The Biennial Blog

Artist Jeanne van Heeswijk explores keyquestions in her practice. This text formed part of her acceptance speech as she was awarded the Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.

In a time of accelerated globalisation and rapid changes in our environment, where neighbourhoods become sites of contestation, where different conditions of power are inscribed, where everything seemed to be locked up by over-regulation and populist images prevail, people are increasingly feeling de-invested and excluded from their own daily environment. There is a serious disconnect between ordinary people and govern-mentality. Taken together, these things call into question traditional methods of artistic interventions in the city. Today there is an urgent need for us (artists and our co-producers) to re-engage and witness to the invisible vectors of power that shape the territory and the faculty of publicness, to reorganise systems of urban interaction and to challenge the political and economic frameworks.

The question is are we capable of creating a place and associated capacities for public faculty – a public domain – where we can research, debate, face up to the confrontation and address one another as co-producers of the city? Can we make this area of tension visible and develop instruments to enable intervention in that area.  In order to create models that allow for people to become participants in the process of visualizing the dynamics, complexity and diversity of the city they live in and collectively develop a narrative about the city in which everyone has a place? Can alliances between politics and art, be imagined, tested, and based in practices that establish (…) narratives for a democratic, post-national, inclusive society?[1] I often referrer to forms of urban acupuncture (hit and run tactics) that will allow the sensitive places in our society to emerge and blocked relational energies to flow again. Developing instruments that enable people to fill in this place and deepen, sharpen or question that narrative. So they can face their world in progress (not as consumers but as creators) and become actors in their own surrounding, being able to act up, to be an active citizen.

It seems to me that is really important to ask how an engaged practice can address and mobilise the existing local physical and socio-cultural capital and use it as the performative basis for a city under development. It should provide a platform for artist and non artist exchanges, for participation and real/ honest communication, that underpins a broadly supported, inclusive and integral idea about living together in the community, as a condition or possibility for bringing about changes, and preferably improvements, in social structures.[2]

Artist practice

The key concepts underlying an engaged practice are in my opinion ‘acting’, ‘meeting’, ‘learning’, confronting, acting and ‘communicating’  But these are all activities that demand mutual responsibility. Rick Lowe , who has taught me a lot in this area once explained to me ‘I began to learn to shift from creation in splendid isolation to collaboration., when I became part of the audience myself.  For this I had to develop the ability “To listen” on how to interject or intervene with my own creative energy.’

To intervene in such a way that the people who are participating can increase the number and intensity of their ties, may seems a simple act to perform. However during the course of my practice, I have learned how difficult it can be to create in collaboration with a community you are addressing and to be dependent upon the community’s continued involvement for sustainability. It also involved all of us together learning how to take collective responsibility to make the information gathered work operate significantly in the  social and political context too. These processes are always long and sometimes painful, as we have to learn about each other’s ideas and different viewpoints. This is a process of collective learning about how to unlease the potential of people to engaging with different creative energies for collective action in order to become a shaping force in our immediate environment.

What did I learn (a few notes on some projects)

So what did I learn from different communities?  While there is a growing faith in the potential of greater community participation to develop models and instruments for city-building. It is too often blind to the naivety of the notion of transformation based on harmonious togetherness. It seems to me that offering a menu of choices is just the last convulsion of the idea of supply-side transformability that still treats the citizen as a consumer. To enable the individual or the community their right to participate in building the city means more than merely presenting them with a few choices and allowing them to communicate through public consultative channels, demonstrations or standard procedures. In fact it is precisely these conditions – the notions of how we wish to and are able to live together – that we should be able to question again and again within this process. It is exactly here where people teach me what it takes to become active citizens.

Face Your World

In an intense process of more than a year, youngster work hard to rewrite the brief and with that the design of their neighbourhood park. While the City Council wanted it to be a quite green zone, the young people went to look for what the community really needed and introduced the concept of ‘Active Green’. Green that allowed for a lot of activities such as sports, play, and gathering for different generations and groups. Trough their production of different viewpoint they argued for the communities need. This might have taken a long intense time but it generated enough friction to change the political process in the end. Finally a month ago (5 years later) their new park was opened. The local Health and Sports Counsellor took this opportunity to launch his campaign to fight obesities and praised the park because of it is contribution to towards wellbeing.

Samia, one of the pupils, whispered in the background “Sure like we didn’t know what the community really needed’ I learned that when I community start t starts to articulate its own voice and aesthetic and begins to self-organise it quickly becomes apparent that they know what they really want and need. And that in facilitating this process we might be able to pass on tools to reshape their world-in-progress.

Ruhr  2010

By working with a small community living in the middle of one of the largest motorway intersections in the Industrial Ruhr area in Germany I learned a lot about the way in which ‘small happiness’ can be a resistance force.  In a time where the Ruhr area wanted to put itself on the map as a ‘creative Metropole’, They effectively fought to retake an empty church so as to create a community centre. Together, we created a large table (at which it was possible to seat the whole village) to serve both as a council table, a beer garden and most of all as a place to publicise their ongoing fight to be recognized as a viable community and to be taken serious for that. “We are the Ruhrgebied.  We are people open to the world and principled, acting in solidarity. We are the heartland of Europe par excellence. You have to take us in account while dreaming up a new Metropole” While at the same time, through selling  beer, cofee, cakes, marmalade and soks they raised the neccesary amount of money to do the building work. I learned that the programs of action (a offline form of crowd funding) and multipliers of images which make up the work, made it is possible for a to maintain itself in its own indetermination and at the same time, to multiply its links with a world that it continually approaches.

Stavanger  University Hospital

The same counted for the employees of one of the largest university hospitals in Norway. They used the opportunity to be part of the public art project ‘Neighbourhood Secrets’, in order to tell their own narrative on the ethical and moral dilemmas they face every day, but which have no place in the ‘official information the hospital is supplying to the outside world. After collecting stories from within the Hospital an  Open Call for Actors (players) was made and over 80 people both working as being patient in the hospital showed up for audition. It took two years to shoot  (completely in house, actors, camerawork, musical score, scene locations) an episode hospital sitcom series. Imagine how difficult it is to have 7 ‘volunteer actors present in a real time operating hospital and at the same time to shoot a scene. But all the actors/players always found away to be there. When I expressed my concern, that we might take time away from more urgent matters, they had to tell me–that besides saving lives –the way in which the hospital performs and to discuss the sensitive issues publicly is also important. So they told me to just do my job and do it well’

Freehouse

The Afrikaander district was one of the first in the Netherlands with a population mostly of foreign origin. In the 1990s, the Rotterdam City Council started a major urban development scheme adjacent to the area, and while one architectural feature after another rose up around it , with the slogan ”Clean, Whole and Save” stricter regulation were put in place and the economic activity in the Afrikaander district itself died out. In order for the Afrikaander district to survive the expansion of the ‘creative city’-and to thrive from it – Freehouse actively challenged this new regulation imposed by the local government in doing over 300 interventions. Freehouse helped to set up small-scale skill based projects to regenerate the area and its market, by improving products, services, market interactions and social integration in order to retain its intimate local character and cultural diversity.  In collaboration with residents, artisans, artists and designers new sustainable infrastructures were different skills and knowledge were combined were created such as a neighbourhood workshop for making and designing clothes, a communal kitchen area, a neighbourhood shop selling local products and a small-scale delivery service, which at present offering 40 jobs and various internships in the community. But more important by radicalising local production people together created a different image of success showing that a skill based city could be a viable alternative to the creative city.

The money of this prize is also going to the Freehouse project, as it is exactly the amount we needed to establish a local holding to ensure the duration and sustainability of the different cooperatives.

For my practice, becoming part of the community and being part of the whole process of change a neighborhood is undergoing, is key. Learning how at a deeper level we can face today’s broken circuitry between people, culture and the political process. To take collective responsibility to learn from each other how to produce change can make it possible that the processes started, work in a larger social political context as well. Encouraging people to make in their territory an environment in which they can create, produce, disseminate, distribute and have access to their own cultural expressions.[3] So that the energy generated through people acting out in their own environment will lead to a network of support, a critical reading of one’s own surroundings and an involvement in the changes that take place. Finding ways to re-set the public value of the arts, its public faculty as a contributor to greater solidarity. And for this you need to continuously go back, again and again to create an understanding of public domain as a shared space, a space that everyone can contribute to and change.

[2] My own lesson from practices about the contemporary state of the public domain is that it will require nothing less than making private public during this state of exception

[3] UN Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (Signed Paris 20/10/2005 and entry into force : 18 March 2007). Specifically  Article 7 – Measures to promote cultural expressions

Last weekend I made my way to a warehouse in Hoxton for an appointment to see Ryans Gander’s most recent site specific project Locked Room Scenario. Produced by Artangel, Gander is often described as a storyteller as much as he is an artist. His work is loaded with witty in-jokes, sub-plots and puzzles, and lacks any coyness in making art about art.

Earlier that morning I’d received a curious text message,

‘It’s in the pocket of Aston’s Yellow Macintosh. Spencer A.’

Arriving at the open building, discreetly signed as the Kimberling Gallery, Locked Room Scenario is both self-conscious and uneasy. Standing at the bottom of a littered stairwell I’m faced with a sullen teenager sitting on the stairs and against my better judgement squeeze past him toward the darkened doorway at the top of the steps, which turns out to be locked. As is the next one. Peering through the gaps in the newspaper puzzle pages that cover the windows, a door slams and a tall, long haired man disappears down the stairs. I’ve just missed him.

The ground floor is more familiar, flawless white walled corridors frame a large but inaccessible gallery space.  A press release in the deserted foyer outlines the work of the ‘Blue Conceptualists’, an overlooked group of artists active since the 1960′s and details the work of Mary Aurory, Aston Ernest and Spencer Anthony (this mornings mystery text message sender) among others. Nearby boxes are piled high containing postcards of humorously named artworks; a large, phallic, blue fur sculpture wears a sign around it neck reading “If I was in monochrome I would be better appreciated”. Increasingly confident in my detective skills I take a risk and call the Kimberling Gallery on the number on the press release, a phone rings in the distance but remains unanswered.

Gander engineers elaborate and convoluted clues; overheard conversations, a glimpse of blue fur through the gallery window, the yellow Macintosh flung over a chair, everything remains just out of reach. Layering tensions of the personal relationships of the exhibiting artists over their fictitious art histories, there are hints at an incident that jeopardised the opening of the exhibition, and it all seem to hinge around the enigmatic Spencer A……… The crosswords disguising the windows were weighted with more significance that I’d granted them previously, Locked Room Scenario is as close as conceptual art comes to a murder mystery weekend.

A quick scout around the shabby exterior of the warehouse reveals scrawled apologies to Marie Aurory. The plot thickens but I’m not closer to making any sense of it all. I’m quite sure now that I’m not going to. What’s more, people are acting very strangely. Locked Room Scenario successfully disarms you to a point that it’s near impossible to distinguish what is real and what is constructed by the artist.

Leaving the depot, I’m still trying to pick apart fact and fiction… looking over to the pub across the road I had to actively reassure myself that the men drinking outside are not all in on it too. A woman taps me on the shoulder and gestures towards a folded sheet of paper on the floor behind me. She signs that it had fallen from my bag and disappears back in the direction of the exhibition. Unfolding the paper, a page torn from a book, the text is littered with the names of now familiar artists, one sentence is underlined in blue and I remain immersed in intrigue and suspicion.

Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario is open until 23 October 2011, tickets must be booked at least a day in advance of your visit from the Artangel website.

http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2011/locked_room_scenario

So I’m Caz and today is my last day in the Biennial office after 4 years of working with the public art team as programme assistant.

I thought I might blog about some of the work I have been involved with, always in the background, I have had a fantastic 4 years and ‘it’s good to share’ or so they say.

I lent a small administrative hand with Dream in St Helens, my first ever experience with Biennial was chair racing down the office with the miners who worked in the former Sutton Manor pits, yes… seriously!

I then worked on the Visible Virals programme with a-ape, the phrases you can see painted around the city walls are a lasting tribute of that project but it also included a phenomenal ‘can shop’, a publication of photo’s, facts and figures along with a set of scales that tell you your weight via how many bags of sugar one person eats in a year or how much toilet roll one family uses each year amongst others.

I worked with Nils Norman on his parks project too finding all the banner sites for his posters (one of which is still up on the office wall).

I also worked with David Bade in Seaforth, even managing to make a book art piece myself to display in the Seaforth Post office window.
Kerry Morrison also worked from the post office, her ‘Wild and Productive’ project really inspired me into working with nature and engaging with communities with my own artwork.

Next came The Canal Project sourcing swan pedaloes to sail down the Leeds Liverpool canal was my claim to fame, swans that have been re-homed one as an ‘Open Source’ swan http://www.defnetmedia.com/swanpedalo.org/ and another that I found out only today, has been refurbished and relaunched in Dartmouth raising many smiles.

I worked with Raumlabor Berlin helping find accommodation for artists, sourcing materials for the amazing Jantar Mantar and researching local history of St Winnies school in Bootle. Then managing volunteers for the Urbanism project on the canal in 2009.

Working with Paul Kelly and Elaine Speight on the ‘Our Turf’ project in Wirral last year was fantastic, organising foraging walks and watching the way Squash nutrition work led me to making my own mobile allotment for my lastest art project.
I really got a feel for project management through this and realised that I may even enjoy that as a career myself.

I helped organise a really successful series of talks and conferences with Bruce Mau in Everton Park, in a local school and in a giant pink marquee of all things!

Property management also seems to have played a big part in my work, I have organised refurbs and/or paid bills for schools in Garston + Bootle, an old wine lodge (Turning the Place over), a post office in Seaforth, a shop in China Town, 2 artists houses in Bootle and Crosby and now a bakery in Anfield.

The latest project I have been involved with is project managed by Franny George. It’s ’2up2down’ by Jeanne van Heeswijk, a truly inspirational artist from the Netherlands. She is working with teams of people in Anfield and schoolchildren, who will be designing, building and refurbishing a row of ‘tinned up’ terraced houses over the next year whilst based at Mitchells Bakery (opposite LFC) and during the timespan of this project ‘Kemps’ restaurant will be starting to re-use the site as a social enterprise community bakery again. I will continue to watch the project unfold from a distance as I’m sure it will be a huge success.

Working part time for Liverpool Biennial has allowed me to bring up my young family, finish a Fine Art degree, complete a residency at New Ferry Butterfly Park and now finish my MA too and has also given me a wealth of experience of working in the arts as well as meeting many artists and making good friends.

It has been busy, sometimes frantic, especially around festival time but the team are truly amazing and the curators are inspired. My personal favourite festival pieces over the years being ‘The Gleaming Lights of the Souls’ by Yayoi Kusama and ‘The Mending Project’ by Lee Ming Wei, not to forget the serenity that was Sachiko Abe with ‘Cut Paper’.

I go on to be an activity and volunteer manager at a local heritage restoration project and also to concentrate on my own work as an artist. I shall miss working for Biennial but can’t wait to see what comes next for them.

Roll on Biennial 2012 and all it’s fabulous artwork.

Viewing artwork in real life, like listening to live music, is an experience which can’t yet be beaten by any virtual facsimile, but as screen resolutions get better and mobile devices ever more numerous, web design develops to ensure the best viewing experience for the user. One of my favourite features of the upcoming new Biennial website is the fluid design which not only allows for lots of beautiful images of artists’ works to be displayed, but also shuffles the page elements around depending on whether you’re using, say, an iPhone, a tablet or a desktop computer, so you always get the full content – and if you zoom in or out, enlarge an image or adjust the browser window, the gallery and other information re-organise themselves to make the best use of space, in an almost magical fashion.

This means that there isn’t a static hierarchy in the display of images, and the shuffling galleries create changing juxtapositions of artworks, a contrast to the precisely-curated sequence of works a visitor might find in an art gallery. All this playing around with space made me think about how the way things are presented to us in the real world affects our response, often without our realising it. We can be easily manipulated – advertisers clamour for our attention with eye-catching window displays and noisy adverts, unless they are selling us luxury goods that is, in which case less is more; the more expensive the item, the more expansive the surrounding space and minimalist the approach used in display, or the more esoterically irrelevant the television advert can seem to the product itself. This is really an only slightly cleverer way of selling us something we probably don’t need: a product so magnificent it hardly has to try has to be worth having, surely?

The pristine white walls of the archetypal modern art gallery can alter the way we feel about the artwork on display, inducing a reverent attitude toward the pieces: a contemplative atmosphere deemed necessary by most, perhaps, but a form of conditioning nonetheless. For the Liverpool Biennial and other city-wide festivals, artists make use of a wider variety of urban spaces, not setting their works apart from the everyday but bringing the two together in unexpectedly eye-tickling ways (see Richard Wilson’s Turning The Place Over, or Do Ho Suh’s Bridging Home), heightening the impact of the former through the way they makes us view the latter in a different light – and isn’t encouraging the viewer to consider the world in a new way one of the main functions of art?

‘For decades… international artists have questioned the idea that visual art should be static, sanctified and presented on a wall or plinth to be viewed from a distance.’ (Peter Gorschlüter, Touched guide, p. 82)

Right now I’m sitting with a stack of Biennial catalogues in front of me, colourful but dauntingly thick. Why, I hear you cry – and who are you anyway? Tackling those questions in reverse order my name is David Lawson and myself and fellow intern Dawn Wood are going to be helping create the brand new website for Liverpool Biennial 2012 (launching very soon!) along with keeping you updated on this blog as to the latest goings-on.

Biennial catalogues going back to 1999

As well as the upcoming Biennial 2012 events the website will include an archive of past Biennial programmes, and all this has raised the question of how best to organise the information so users can find the right information whatever path they choose – whether they want to look directly for artists across all years, what was on at a particular venue in a particular Biennial year or generally what is coming up anywhere and everywhere in the future.

The clever bods at Smiling Wolf have come up with intuitive designs to make the new website really easy to navigate, aided with clear definitions of what sort of events are on – no mean feat considering the many and varied categories that previous years’ events have been headed under. All this conceptualising got me thinking more broadly about how useful labels are in general when talking about art: much as the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize allows for any works that have some element of painting in them – resulting in a wide array of styles and media used by entrants over the years – how broad or narrow should definitions be to capture the essence of what an art event or artistic style is, while still allowing flexibility?

Humans have a tendency to want to put things into neat boxes, to impose order on the great big Venn diagram of the world – it might only be a rough approximation of how things really are, but it helps us to see connections and find our way through. But how far should this labelling go? As someone a little obsessed with subdividing genres on my iTunes collection I like to impose a structure onto things, but an artist might reasonably reject their work being labelled as though they were simply one of a collective, when they in fact see themselves very much as individuals pursuing their own style, or similarly reject having a definition foisted upon them by someone else – and in any case, isn’t whether something is successful as art or not the key point, regardless of the artificial constructs people try to squeeze artists into?

For the relative newcomer to an art programme as dazzlingly diverse as the Biennial, however, the sheer range of artistic concepts and styles can be bewildering; broad labels can help understand what sort of work an artist produces and what sort of ideas they like to play around with, and thus help people discover new art that they might otherwise have skipped over. Perhaps a balance is needed between reality and utility – but should one take precedence?

Hello Biennial Blog,

This entry has been a long time coming since I took over Sacha Waldrons position as Programme Assistant in September, but better late than never. So first things first, I’m Hannah Pierce, nice to e-meet you.

I’ve just returned to the office today after 2 weeks working on another short festival in Ireland called Terminal Convention. Developed by Static Gallery, Liverpool it’s currently taking place in the Decommissioned Terminal of Cork International Airport. Read about it here www.terminalconvention.com

In addition to an exhibition, art fair, farmers market and music festival there was also a three day symposium titled Airport Art: Is it a Terminal Convention? (See what they’ve done there?) Speakers included Charles Esche, Annie Fletcher, Steven Ten, Alistair Hudson, George Yudice and Stephen Wright among others, all chaired by John Byrne, liberating his inner game show host….. and attended by a number of past and present Liverpool Biennialists.

Topics covered in the departure lounge included;

-Double ontology

-The guilt of the art fair (with a full apology)

-The museum as a place of antiquity

-The museum as an activist space

-Aerosexuals (google it)

-The user value of Art  “one can be a drug user, but never an Art user”

-The Market as Condition of Possibility for Art

-Government money paying for wayward experimentation – We should be more useful.

-The over saturation of Art in the public sphere, is it time to apply a de growth?

-The Bermuda Triangle

All punctuated by Douglas Gordons rendition of Perfect Day by Lou Reed seeping through from the duty free, where every work he has produced from 1992 is being exhibited on a loop.  And of course the regular arrivals and departures of Aer Lingus, the runway is still fully functional.

Douglas Gordon. Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now.

The discussion saw academics not only asking questions but also suggesting a few answers. Charles Esche argued that the model of the museum is now is redundant, maybe we don’t even need it anymore (the Van Abbe no longer shows any temporary exhibitions, but continue to commission new works). This approach to programming opens up new possibilities for curatorial and performative use of the archive – look at their four part Play Van Abbe exhibitions here http://vanabbemuseum.nl

Annie Fletcher, Van Abbes exhibitions curator agreed “ There are many ways to archive, just don’t wait for it”

Unfortunately this is where I have to admit that I’m procrastinating a little, and that there is a rather large spreadsheet for the 2010 Touched archive awaiting completion. So in heeding Annie Fletchers advice I will go back to Excel and make sure that the recent festival and all the images are available online for you very soon, just don’t wait for it….

There were long-term causes for the current credit crisis, going back to the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange in 1986 and beyond (the comparison with the current resilience of the Canadian banking system, which has been properly regulated over the past sixty years, is highly instructive). There are also long-term reasons as to why affect, as a way for people to value art, has been ignored or downplayed in the art world over the past half century. One reason has been that the way in which society reflects on art has been professionalized, necessitating the creation of distance between professionals and amateurs. A second is that for people on the political left (which includes the majority of academic art historians / cultural theorists) emotion has been more or less a taboo subject. This historic intellectual context was a contributory factor in my proposing ‘Touched’ as the theme for the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. I am not too optimistic about the discourse of art shifting its alliance away from the saleroom and the academic marketplace towards subjective and affective experience, but there are some welcome signs.

When I first studied the history of art in the 1970s, orthodoxy (power) within the subject was disputed between the new professionals, keen to establish their careers within what was then still a fairly novel industry, and the connoisseurs, who were aware that they were rapidly being outmanoeuvred. The cohort of students to which I belonged quickly learned that ‘art appreciation’ should be left to journalists and old-fashioned critics: our future success lay in the elaboration of theory. Any rising profession has to establish an area of specialist knowledge, and the valuing of art through personal or direct means such as affect might after all be too readily accessible to vocational experience (connoisseurship) without requiring the professionalism conferred by academic study. But for some of us there was a problem: the scholarship of connoisseurs was clearly based on love for and dialogue with the object / the other, while so much theory turned its back on the object as soon as possible, floating free into a space that gloried in the boundlessness of solipsism. What use was such theory outside an academic context; did the profession have value beyond the museum?

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, I used to receive exhibition proposals from artists written in the third person, proposed as scientific experiments without personal emotional investment. For many critics and theorists of art, as well as artists, an explicit emotional reaction to an artwork remained something to hide until even quite recently. Why would any critique or theory about art ignore the fundamental role of the emotions? Paul Ekman’s edition of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) suggests one answer.[1] Darwin’s book was written to show the commonality of emotions in humans and other animals, their similar expression in humans and other animals, and how these expressions are an innate outcome of evolution. He was writing against slavery and the beliefs that later underpinned apartheid. He believed that all humans were the same in ways that mattered, such as our emotions, and he hoped his observations would show this.

Ekman argues that Darwin’s Expression was entirely ignored in the twentieth century because the dominant school of social scientists was invested in the notion that all cultural expressions, such as language, are learned (not innate); any discussion of human ‘universals’ was simply unacceptable:

The first half of the twentieth century was a time of optimism about the perfectibility of man. There was no acknowledged limit to how much human nature could be reconstructed by changing the environment. Change the state, educate the parents, modify child rearing practices and we would have a nation of renaissance men and women. Nothing was innate.[2]

As a result, ‘for decades, any scientist who emphasised the biological contributions to social behaviour, who believed in an innate contribution to individual differences in personality, learning or intelligence, was suspected of being a racist’.[3]

The political background to this investment, which has been even now only partially discontinued and deconstructed, was the fact that both fascism and racism had proposed that ‘social Darwinism’ should be allowed to operate in order to separate the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ humans: that certain humans were ‘innately’ inferior to others, and that nothing need be done to improve social conditions since people were born good or bad. In reaction, social scientists asserted that nothing was innate, rather than risk giving power to the wrong side:

Today most scientists reject such absolute relativism: nature and nurture both play a role in all human behaviour. Emotions are both the product of our evolution, particularly their physiology and expression, and of what we have learned, especially our attempts to manage our emotions, our attitudes about our emotions and our representations of them.[4]

It does seem that the immediate effect of the interdisciplinary application of the social sciences to the history of art, which took place from the 1960s onwards, was to lobotomize emotions from the body of knowledge.

‘We lack a vocabulary with which to discuss emotion,’ remarked Steven Connor following his contribution to the series of Touched talks.[5] One hundred and forty years after Darwin’s Expression and more than a century after Freud and Nietzsche’s explorations of emotion, this suggestion is intriguing, and revealing. What it reveals is this. The modernist art historical orthodoxy set up in the 1960s and 1970s has been under deconstruction for forty years by ‘minority’ interests: feminism, cultural diversity, gay and lesbian studies, identity politics and so forth. During this time, the publishable ways of writing or theorizing the history of art have become infinitely more diverse, along with the range of artworks offered to the market. Theory itself – which was then sustained by optimism born of science – has become a form of creative, or at least highly subjective, writing in which poetics are dominant. But, with some notable exceptions such as Briony Fer, a writer today who combines scholarship with reflections on the direct, emotive, subjective experience of an artwork (in the manner of Bernard Berenson or Ernst Gombrich, for instance) is unlikely to be taken seriously in the academic world (think of Robert Hughes).

David Sylvester, the pre-eminent art critic in the UK in the 1970s and 80s, remarked that ‘art affects one in different parts of one’s body. For example, sometimes in the solar plexus or the pit of one’s stomach, sometimes in the shoulder blades […] or one may get a feeling of levitation – an experience I particularly associate with Matisse.’[6] Sylvester’s phenomenological approach was not adopted as a ‘critical position’ (usually to be interpreted as ‘career position’) but because he wanted to be honest in communicating to his readers his reactions in front of artworks. Touched was intended to address the viewer in a psycho-somatic way – head, heart, hand. This is the ‘embodiment’ of a critical reaction to art. ‘Embodiment’ was an artistic strategy in the 1970s and 80s, when artists asked the viewer to focus on the perceiving subject as a means of avoiding existing formalist, impersonal or anti-personal orthodoxies. The politics of the personal and the politics of embodiment were allies. The globalization of the past twenty years has allowed an increasing respect for cultural difference and localism into the art critical consciousness. This has allowed the incorporation (within the idea of embodiment) of the geographical and historical context of the subject, a position best described by the word ‘emplacement’. Both embodiment and emplacement were invoked as ways in which the art gathered in Touched was intended to affect the viewer.

It may be that the tide in critical thinking – including how we think about artworks – already turned with the century from being a ‘rationalist’ to being an ‘holistic’ one. But there is still much work to be done. Michael Hardt calls attention to this positive ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, without underestimating the challenge this represents for academic discourse.

A focus on affects certainly does draw attention to the body and emotions, but it also introduces an important shift. The challenge of the perspective of the affects resides primarily in the syntheses it requires. This is, in the first place, because affects refer equally to the body and the mind; and in the second because they involve both reason and the passions […] affects belong simultaneously to both sides of the causal relationship. They illuminate […] both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between those two powers.[7]

[2] Ibid., p. 368.

[3] Ibid., p. 369.

[4] Ibid, p. xxxv.

[5] Steven Connor, ‘Fidgets’, Touched talk, September 2010 (see below, p. XX).

[6] In conversation with Martin Gayford, 2001. Quoted in James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

[7] Michael Hardt, Foreword to The Affective Turn, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

This text is an excerpt from the forthcoming Touched: The Book. You can pre-order your copy here.

Just when you thought your life could not be more complete…now you can take flight in the comfort of your own home, office or in front of an audience.

Liverpool Biennial is selling the airline seats featured in the Touched exhibition last year. The seats formed part of artist Ryan Trecartin’s video installation Trill-ogy Comp (2009)

We think they would be ideal for home cinema, gaming or theatre productions and there are three sets of three seaters for sale at £150 each set or best offer.

If you want to to view them or simply get further information please contact Amanprit Sandhu at the Biennial office 0n 0151 709 7444.

Image of Ryan Trecartin's installation "Trill-ogy Comp" for Touched

If you are yet to have catch up with the views of some of the most active arts and culture attenders in the City, then why not have a look at their blogs?

Throughout 2010 Paul Argent, Barbara McGrouther, Becky Smith, Kristal Clark and Donna Williamson have been recording their visits to a wide-range of cultural events across Liverpool and they are still attending in 2011.

One of the more recent post was about Liverpool’s Chinese New Year Celebrations.

This is what Barbara reported about Liverpool Biennial 2010.

It’s a great innovation and hopefully will find a way to continue for a long time to come, the Cultural Champions will eventually have to be re-elected and if you are as passionate about the role of culture in your communities as they have been then you could put yourself forward. I don’t know the details of when that will be, but keep look out for further information.

Massive Change Network Launch, part of the Decade of Health and Wellbeing

At the Johnson Foundation Auditorium, Liverpool John Moores University, Art & Design Academy, 2 Duckinfield Street, Liverpool L3 5RD.

17.30 – 20.00 on Thursday 24 February 2011

(18.00 – Screening of Plan B, 19.00 – Live-link Discussion)

This is a great opportunity to join in the discussions around placing Liverpool at the heart of a growing movement of cities looking for a future which is more equal, well and green.

In May 2010 Year of Health and Wellbeing, Bruce Mau, designer and global urban strategist, visited Liverpool and engaged with stakeholders from diverse communities on the topic of sustainable cities, looking at Everton Park as a site for transformational change. Since then the dialogue has continued as Bruce Mau moves from running a design studio to launching this new initiative – a global Massive Change Network.

They are keen to involve a wide range of stakeholders, including those who were involved directly in the Bruce Mau visit and other stakeholder groups who are pro-actively supporting the Decade of Health and Wellbeing. Community groups, businesses, students and professionals from all spheres  - all are most welcome to join this seminar and we hope contribute to ongoing discussions on this theme for the Decade of Health and Wellbeing.

People around the world are invited to join an open format for live discussion, questions and answers on the potential of design to confront the challenges we face. Be part of the global screening of Swedish documentary film THE PLAN written and directed by David & Michael Stenberg of Biosphere Pictures.

Followed immediately by live discussion with Bruce Mau, Bisi Williams, and director David Osterberg.

Whether we like it or not, we are heading toward a profound change. The climate, population growth, species extinction, resource consumption..are running wild. We can deal with it and produce the change we want, or we can let that change force itself upon us. More and more people are becoming aware of these challenges and engaging in different plans and initiatives to drive this development of new possibilities forward.

In THE PLAN, we will get to know some of these people. Their stories, thoughts, ideas and plans seem to be part of something bigger — MASSIVE CHANGE. Imagine harnessing the power of collaboration, science, creativity, design thinking and optimism to solve the world’s greatest challenges. Citizens could change and design the world for the betterment of not only our welfare today, but the future of generations to come.

For more details and respond to sarah.garner@liverpoolpct.nhs.uk to reserve your free place or phone 0151 296 7532. Please feel free to extend this invitation to others.

26 November:

DaDaFest – The Freak and the Showgirl - In this comic cabaret of striptease, freak show and song, Julie Atlas Muz, Miss Coney Island 2006 and performance artist, and Mat Fraser, film, television and stage actor and presenter, perform their greatest hits, new work, daring duets and hilarious audience participation.

27 November:

Art Mediator Tours | Sam Jones – Sam Jones is a Liverpool-based artist focusing on public art and digital works as well as a lecturer at institutions such as LJMU and Leeds College College of Art. Her tour will be of works that speak to her. Book FREE tickets.

Liverpool Live Event – Guillermo Goméz-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes (La Pocha Nostra) – Corpo Ilicito - La Pocha Nostra’s immersive performances have inspired a devoted international following and were last experienced at the Bluecoat in a legendary performance to open the 2002 Liverpool Biennial. Using their bodies as sites for political reinvention and poetic prophesying, they explore the Bush administration’s criminalisation of the brown body and the emerging culture of hope that has developed in response.

The Dark Behind My Eyelids – A conference in collaboration between Liverpool Biennial and DaDaFest. The conference aims to rethink the relation between art, thinking and normalcy. What are our assumptions when we distinguish between thought and feeling, body and brain, identity and difference? How is (dis)ability marked by these assumptions and who’s interests are served by them in the space of art? Book by contacting the Bluecoat.

28 November:

Art Mediator Tours | Sophie Bower -  On her mediated tours Sophie offers further information on selected works but asks participants to note down and discuss the thoughts that come to mind throughout the tour. Previous participants have mentioned how tricky it is to ‘catch the fleeting’. As the Biennial Festival develops, she is compiling these thoughts as a work-in-progress on a large hand-drawn floor plan, which can be located on the wall by the black shed in the Visitors Centre. Come back and see your anonymous thoughts up there amongst all the others!  Book FREE tickets.

EarlySundays Tour with Elfin Spurs - Elfin Spurs will take you on the ultimate Touched tour. Experience live music, costumes and a wonderful Sunday morning mixture of wit and beauty.  Book FREE tickets.

DaDaFest – The Feral Four – Hysterical screaming was integral to the Beatles’ music and The Feral Four were formed to concentrate upon exploring this theory by screaming at the audience while dressed as a Beatles tribute band.

27-28 November:

Spray Paint Graphic Wolves - Like Carlos Amorales’s graphic wolves? Want one on your shirt/bag/skateboard/anything?  Every Saturday and Sunday 12-4pm in the Visitor Centre – stencil whatever you want for £2.  Fabric safe spraypaint (red, black, and white) and stencils provided. Bring whatever you want a wolf head on.  Any questions – email mary@biennial.com

Roswitha, a volunteer invigilator for the Liverpool Biennial Festival, reflects on 52 Renshaw Street in general and Enjoy Yourself in particular, taking photos on her mobile phone

Today my invigilation took me to the first floor of 52 Renshaw Street, where I overlooked the work of Aime Mpane, Y. Z. Kami, Markus Schinwald and Oren Eliav – all excellent art works, but among these four artists I chose my personal favourite style for narrative work, execution and colour (sorry, a splash of colour always works for me) – Aime Mpane’s paintings.

There were a lot of visitors during lunch hour, when besides the normal amount of lunch visitors the students from Liverpool John Moores University arrived, equipped with all their sketch pads etc. Most of them took a photo of the Cuban Artist Loidys Carnero’s ‘tongue-in-cheek’ work Enjoy Yourself (click here to download more info), part of which is basically an old dilapidated fireplace on the first floor.  Very often was I asked by people if this was part of the exhibition while they wore a big grin on their faces.

However, one visitor to Liverpool built her own installation.  She took off her rucksack and placed inside the chimney and took a photo of it!  But little did she know, that I stood behind her and took a photo of her whilst she was creating her own interactive artwork…  Unfortunately, my image it is not totally focused as we all moved a little whilst rushing… She was very surprised when I showed her the photo that she had been ‘caught in the act’ and her friends really loved the idea of the double take.

Tonight is the Long Night!

All of our non-gallery, Public Realm sites are open until 9pm.  At the Visitor Centre, we are open until 10pm and DJs will be spinning tracks from 5:30 – 9pm, creating a Touched mood to accompany your stroll through all the artworks in 52 Renshaw Street.  We will also have special Long Night book deals – Festival guides will be £2 and many other books will be £5 and under!  Perfect late night reading for arty-types!

There are dozens of other activities going on around Liverpool for the Long Night, so be sure you download the full catalogue to make the most of it.  Have a look at our partners’ activities below for extra doses of Biennial goodness.

the Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery, FACT, the Cooperative, and the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker

Below are two surveys which allow you to have your say about how Liverpool Biennial as well as Liverpool cultural organisations in general are doing.

Due to the clocks going back, all public realm sites (i.e. none gallery/Rapid) will be closing at 5pm everyday.  The Visitor Centre and exhibitions at Rapid/52 Renshaw Street will remain open unil 6pm everyday.  Please check the opening times and dates of the galleries you wish to visit in order to plan which days to come.  Tate Liverpool and A Foundation, for instance, are not open on Mondays.

Below are the opening times of each venue including <City States> at the C.U.C. and John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker:

Tate Liverpool

A Foundation – Tuesday to Sunday 12 noon – 6pm

Open Eye

FACT

Contemporary Urban Centre

The Bluecoat

The Walker

Please note that SQUAT Liverpool and The Cooperative, which have multiple venues, have more limited opening times.

This is another guest blog is written by Doug Herbert, a Liverpool Biennial Volunteer Information Assistant as well as model for Daniel Knorr’s The Naked Corner.  These are his personal perspectives on his experiences invigilating the works in Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Afoundation, and the Wood Street garage.  New Contemporaries runs until this Saturday.

You might be interested to know that I’m writing this in Afoundation and that, despite it being close to freezing in the New Contemporaries exhibition, I’m sweating. Is it because I’ve just been looking at the Patrick Coyle piece, This Works – which is just graphite pencil on the wall which reads, “This Works is extremely fragile, Please do not touch.” For some reason it put me in mind of my first piano teacher, which is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat, but no, that’s not why I’m sweating.
Has everyone here seen Toy Story 3? Remember this? That’s why I’m sweating. Just like Buzz and the gang I got the shock of my life a moment ago and I suppose to explain why we need to talk about this morning.
I spend a lot of time in the public realm, this morning I was in Raymond Pettibons garage on Wood Street. I like it there, its home to My little red flip book and a video piece called Sunday Night and Saturday Morning. The video is from 2005 but the paintings were done specifically for the Biennial, apparently there is quite a good story behind them involving lots of red wine. Funny how all the best stories include red wine. I am clueless about art but I like the animation and some of it is really funny. If you can stand the cold it’s worth sitting through the whole hour. It’s quite cryptic but what art isn’t?

I particularly like the reference to Dennis “Beach Boys” Wilson, “Dennis you’re the only one who can surf, Dennis you’re the only one who can’t sing.” This is particularly meaningful to the residents of my flat because “Dennis Wilson- Pacific ocean blue” is the equivalent to the Marvin Gaye LP my dad breaks out on special occasions, very special occasions. Yep, when Dennis is rocking, don’t come knocking. In fact, if Dennis is rocking, just stick Born to Run on your head phones and reach for the whiskey.

Anyway, this is meant to be about volunteer experiences not volunteer “experiences”. So as I was saying, I spend a lot of time in the public realm so when Joёl comes over the radio warning “all volunteers, there is a large group moving through the building so be prepared.” I get all smug, sip on my luke warm tea and proclaim to whoever I’m with (this morning it was Craig), “Mugs, listen to them making mountains out of molehills.”

This brings us back to Afoundation, New Contemporaries, Toy Story 3 and me, sweating. I experienced my first large group, they were foundation year art students and they tore through the building like a tornado, I was all “Don’t touch anything!”, “Please don’t run!”, “No horse play!” I sounded like a teenage life guard trying to control Wavertree pool during the inflatable fun afternoon. I now have a sore throat.  Luckily nothing has been damaged, which is good, because I’d quite like to come back.

The stuff here is good, I like the Nathan Barlex paintings for no other reason than I like the colours, (how valuable you must find my in-depth analysis of art) and I like Untitled by Daniel Lichtman, it reminds me of The Catcher in the Rye. If you’ve read it you’ll know the books main protagonist, Holden Caulfield has a thing against phonies, well the two artists commissioned by the Biennial here are anything but phonies.  Antti Laitinen built a boat out of old tree bark from his native Finland and sailed the thing across the Mersey, having just seen it I’ll tell you I wouldn’t even sit on it. His exhibition is great. There’s a video of Antti building an island out of sand bags, I don’t know why he did it but I’m glad he did.

I also don’t know why Sachiko Abe has decided to dedicate 10 hours of her day everyday for two months to cutting paper into tiny strips, the accompanying sculpture is beautiful and Paper Clouds is amazing. I don’t know why she’s doing it, but again I’m glad she is. It’s my highlight of the biennial so far and I have no idea why. Coming from a man sat sweating in a freezing cold warehouse watching a video of Emma Hart playing Dice with the sea I’m not sure how much weight can be put behind this statement but to paraphrase my friend Joe, artists be crazy.

We are art monsters from Melbourne, Australia. We aim to engage the community and promote non-violence by creating a dialogue about violent human and monstrous urges, both individual and en masse. Monsters get a bad rap for eating brains. John and Yoko got a bad rap for promoting peace. We’d like to show you that even out and out monsters can contribute to a better society, and indiscretion or two aside.

We demand monster-rights!

We’re better educated than Sarah Palin, and we have even better hair than Kim Jong-Il.

Viva la Monsterpiece!

Yours Sincerely,

The Monsters xx

Watch us

Stuart Driscoll, a volunteer invigilator for the Liverpool Biennial Festival, reflects on his experiences so far – the good and the bad

Prior to me volunteering at the biennial I’d been living away in Asia and Europe for 10 years. Of course I’d never lost contact with Liverpool, but following my return when I heard about this volunteering opportunity I thought it would be a great chance to…kind of in keeping with the theme of the biennial… get back in touch with my hometown.

The locations in the public realm such as The Black-E, The Scandinavian Hotel and The Oratory had long been features of everyday Liverpool to me, but I’d never been inside any of them before. And I’m not the only one. I’ve noticed that a lot of visitors are drawn to the biennial out of a curiosity to visit some enigmatic local landmarks that have been out of access to the public for a long time, and once inside they tend to stick around.

I was in the Black-E when a couple came bouncing in full of tales of how they used to hang-out in there during their younger years, then they looked up and noticed Kris Martin’s Mandi XV hanging down above their heads. They were blown away by it and asked me questions about the size, weight and construction of the massive sword which I was happy to answer with the help of some insider knowledge. They left happily leaving echoes of “Boss that” swirling around the dome.

And while I enjoyed some autumnal sunshine outside of The Scandinavian Hotel an older couple who were local to the area passed by. They were curious as to what was going on in there and was it being renovated. They told me it was a fantastic building in the past and I managed to persuade them in for a few minutes to look at the films and the building. They left a good while later, to wander around the corner for a real-life look at Cristina Lucas’s Touch and Go.

Such interactions with visitors are great, it often starts with a discussion on a piece of work in the biennial and leads to someone telling you about their own painting or sculpture that they practice in a lock-up garage/studio in Southport.

Mind you its not always so positive, a mad, aggressive person threatened me with a car key at the Cathedral. The man clearly needed a touch of peace and calm in his life, and if he didn’t find the priest that he was looking for and if I had been braver…I’d have recommended him a therapeutic visit to The Mending Project at 52 Renshaw Street.”

Lee Kendall, a volunteer invigilator for the Liverpool Biennial Festival, writes on the Government’s cuts in reference to Kris Martin’s Mandi XV, a giant sword which hangs in the Black-E.

Britain’s newly unelected Prime Minister has announced a raft of public spending cuts the likes of which the citizens of this country have never before experienced, not even during the austerity drive following the end of WWII.  The real reason that we are all in this mess, the global financial crisis and the impact of profligate bank practices in the City, that still remain unchecked, is being sublimely, gleefully ignored.

As with all of the other public sectors that have been most affected by swingeing cuts, the arts sector has been hit by a hammer blow. Or should that be sword?

I took a walk inside The Blackie this afternoon, set against the gloomy backdrop of crepuscular storm clouds and drenching, icy rain, and Kris Martin’s phenomenal Mandi XV (2007), suddenly represents not just a physical manifestation of the fabled Sword of Damocles, but the absolute physical reality of what these gigantic cuts are going to mean.

I stood, open-mouthed, beneath the deadly point, watching the massive blade swing slightly in the breeze funnelling inside the space from Berry Street, and wondered whether we will ever be fortunate enough to see such a fantastic piece of art in such a wonderful public setting again? The sword seems glaringly malevolent today, the eve of the spending review announcements that will mean the end of many community arts centres such as The Blackie all over the country.

How fitting it would be perhaps, if the whole edifice were to come crashing down?