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?
