Organised by Liverpool
Biennial
e-space lab Paul Rooney
Common Culture Imogen Stidworthy
Alan Dunn Union North
Liverpool
and Shanghai are twin cities. Both stage concurrent international art
biennials, and this exhibition by UK artists, being shown during the 2006
Shanghai Biennale, is expected to be the start of an ongoing process of
dialogue and exchange between the visual arts in the two cities.
The
UK artists selected are based in Merseyside, North Wales and London and all
have a relationship to the city of Liverpool. They have been chosen in response
to the Shanghai Biennale’s theme of HyperDesign.
Working
with photography, film, installation, design, sound and installation, all the
artists are interested in aspects of the everyday. Each responds critically to
experiences of modern life, revealing them as perhaps alienating and
unfulfilling, whilst at the same time celebrating humour, complexity and
resilience in the face of an increasingly regulated and ‘designed’ reality.
The
exhibition also reflects particularities of Liverpool itself, a city presently
undergoing transformation, both physically through a comprehensive city centre
regeneration programme, and culturally, as reflected in the city’s designation
as European Capital of Culture in 2008.
Some
of the artists engage directly with the city and its culture, whilst others
strike a more oblique chord with Liverpool’s particular histories, those for
instance with an architectural or social dimension. The rituals of popular
entertainment are also the subject of several artists.
In
his book Liverpool 1907 Walter Dixon
Scott described the River Mersey landing stage as a ‘democratic promenade’,
through which human traffic passed during the city’s heyday a century ago. No
longer a symbol of the seaport described as Britain’s ‘gateway to Empire’, the
site’s historic combination of commerce and recreation, a place where – in the
words of a popular local anthem – people from all walks of life walk on - is still however pertinent.
For today the extent and nature of participation in civic life and in economic
growth continue to be critical factors in shaping and defining our cities in
transition.
The artists
Leo Fitzmaurice works with the designed
commodities of consumer culture, the branded packaging of cigarette pack or
food carton, whose familiarity he undermines by carefully removing all logos
and wording. These empty and exposed card containers provide building blocks,
which are then arranged into a miniature city, sprawling across the floor. The work
alludes to both the power of ubiquitous consumer brands and the utopian appeal
of ‘designs for living’ that invariably accompanies the rhetoric of urban
regeneration.
Imogen Stidworthy’s sculptural sound and video
installation, Anyone who had a Heart,
involves two professional singing impersonators. A hit record over 40 years ago
for Liverpool singer Cilla Black, who came to prominence at the same time as
the Beatles and is today a leading TV celebrity in the UK, the title plays on
the notion of authenticity, as the performers try to inhabit the voice of the
original singer, their dislocation emphasised by the installation’s acoustic
and spatial design.
Paul Rooney, a composer and
performer of deadpan post-punk paeans to humdrum existence with his band
Rooney, chronicles the everyday in his video and sound pieces. Mundane stories
of ordinary lives are at the heart of his works. No Sad Tomorrow is a monologue with music, in the form of a science
fiction story about listening to sounds and voices from other worlds. Distorted
fragments of early 1960s pop music can be heard in the background, creating the
soundtrack to a video of the site in Havana where Cuban pop music fans listened
to tapes of banned Beatles music.
Alan Dunn, in a new billboard diptych entitled
Great Wall, replaces the space
usually reserved for advertising consumer goods with what appear to be abstract
surfaces. They are in fact photographs of the richly textured wall, scarred and
uneven, cut into the rock at the end of the tunnel that carries trains into
Liverpool’s Lime Street railway station. The scale of these images emphasises
the monumental engineering achievement that provided Liverpool with an
essential communication and transport link, whilst at the same time concealing
perhaps hidden histories of the labourers who created them.
Philip Jeck (who will present a live
performance at the exhibition opening) brings together popular music and visual
art, challenging the increasing homogeneity of pop in the digital age. He
manipulates long player or 45rpm records, scoured from the discarded world of
the vinyl junkyard, to create beautiful and unique soundscapes, using a
combination of old record players and newer technology. In live performance,
the mixes build into rich sonic layers, the results both aurally and visually
compelling.
Common Culture (David Campbell and Mark
Durden) critique contemporary mass culture, playfully mixing high and low, to
suggest that any culture can be
objectified. Their current focus on live entertainment has enlisted stand up
comics, who were paid to tell jokes to an empty venue, and a pop star
impersonator (of popular entertainer Tom Jones) to sing in the normally hushed
environment of a public library. In Bouncers,
a group of night club security men, hired to literally stand in as the art on
the opening night of a gallery show, were filmed. The result is a meditation on
masculinity that creates a sense of unease and dislocation.
e-space lab (Philip Courtenay, Peter
Hatton, Peter Hagerty, and joined for this project by Jonathan Kearney, a China
based artist from Liverpool) take as their subject the city in transition and
the relationship its inhabitants have to the process of regeneration. Through
technology they are developing an exchange of ideas between artists and others
in the twin cities of Liverpool and Shanghai. The hybrid space thus created
acts as a sort of virtual laboratory within which people, places, spaces,
identity, history, urban design and change are examined. The most recent
manifestation of this project, staged over three days in February 2006,
involved mobile phone cameras and live video streaming between the two cities.
Tom Wood’s photographs express
Liverpool through its inhabitants, their social interactions recorded in epic
series of images taken by the artist over several years. In his most ambitious
project, All Zones Off Peak, the
perspective is that of a bus traveller, Wood journeying on public transport to
document the lives of the predominantly working class passengers on their way
to work, to the shops, or to school. Never voyeuristic, the images reflect the
artist’s empathy with his subjects, their mundane comings and goings
represented as a sort of Homeric voyage.
Union North architects engage with the
physical space that the exhibition inhabits, overlaying and responding to the
works in the exhibition. Using cheap recycled materials that emphasise its
temporary and contingent nature their design draws together the exhibition’s
disparate works, whilst providing a contrasting aesthetic to that of the
shopping centre environment that houses the gallery.
Burn give shape to the
exhibition, creating a graphic look through designing the publicity material,
labelling, text panels and the exhibition guide. An articulation of the
exhibition’s dynamic, this also reflects Burn’s own practice that fuses
innovative graphic design, fine art ideas and a new Liverpool pop sensibility.
Artistic Director,
Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool
July
2006