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.

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[1] In reference to Gottfried Wagner, The Art of Difference

[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

For curator Lorenzo Fusi, the best Biennials never forget where they came from. For him, the word on the street is far more important than the sensational headlines…

Talk about culture shock. You’re the curator of Siena’s Contemporary Art Centre: a striking series of galleries set within, and connected to, the the 1,000 year old Santa Maria della Scala – originally home to one of the first hospitals in Europe.

Frescoed ceilings and honey coloured walls yield to angular glass and steel walkways leading on to light filled new exhibition spaces: oversized windows offering both a clear view of the art within, and a frame for the harmonious town scape beyond.

A year later, you’re wandering around the skeletal remains of Rapid Hardware. ‘More Lighting Upstairs’ signs falsely beckon you onwards. But you’ll find no frescoes here. Nor, for that matter, any plastic chandeliers.

For Lorenzo Fusi, curator for the 6th Liverpool International Biennial, the last 12 months has been an object lesson in how to accentuate the culture and eliminate the shock. And transforming the venerable hardware store into a temporary exhibition space is just part of the process.

“With every city, the important thing is to dig beneath the crust,” Fusi says. Do this, he believes, and you’ll find more things that unite our cultural hubs than divide them.

“Like Siena, Liverpool feels a long way from the capital. On the periphery…” he pauses, “… a little disconnected.”

To a curator intent on making his mark, cities on the edge are an excellent place to do it.

“If you’re caught up in the flux, which London and the major art centres can be, it’s all too easy to get distracted; for your focus to be carried away with the next big thing. Liverpool’s not as prey to that. It’s self-centered, but in a way that encourages creativity. It operates to its own rhythms, but still manages to be current, and vital,” Fusi says.

But Liverpool, perhaps because of its relatively compact core, and its self-sufficient milieu isn’t the easiest city for a new arrival to get to know.

“It took me a while to get understood, or to find the opportunity to get integrated,” says the softly spoken, animated Italian who’s curated shows around the world. “Larger cities have niches into which you can comfortably slot. Liverpool’s too small to have niches!” Fusi says.

Not that he wasted time waiting for the invites to drop through the post. Fusi didn’t have the luxury – there was the small matter of Britain’s biggest Biennial to oversee and, specifically, curate its strand focusing on art in the public realm.

As before, this is the pivot around which the entire Biennial rotates – amounting to around 50 percent of the event’s artworks, and, doubtless, even more of its attention.

Fusi arrived to the single word brief: Touched. There was, he said, no instructions beyond this.

We imagine him arriving at John Lennon Airport, whereupon a man in a Homburg hat whispered the solitary word in his ear, and vanished in the mists of the Mersey.

Sadly, even the Biennial doesn’t operate along quite so quixotic lines. Still, the task remained: build a world class biennial based on a brief that’s at once simple, yet fiendishly ambivalent.

“I needed to find my own interpretation,” Fusi says, “It was a unique way to approach a show. But it helped me focus on how, in my opinion, art can really touch a place, and its people.

“Obviously, my starting point was that of the Biennial’s mission – ‘engaging art, people and place’,” he says, “but in the public realm the boundaries between the makers and consumers of art are often blurred. Then it becomes a case of what is being touched, and by whom?”

Engaging emotions – whichever way the engagement flows – is something Fusi has been grappling with for the past decade or so: “It’s something I deeply share with the founders of the Biennial, and why I was so excited to be offered this role,” he says. It’s also the reason Fusi was so intent on leaving the medieval precincts of Siena, and heading to a post-industrial northern English city a full 18 months before the show began.

“I’m not one of those globe-trotting curators,” he says, “I have no time for art that’s imposed into a place, like some alien strain. From the outset, I was committed to the Liverpool Biennial full time, dedicating all my energies to it,” Fusi says, eliciting a clear distinction between his modus operandi and many who’ve gone before him (we all remember the Capital of Culture artistic director who worked out of an office in Melbourne, and recoil at the thought processes that led to that particular appointment).

“The public realm, by its very nature, is political – it’s of the people,” Fusi says, believing that you can only truly operate within it with the consent of the rest of us. “I was very aware of the need for collaboration, not just between myself and the artist, but between the myself and the city,” he says.

It’s not a trick that all Biennials pull off. Many of the bigger art events seem to exist in bubble wrap: two week jamborees for artists, agents, buyers and sellers to clean up, cash in and create headlines, with no real attempt to communicate with the city that surrounds it.

Liverpool’s event, thanks to the support of the city council and the engagement of the rest of us, has always been able to bleed out from the galleries and onto the streets.

“I want the Biennial to be perceived by future generations as something that has a lasting, tangible benefit. Art is a great way to empower people, and if I can facilitate this processes, I’ll have succeeded in my role,” he says.  Fusi’s take on public art is one of the most obvious ways in which this year’s event will feel subtly – and in some ways, markedly – different to the rest.

“To me, the public realm isn’t all about the ‘big hitters’, or the show-stopping set pieces. To me, that’s far too limited, and it’s not something that, beyond the spectacle, has any lasting impact.”

Fusi’s preference, for art which operates on a more intimate scale, is all about layers, about reflection. The slow reveal. Don’t even think of a Swarovski-encrusted spider perched on a hi-wire web, this year, then…

“Of course, you need the easy catches to spread the word,” he says, “but you also need artwork with a more complex narrative, like Liverpool’s itself.”

All too aware of Liverpool’s strong political and social conscience, Fusi’s approach remains steadfastly nuanced.

“It would be easy to imprint political messages on a piece, just to seek the approval of the crowd,” he says, “but that would be a banal gesture; a quick win. Many artists operate like this, but I’m far more interested in those who seek to convey their messages in a more interesting way.

The Biennial does ‘Brick Up The Mersey Tunnels’ is, we imagine, still some way from being commissioned.

“Densely layered artworks are those I favour, but these are often the most beautiful,” Fusi says, pausing. “Yes…there’s a lot of beauty in this year’s show, but it’s emotionally challenging, and a little anti-glamorous too.”

Sounds like, in Fusi, Liverpool has found its match.

David Lloyd

Writer Freire Barnes is inspired and engaged on a recent trip to survey the art scene in Liverpool…

Full of anticipation for a weekend of exhibition openings and talks, I arrived in sunny Liverpool. Home to the Beatles, The Grand National, an ever-growing arts scene and more shopping centres than you can shake a stick at, cranes penetrate the skyline of this once prosperous port as redevelopment is rife. Between the Albert Dock where the Tate resides and the Edwardian Three Graces, the Mann Island development is in mid-construction, reminiscent of the Death Star with a sheer black glass façade; it will house the Open Eye gallery come 2011. The neighbouring Museum of Liverpool is due to open in the same year.

Yet the majority of development has been in retail in a bid to boost consumerism most notably with the £1 Billion, Liverpool One complex. So what of the boost in art consumerism? As a UNESCO World Heritage City with a 450,000 populace, Liverpool can boast unique urban interventions by leading artists and a rather impressive mix of traditional and contemporary art spaces – apparently the largest collection of national museums and galleries outside of London – from The Walker Art Gallery (1887) to the South Bank equivalent, FACT (2003). Liverpool is a wash with artistic talent and possibility yet there is an air of discontent. It almost feels as if it needs to be an outsider, dare I say a Southerner, someone from the big smoke to make a proclamation of the true potential of this city.

Having visited Liverpool on numerous occasions albeit mainly on press trips, meaning apart from a brief glimpse out of the coach window that would collect you at Lime Street station and deliver you to your destination, my sense and knowledge of this North West city was somewhat limited. Yet there in the derelict buildings of majestic-port-city-yester-year lay a beckoning wake up call for artistic growth and enlightenment. Crowned most successful European Capital of Culture in 2008 – generating £880 million in economic revenue – Liverpool is no shrinking violet when it comes to the arts. The renowned Liverpool Biennial has certainly cemented the foundation of this city’s artistic capability. Originally set up to create a significant international contemporary art event, partnering with as many of the existing arts organisations in Liverpool to celebrate its thriving artistic scene, it has gone on to become the largest and most successful arts event in the UK. It has attracted and commissioned numerous international artists such as Pavel Büchler, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Ai Weiwei, Yoko Ono, Roman Ondak, Annette Messager, Tomas Saraceno, Doris Salcedo, and Phillipe Parreno (the list of artstars is endless), in 2008 Art for Places was launched, it actively engages the local community, continues to push the boundaries of artistic development, focuses on economic regeneration, has initiated an on-going significant International dialogue, realised the most unbelievably awe-inspiring piece of public art by Richard Wilson and with the launch of an iPhone App this year to aid visitors to the 6^th festival, the skies really have been the limit.

So it’s no surprise in the run up to such a prestigious event that exhibitions should be looking at the diversity of collaboration and international exchange that the Biennial so successfully endorses. To kick-start my Liverpool art marathon weekend was Global Studio at The Bluecoat. Aiming to bridge the gap between the distance of geography, the exhibition facilitated the experimentation of many artists either hailing from and living in Liverpool with other artists from international cities. Broken down into five interconnected displays, artists were invited to ‘develop exhibition proposals’. POST a Liverpool artists’ collective formed during the European Capital of Culture invited 7 female artists from Linz, the 2009 European Capital of Culture to create riPOSTe, an exploration into the common and differing themes of artists from two diverse cultures. Haruko Maeda’s (Linz) memento mori themed portrait with skull face, dead hares and birds harked back to allegorical concerns in the 16^th and 17^th centuries creating a narrative based on reality and myth. Robyn Woolston’s (Liverpool) haunting video although similar in theme to Maeda’s work highlighted eternal presence and loss using the framework of abandoned architecture. More concerned with the locality and heritage of an artist were the offerings from Liverpool’s very own artist-run initiative, The Royal Standard. Their first presentation of a changing gallery installation included Nathalie Hughes’ comical animation, Turning Scouse that illustrated how a common Liverpudlian colloquialism ‘Boss’ had infiltrated her Lancashire vocabulary. Extending on the theme of Liverpudlian patriotism was a room filled with can’s of 100% Scouse, which you could take away once branded by the artist with an ink stamp. Now residing proudly on my bookcase, this ‘Authentic can of culture’, which is of course filled with the famous local stew, scouse watch over me as I type and contemplate what being an artist in Liverpool really means. In its entirety Global Studio allowed Liverpudlian puns to shine and illustrated the energy of contemporary art practice rather than successfully illustrate the ‘workings of a studio’. However it was refreshing to see a younger generation of artists dominate an established arts institution even if the displays were tenuously linked to the exhibitions premise.

Over on Greenland Street, flying the flag for a younger crop of artists was A Foundation’s, A Curriculum. An expansion as it were on Global Studio’s concerns, the artists’ residency programme provides selected artists the space and opportunity to pursue a new body of work. Still painted gold from the previous exhibition, here was a true working studio with scatterings of work by eight artists picked from over 300 applicants lay strewn across the Upper Blade Factory space. Half way through the 2-month long residency, I met Hannah Perry who after finishing her BA at Goldsmiths had moved to Liverpool. She welcomed and realised the importance of being able to make work in such an environment. So A Foundation certainly was honouring it’s mantra to support development, production and exhibition of contemporary visual work.

Downstairs in the Coach Shed, offering an insight into the other end of the Contemporary Art World, that of selling, was The Economy of the Gift a new annual exhibition. Wanting to re-contextualise the art fair and ultimately create a ‘boutique scaled’ event curator Ticiana Correa invited four UK galleries, hailing most notably from the northern counties to choose four international counterparts who in turn would each select one artist from their partners stable to exhibit. Why? Well to generate international exchange and to breathe some life into the regions art market, creating a discourse between each gallery and their respective artist and allowing gallery visitors to experience the work of international artists in a fair format. But how can a show of this remit work outside of the ‘art fair’ environment without its temporary exhibiting structures, the black clad-radio-mic’d door men, miles of corridor, Haute-Couture-clad gallerists and no VIP area to sup champagne?

Well, the ‘gift’ for me lay in the fact these elements weren’t present to infringe on the artwork. Albeit a slightly disjointed show that hovers between experimentation and curatorial playground, there was a huge array on offer from video installation and graph paper scribbles to performance and earth sculptures. The recently graduated Rebecca Lennon’s Which Part of the Agreement Have I Broken, references main components of the exhibition: money and that of a mutual contract but also adds a humorous juxtaposition to the other works. Jacob Dahlgren’s Colour Reading Context ingeniously collated piles of everyday objects in varying hues and tones. Spread across the gallery floor like a mutating organism, morphing from one banal object to the next, felt tiles, old pink sponges, red napkins, panes of glass, bits of carpet, word chip, and even the Ballet Annual saved from the local library who were going to burn it were transformed to an abstract motif of the ordinary. Looking at the ultimate aim of the show allows for a microscopic understanding of Liverpool’s commercial market and the evident unfortunate lack of one.

Remarkably there is only one commercial gallery to exist in Liverpool, Ceri Hand Gallery. Run by the eponymous Ceri who is single-handedly attempting to rejuvenate the commercial scene, is the perfect masthead with her impressive 17-years background in the arts from Director of Exhibitions at FACT, Contributing Curator to Liverpool Biennial to Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts. It must be said I was rather taken aback by the enormity of her first floor space on Cotton Street. Obviously so akin to hearing about recently opened gallery spaces in London that are often no larger than a shoebox, I was pleasantly surprised to set foot in what can be called a cathedral to art – maybe I slightly exaggerate – but certainly a temple for the artistic cause with its high ceiling and perfect dimension. Eleanor Moreton: Im Wartezimmer (In the Waiting Room) was on show. Her expressively loose paintings of patriarchs, tyrants and lovers are like washes of memories from a previous life. Subconsciously – which is very apt considering the psychoanalytical aspect to the show – Moreton drew on her childhood memories for her parents fondness of the Austro Hungarian Empire; post 2^nd World War they would make regular trips to Germany and Austria, no doubt to satisfy her father’s penchant for Schubert.

Not waiting for the commercial galleries to come to them, artists are quite literally doing it for themselves, take The Royal Standard as prime example. Located on the outskirts of the city they’ve taken the non-profit space model to develop a studio complex not just for the creation of art but more for interchange amongst artists to be occurring. After a scrupulous application process and assessment, artists are selected not only on artistic talent but also in relation to other residents and their subsequent input to the greater cause of The Royal Standard. This is an exceptionally noble principal but I wonder if these artists who are desperate for space and opportunity have got caught up in the application process so professed by bureaucratic arts agencies. This said they curate an exciting roster of exhibitions in the downstairs space that enables the vision of these young fledgling artists to be seen by a wider audience.

During the weekend there had been a variety of organised events, Collecting, a passionate commitment seemed to hit a raw nerve with some of the younger attendees. I wondered in the talk where the Frank Cohen’s and John Madjeski’s of Liverpool were, surely a city of such prospering opportunity could muster a mere art collector. One disgruntled artist piped up at the end wanting to know where the support for her to pursue her artistic career in Liverpool was without moving to a big art metropolis such as Berlin and London, a valid question I thought until it transpired, as enthusiastic as she was to stay in Liverpool, she was starting her Masters at Goldsmiths come Autumn. And it made me wonder maybe if more artists stayed in Liverpool, didn’t wait to be given funding or expect support but sought it out as many artists have done before them and took advantage of the possibilities that lay in the multitude of derelict buildings and a growing market, well then Liverpool would become its own metropolis, one not to leave and most certainly to be reckoned with.

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

How important is art in the public realm? And what is the Biennial’s commitment to ensuring we get the public art we deserve? David Lloyd talks to Laurie Peake…

Those hardy souls who braved the slopes of Sutton Manor during our recent, brief, Ice Age were rewarded with a spectacular sight. Gleaming white against a mouthwash blue sky, a transplanted outcrop of Spanish dolomite, sculptured into Jaume Plensa’s 20 metre tall ’Dream’, shone brighter than a million miners’ helmets.

Rising from – and commemorating – the site of the decommissioned Sutton Colliery, Dream is ‘big art’ at its boldest – a £1 million slab of stone, selected especially for its ability to glow even against the greyest St Helens skies.

A beacon? On all but the gloomiest of days, it’s practically impossible to see it as anything else. Sliding back down the snowy slopes, you’d have been in no doubt: ambitious public art can have a transformative power.

Dream is one of three large-scale pieces settled for an extended stay within our region – all of which under the continuing care of Laurie Peake, the Biennial’s Programme Director for Public Art.

Her organisation’s mission statement ‘Engaging Art, People and Place’ is more than an idly snappy triptych. Its stewardship of Dream, Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ on Crosby beach, and Richard Wilson’s gyrating Moorfields facade, ‘Turning The Place Over’ is a public proclamation of how, when those three forces intersect, something very special can happen. And of how the Biennial’s reach extends far beyond its two yearly time in the spotlight.

Of course, not all meetings of art, people and place hit the mark quite so magically. To our parents, public art usually meant bronze casts of waistcoated dignitaries (men, usually, striding confidently forward, casting their dead-eyed stares across windblown squares). Liverpool has no shortage of these civic ghosts. Now, public art says more about where we’re going than where we’ve been. Whatever the remit – a monument to ambition, a statement of intent, a catalyst for change or simply a confident display of a city’s resurgent tail feathers, work in the public realm is just about as provocative  – and invasive – as art can get. And, aside from the temporary interventions of festivals and special events, it’s usually here for a generation, or longer.

Get it right, and even the transient waders of Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ remain rooted to the shifting sands of Crosby beach, as residents dig deep to fund an extended stay for the migrants from Stavanger. Get it wrong, and you’re left with an awfully expensive, and intrusive white elephant (or, for that matter, white horse).

Peake leads a team dedicated to commissioning, curating and caring for work in the public realm which, she hopes, acts as a catalyst to stimulate an invigorated relationship between people and their environments. “Good public art is that which makes you think and feel differently about the place it’s in,” she says, adding that ‘local engagement’ is crucial to the Biennial’s desire to reach far beyond the main, ten week, event: and challenge the boundaries of Biennials. Originally a three-way discourse between artists, the academy, and the marketplace, Biennials in the 21st century are increasingly attracting a wider audience. For Peake, the fourth wall is just as important  – and art in the public realm is a surefire way to start the conversation.

In the week that Dream was shortlisted for a Civic Trust Award, we talked about the role art in the public realm can play in reaching the parts other arts festivals can’t reach…

How important is context when you’re considering a public art commission?

We strive to offer artists the chance to experiment and get excited by the context here and in doing so stretch and challenge their own practice with as few constraints and mediations as possible. Whether commissioning for the International exhibition of the Biennial or with neighbourhoods in our work with Housing Market Renewal areas, the site is key. It is the context that elicits the choice of artist and sometimes, in the case of the International exhibition, the curatorial premise which in turn elicits the artists.  Then the alchemy begins, all we have to do is provide the perfect crucible.

Is there a need for pieces to ‘compliment’ or respond to the history or character of the city?

We often work with artists who want to use the locality and its unique complexities as their material; its people, its places and its situation. This approach yields so much more than simply the work produced, the artist’s research and development process at a site generally yields valuable relationships made along the way whether it’s between residents who come together, often for the first time, to think about their neighbourhood and make things happen, or between the authorities responsible for those places who often sit around a table together for the first time. The transformations that happen within those relationships can have an equally transformative effect in the spaces they care for and live in.

How much of a role do local residents have in selecting or helping to shape a new commission?

Inspiration works both ways; the best work is inspired by and is inspiring in its context. People in this city are especially open to dialogue which creates a particularly fertile environment for artists from other countries and cultures to work in.  It is a city born from world trade and maybe that’s why local people offer an easy welcome to international visitors, producing a natural interface between the local and the global.

What consideration do you give to the longevity of a piece?

It’s an important consideration. Even those works that are only on show for the ten weeks of the Biennial International exhibition should have a long-lasting impact, not least in people’s memories.  I personally can’t look at Exchange Flags without seeing Ai Weiwei’s Web of Light or the Victoria monument in Derby Square without fond memories of Tatsuro Bashi’s Villa Victoria.

Out of the hundreds of new works we have commissioned, only two were intended from the outset to be permanent, both of which were commissioned and owned by external partners. They are Penelope by Jorge Pardo, commissioned by Liverpool City Council, the Ropewalks Partnership and Tate Liverpool and Dream by Jaume Plensa, commissioned by St Helens MBC.  Durability and low maintenance become major considerations in the brief for such works which are to become the owner’s responsibility.  Having said that, many of the temporary works we commission and construct need to be as robust for a short time as they would for the long-term as they have to be structurally sound and robust to survive in the public domain and be safe for people to enjoy them.  Taro Chiezo’s Superlambanana commissioned by Lewis Biggs as part of the Art Transpennine exhibition in 1998 and one of the sparks that ignited the idea of a Liverpool Biennial, was meant to last for 10 weeks (built by local artist Andrew Small) and has endured successfully for 10 years.

Is there a conscious decision to commission work likely to give an economic boost to a region?

Undoubtedly some works bring their own tourism success and with it regeneration spin-offs, Another Place being an obvious case in point, but I believe that any successful commission will bring its own benefits.  When we achieve the perfect match between artist, space and context we get a quality piece that naturally and inevitably enhances and transforms a place and attracts people to it. This yields different results depending on the context, so Richard Wilson’s Turning the Place Over makes it a joy to spend time on Moorfields, a formerly unremarkable street.  Whether the beach or the street, these works animate the spaces they inhabit by making people stop and think and talk to each other.

With much of Liverpool’s centre now owned by a private company – Grosvenor – it begs the question: how public can ‘public art’ really be in 2010?

The Rotunda Folly raises interesting questions about the nature of public space and public ownership.  Rotunda Community College’s commission for 2008, by Gross Max, saw a hanging garden rise from a former wasteland. Once the community was given something of value, the site became ‘owned’ by them and lovingly cared for.  It makes little difference whose legal ownership land is in, if no one actually cares about it. I know there’s a worry that Liverpool One is in private ownership but seeing Chavasse Park (co-designed by Gross Max, coincidentally) full of people spending time there on a sunny afternoon makes it feel far more public than it felt when it was in public ownership.  There are acres and acres of publicly owned open space in Liverpool that could benefit from some love and attention, whatever the motivation!

Similarly, Kerry Morrison’s residency continues to reap benefits along the canal with the Council installing litter bins at key points along the towpath in response to Kerry’s behaviour and wildlife mapping, while her beehives have brought a whole new form of life to the canal bank and are being lovingly tended by a new group of beekeeping residents!

Meanwhile, we are currently working with a group of young people in Anfield to come up with imaginative interim uses for the vacant housing and open spaces there and will be unveiling their first project with artist Ed Purver this Spring (watch this space !).

There is an argument that the framing that happens when you walk into a museum is restrictive. Does public art offer the potential for a greater impact?

Art in museums tends to work in a tightly choreographed product/consumer relationship and as such is a necessarily constrained and passive experience.  As Professor Declan McGonagle, our former Chair, explained on his paper on new public art, ‘No Hiding Place’, ‘This is not about creating or simply expanding audience. It is about transforming consumers into participants or, more usefully, creating the conditions where consumers can transform themselves into participants in the culture and therefore in society. It is about art as vitamin rather than tranquiliser!’.

What, in your opinion, makes a successful piece of art in the public realm?

A good work is only as good as the process that has produced it and should make a place feel more owned by the public, be it the people that live there or those that visit it.  If you could take it away and not miss it, then it needn’t be there in the first place.  I would hope that people feel that about the sites of all of our commissions – many of which occupy spaces which were formerly invisible,  ignored or even considered eyesores. More importantly, it should have a positive impact on all involved, be it residents or authorities, stimulate positive attitudes about the place and hopefully inspire positive action in people to continue to love and care for their environment and neighbourhood.

Why are you, and the Biennial, so passionate about the role of art in the public realm?

There is a sad and seemingly growing tendency for people to abdicate responsibility for the public space around them, littering is an obvious symptom of this.  Art in the public domain and the process of developing it focuses the mind and activity on the value of space. It has a long but invisible tail. The city is only what we make it, and can only be the best it can, if everyone concerned is the best they can be.  Every single project we have embarked on here has convinced me that people only need to be given the chance.

2010/1/25 David Lloyd

In her landmark 2004 book, The Infinite Line, art historian Briony Fer begins “We are lost without repetition”. Her book is a radical interpretation of the innovative art of the late 1950s and 1960s at the moment of the disintegration of modernism. But her opening statement could equality be applied to the world of the Biennial.

Fer develops her theme darkly, suggesting: “If we are lost without repetition, we are also in thrall to it. Repetition cuts both ways, both shoring up and shattering its fragile and precarious hold. It is a means of organising the world (and) it is a means of disordering and undoing. It can be utopian or dystopian.”

Fer acknowledges a debt to Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition 1968, and my own reading of this seminal book encourages me to propose that recurrent exhibitions can never convincingly proclaim overarching theories – that any presumption to be definitive is just a bubble waiting to be pricked.

Recurrence promotes, explores and experiences what is new, what could never have been said before and won’t be said again. The consciousness of the present moment.

Biennials, wherever they are in the world (and there are between 100 – 200 of them, variously labelled fairs, festivals, competitions, prizes, Biennials, Triennials or Quinquennials) have just one thing in common. They recur.

The question is, what purpose do they serve? And why do we keep coming back for more, year after year?

Continue reading ‘Lewis Biggs: On Biennials – Triangulating Validation.’

by Diana Marrone

I visited Liverpool first time in September 2008 – onto opening days of last Art Biennial (and thanks to this event).

My boyfriend Danilo Capasso – founder and director of N.EST (www.napoliest.it) art and architecture think tank – was invited by Rotunda Community College to take part on “La Dolce Vita – for the likes of us” – and I joined him in order to visit the city.

A neighbour happening celebrating one of the public commissions the Biennial activated that year: the Gross Max’s Rotunda Folly pavilion.

I never enjoyed so much to be among unknown persons – to be sharp: a very coherent and never-met-before community made of children, adults, many retired sailors, all well mixed together.

Added to them, any kind of variety of visitors coming from the bubbling art world that you can easily reach during International vernissages: the Manifesta work group, Athens, Lyon and Istanbul Biennial officers as well as Berlin fair as well, artists, gallery owners, critics…

The celebrated movie La Dolce Vita was spreading out the Italian vague, Danilo – aka deejay Danylo – was selecting fashioned Italian songs from the 50ies, the building facades surrounding the Rotunda premises were dressed by cute light sculptures and the youngest inhabitants, attending dance or art courses at the local youth association, were tasty eating all the orange pieces themselves sliced to serve with the Italian Spritz into the Rotunda Folly (used as temporary bar).

All around – on the horizon – there were the docks, or better what remains of. Can art depict new scenarios for old, exploited societies and how much?

Returning back in Naples, I started to feel stranger contact points between the cities, and especially, in a wider sense, among the two people and on each of their seat in the nation – in one word how citizens are conceived and felt from the rest of their country: Neapolitan from Italians and Scousers from Brits.

Baby-mums, often single, are common here and there – as are common the unexpected kind helps given by unsolicited walkers seeing you lost in the street to look for something or for a place.

Both the cities are full of smells and their unforgettable odours palette are eligible markers for saudage victims. Yes, because either Liverpool and Naples, despite the severe problems both express, can hurt your heart forever. Like the first love.

The way visual art and in general culture industry are changing the “face” of the two cities is another strong point in common … but I will comment on it next week!

A project by Danilo Capasso
Sandhills is one of the  liminal spaces along the liverpool canal – “a space between its past and future identities and thus outside the established order, in a state of possibility”

Actual view of the sandhills garden and canalside

here is a draw of the project idea of reconversion of a public garden site in a public amenity

The UK’s biggest and best free urban and extreme sports youth festival, HUB has launched “HUB Life”, the brand new Fringe Festival element for 2009

As a part of HUB life, Liverpool Biennial and the Jamm Factory have programmed a day of live music at Rockscape, an open air theatre in the heart of Liverpool city center designed by Japanese artists Ateiler Bow Wow for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial.

On the 24th May you can see the following artists live at Rockscape:

1.30 pm     Kinsheeva
2 pm          The Know
2.45pm      The Harlettes
4pm           DJ Graham Hall

There’s nowhere else like Rockscape so join us on the 24th May (corner of Hardman and Renshaw Street, opposite the bombed out church) and listen to some music in the most amazing setting for free!

For more information on HUB go to www.hubfestival.co.uk

Journalists have rushed to the site of the former Sutton Manor colliery in St Helens to capture the first sneak preview of Dream, a spectacular new, landmark piece of public art by Barcelona based artist Jaume Plensa.

We’re absolutely thrilled with the keen interest in the piece ahead of it’s official, public opening on Sunday 31st May at 12pm.

Chosen by a group of ex-miners and commissioned by St.Helens Council as part of The Big Art Project, Dream takes the form of the head of a little girl with eyes closed, seemingly in a dream-like state.  The work stands 18 metres high and is a  gateway sculpture for both Merseyside and Greater Manchester – the Guardian are calling Dream a “rival for the Angel of the North’

Like all good public art, Dream has started fierce debates concerning its commission:

See the BBC broadcast here:

http://tinyurl.com/dreambbc

Read the Guardian report here:

http://tinyurl.com/dreamsthelens

But most importantly make up your own mind!

For more information about the official launch of Dream on the 31st May:

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I hope to see you there!