Brickworks @ Tate Liverpool – Reviewed
Current Tate Liverpool exhibition takes inspiration from the most humble of materials. Could Brickworks exceed similarly modest expectations?
The press release for Tate Liverpool’s current exhibition, Brickworks, I admit, did not fill me with confidence. Trumpeting details such as Liverpool being known for “its iconic brick warehouses and [as the home of] the first red brick university,” it promises that the exhibition would be “more than just a ‘pile of bricks’”. Underwhelming reading, then, especially given this is the first show in the current space to feature works from the Tate collection. Could they not be more ambitious or imaginative, I wondered, with an eye roll.
So, reader, colour me pleasantly surprised when, upon arriving at Mann Island’s Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, what I found there surpassed expectations. It ‘feels’ like a Tate show immediately. It is well lit (as it should be, of course); there is enough, but not too much, interpretation; and, most importantly, there are works here to contemplate, inspire and provoke – whether in isolation or in conversation with one another.
Organised into astutely selected groupings, each of the works share between them particular affinities beyond the obvious. Screenprints by Ivor Abrahams and Patrick Hughes, for example, seem to employ bricks as barriers; obstacles declaring there is no access (to you and me, at least) beyond this point. Spend longer with them, however, and they reveal that this might not quite be the case. Out of Hughes’ patchwork puzzle of bricks emerges the outline of a door, granting entry to those who crack its visual code; Abrahams’ Privacy Plots – despite the title – somehow evoke the feel of a garden waiting to be discovered or a maze to be bested.
In the hands of others, the brick becomes a tool of violence or subversion with which to challenge the state. Philip Guston lithograph, The Street (1970), depicts a gloved hand holding a baton while bricks fly, in aggression or retaliation, through the air. Nearby, Tamas St. Auby’s Czechoslovak Radio 1968 (1969, 2008) references the bizarre and barely plausible moment in geopolitics that found public broadcasts banned and then bricks – to which people attached antennae, pretending to listen to them – confiscated by the invading Soviet Union. Isa Genzken’s precarious-looking Two Loudspeakers (1986), meanwhile, speaks of the potential of sculpture to both transmit and receive a message.
The exhibition’s centrepiece in both scale and positioning is Algerian-French artist Kader Attia’s 2008 work “Untitled” (Concrete Blocks). Its uniform grey rows a reference to the uncongenial high-rise developments in France housing working class, often migrant, communities. First trialled in former French colony Algeria, Attia’s work speaks to segregation, disenfranchisement, and, as he puts it, the dissolving of inhabitants’ “identity and any desire to exist as individuals.” A pair of frankly dystopian Chris Killip photographs compound feelings of walls closing in on us, making of the ‘home’ – what should be a place of refuge – something else entirely.
The great Lebanese pioneer of abstract art Saloua Raouda Choucair lifts the mood, her Poem Wall (1963-5) offering a plethora of alternative possibilities – and worlds. “I wanted rhythm like the poetic meter,” she has said when discussing the modular nature of the composition; “to be at once more independent and interlinked, and to have lines like meanings, but plastic meanings.”
Like the form of Arabic poetry that inspired Choucair’s work, this exhibition offers a movable feast of meaning. Focused yet expansive in its scope, it reminds us that with bricks we can build walls – either those of a home or a prison; they can be flung in anger or used to lay the groundwork for bridges to be built. With Brickworks, Tate Liverpool demonstrates that much can be done with seemingly modest raw materials.
Mike Pinnington
Brickworks continues @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North until 12 January, 2025
Images, from top: Kader Attia, “Untitled” (Concrete Blocks) 2008 © Kader Attia Installation view. © Tate (Sam Day); Czechoslovak Radio 1968 1969, 2008 © Tamas St. Auby (Szentjoby); Saloua Raouda Choucair, Poem Wall 1963–5 © Saloua Raouda Choucair Installation view. © Tate (Sam Day)
