speak is hard to swallow?); not for the first time, I felt like I was wandering around an illustrated essay. The work existed in some academic, alternative universe.

I was aware that as part of this exhibition there was an audio piece available – Lois Macdonald, Audio Tour #1 : Join the Club – comprised of artists’ conversations during the install that visitors could listen to on headphones around the gallery; but as I came with someone this time, it seemed a little rude to listen to something else.

It also appeared to compound my doubts about the work being produced for the gallery space. That the gallery space becomes the ultimate destination: the completion of the piece, its only goal. It’s a difficult phenomenon to prove, but there is something in the fact that artists create content that becomes the context of the white walled space, which can lead, inadvertently perhaps, to an insular system.

Leaving visitors, like myself, outside of this system, unable to interact or to engage.

I’m pretty sure my interest in the way people experience art stems from studying a thing called ‘Spatial Design’, or Interior Architecture, at university. This involved spending a lot of time imagining how people would interact with the representations of spaces being sketched out on my drawing board.

How does this relate to art? Well, it occurs to me that the predominant form that art galleries have taken since the age of Modernism has been the White Cube. A space for art to exist in a space akin to a vacuum. The idea being that you, the viewer, will enter a meditative void where you can contemplate, absolutely and without distraction, the work before you.

Nothing wrong with that, but I have begun to wonder whether artists, subconsciously or not, have begun to create work which fits into this imagined void; making work which can be activated by being placed within this emptiness, in order to throw whatever concepts and meanings attached to these creations into sharp focus. Does this meditative, negative space actually exist? Do artists and viewers carry expectations regarding what galleries should be?

Thinking about my experience at Castlefield, I begin to consider my role as viewer, audience, and participant. How recently when I have enacted this role (visited a gallery) I have felt lost, staring at collections of objects which fail to coalesce into some kind of meaning?

It may appear that I’m picking on the artists at I Would Like To Join A Club And Hit Myself With It. It is simply the most recent example. I have seen exhibitions like this before: Father at Wolstenholme Creative Space, Liverpool; Glamourie at Project Space Leeds; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial.

At the danger of repeating this allegory (finding myself like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, pawing at his mash potatoes, mumbling ‘This means something…’), I can only imagine, in these given examples, that the artist is, simply, working in a vacuum to create work that exists in a vacuum… Forgetting that whatever work they create exists beyond its own boundaries, whether they be materialistic or conceptual. That the ultimate propose of art is to communicate a part of the human experience the artist has decided to throw their attention on.

I can’t definitely pronounce that the current system fails, but I do think that we should always consider how it works, and how to work with it. This was something Brian O’Doherty contemplated in his essay collection Inside The White Cube (1976). Nearly forty years ago, O’Doherty speculated on the affect the white cube gallery space would have on artists. For O’Doherty, the white cube isn’t as neutral as it appears — it comes loaded with history. It is the descendant of the church, the private room and showroom. This is even referenced in the interpretation to the aforementioned Castlefield Gallery exhibition, which states ‘how much the gallery space is always loaded with content’.

O’Doherty observed a paradox: although he identified that galleries come loaded with content, their apparent neutrally was an attempt to remove the gallery from this context; so on entering an exhibition, the visitor sees it as a single, self-contained and temporary entity.

I wonder if this combination of complex issues creates the conditions which support, feed or create the kind of work I’ve alluded to. Work that meets an expected conceptual criteria, a criteria that the artist and curator may not be necessarily aware of. The formation of a habit.

Here’s the thing: you could also argue, of course, that artists don’t actually have to consider the experience of this nebulous thing termed ‘the viewer’. At all. You could say it’s not their role nor should it be their main concern.

How art works, how it’s viewed, is a difficult notion to address. Some of the things I’ve written about can all be undone by the malleability of the gallery space and, of course, individual subjectivity. It doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t look at the prescribed methods we have for the dissemination of art (that includes galleries and writing) and ensure they are working.

Otherwise, we run the risk of alienating art’s audience, closing off all lines of communication with those very people who keep our galleries open: you.

C James Fagan

Read Biennial 2014: The Space In Between

What’s hot this week? Our pick of the listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK!

Tuesday – Combines #2 6-9pm @ Model, Liverpool — FREE

Tonight sees three more artists take up the challenge of experimenting with responsive commissions, at newly installed art space, Model (taking over the former Open Eye Gallery). Version #2 revolves around the concept of Robert Rauschenberg’S Erased De Kooning (1953), where the artist “kept making drawings myself and erasing them”… Open Wednesday to Sunday 12-6pm or by appointment.

Metropolis 8pm @ the Gregson Institute, Liverpool — Donation OTD

The latest in a series of indie screenings at this Wavertree-based community centre, tonight sees Fritz Lang’s masterpiece accompanied by live music from ‘adamant musico-explorers’ The Public Apophenia Council. A visionary statement about power, propaganda and class, produced between World Wars in the madhouse of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Metropolis was famous (or infamous) as Herr Hitler’s favourite film (more here).

Wednesday – Zéro de Conduite 6.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool — £9.50/8.50

Translated as Zero for Conduct, Jean Vigo’s film follows a group of rebellious boarding house boys as they fight against the strict but comic tyranny of the school’s rules and teachers… and is one of only four films the director made before his untimely death at just 29 years old. See Adam Scovell’s full article here.

Thursday – St. Vincent 7pm @ O2 Academy, Liverpool — £18.56

Bringing her particular, stylish brand of gnarly rock’n'roll to Liverpool tonight,  before heading to End Of The Road Festival and then onto the US, see Anne Erin “Annie” Clark — better known as St. Vincent — exert ‘strict control over wild sonic experiments to exhilarating effect’ (the Observer). See here for all tour dates.

Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder 8.15pm @ the British Museum, London – £15 per screening/weekend joint ticket £39

The BFI’s Sci-Fi season proper doesn’t begin until October, but appetites will be whetted in earnest this week with a trio of screenings on successive nights (Thursday to Saturday) in the British Museums’s forecourt. Kicking off with 1961′s The Day The Earth Caught Fire and culminating in Flash Gordon (1980), the one not to miss is Nic Roeg’s 1976 study in alienation, The Man Who Fell To Earth (more on the director here).

Friday – Peel’s Big 75 7pm til late @ the Kazimier Gardens, Liverpool — £3 OTD, all proceeds go to charity

Celebrating John Peel’s 75th Birthday in massive fan-boy style (with all proceeds going to Shelter and Crisis), see live music from punk-pop lads DoubleDoublePlusGood (previously Elle S’appelle/House That Jack Buit), and ‘full-throttle’ rockers Avenging Force (whose debut album was recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago earlier on this year), plus live poetry from John Kay and a dedicated Peel DJ set by music podcasters Trust The Wizards.

Park Nights 2014: Lina Lapelyte’s Hunky Bluff 8pm @ Serpentine Pavilion, London — £5/4

A great chance to check out this year’s stunning Serpentine Pavilion — designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić –Park Night’s latest evening summer event is by artist/performer/composer Lina Lapelyte. Her costumed, all-female choir, all with low voices, will be deconstructing the arias originally sung by castrato singers, reflecting upon femininity and gender in the process.

Saturday – Tour: Claude Parent & Works From The Tate Collection 2pm @ Tate Liverpool — FREE

That the eighth Liverpool Biennial has been subject to no small degree of critique is no secret (read our review); managing to come out more or less unscathed however has been Tate’s offerings. In the groundfloor Wolfson Gallery, the ageing enfant terrible of French modernist architecture, Claude Parent, has transformed the space and its dynamic with his ‘fonction oblique’; while the second floor playfully employs works referencing domestic spaces. Expect the likes of Warhol, Picabia and Nash.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks 8pm @ the Kazimier, Liverpool — £16

More than a decade since Pavement (the indie-rock luminaries formed in 1989 by Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg) called it quits, Malkmus & the Jicks have built up six albums worth of more than respectable material. The latest of which — Wigout at Jagbags — is arguably his most accomplished post-Pavement effort yet. You can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be there. See full tour dates here.

Sunday – Last Day: Bristol Biennial Presents: I’M STAYING 11am-11pm @ Arnolfini, Bristol — FREE

A great appetizer for this year’s Bristol Biennial: Crossing the Line (12-21 September 2014), I’M STAYING is a new public commission by artist Shaun C Badham commenting on ‘place, community and change’. A huge neon sign, now overlooking the harbourside, the work will move around Bristol over a two year period, with viewers in control (by vote) of where it goes next.

Last Day: Cornelia Parker/As Exciting As We Can Make It 11am-6pm @ IKON, Birmingham — FREE

Visit Ikon in their 50th anniversary year and see why it is such an important, valued and locally much-loved institution.
The last day to see As Exciting As We Can Make It, a comprehensive highlights show of work shown at the gallery through the 1980s — including works by Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, Gillian Ayres, Agnes Denes, Max Eastley, Susan Hiller, Dennis Oppenheim and Richard Wilson — plus ’Ikon Icon’ Cornelia Parker’s 1988 commission Thirty Pieces of Silver, now in the Tate collection.

Notice anything different? C James Fagan realises that Liverpool Biennial is changing the space around us, and therefore, he argues, the expectation of the visitor…

There’s a lot of space in FACT. The artist Sharon Lockhart has opened part of the foyer and uncovered a hidden window. If this were one of those ‘Sell Your House’ TV shows, we’d be talking about how it really opens up the space. It might be trite but it’s true: the vibe is different. It’s not just a case of something else on the wall.

My relationship with that space has changed.

In that spot, you have an encapsulation of this year’s Liverpool Biennial: A Needle Walks Into A Haystack. Though this time, it appears to be more of a guideline than a theme (there is no official theme). This Biennial seems to be centred on ideas of liminality, and the everyday architecture of routine and habit that make up the bulk of our lives. After an initial visit to the big festival venues, it seems that they haven’t strictly adhered to his idea. They’ve floated around it curated works and artists whose work doesn’t exactly match the brief.

This could all be for the better.

Returning to Sharon Lockhart as a case in point, in order to describe her work, I’d have to explain about her careful documentation of Polish children at play and how this led to the development of a relationship with a particular girl (Milena). This forms the core of Lockhart’s work; what it doesn’t describe are the works’ spatial qualities. Her static films and photographs show a world set within a frame: a cropped vision of society.

The emphasis is on how the subjects move through space, rather than the movement of the camera and the editing. Watching the children through this narrow spectrum, you begin to get the sense that these are human beings under the influence of unseen systems. Of unwritten rules, both internal and external, that govern their actions, and that makes them part of the architecture that surrounds them.

In the upstairs gallery, Lockhart present the basic shape of a gallery: like this is the bare minimum you need to have a gallery experience as a visitor. It’s an example of the idea of architectural space, buildings, habits, etiquette — however you describe the differing layers of soft control that nudge your life one way or another.

Space and how you interact with it has been an element of Liverpool Biennial for a while. For the last three festivals, large landmark buildings have been commandeered: Pilkington’s Warehouse (2008), Rapid DIY store (2010), the Cunard and the behemoth ex-Post Office warehouse (2012). This Biennial has inhabited the dusty skeleton of the Old Blind School on Hardman Street.

It is as much out of necessity to utilise the city’s assets, as it is a Biennial with no fixed abode. It does, however, welcome a different type of visitor; one who has a direct connection with a former incarnation of the building. Or simply someone who wants to nose around. Any art is incidental.

A curatorial pre-occupation with space is more pronounced this year. For example, Michael Stevenson’s sets of grey institutional doors which lock and unlock themselves to some unknown door lore. Or the torn-away wall of William Leavitt’s Arctic Earth, offering a view of the planet through patio doors. Both works are a playful way of re-evaluating our interaction with the built environment, and all the little rules underlining their liminal ubiquity, their ‘everydayness’.

Down the road from the Old Blind School, Claude Parent’s reworking of Tate Liverpool’s ground floor gallery space is a playful mix of expressionistic ramps and ’60s sci-fi set; the architect has set out to remove the sense of polite, distant observation you can fall into when wandering around a gallery. Being almost flung into a sculpture, or having to climb to see a painting, is a clip around the ear to remind you that you’re an active — not passive — participant.

An alteration of a space leads to an alteration of behaviour.

Approaches to how art is viewed also surface at The Bluecoat, who have chosen to follow the dictates of Whistler. The antagonistic artist had clear ideas about the ambiance his works should be shown within, even down to choosing the clothes that invigilators should wear. This manifests itself through use of pastel colours on the walls, canopies and defused lighting. It may be to too subtle; it’s not as radical as Parent’s ramps, but it does provide a different experience within the boundaries of a familiar community art gallery.

If this Biennial is chasing an idea of questioning our relationship with the everyday, then it has done it through the adaptation of the space used to exhibit the work itself. As a viewer of art, you can slip into a system of liminality, of expecting art to exist in the space of a white cube. When confronted by a gallery stripped to its bare minimum or bathed in soft light, even walking through abandoned offices, it becomes necessary to reconsider your behaviour, expectations and, indeed, your role as viewer.

While I cannot claim that Liverpool Biennial 2014 is 100% successful , I have found something within it that many haven’t. Perhaps it lies within this year’s unofficial theme being a guideline rather than strict doctrine; this has seemed to enable the galleries and curators to freely explore that theme and use work which opens up a dialogue about the role of gallery and visitor.

The lack of ‘dictatorial curation’ makes the whole thing feel more cohesive and somehow more successful.

It might be a paradox, but it’s a welcome one.

C James Fagan

Liverpool Biennial continues until 26 October. Look out for talks, fringe events and performances on the site – www.biennial.com/2014

Read other articles by C James Fagan here

Biennial 2014 — Reviewed

Biennial 2014: What Peter Wächtler Has To Say About Liverpool

Should an arts festival directly reference the city it calls home? Can art become relevant to a context in which it is displayed? Richard Whitby examines one artwork in this year’s Liverpool Biennial that has a lot to say, however indirectly, about its location…

Peter Wächtler’s videos are (beautifully) installed at the Old Blind School site as part of the Liverpool Biennial this year, along with several of his drawings and sculptures. The German-born, Belgium-based artist’s videos are, for me, the absolute highlight of this edition of the Biennial – in particular, one untitled video (2013) that will inevitably be known as ‘the one with the rat’.

A shakily-drawn cartoon rat enters a room and gets into a sad-looking bed, sleeps and when morning comes, rises and leaves. The action repeat; in some iterations on the way to bed the rat is hit on the head by a bowling ball rolling off a table, which it arduously places back on the table as it exits the room the next morning. The rat is an exhausted, Sisyphus-like figure, hunch-backed and empty eyed, the stuttering nature of the animation emphasising the difficulty of its depressed existence.

The soundtrack is a monologue in what we presume to be the artist’s own heavily German accented voice, melancholically reading a kind of poem; ‘How I fixed my car’, it starts, ‘How I got married’, it continues. After around ten minutes of often quite elaborately described situations, the voice sings an a capella version of Bruce Springsteen’s song The River (1980). The piece is both funny and nightmarish, and ranges from the ridiculously melodramatic (‘How I had a party and everyone made me feel like shit immediately’ – I paraphrase as accurately as I can), to the surreal (‘How I inhaled all the mosquitoes in the tent to protect my newborn child’), to the genuinely touching (‘How I watched your face while you were sleeping and it wasn’t boring at all’). The rat – if we take it to be the ‘I’ of the narration – plods through treacle-like quotidian boredom, bizarre misfortune, abuse and nostalgia.

Zoe Pilger, writing for the Independent opened her review of the Biennial (6/07/14) by stating: “In March this year, cuts of £156m to Liverpool’s public services were announced, which means that half of the city’s 19 libraries are expected to close, as well as the majority of children’s centres. Against this backdrop of social injustice, the 8th Liverpool art Biennial has just opened… I visited seven [of its exhibitions], none of which addressed the current economic situation directly.” Pilger’s argument seems to be that direct, prosaic reference is the way to local and political relevance. Is the Biennial to act as a kind of local news report? Who would this be useful to? Surely, though, work can become relevant to a context in which it is displayed?

Wächtler’s video is not commissioned by the Biennial, nor does it make any reference to Liverpool, austerity or cuts to local services. Later in Pilger’s almost entirely negative piece, she writes about the mural still just-about hanging on to the ceiling in the Blind School venue, “of the ‘people’s march’, which shows demonstrators with fists raised and banners flying (pictured, below).

“[F]or me”, she writes, “it is the most interesting work in the exhibition, despite the fact that it is not officially included.” It certainly is striking, but I disagree that it isn’t ‘officially’ included – it is there, and it is unmissable – as unmissable as the prior uses of the building; a former blind school, a trade union centre and resource centre for the unemployed. As well as union protests, it depicts dock and car factory workers, jobs of which many Liverpudlian visitors, or their families, will have direct experience. I personally feel that ‘official’ inclusion of the mural would be presumptuous and pretentious – simple proximity to the artworks, with all the awkward contrasts it brings, is more productive.

The references in Wächtler’s video are hard to pin down in terms of time, location and class. ‘How alcohol, scientology and the German government destroyed my life’, goes the narration; ‘How the cat gave birth to twenty-eight kittens during a tuperware party and only two of them were actually alive.’ Wächtler’s drawings (also installed in the Blind School site) include characters such as butlers and eighteenth-century lords in aristocratic interiors – this particular video is rendered in a style of animation that suggests the middle of the twentieth century – and Springsteen’s song brings associations with post-industrial, American nostalgia. Wächtler’s own writing in the narration melds with Springsteen’s blues-inspired lyrics (‘lately there ain’t been much work, on account of the economy’) – indeed, the latter part of the soundtrack is more like a viable cover version of the song than an ironic appropriation of it.

The consistent past-tense and justified sense of victimhood might mean that Wächtler’s rat will conjure even greater empathy in Liverpool and the North. Within the wide range of Wächtler’s references there is frequent mention of work (in a ‘fish factory in Norway’, for example) and also many slightly anachronistic manual tasks (‘how many of us fix cars today?’) The rat is locked into a routine, perhaps leaving for whatever kind of work a cartoon rat undertakes, returning exhausted, or maybe seeking and failing to find work each day (“unemployed as fuck”, in the words of Glaswegian comedian Kevin Bridges). Either way, the rat/narrator is preoccupied with the strange and diverse circumstances of its past that make up its subjective self, blindly plodding through its days, painfully hit on the head by a ball it constantly replaces.

Viewed thus, the work is certainly not curative, but is reflective of a contemporary kind of self-centred and self-perpetuating discontent. ‘How I hear my neighbour moan and cry, and how he tells me I should call the police because he has HIV’, we are told. Here is loneliness and introspection, rather than the celebration of collective power we find in the trade union mural.

The use of drawn and layered animation, a narration performed by the artist and the use of pop music summon comparison to Jordan Wolfson’s video work – and both artists have been shown in prominent British art festivals this year (Wolfson was part of Glasgow International 2014). Wolfson has been criticised for misappropriating important issues such as HIV for what can be interpreted as flippant aestheticisation and play. Wächtler’s sensibility is, however, very different. Whereas Wolfson revels in high-cost slickness, Wächtler’s work looks decrepitly handmade – this is a big part of its whit and appeal. One gets the feeling that at least some of his narrative fragments are deeply personal, and are emotive in a way that Wolfson’s brash provocations can never be.

Would it be possible for an exhibition in what is obviously a building on its way between dereliction to gentrification to actually protest the process it is so inherently bound up in? Wächtler’s work is not for or about Liverpool in the way that Michael Nyman’s Hillsborough memorial symphony is, or Jeanne van Heeswijk’s project 2up 2down project was in the last biennial. It has a differently specific resonance. Wächtler’s video, for all its pleasures, inhabits and embodies the ambivalence, impotence and melancholy that is inherent to participation in the neo-liberal urban regeneration that is so bound up in the attendance of this biennial and others like it. The Blind School site is no longer a trade union centre, and the Biennial exhibition happens at an awkward limbo stage of the building’s life, and Wächtler’s work, seen here, underlines that.

Springsteen (via Wächtler): ‘I come from down in the valley where mister, when you’re young, they bring you up to do like your daddy done’ – Wächtler: ‘How the days my father used to get dressed up for are no longer celebrated.’

Richard Whitby

Liverpool Biennial continues until Sunday 26 October 2014

Don’t know where to start at the GI? Don’t panic! Emma Sumner picks her highlights…

Hailed by Adrian Searle as “the UK’s best visual arts festival”, the pressure is on for what will be the sixth edition of the Glasgow International. Since its first edition in 2005, this biennial event has grown in stature, gaining itself a place in the international art calendar.

This year’s nineteen day festival will be the first under the leadership of new Director (and former Frieze curator) Sarah McCrory.

With a diverse offer exceeding 70 exhibitions, events and talks — taking place across the city’s commercial galleries, artist-led spaces, museums and studios — GI 2014 looks set to demonstrate Glasgow’s cultural capabilities on a grand scale.

Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) – main picture

Director’s Programme: Aleksandra Domanović

In her first big solo UK exhibition, Berlin-based artist Aleksandra Domanović  will transform this much-loved gallery into a ‘timeless survival pod’; exploring the role of women in pop science fiction and the development of future technology. With visitors being able to ‘inhabit’ the alien pod during the day, at night the installation will glow from within GoMA’s spectacular architecture for passersby to gaze upon.

Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, G1 3AH

Opening Hours: Until 1 June, Mon-Wed & Sat 10am-5pm, Thurs 10am-8pm, Fri & Sun 11am-5pm

The Common Guild

Gabriel Kuri: All Probability Resolves into Form

Always worth the trek out of Glasgow for the fantastic view it offers across the city, for its festival offer The Common Guild will host new work by internationally acclaimed Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri. Keen to question the value society places on everyday objects, Kuri explores his surroundings in a humourous and seductive manner by finding new potential in everyday, mass-manufactured utilitarian ‘stuff’. This will be the first exhibition of Kuri’s work in Scotland.

21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, G3 6DF

Opening Hours: Until 7 June, Mon-Sun 12-5pm

Wasp Artists’ Studios: The Briggait

Reclaimed – The Second Life of Sculpture

One of this year’s independent offerings, Wasp Studios has come up with a corker. In their most ambitious exhibition to date, WASP will transform the court yard of The Briggait into a sculptural landscape of historical, modern and contemporary works. Celebrating the diversity of sculptural practice, the exhibition will also liberate 25 important sculptural works from the confines of storage, some of which have not been seen for the last two decades. Featuring works by artists verging on the bizarre, such as Lotte Glob (primal ceramics), Jock Mooney (neon nightmares) and Glasgow’s current art star David Shrigley, this is one not to be missed.

The Briggait, 141 Bridgegate, Glasgow, G1 5HZ

Opening Hours: During the festival 9.30am-5.30pm Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun, Thurs 9.30am-8pm. Post-fest, 22 April-2nd May, Mon-Fri 9.30am-5.30pm

Mary Mary

Jesse Wine: Chester Man

Recently awarded the Camden Art Centre’s Ceramics Fellowship, London-based artist Jesse Wine will reveal a group of new ceramic sculptural works at this artist-space-turned-commercial gallery. Fascinated by human behaviour and interaction, Wine produces sculptural forms using traditional materials and construction methods which fully embrace the element of chance. Given his reputation for using unconventional display methods when exhibiting his work and the fast pace at which his reputation is growing, this exhibition is an opportunity to see what direction this promising artist is taking.

Suite 2/1, 6 Dixon Street, Glasgow, G1 4AX

Opening Hours: Mon-Sun 11am-6pm 

McLellan Galleries

Director’s Programme: Hudinilson Jr

The previously empty McLellan Galleries will play host to an artist once described as one of the most marginal artists in Brazil’s aesthetic history.  Addressing queer issues and sexuality, Hudinilson Jr was a story-telling machine, who created his own imaginative world from images in newspapers and magazines and notes from friends. Since his passing in August 2013, the exhibition will also look back at his diverse 35 year career.

270 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3EH

Opening Hours: Mon-Sun 11am-6pm

Glasgow Film Theatre and Centre for Contemporary Art (CAA)

Art Screen

A stellar BBC Arts collaboration with the British Council, Frieze, LUX, Glasgow Film Theatre and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Art Screen is a four day programme showcasing some of “the world’s best” and most thought-provoking arts documentaries. Blowing the dust from many classic BBC documentaries, with important artists including Louise Bourgeois, the programme will run alongside a series of Q & A sessions and discussions with some of the UK’s leading art figures. Four days just isn’t enough.

Glasgow Film Theatre, 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 RB / CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD

Opening Hours: 10 April-13 April

Glasgow Botanic Gardens

Hydrapangaea

The wild card choice, Glasgow’s Botanic Garden’s Hydrapangea is described as a ‘wunderkammer’ of sculptural objects, printed material, videos and sound works. Hosting the work of seven emerging Glasgow-based artists as a major installation in The Kibble Palace, they have chosen as inspiration Glasgow’s historical collections of foreign curiosities, acquired through trade. An intriguing look into how foreign knowledge has shaped the cultural identity of Glasgow today.

730 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G12 0UE

Opening Hours: Mon-Sun 10am-6pm

Emma Sumner

Glasgow International previews today and opens to the public tomorrow, Thursday 4 April until Monday 21 April 2014

See full programme here!

Main Image: Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Carla Black, GI 2012

Responding to yesterday’s massive funding cuts, and ahead of the International Festival of Business 2014, Laura Brown argues that we need a whole new approach to arts giving in Liverpool, otherwise we risk losing our next generation of cultural instigators…

We need a radical new strategy for arts giving in Liverpool. Major arts organisations, businesses, all of us — right down to the grassroots and freelance curators — need to hammer something out because otherwise the ride stops here.

Liverpool works hard and it plays hard. From its start-ups to its multi-nationals, to its orchestras and cutting edge cultural institutions, this is a city that is driven by creativity, by innovation and commitment to creating, not just cold hard cash, but a better place to live and be. Unfortunately, Liverpool is also a city where it’s really hard to get to the top table. There’s a network of clued-in figures across business and the arts who have great relationships. Not part of that? Good luck!

Perspective is everything, as is experience. But we need to bat the past into the long grass and start working together to fundamentally reassess donation, patronage, arts funding and giving. If we don’t we are screwed. Properly screwed. The worst case scenario is not losing major arts organisations; the worst case scenario is having no young artists, curators, musicians and people who think they can make a difference. That has to be our goal.

Without a systematic shift in how we look at funding, how we relate big business and big arts, there will be no Jayne Caseys, no Eddie Bergs, no Pete Wylies. There will be no independent Liverpool. Instead, we’ll be a stop-off on the international calendar, an outpost of national cultural experience. Unless we make art fairer, and enable smaller organisations and individuals to get access to the serious funding and philanthropy conversation, then grassroots community art will dissolve. Without it Liverpool will be, quite frankly, as dull as the ditchwater it sprang out of 800 years ago.

Whether you believe the local or national government spin (and it comes from both sides equally vehemently), Liverpool’s arts and cultural institutions face a huge cut in their funding over the next three years. We could not only lose a major organisation, but remove the ability of all but the very wealthiest to enjoy a life and career in the arts. For it to survive everyone understands there needs to be a concerted effort to reassess and restructure how we define philanthropy and how we fund projects, initiatives and organisations, and how we ask for money.

Yesterday, Liverpool City Council announced enormous cuts to adult care, libraries and leisure centres. We saw this coming. Just a few months ago, Liverpool Council launched an online budget simulator which invited people to try to balance the books. It was a hamfisted but effective way of telling you that it’s bloody hard to bridge a £156m shortfall. Out of sheer curiosity, I made a 50% cut to its culture, sport and leisure budget, and that (eerily) forecast the closure of all community libraries, closure of more sports facilities, limited public access, and redundancy of staff.

My budget simulator also predicted the closure of one of Liverpool’s halls (like St George’s Hall), parklands sold, the loss of every major cultural organisation and festival, the closure of all grant-funded organisations, and mass redundancies. The knock-on effect of this, of course, would mean the exodus of creative talent, the loss of 9m potential visitors, a £30m loss to the city’s economy, no outreach or education programmes, a severely diminished ability to receive visitors, and an inability for the city to retain graduates.

Find your money elsewhere, kids, because this show is over. And who would want to live somewhere with little or no cultural life?

It’s a deliberately bleak picture, but the truth is that the city’s major arts organisations will indeed take a hit. But, those art spaces in Liverpool – call them Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium (LARC), Visual Arts in Liverpool (VAiL), the Big Eight, whatever – all have excellent mechanisms for interacting with and developing partnerships between themselves and the city’s commercial industries and securing different modes of income. This philanthropy cannot plug the whole of the gap left by the loss of local authority funding, but it helps.

£1000 to the Everyman secures the chance to name a seat in the new theatre, an invitation for two to the opening party and a limited edition print of the new building. Both FACT and Tate Liverpool have membership schemes; all the better to be able to plan for an expected level of income. Tate’s corporate sponsorship promises a return on investment. Citing its BP case study, the oil giant seeks to “connect people and inspire creativity, reach a broad and international audience, promote understanding and enjoyment of art to wide reaching audience, engage with clients through exclusive entertaining and to engage (its) employees in their arts and culture programme”. With dedicated staff, strategy and confidence, this major arts organisation is best placed to delve into the corporate world and come out with a bob or two in its pockets.

Yet what about the smaller arts organisations, grass roots projects and independents? The loss of a major arts organisation would certainly hit the headlines in the Liverpool Echo (it might even bump a crime story to page 3), but the loss of 50 smaller ones? More importantly, what about the inspiring creative individuals, the young people who never quite got a foothold but knew this was their passion? What about bands forced to split up because they can’t afford to travel to gigs; artists downing tools because they are too tired to paint while they work one or more jobs; venues sitting empty because business rates are too expensive or the developers have moved in; or the creative individuals dissuaded from higher education by tuition fees?

LARC’s motivation to “promote a culture of creativity, innovation, learning and ideas across all aspects of Liverpool life” is a vital and laudable one. But these are seven organisations with an existing profile and authority. Without a fundamental shift to inspire a boom in philanthropy that helps every layer of this city’s creative community, from teenagers to freelance curators, then there will be no scene to be heard.

This is not to say there is no provision within Liverpool’s arts organisation for young people. Each has dedicated programmes. FACT’s Young Liverpool Film Night is a delight. Art students in Merseyside universities get free entry into the launch night of many major exhibitions. The International Youth Arts and Cultural Festivals, organised by LARC for Summer 2014, will inevitably be great and enthusing for all those who take part.

But let’s be perfectly frank. When you’re 13, you want to believe you can change the world on your own, with your own mates and your own guitar, or paintbrush, or words or ideas. As you should. We shouldn’t just create a young-person-friendly imitation of a grown-up art world and say that’s what we’re doing to encourage young people. Art and culture develops when a gang of you sit in a room and start bouncing around ideas. It comes from what you see and experience. It comes from growing up in a scene that’s emerging on your favourite street in the city. That’s independence. And that’s where it gets exciting.

The problem is that supporting individuals or grass roots arts organisations might not give the profile boost that a business wants. And businesses need to stop thinking like that. Giving shouldn’t be seen as getting something tangible in return; it isn’t about a press release or a photo opp. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, just about getting a special seat in the theatre. Instead it should be about creating a landscape that echoes the one you had access too; when it wasn’t vastly expensive to travel around the country to play a gig or see an exhibition, when you could access the top tiers just by knocking on doors. The city many of us grew up in was much more egalitarian, much more politicised and much more vibrant. That’s because we could explore for ourselves what we wanted to do and much of it was free or at the least very, very cheap.

Business in Liverpool anticipates a glorious year with the arrival of the International Festival of Business 2014 in June. It would be a travesty if while the corporate side of the city reaches its epoch, its cultural community loses heart and slowly vanishes. Instead of being seen as a profile raiser, philanthropy should be part and parcel of a way of sharing experience, expertise and knowledge. Both business and art can learn from each other. Philanthropy should be an exchange rather than a one way street. And its motivation should be civic pride, responsibility and social inclusion.

How about funding a musician who needs to travel to gigs? Have you ever had to travel by bus with a cello? It is not fun. If you’ve lost your funding to go to college, then how about a local business supporting you? What about travelling to see exhibitions around the country, to learn how to be a curator and immerse yourself in cultural life and identity; could a firm of solicitors or haulage company not support that? How can we create those partnerships and that kind of access?

Since 2007-8 business contributions to the arts in the UK have dropped by 30%. To give an indication how vital that support is, it represents two fifths of all arts support. Sponsorship is strong at £113.8m, but in-kind support has fallen. This in-kind support, like promotion, marketing and event management, represent the skills many smaller arts organisations, individuals and young people simply don’t have access to. If no one knows about them or the work they do, they will simply close. The biggest decline has been in business donation; business investment in the north-west is £8m.

It needs to be higher. And it needs to be the kind of support that filters down from major arts organisations like Tate Liverpool to smaller ones and individual artists. And it needs to be more than money. It needs to be contacts and experience and support.

The arts, right the way from the bottom-up, needs to get better at asking for money and investment, not just for itself, but for the organisations and individuals around it as well. It isn’t about the arts behaving as a business, or business behaving more like the arts; instead it is as London International Festival of Theatre’s (LIFT) Julie Rowntree describes it: as walking in to work on the other side of the street to see a fresh perspective (see Changing the Performance: A Companion Guide to Arts, Business and Civic Engagement).

Corporate giving and sponsorship needs to be about more than a Corporate Social Responsibility programme. It needs to reflect a passion and determination to protect a city. If Liverpool’s arts and cultural community becomes barred from its poorer or working class, if it becomes too expensive to enjoy or to participate in, then it isn’t just the city that will be harmed. There is value in a robust and healthy cultural identity, but to ensure this continues there needs to be a working and sustainable relationship that bridges Church Street and removes the barriers between culture and business. Business needs to get involved. Larger arts organisation need to make room for their smaller colleagues.

As a friend put it this week, it’s really hard to be creative when you’re hungry and skint. Let’s buy each other lunch.

Laura Brown

Read more — IFB 2014: What’s In It For Me?

Images courtesy Rhys Chatham, A Crimson Grail (Liverpool Biennial and Andrew Ellis); Freehand at FACT; Tate Young Persons Collective

The International Festival of Business (IFB) lands in Liverpool this summer. But what opportunities will there be for arts and culture businesses? We asked a range of experts to shed some light…

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few months about The International Festival of Business (IFB); a combination of over 100 events and 250,000 visitors in Liverpool through June-July 2014, promising to ’accelerate UK economic growth’ and ‘connect the smartest entrepreneurial minds and best business opportunities in the world’.

With a Knowledge, Creative & Digital theme on offer, what does this mean for arts and culture organisations or the self-employed? We spoke to the city’s top creative businesses and support agencies about what they’re doing for IFB, and what, if any, real opportunities are out there for you to get involved…

Nick Birkinshaw, IFB Cultural Programme Co-ordinator, Liverpool Vision

“My job is to work with the cultural sector of the city region to try to make sure that during IFB, Liverpool is seen to be a place that’s bursting with creative energy with one of the best cultural offers in the world.

“The cultural offer is a key element in the realisation of city’s aspiration to be seen as a distinctive global city, with a very attractive unique brand that’s recognised worldwide as a great place to visit, work, live and — with reference to the IFB ambitions — to invest in. A place with world class arts and artists, that attracts world class acts to it.

“We have a fantastic cultural heritage to build on, based on the city’s maritime and trade achievements and position in the days of 19th century Empire, and a worldwide fan-base for our 20th century engineering and technical innovation, pop music & football. The challenge is to make sure we’re now (and continue to be) seen to be a vibrant, diverse and distinctive welcoming 21st century city that never ceases in its efforts to innovate, create and to project a positive image and identity, doing things that that make people want to be here.

“The cultural calendar for June and July (fully revealed end January with the new IFB website) that’s already in place has the most extensive programme of events, exhibitions, shows, festivals since 2008, that will show the world what a great place this is for creative activity and as a destination for cultural tourism. Those who’ve taken notice of our recent rating in the Rough Guide places to be in 2014 (Liverpool was recently voted the third top city in the world to visit) won’t be disappointed when they come.

“My practical advice to people and organisations with cultural and creative produce to share and sell is to take notice of the IFB opportunity, be proactive and do something: if you can put on a quality event, no matter the scale, let me know about it (Nick’s contact details here) and I can license it as part of the ‘official’ cultural programme, and we can help to promote it to IFB delegates and the many other visitors and local people who’ll be on the receiving end of a very extensive marketing campaign. If you’re a service provider, get on the suppliers database.

“The core IFB business events programme will also have plenty to offer. If you’re a creative business, you could benefit from attending things like the Accelerate conference, aimed at generating more rapid growth. I’m hoping to work with the UKTI (UK Trade & Investment) and The British Council to arrange seminars around export for culture and creative business (tbc – but I’m optimistic that these will happen). Writing on the Wall will be doing an event with a focus on digital publishing – if you’re a writer – be there. Sound City, likewise, is developing a programme around the impact of the digital technologies on the music business.

“The new IFB website is to be launched at the end of this month. Get in there, have a look, sign up. There are bound to be elements that you’ll find interesting, attractive and useful. Creative and cultural organisations are businesses like others – IFB is a chance to show your stuff, to listen and learn, to network, to develop relationships that can have positive legacy.”

Nick is a Creative Producer, Events and Projects Manager, and an Arts in Regeneration & Education specialist. He works for Liverpool Vision.

Amy Jones, Director, The Royal Standard Gallery and Studios

“Any event which brings an estimated 300,000 visitors to the city has the potential to be beneficial for those of us working in the creative sector. While the main programme (and the cost of attending) might not be aimed at creatives, the IFB is actively pointing visitors in the direction of cultural events such as the Biennial and Tate’s summer blockbuster show, so it’s a great chance to capitalise on a swell of creative tourists in the city.

“To make the most of your increased audience it’s important to make yourself and your work extra visible during that period. The more inventive the better, but it can be as simple as holding an open studios or, if you’re not part of a studio, banding together with other artists to put together a showcase of your work.

“Besides from expanding visitor numbers and getting artists work out there, it’s also a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on the grassroots arts community in Liverpool and where it stands in relation to the business community. For example, should it just be Liverpool’s large institutions thinking about corporate funding and sponsorship or is it something to be seriously considered for grassroots initiatives too? With considerable funding cuts in the region, it would be great if IFB inspired some debate around those issues.”

The Royal Standard is an artist-led gallery, studios and social workspace based in Liverpool.

Andrea Nixon, Executive Director, Tate Liverpool