Liverpool: Noise festival / Biennial

Last Wednesday I travelled up to Liverpool to help assist my friend Leah with a performance piece at a show that her work was in. The show was part of the Noise Festival. When we got to the gallery things were pretty chaotic. There didn't seem to be any particular plan for hanging the work, and the majority of the organisers seemed more interested in the BBC film crew that were shooting a documentary than actually getting on with putting the show up. They didn't take into account how vital the context of the gallery space was to Leah's piece and initially tried to get her to do it in this pub next door, which would have looked totally wrong, and been a logistical nightmare. Her piece consisted of this giant Mickey Mouse head she'd carved out of polystyrene and coated with this plaster like stuff, which she would wear whilst sitting on a chair on a plinth for about 40 minutes in see through 'sexy' underwear. Leah couldn't see out of it at all and it's actually incredibly heavy. My job was to walk her up to the chair, and sit her down, then using this radio set/earpiece thing, check she was alright every 10 minutes and let her know how long she had left. Here's a picture of it:

That's after a performance, as we were just about to get her out of the head. Anyway, overall I think that the space could have been used in a more interesting way- it was narrow and long, and everything was just stuck to the walls, so it felt like you were in a large corridor with art stuck to the sides. I also think if people hadn't been so obsessed with running around after the TV cameras it might have been better. I guess it was an interesting learning experience though.

That weekend was the beginning of the Liverpool Biennial, and we managed to get passes for the major private views that evening. We went to the Tate Liverpool first. In the permenant collection I saw a John Latham piece 'Film Star' that I've always loved, but never actually seen in the flesh until now.

I had no idea it was in their collection, and I stood in front of it for AGES just gawping and grinning. I also saw a documentary piece called dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johan Grimonprez, which had me really gripped.It was about hijacking and terrorism, and interestingly had been made a few years before 9/11. It was cool to see that kind of work in a gallery, and it made me think about the difference between documentary/narrative based video work and video ART. I much prefer the former. The actual work that was commisioned for the Biennial was pretty dull. Obviously lots of it was based on things the artists found interesting, and as a result lots of it seemed like very socially worthy, very boring investigations into the area. The strongest pieces of work were Tsui Kuang-yu's 'Liverpool Top 9!!' in which normal parts of the city were given new, ridiculous uses, and were presented as news stories. It was really funny. On the total polar opposite end of the scale, I also liked the work of Teresa Margolles. At first it just looked like a minimalist sculpture-a stainless steel cube. Then you'd notice the hiss as a drop of water fell from above onto it's heated surface and produced steam. But most preturbing of all was when you realised that the water that is falling onto the heated block is water that has been used to wash bodies in a Mexico morgue. I am familar with Margolles work, and I think the subtle, yet very literal way that she works with ideas about death and processes involved with it is very interesting. Rather than beating you round the head or trying to be shocking, the realisation sort of creeps up on you, which is way more disturbing.

After the Tate we headed to Greenland street, an old industrial building, which had been made into a massive art complex by the A Foundation, an organisation who help the developments of the arts in Liverpool. The space was AMAZING and consisted of three parts. In the Furnace was a Goshka Macuga installation, which I thought was very well executed. The space, which was based on a film set, was full of weird structures you could look round, and which housed objects that had been borrowed from museums or galleries. Performances also took place throughout the night. I enjoyed the way that there were lots of works that existed individually within the installation, but were ultimately part of the whole installation, which was a piece of art in itself.

The Blade Factory part of the building housed a project by Grizedale Arts, who are an arts collective from the Lake District. There were lots of community based works, 'worthy' kind of stuff similar to the things at Tate Modern, and some Relational Aesthetics type events. I didn't feel particularly interested in any of it. There was a sound/visual installation upstairs by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and someone who used to be in Spaceman 3, which involved subliminal messaging as a form of creating the artwork in your head. I'm not sure if it actually worked like that on me, but I enjoyed the ambience of the whole thing.

The final space within the complex, the Coach Shed, was where the New Contemporaries show was located. New Contemporaries is open to any final year BA students, post grad students, and anyone who has graduated within the last year. Looking round it made me feel really dispondant about art. 'Bad' painting is the new video art in terms of what's trendy by the looks of things. When I say 'bad' I mean knowingly shoddy looking, calculated attempts at 'bad'. There were lots of blobby, semi abstract pieces, and it was really fucking boring. The two pieces that really made me go 'oh please!' were Yuko Nasu's horrible 'cubism gone soft' brightly coloured faces, which looked like something someone would buy in one of those poster shops like Athena or Art Republic, and Henrietta Simson's 'suburbia' paintings of...you've guessed it, suburban houses, done in a knowingly amatuer style. It's such a done subject anyway, and she hadn't even tried to think of a newer way of critiquing it. On the new contemporaries website it says the following:The work, this year, could be simply characterised. It is not exactly ‘show off’ but is, instead, quiet, light even, in approach.Yeah sure, and that's why the majority of it was so so so dull! I think a lot of this is a reaction to what happened in the 90's with Brit Art being so huge and making art which referenced and then became part of popular culture. The work in the show had a feeling of being quite serious, and ambigious in terms of meaning. It felt really non-commital, almost as if the artists were afraid to make any kind of statement with their work. I don't believe art should always be about making statements, but the work in the New Contemporaries show for the most part lacked any kind of backbone, and as a result I found it really disappointing.

Overall the weekend was an eye opener. From the experience assisting Leah it made me think a lot about my problems with the systems and structures of contemporary art, especially in terms of the gallery space, and possible alternatives to the white cube style of gallery. Although I felt that a lot of the artwork I saw over my time there was pretty average, I really liked Liverpool. The community in general there seem to be a lot more receptive to contemporary art, and I saw lots of people who weren't typical 'art' types looking round shows. There are lots of cool spaces to show work in and I think the artistic potential there is great. I wish I'd had longer up there to look round the smaller galleries.

British Art Show 6 at the Arnolfini, Bristol

Today I ventured down to The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol to take a look at The British Art Show 6. The British Art Show happens every five years, and tours a number of art venues across the country, across multiple venues in each city. I only saw the art on show at the Arnolfini, but there were also exhibitions at the City Museum, The West of England Academy, ROOM, and the A Bond warehouse.

Overall I found the show at the Arnolfini to be pretty underwhelming. I thought that the painting based work by Tomma Abts and Phillip Allen were particularly dull. Abts work were small canvases, in which she'd used shape and texture to create illusionary effects. It reminded me of something someone might have done on their art foundation year, and felt clever about doing. One of her paintings was called 'emo' as well. ha ha. The other painter in the show, Allen, was slightly less dull, but his work felt equally cliched. Lots of blobby paint and texture at the tops and bottoms of the canvases, swirling the thick oil paint into rosette shapes. The middle ground was dominated by flat, colourful geometric shapes. I found the overall effect to be very disjointed, but not a good kind of disjointed, just an irritating one.

Mark Leckey's film Made in 'Eaven, a two hour loop of the shabby interior of his studio reflected in Jeff Koon's 'Bunny felt like a triumph of technology over concept. Although I liked his idea of taking such an iconic piece of work, and using it as a mere mirror to focus on his own, unspectacular, run down studio, I found the way he'd computer generated the studio's appearance to look too unreal and tacky.

I was surprised that two of the pieces I liked the most were video installations. I have a bit of a problem with video based artwork (which I will elaborate on in another post), but I thought that Ergin Cavusoglu's four screen installation worked really well, due to the positioning of the screens within the room, which the viewer had to move around to see, developing a commitment between viewer and the piece, which I think video art sometimes lacks. I also liked the fact that different things were happening in each projection, but the whole thing was unified by a soundtrack of Byzantine chanting, which contrasted greatly with the chaos on the screens. I also liked Paul Rooney's video work, in which he combined shots of a certain location (a nightclub, or a gallery), with a specially written song which was about the experiences of the person that worked there (cloakroom attendant, gallery invigillator). I thought they were quite funny, and I liked the fact that they were about the length of a music video, which is a brevity I feel a lot of video art often lacks, and as a result ends up spilling into overindulgence.

Roger Hiorns bubble foam scupltures, which were created by compressed foam steadily being squeezed out of strangely shaped wooden nozzles and falling to the floor, was perhaps the piece I felt most instantly attracted to. I think it's probably because of the surreal nature of the shapes that were created, and how even though it was a random process, repeated shapes and patterns could be found in what was created. It also smelt quite nice! Adam Chodzko's 'M-Path also interested me. In this work, you could swap your pair of shoes for another pair (that had been donated by residents of the Horfield district of Bristol), which could be worn for the duration of your visit to the exhibition. I thought it was quite an amusing idea, but like all works which rely on viewer participation, would anyone actually do it? I ruled it out for myself, as I lacked a pair of socks, but I hung around for a bit to see if anyone would swap their shoes. Eventually an entire family turned up and did so!

So there we are. l thought the exhibition was set up well, but nothing really blew me away. I wish I'd had the time to check out some of the other venues, as there were some artists exhibiting in them whose work has previously interested me. The British Art Show says it's aim is to be 'the most ambitious survey of new and recent developments in art from the UK'. And whilst I didn't think that much of the work was particularly ambitious, at least it was varied.