Over the summer I worked on the production of Level Five, a project by Brody Condon as part of Abandon Normal Devices 2011.
Here is a short video documenting the project. Its only two minutes long and well worth a look, if only for the kooky 1970′s clips pinched from Adam Curtis documentaries!
Published in IdeasTap
Daniel Bozhkov, Music Not Good For Pigeons: image courtesy of Phil Olsen/Bluecoat
The approach of Biennial time means three things for anyone involved with the arts in Liverpool: hard work, lots of parties and some very bizarre antics. I have had some wonderful experiences, including leading a live horse around the interior of one of Liverpool’s largest hotels, and working with a team of volunteer stewards who spent most evenings after work drinking free wine at exhibition previews. Not only does Liverpool Biennial inject £30m into the city’s economy, it also yields a wealth of opportunity for young creatives to showcase their artwork and experience life behind the scenes of the UK’s largest visual arts festival.
Liverpool Biennial was founded in 1998; its sixth event kicked off on 18 September and runs for 10 weeks. Featuring 900 artists and over 100 venues, the festival is a mix of international shows presented at major galleries, public realm commissions for unusual sites, and artist-led DIY installations in disused shop spaces, hotel lobbies and pubs.
This year, the International strand responds to the theme of “Touched”, and asks if art can have an emotional impact on the inhabitants of a city. Must-see works include Korean artist Do-Ho Suh’s public realm installation Bridging Home (pictured above), which replicates a life-size traditional Seoul house wedged between two vacant warehouse buildings on Duke Street. At city-centre art space the Bluecoat (where I work as Performance Programmer), Bulgarian-born artist Daniel Bozhkov has created a replica of Liverpool Football Club dressing room to house his installation Music Not Good For Pigeons (pictured below). Having returned to the city almost 25 years after his first visit, his work investigates the Liverpudlian cultural icons that caught his attention both then and now.
In addition to major commissions produced by big galleries, Liverpool Biennial has a thriving fringe programme of artist-led ventures keen to capitalise on the festival. These low-budget, high-enthusiasm projects are often where the most vigorous and interesting work is shown. An old hardware shop on Renshaw Street hosts arts collective Mercy’s Midnight Specials: experimental performances with cutting-edge artists held every Saturday at midnight. Studio group The Royal Standard are exhibiting the work of maverick artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv, whose videos of cutlery wielding youths in elaborate costumes are not to be missed.
If all of the above sounds enticing, then fear not: there is still time to get involved in this year’s event. Both Liverpool Biennial and the Bluecoat are currently recruiting for festival volunteers. Potential visitors should check out Mercy’s weekly pod cast, for an insider’s perspective on what to see and do. A visit to Liverpool Independents’ website also provides a useful index of grassroots activity where savvy young artists may be able to negotiate an exhibition.
Above all, this is an event with countless opportunities for anyone who is ready and willing to experiment and explore.
When Josh sent me an excited email a couple of weeks ago, to ask if he could borrow four of my flat screen monitors for Red Wire’s next exhibition, I was happy to oblige, particularly as he was insistent that the work he was putting on them was of mind blowing quality. Great I said, what is it?
Sarah Harbridge’s four screen installation ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’, consists of individual 60 second video pieces that play on a continuous loop. The ‘her’ as referenced by the title is the artist’s Grandmother. Josh gave me the link to watch it on youtube and I followed it to find a row of twisted and contorted manifestations of an old woman’s face, gasping for breath, wrestling with some moment of indecision between life and death. Even at low resolution, the images were so tightly and unscrupulously framed that every last tortured detail was visible.
By convention, sculpture is the art of the dead. In order to preserve lost loved ones, we memorialise in stone with statues and monuments. Immovable and atemporal these objects are created to immortalise, often portraying whole heads or full bodies with an air of distance, dignity and grace. While they remember death, they do not evidence its processes or its tendencies toward degradation, decay and suffering.
In her essay ‘Infected eyes: dying man with a Movie Camera, Silverlake Life: The view from here’, critic Peggy Phelan recounts the story of film Silverlake Life, in which aids victim Tom Joslin’s gradual death from the disease is documented on film in collaboration with his partner Mark Massi. She asserts in her essay that this film “resolutely and imaginatively re-examines the link between the temporality of death and the temporality of cinema,” with her argument pivoting on the fact that film can be rewound and replayed, allowing dying on screen to be reenacted infinitely. On film she asserts, the dead can live again. Silverlake Life is a monument to Tom Joslin that allows the viewer to relive his death with compassion and empathy.
Shot in the early 1990s, this film belongs to the preinternet age of filmmaking, when dissemination of the moving image, although widespread (people could watch movies on VHS at home) was vastly different to the post cinematic, networked age of digital image making that we inhabit at present. Watching ‘One minute on each of the four days before her death’ over youtube, I was struck by the overwhelming melancholic sense that in an era of happy snapping, vimeoing and facebooking, not even the dying moments of an aged women are too sensitive to to be filmed, cropped, edited, disseminated on youtube, exhibited in a gallery, photographed and then blogged, reblogged and critiqued here by yours truly. This is the moment at which death becomes transient and timeless, available to be relived and replayed by gallery visitors and net users at their own whim.
Challenging and in tune with the current state of digital dissemination, this makes for a fascinating piece of work that mixes the banal with the sensational and provokes a thousand unanswered questions about the life story of the artists Grandmother, why she died and why her death merits such lucid and invasive documentation.
Apocalypse Now runs at Red Wire Gallery until 8 August.
