The Biennial Blog

We were talking over lunch today about blogs and the general opinion seems to be that blogs are mainly drivel and not really worth the non-paper they are written on.

Lorenzo forwarded around an article last week called The Death of Blogging. Apparently only corporate blogs are the ones still thriving, individual bloggers seem to be going into ‘retirement’ daily. The bubble has burst.

I wonder does ours count as a ‘corporate’ blog? I suppose it does…there are certain things that i could (or maybe the right word is ‘would’) not say as an individual on this website, i am supposed to represent not only myself and my thoughts but also have to consider the Biennial ‘identity’ or, although i hate that word, our brand.

It is simply a fact that total honesty is not always the best (or wisest) policy when you are dealing and working with partnerships, funders and artists, it relates back to what Alphonso was saying about Tact in his talk the other night. As soon as you have to relate to another human being you must have an awareness of tact and how to use or reject it. It is the basis for building a relationship. In a blog you sort-of have a relationship with yourself (apart from the odd occasion when someone comments on them) which is curious for me as people look at the website to hear the Biennial’s opinion, not Sacha’s, they just get mine along with it. Writing here is like exercising a double-tact. I’m not so good with single tact, let alone double tact. I think i might be violating the tact rules by even talking about tact.

So. I’m not sure what i think about blogging. I like writing for our blog and it feels like some of the things that are harder to understand about what we do can be unpicked here. In my blog i do not have to satisfy as many people as i do with a bit of ‘official’ print or press release. I can tell you about taking the residents to Amsterdam without mentioning that it is part of the ‘Sefton Community Engagement Programme/Project (i forget)’, making sure all the partnership logos are attached and sounding super chirpy about it (except i had a good time so this happened anyway). I can just write some drivel and hope you find it remotely interesting or illuminating.

Tuesday was the Alphonso Lingis talk at the Bluecoat. I have been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with Alphonso over the last few days and his over-dinner conversation is much the same as his lectures. He weaves his stories like no-one else.

I was going to publish an extract here but i need to get his okay first so i suggest you either read the live blog/read one of his books and listen to this Gamelan music (There is a good album i have on my deezer account which should be just the ticket:

http://www.deezer.com/en/#music/various/anthologie-des-musiques-de-bali-vol-2-43076)

or watch the video when it becomes available next week.

I was controlling the sound during the event so couldn’t concentrate fully on the lecture (like his books they are best when you have no distractions and can be lost in them) but there was a story that came up in the Q+A which, as one member of the audience put it, made you feel like you were floating slightly. i felt that. It was the story of when Alphonso was in …i can’t remember where actually…but there for a whole summer and in this community the men and the woman lived separately. The men in one house/compound where they slept, and the woman in other dwellings with their children. Although the men would come and visit their wives and children, have dinner etc, they would always return to their own private compound in which woman were forbidden to go. One day Alphonso was in the market place and he spotted some other white-faced people in the crowds, a young family, Canadian, attractive with equally attractive children. They were missionaries and invited Alphonso for dinner. Although he knew he had to be careful what he said with them he was curious and asked them whether the local people were receptive to the missionaries work.

The husband and wife smiled at each other and then the wife recounted how she had just days before gone into the mens compound and into one of the men-only houses to the place where they kept their gods. She had picked up the statues and religious objects and taken them from the dwelling dropping them on the ground outside. The local men, armed and powerful, stood on totally overwhelmed by what was happening. They did not know how to relate to her, how to respond to her on their territory, in their residence, in their shrine and looked on, expecting that a god would come and strike down this woman for the outrage she had committed. It did not.

and this woman was HAPPY!?. She had succeeded in her own gods work… she had shown them that their religion was ….well …worth nothing…or rather…so unimportant to her that it could be trampled upon so easily.

I felt like i wanted to go and mourn with these people for their loss and string the woman up, hold a mirror to her beliefs and show her how alone she really was in the world. I hoped she would get a terrible illness, suffer for years, her children dying around her, her husband not finding in her his soulmate any more and leaving her. I hoped she would grow old and alone and when she looked in the mirror see a wizened old tree, not a woman, a human but something dead.

Life is not an easy experience to navigate through and anything you could do to make people feel more impotent, powerless and desolate should be punishable to the highest degree but then what have i just said, i am also to be punished for what i feel towards this woman i will never meet or hear of again.

Alphonso Lingis will be talking at The Bluecoat from 7 to 9:30 pm on Tuesday, 23 March as part of the Touched Talks. For information about what Alphonso will be talking about, please click here. The free tickets have all been booked, so you can’t register anymore. However, Mike and I will be liveblogging again. For our other Liveblogs, please check out last September’s Liveblog from Urbanism 2009 or the one from Steven Connor’s Touched Talk in February.

If the whole Liveblog concept is new to you, why not give it a try? All you have to do is come back here at 7 pm on Tuesday, 13 March, click on the blog to load it and read what we have to report. You are very welcome to participate by commenting or using the hashtags #alphonsolingis or #touchedtalk on Twitter! Also feel free to ask questions, we will try our best to get your questions answered by Alphonso.

The computer or the internet or something crashed yesterday so i couldn’t really tell you about the exhibition on Saturday.

After a mad rush to The Hague we finally made it and well done David Bade as it was such a huge and comprehensive exhibition of his work (even the Bade Boat from last years Canal Parade was ‘moored’ in the gallery space with people clambering all over it). Retrospective like, even though David does not like to call it this, it sounds too much like an end-of-career show. There was quite a funny mistake on the first exhibition text panel…it said David Bade was born in 1970…etc etc….his first major art prize (or commission) was in 1970! Very impressive for a new born.

Here is David’s weblog…

http://badeblog.wordpress.com/

I’ve just read he is organising a flash mob event at the GEM Museum (where the exhibition is) where you can go and tie your leg to some of the sculptures to build a ‘community sculpture’ so if that’s your thing…

He was really pleased to see Margy and Brenda (who managed to let most of the people in the show know that she was the star of the painting, Margy was a little worried she had been painted to look like a man) and gave us all a lovely and enthusiastic welcome.

There was a bit of a party afterwards with disco dancing and then we had to go back to our houseboat for wine and discussion on the faults of the British care system and the realities of leaving university with more than 20 grand in debt. It is impossible to argue with a 92 year old. I don’t recommend it.

Yesterday we were tourists. The Anne Frank museum was wonderful i thought and the photograph of Otto Frank at the end of the exhibition just standing in the attic and looking away from the camera, thinking about his lost family was just…well pretty awful.

It’s a nice space, they haven’t tried to overcomplicate the rooms and there are just a few cases with, for example, sections of wallpaper with Anne’s pasted filmstar pictures, the board game that Peter got for his 16th birthday, recipes for sausages written on the back of shopping lists. Go if you get the chance.

http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?pid=1&lid=2

Then it was on to the Cat Cabinet.

http://www.amsterdam.info/museums/cat-cabinet/

I think the man who worked behind the desk was the slave of the cats, he seemed to communicate silently with them and do their bidding. He was very quiet and i think trying to let us know that he wanted to be rescued or taken away from the museum but we just oohed and ahhed over the books and postcards and left him to his fate.

You can stay in the cat museum, maybe thats how the cats get you in the first place….

http://www.amsterdamapart.com/

Back in the office today and the roadworks and the rotten weather. Alphonso Lingis is in town at the moment for his talk at the Bluecoat tomorrow night at 7pm. Sold out I’m afraid. The video will appear on line next week.

The show last night was great! David was very pleased to see us and Lambert (Kamps who made the taxi boat last year) even came to see us (and the show obviously). We had a little Liverpool crew and lots of free drink tokens…

I want to sightsee and have breakfast and i need to pack and the internet is being so slow i can’t even upload any photos. I’ll do that later…

Tomorrow its back. to. life… back. to. reality. Maybe i need to do a call out, if you would like to keep us in Amsterdam and finance our life of international travel and private view hob-nobbing then please write a check addressed care of Sacha Waldron at Liverpool Biennial, 55 New Bird Street, Liverpool, L69 1XB.

This could be our last post from Amsterdam as the boat we live on has sprung (several) leaks. Andy has spend all afternoon on the roof trying to combat the weather while the rest of us took shelter under a hot-dog cafe and got soaked anyway.

Today is not the day for walking around in 2 euro non-waterproof Primark shoes. no indeed.

We have already discussed what will happen if we start to sink in the middle of the night. The consensus is that we will have time to realise that we’re going to die because the water will shock us awake but actually by that time we will be trapped and it will be too late.

Isn’t that cheery. I think i’ll have more wine.

Off to the Hague now….

Last night was fun. Much beer was drunk and the world was put very thoroughly to rights.

Today we are going to the Rijkesmuseum.

We have spent the morning deciding reading our guide book.

“Normal Behaviour. Too much alchohol often causes irresponsible and childish behaviour like undressing in public, jumping into canals and so on. Please don’t make a fool of yourself. People who live here do not appreciate it. So have fun but show some respect.”

“Urinating in Public. A dirty habit, and always committed by men”

indeed.

Our little party are now safely installed on our wonderful houseboat! Unfortunately the only thing we have managed to achieve so far is to get the neighbouring Moorhens hooked on Pringles. They go crazy for them and one has just bitten Andy. We will have to keep the windows locked tonight….

As i said in a previous post we are here to see David Bades painting exhibition in The Hague tomorrow night. David Bade did his residency in Seaforth last year and made a boat for the parade we staged as part of Urbanism. Local residents who had their portraits painted by David – Margi Roberts and Brenda Murray have joined us for this adventure (sadly not, at the last moment John Furlong and his son – if your reading this we send you our best wishes), along with Andy Foulds who assisted David for his residency, Samantha Jones who is doing research for her Biennial hosted Phd and us Biennial lot (Paul Kelly, Franny George and me-Sacha).

So know you know everyone.

After we finish our tea and finish philosophising on the resting and spiritual qualities of being on the water we will start exploring the city. If we manage not to get killed by the cyclists I’ll post some photographs later on. …

Its hard to be in a bad mood today, the weather is so beautiful. I walked to work this morning with just a cardigan on. There is a garage near my house in Waterloo that puts a parrot outside in his cage on sunny days and the first time i walked past him he wolf whistled and said ‘where are you off to?’…I’m going to walk past him every morning and see if we can’t be friends. Its my new project.

So anyway. ART.

On Saturday i went to see Jon Pountains installation ‘The Sitting Room’ at Casa de Brujas (or the old Arena, Duke Street. Open 11-5 daily). Worth a look, its going to be changing over the next few weeks as Jon adds his paintings to the installation and there will be a closing party (Friday 26th March). I really like the cat they have in the studio, he doesn’t like private views though and hangs out outside with the smokers, licking his paws. There is one picture Jon has up, a faded green Constable painting that if you look very closely has a murderous scarecrow man lurking in the reeds and obviously up to no good. I need to write something about Constable paintings one day, they all seem very disturbing to me. Elfin Spurs provided the music for the evening and much time was spent discussing what musical genre they belonged to (my suggestion is ‘Dado-Rail Lounge Rock’). Very good anyway.

On Friday Tania Bruguera (over on research for her work for the International Show in September) is doing a talk at The Bluecoat, in informal-style Touched Talk. See the main Biennial news page for more info. Should be good but i will not be here as i will be in…

AMSTERDAM. Hurray!

A group of us from the office are going over to see David Bade (who came over for a residency in Seaforth, part of the Art For Places programme, last year). His new show is opening in The Hague and we are taking some of the residents who helped with, and are featured in, the paintings being shown there. You can still see reproductions of David’s paintings in the walk-way at Seaforth Station if you can’t make it out that far.

Here’s David in his Seaforth Studio…

I will be blogging from Holland starting Friday to tell you whats happening and what we’re up too. I better stay out of the cafes…

Tomorrow night the new show at Arena opens, a collaborative project between Rich White and Brychan Tudor so i will be heading over for that. I like the Arena gallery, it the size of a postage stamp but space constraints or quirks can sometimes throw up the most interesting work. Also a good place to catch up with people you haven’t seen for a while as you will inevitably, at some point, be standing in front or on top of them.

Today i am listening to the dramatisation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland while i answer my emails and book some artists travel. I’m looking forward to seeing the Tim Burton version, in an interview recently when asked why he had cast his wife Helena Bonham Carter as the (red?) queen…he said that it was just because she had a rather large head.

In the radio play Alice has just drunk some liquid from an un-marked bottle. Her sister has warned her not to do this but she blames the conservative point of view on the fact that her sister ‘would say that, it comes from reading books without pictures’….

That brings me nicely onto the fact that we are having a book sale tomorrow in the office. It is a ‘pay what you think its worth’ sale. We are going to give the proceeds to Oxfam (to give to Haiti) so i hope folks think they are worth something. Its 4.30 – 7pm if you are in the vicinity. We have lots of books with pictures…..

This week has been a week of updates. On the International Show – think houses crashing into buildings, armchairs with real arms, bendy loopy structures you can lie on and animation videos of cartoon characters having their hands eaten off. The Waterworks commission from last year is moving ahead, the commission winners Duggan Morris were in the office on Monday to present and i think their idea is pretty perfect for the site where St Winnie’s is/used to be, or it would be perfect if they had incorporated a revolving wooden tree-top restaurant….i live in hope.

Just noticed this second that Emily Speed has been shortlisted for the Liverpool Art Prize! oh and James Quin who has his studio at Bluecoat (and owes me a painting still…). Hurray! Hurray! I think they should both win.

Tonight is the My War private view at FACT. See you then.

I won’t bang on about this too much again…i just wanted to finish off that On the Streets update by enthusing about the fact that we are inviting Jeanne van Heeswijk to work on a durational project (a few years anyway) in Anfield with the young people and with the area. I suppose the project that first drew our attention to her and the potentials of what she could do for Anfield was The Blue House (if you don’t know it already LOOK!) but looking at her website she has been working on many projects since

http://www.jeanneworks.net/

Some artists CV’s are just a bit mind blowing…..Jeanne’s is one of them…(Sometimes it’s so hard to think ‘oh yes, you do wonderful things im so happy for you’ rather than ‘I’m so jealous i would quite like to kill you and steal your identity’ …. i really hope she doesn’t read that before i meet her)

I won’t say too much more about that as we are still waiting for her final proposals.

Last night i went to see Ian Whittlesea talk at JMU. He didn’t inspire me too much with his own work but he talked a lot about more recent projects he’s been doing with Judo and his new translation of Yves Klein’s book he wrote on the principles of Judo…
I didn’t know the following things:

That Yves Klein convinced his parents to pay for him to spend two years in Japan studying Judo.

That he then went on, on his return to the USA, to open a Judo School of his own.

That the red star stamp on the back of his paintings is the emblem for the Judo school he set up.

http://www.yveskleinarchives.org/documents/bio_content_us.html

Whittlesea also mentioned a new little gallery project in London called the Ledge Project which seems very nice.

http://ledgeproject.org/

Maybe tomorrow i will go to see the opening of the Carlos Amorales show in Manchester, he is designing the Wolves you can see starting to appear on the website but Manchester is so very far away so maybe i will just have a bath instead.

Oh and I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, sorry Paddy and Roxy who sent me this picture ‘for your blog’

Apparently it is a collaborate piece entitled The Hair Rat made by Dan, Penny and Emily..er……thanks!

Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould are in Linz (i think they still are, perhaps they are back already) sent off on exchange by us. I think there must be more Liverpool artists in Linz at the moment than there is in Liverpool.

Here is a link to their blog anyways, enjoy:

TopiaGould.wordpress.com

My briefing notes for an upcoming scenario planning meeting start with a question that looks backwards rather than forward: what is the most important factor that has shaped the visual arts in the last three years?  The intriguing aspect of this is to ask the question of the future, not of the present: if one looked back in five, seven or ten years, what factors would have shaped the arts?

The answer for the coming period may well be about vision and how tightly the arts can keep to their visions.  Are we, as individual units, doing first and foremost that which we do best?  The environment for the arts has become more complex and the demands more varied but I believe those organisations with a simple, compelling commitment to their mission thrive best.  This does not mean that they avoid diversification, but rather that new activities spring from the essential values of the artist or organisation.

The vexing paradox of funding will remain, however.  Many funding streams work to innovation and new projects rather than core activities.  So chasing resources can fill the minds of arts managers.  Are there other models?

Liverpool’s reign as European Capital of Culture facilitated the emergence of Liverpool as an action research centre for culture as a civic leadership force, extraordinary programming, collaborative working and the interlinking of complementary sectors such as Higher Education and the arts.  It has not been explored, but I wonder if Liverpool arts organisations have inadvertently begun to operate according to the principles of intrapreneurialism.

Loosely, intrapreneurship is a “management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of … entrepreneurs, even though they have the resources, capabilities and security of the larger [system] to draw upon.” ¹

The collaborative model of LARC (Liverpool Arts Regeneration Campaign) is creating a larger, more stable, albeit informal, system that draws upon the values of entrepreneurs (“trying things until successful, learning from failures, attempting to conserve resources, etc.” ^ibid) and understands that the investment of resources (especially time) must bring rewards.

So I ask what the future holds for the arts.  Can we develop a resilient, productive system which is based upon appropriately resourcing the core activities of the arts but which motivates risk taking and, more importantly, recognises and rewards success by recycling resources and understanding the differences between investment and support?

Paul Smith

Executive Director

Liverpool Biennial

Last night, to the soundtrack of singing from one of the biggest Liverpool funeral parties ever seen, we held an update meeting for our On the Streets project for local residents, councillors and well, everyone really.

On the Streets is the project we are doing in Anfield at the moment. It’s a three year programme that’s trying to engage ‘The Kids’ (aged 11-17…not really kids anymore..) in Anfield in issues of physical regeneration in their neighbourhood. We started with about 20 young people last year and have been partnering them up with artists, architects and designers to give them a voice in the whole process and, for those of you who may think this all sounds a bit ‘worthy’ seriously go and have a walk/drive around Anfield. It must be quite bizarre to have to live in a place that, in certain parts (like the V streets), has basically shut down and just awaits demolition. On my first drive around we saw a primary school that was literally surrounded by boarded up houses, streets and streets of them and that was their view from school. What kind of image is that going to instill in a childs mind of how society works and how life in general works. ANYWAY, now I sound a bit worthy but I wouldn’t like my child to go to school every day and think ‘there are no people around and where I live is just waiting to be demolished…’

Since the last community update (about 9 months ago) we have been running workshops for the group of young poeple to start them thinking about some new possibilities for the area. There’s been a trip to see Turning the Place Over and the Urban Strawberry Lunch at St Lukes Church to see different uses of urban space and buildings, they came and did a session with Canal Club (part of Urbanism09) and also a trip to see New Islington in Manchester which seems to be going through similar times to Anfield.

http://www.neweastmanchester.com/area_map/2_-_new_islington/

http://www.cabe.org.uk/case-studies/ancoats-and-new-islington

To bond the group there has also been more funfunfun trips such as Go Karting in Manchester. Jenna Beaty, who is working closely with the group, said this was really interesting as they were asking the guy who runs it lots of questions about how he ran his business, the mechanics of it. Apparently they are already, and I suppose unsurprisingly, totally switched on to the idea of making money and the business world. Totally, also, switched on to a certain scepticism (maybe even…negativity? or perhaps even better ‘realistic defeatism’?), as one said ‘We’d rather not have it at all than it get robbed or burnt down’.

More recently the group has been working with Ed Purver, who is based in New York, to film for an installation that will be shown at the big launch of the On the Streets project on 16th April 6-8pm. They filmed on a trampoline in front of a blue screen and the result is rather magical and amusing. Instead of boarded up windows in the -to be- demolished streets you would have the kids jumping up and down and dancing around you. Have a look at the video’s below..

http://www.edpurver.com/

and see the sketched out films for Anfield here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfm91mQOXrE

The only concern at the meeting about this was that, after a drink or two (or five), making your way home at night and seeing a giant girl staring down at you from inside the houses might be quite frightening. Yes it probably will be.

Theres a few other things I want to tell you about this but I need to go and put my potato in the oven and have a meeting (not about the potato) so I will write it later.

Peter Arlt, our Linz residency artist, held a lunch today in Tranmere to talk to some of the people he has been meeting in his walks around the Wirral about the project he has been thinking about for Mersey Park. The idea, although it has not been totally settled upon yet and still has a way to go before is finalised, is rather lovely and playful. He proposes a column (Peter calls it ‘a column for the people’), not unlike the beacon or monument that sits at the entrance of the Mersey Tunnel that would become a barometer for the mood of the area. It might have lights on top that could be switched on or off, or may have several lights that could be switched on/off individually. The idea would be that there would be a group of residents who would meet every year and decide what the year has been like for Tranmere and if it’s been good, the lights go on and if it’s been bad, they go off.

Peter has the idea that on a very basic level the residents could have their say on how the year has gone for them, not really demanding anything or expecting anything but just able to make their opinion known in a very obvious and also quite cheeky, I think, way…..hey, times are bad, but people can still have a sense of humour.

It was only the first meeting today to introduce the proposed plan to residents and as Peter says, if they don’t like the idea he won’t do it but the reception seemed to be good and I think everyone felt that we could take the project to the next stage.

Peter described his feelings on the effect that regeneration has had on the residents of Tranmere as like a ‘tsunami’. Feelings echoed by the residents present who spoke about the issues of buildings being bulldozed with no alternative offered and no real need seen, “There’s nothing wrong with our houses, our houses are nice” said one woman, expressing confusion on why proposed regeneration projects seemingly only wanted to re-genrify the area and attract more young upwardly mobile people into the area (the point was, the regeneration programme has forced people to move away in the first place and now those people have new lives elsewhere and don’t want to return anyway…who is this new ‘public’ they are trying to attract and what would bring them to Tranmere?. Of course housing market renewal is exactly about stimulating the ‘market’ and not about he people at all. Who cares as long as they can afford it). This is all very well, but someone commented, ‘What about the old fogies like us?’

Now of course, many regeneration programmes have stopped entirely due to the economic downturn (or just total lack of foresight) and this is inducing even more worry, lots of people have been through this ‘renewal’ type senario before and now will go through it again, when will things ever improve and settle down. Residents still have a lot of hope and at least when things were visibly progressing, it was easier to have some hope in the future, as one resident put it beautifully -

‘When you see cement going in between two bricks, peoples hearts just lift”

Well we may not literally be putting cement between two bricks but I think our cement is of a different kind, I think Peter is interested in neighbourhood ‘glue’ and his project seeks to, not only create something for Tranmere but more specifically for the people who live there.

We will keep you updated as the project progresses.