Back in business at the Liverpool Biennial
With its themes of trade and commerce, the Liverpool Biennial seemed bland to Adrian Searle – until he came across video art by a gender-blending Texan
The Guardian
Somewhere in the Liverpool Biennial there is a swanky electric-blue cement mixer. It is filled with coconut-butter sun cream, churning and glooping under a spotlight. I felt like sticking my head in there, just to soothe away the questions, the frustrations and doubts I had about the whole biennial, now the largest visual arts festival in the UK, which this time is subtitled Touched.Touched in the head, touched for money, touched as in moved or sentimentally engaged: in this show, all the above sporadically apply. There are things I do not understand – but sometimes this doesn't matter. Coming across Korean artist Do-Ho Suh's life-sized replica of a traditional house in Seoul, wedged at an angle between two imposing but run-down Victorian buildings on Duke Street, it is enough to know that the apparition is real. Is it about the artist's sense of displacement, or ours? Is it a culture clash?
I can find no good explanation why Sachiko Abe sits, like a human paper shredder in a pristine white dress, snipping tiny slivers of paper all day every day at the A Foundation gallery. The trail of paper falls from the platform where she sits, leading to a delicate, fuzzy white cone that reaches towards the roof of this stripped-down, light-filled former industrial space. Maybe she does it because she's touched. The amplified sound of scissors fills the empty space. It gets on my nerves.
Abe's work takes preciousness to a new level. Her constant activity might be contemplative, but it is also very boring. And nothing like as reckless as Antti Laitinen's attempts to cross the Baltic from his native Finland in a homemade bark boat. This week he will try to navigate the Mersey in a similar craft. He once tried to live on an uninhabited island for three days, naked, with no food or water. His videos and films, also at the A Foundation, do not reveal the whole story – that the wild plants made him sick, and he ended up living on insects. Even this ordeal was nothing like as gruelling as Tehching Hseih's legendary 1980s performance, in which the artist spent a whole year punching a worker's time clock, on the hour every hour, in his New York studio. The documentation of this year of clocking on can be seen at another venue, Fact. Why resurrect it 30 years later ? Maybe Hseih is just clocking in to a city that has now lost its industrial base.
It is beginning to sound as if Touched, which opened on Saturday, is full of crazy, driven loners. But that's critics for you. Alfredo Jaar's latest film about the Rwandan genocide We Wish to Inform You That We Didn't Know has as its centrepiece a series of harrowing interviews with survivors of the conflict, and footage of Bill Clinton's 1998 speech to survivors of the genocide, in which he said: "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." This speech is repeated three times, as though to hammer home the false consciousness of a leader who did know what was going on, but had looked the other way. The trouble with Jaar's three-screen work is that the overall effect is just arty and overplayed. One is touched, inescapably and unavoidably moved, but ultimately unconvinced by the work as art.
Dimly lit potatoes
Much of the biennial is bland and well-meant, and as ineffectual as sun cream in a Merseyside September. One floor of the Tate Liverpool is filled with an installation by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Originally shown at the Polish Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, it looks like a cellar that is full of dimly lit potatoes and gigantic old loaves. They're all handmade from sacking and are meant to remind you of bits of bodies. They don't, much. The works on the top floor – free, after years of a dreadful policy of charging entry to this one small bit of the biennale – are a lacklustre ensemble. Little of it stayed with me: a ball suspended in mid-air by electromagnetism, a cringe-making sculpture with lots of children's feet emerging from under a voluminous overcoat, and a daft installation of old furniture, with candle flames burning decorously on every surface. A fire hose is coiled on the wall. From the nozzle emerges a hand; a real hand, that occasionally flexes. The artist, Jamie Isenstein, or some long-suffering assistant, is hidden behind the wall. This sort of thing is just annoying.
Things get livelier at the Rapid, a former furniture store filled with artists' projects that stretch much of the length of Renshaw Street. A semi-naked model hangs around in one window, skin daubed with corporate slogans. "Connecting People", reads the torso of a woman the first time I passed; "Totally Chocolatey" was written on the back of a young man the next day. This is Daniel Knorr's contribution to a part of the exhibition that concerns itself with trade, and in this case with advertising slogans that have been copyrighted by multinational corporations. Other window displays by a number of artists protest at corporate greed and art-world corruption.
Inside Renshaw Street, there are acres of empty, decrepit floor space, and a mordant and largely depressing painting show that includes hilarious scenes of bestiality, unhappy-looking people wearing arcane prosthetic devices, and melancholic Leipzig street scenes. Somewhere, the mournful sounds of the Mersey tunnel are piped in, seeming to emanate from a huge arrangement of industrial piping.
A cross-dressing Harold Pinter
But all this is mere bagatelle compared to the mind-mangling experience of Ryan Trecartin's high-definition videos. The 29-year-old, Texan-born artist has made a trilogy called Trill-ogy Comp, each shown in a different bit of the otherwise empty basement. Trecartin's art is a gender-blending slurry of stories and images, fluorescent quagmires of up-speaking dialogue and manic straight-to-camera monologue, wrist-flapping and narcissistic preening. Furniture gets trashed, Blackberrys are hurled at walls, there are mock drownings at poolside parties. There's a fake plane crash staged in a wonky warehouse (cue screaming), lard-assed strippers, cute bartenders, and lots of boys being girls and girls being . . . whatever.
Rather than video art, Trecartin calls his work movies, because they move – cutting and slashing, melding and twisting, teeming with action, flip-flopping focus and shifts in tempo. Conversations become a ping-pong game of non sequiturs that could almost be described as Pinteresque, if Harold had been a cross-dressing kid with attention deficit disorder. Trecartin and his friends act out sibling rivalries, perform airhead soliloquies and wear makeup like bruises, war-paint or skin diseases. It's all a glorious mess, slipping between soap opera, rom-com and just plain wrong-com. But there's also darkness and a kind of desperation. You can feel it. It might even be social satire, or a vision of the future. Or it might not.
I was repelled, then transfixed. The pace is relentless. Everything's all queered-up. A matronly gallery attendant, unnerved by Trecartin and his troupe of pansexual miscreants, staggered out telling me she was supposed to explain his work to curious visitors, and what could she possibly say? You have to go with the flow. When you leave a Rembrandt show, everyone looks wrinkled and Rembrandtish. Wandering post-Trecartin into Renshaw Street, the world looked slow and grey. Trecartin is the best thing in the biennial. His work is full of life, wit, pace and inventiveness, next to which most things, however good their intentions, pall. But then the world often is appalling.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/20/liverpool-biennial
The most interesting article I ever read! It's opinion. Honest one? I don't know.
In the opening day of Biennial I ran into a bunch of people to see Visitor Centre at Renshaw Street. It’s a somehow funny feeling, but nice.
I seem to agree about everything in art with Marcel Duchamp.
Calvin Tomkin's biography ( Duchamp: A Biography
), is without a doubt the best biography of an artist I’ve read. Duchamp, who used to say that the artist never really knew what he was doing or why, declined to offer any such explanations for The Large Glass. One of his pet theories was that the artist performed only one part of the creative process and it was up to the viewer to complete that process by interpreting the work and assessing its permanent value. (p.11)
“I do not believe that art should have anything in common with definitive theories that are apart from it. That is too much like propaganda.” (p. 152)
Works of art could not be understood by the intellect, [Duchamp] maintained, nor could their effect be conveyed in words. The only valid approach to them was through an emotion that had “some analogy with religious faith or sexual attraction—an esthetic echo. This echo, however, was heard and appreciated by very few people. It could not be learned—either you had it or you did not—and it had nothing whatsoever to do with taste, which was merely a parroting of established opinion. “Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an esthetic emotion,” Duchamp said, “Taste presupposed a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful and ugly, whereas “the ‘victim’ of an esthetic echo is comparable to that of a man in love or a believer…when touched by esthetic revelation, the same man in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.”
Sometimes it seems just lazy on the part of the artist. People have so many distractions these days an artist may have to do more than 'nail a yogurt lid' on a gallery wall to engage any but a select few.
I'm not saying an artist always (or ever) knows what he's doing, but should try to actually do SOMETHING.
I simply don't believe most of the artists are trying to get at something substantial, trying to answer some indefinable question that is nagging them at their very core.
So much high-profile contemporary art deals with these "definitive theories" that Duchamp mentions and treats them like a stack of tarot cards. The artist shuffles the deck, places a few enigmatic cards down -
". . . as you can see the Five Wands of Marxism is crossed with Nine Pentacles of Relational Aesthetics both of which sit above the Wheel of Institutional Critique . . . " - and there is Biennial, present is the sense of irony and detachment, never or rarely present is the sense that the artist was attempting to meet any interior need.
I agree that often the artist needs to put a little more effort towards execution, sometimes there's too much execution and not enough concept. It's all about the balance, and when it's achieved it becomes art.
I found it curious that art bubbling out of the ferment of Postmodernism was so often accompanied by text telling you what you were looking at, in seeming contravention of its theoretical premises. Maybe the political aspirations made that necessary.
Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs (1935), Alan Koppol Gallery, Chicago.
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