C90 Reviews

Liverpool

Let there be clean and pure division first, perfect singleness. That is the only way to final living unison: through sheer finished singleness. ¹

The title 'Biennial' implies a certain sociability, an alleged group dynamic. The 'Biennial' experience invites us to look at a broad group (international!--artists!) and to search for a thematic, a 'where are we now?' question answered. Within the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 1999, Trace was the chosen title and theme of the international exhibition. Tracey, the name of the biennial fringe, was a much funnier title, and in the end had as much connection to the exhibitions as did Trace, a catch-all 'memory/psychology/personal/physical/social/historical' theme if ever I saw one.

So let us think neither of Trace nor Tracey as themes. Let us rather make our own. And think of art.

Reinhard Mucha in his Stockholmer Raum(1998/99) did not reinvent space. He reconfigured space, an extraction of the desired space from there to here. Extracts from the walls of his installation space in a Düsseldorf gallery rested within glass cases at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. And these wall vitrines contained black-and-white photos of his young son, Roman, at play in and around construction sites, sitting on a bulldozer, pushing a wheelbarrow. Rather than utilising refined cabinets, pristine display cases, Mucha now enabled a site-specific work to be both site-less and every-possible-site-specific. A child's imperative: "take me wherever you go--promise?"

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe--though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. ²

Miroslaw Balka, also at the Tate, remembered. The survival of a series of small charred drawings, Drawings Saved from the Fire in the Artist's Studio (1986-1992), acts as safe access to a past tragedy, the artist's studio almost destroyed. Balka also installed a seven-metre-square soap platform on the gallery floor, as well as soaps used by gallery staff, and their hair wrapped around cables lay in the space. The elements--soap, fire, extracts of body hair, survival, Poland--combined as assembled meditative evidence. Susan Norrie constructed a horror with even less sense of a survival within the video installation Err (1999). The projection space showed both a video projection and a monitor piece, the exchange between the two parts left magnificently open–one, a projection of footage of the Chernobyl nuclear atrocity, and the other a sequence on a low monitor from Woody Allen's Interiors, in which the mother is taping gaps around doors and windows of a room before attempting suicide.

His intrinsic and central isolation was the very centre of his being, if he broke with this central solitude, everything would be broken. To cede is the greatest temptation, and it was the final sacrilege. ³

The denial of the imperative of exchange with the Other is an infinitely more severe position than any 'aloneness'. Its implications scar Europe continuously. Sophie Ristelhueber has previously made a definitive series of photographs of the Gulf War, Fait (1992), aerial photos of the war-scarred desert. It is indicative of the ceaselessness, the quiet acceptance of a decade of war in Yugoslavia, that her series of photographs La Campagne (1991-1997) was more understated. It consisted of twenty or so large photographs mounted on cardboard and resting on the ground leaning against the gallery walls, in disordered groups--quiet idylls of rural life, a horse cart, bathers, the attractive medieval towers of a middle-European town. On closer inspection the windows in the town are shattered, the cottages in the countryside deserted, the field is next to a new cemetery. All is Bosnia.

It is alterity, then, not shared attributes, that is the key to social life. ⁴

Stephen Willats presented in Democratic Journey (1999) the physical presence of a magnificent exchange between 32 individuals, consisting of a glorious Super 8 diary of a Liverpool journey and many wall-mounted sheets of paper featuring the scribbled and sketched thoughts, reflections and discussions between the group on their ideas of the 'Ideal Journey'. A definitive statement was doodled onto one page; once read never forgotten, it followed us around the rest of the Biennial as a fitting substitute to the over-flexible vagueness of the theme 'trace': Deterritorialize Now. (There was also an exquisite hand-written anecdote on one page about lying in a hospital bed and seeing a new way ahead, ending with a dirt track sketched on the page down towards the closing words, "into the sunset, thataway--John Wayne--horses/cigarettes." Beuys was right. Again. Actually Beuys was there in more than spirit. In the same space, Ute Klophaus presented the series of 20 photographs she produced of Beuys' 1970 performance, Celtic.)

Trajectories and becomings: art makes each of them present in the other, it renders their mutual presence perceptible. Thus defined, it invokes Dionysus as the God of places of passage and things of forgetting. ⁵

Liverpool's exterior did manage to make manifest the rare, yet sublime, legitimacy of that slippery genre 'site-specific'. The (ongoing) successful Liverpool Billboard Project featured a billboard each by Pierre Huyghe, Peter Zimmerman, and Erwin Wurm, incorporating Liverpool spaces with a cunning precision. Huyghe, in one of his characteristic billboard projects, presented a large billboard photo at the site where it was taken--here a kissing couple near the centre of Liverpool's club scene. After two weeks it was replaced by an ad, then two weeks later it reappeared. A passage of projecting, forgetting and substitution.

You must always remember that art itself is the Great Illusion, the illusion which Madame Maya manufactures in order to hold the rest of the house of mirrors together. ⁶

 

A Human Furriery (1995-1999) by the Argentinian artist Nicola Costantino was presented in a department store window on a busy central street. Mannequins wore latex flesh-like fabrics, decorated with a multitude of nipples, arseholes, and navels, with collars of human hair. Dissections of modified fashion, Hannibal Lecter haute couture, meta-texts (all fashion is text) which remarked subtly upon the variable place of that 'in' within in/humanity.

At both the Anglican Cathedral and its Oratory--perhaps the finest architectural spaces in the North of England--contemporary sculpture integrated itself inside sacred space. Juan Muñoz's Broken Noses Carrying A Bottle #1, #2, and #3, Pompeian resin figures at surreal play, were installed against the grandiloquence of memorial sculpture within the Oratory. Within the cathedral itself, Doris Salcedo positioned the scarred within the sacred: tables sealed to wardrobes with cement, chairs fused to cupboards with cement, domestic space--domestic relics--reified in discomforting union, cemented personal (ergo political) reliquaries.

But a milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events: the street, for example, with its materials (paving stones), its noises (the cries of merchants), its animals (harnessed horses) or its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls down, a horse is beaten...). The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it. ⁷

'Site-specific' functions both as intervention and incorporation. Pavel Buchler intervened with fine drama in the quiet city-centre idyll of the enclosed garden at the Bluecoat Gallery buildings. His sound piece LIVE (1999) consisted of a mix of the applause at the end of almost 400 live music recordings which the artist owns. It played over the birdsong, wind-'midst-the-leaves, mellow lunchtime sandwich eaters, all who have--till now--fully colonised the space.

Sound and music is in any case (and above all else) the "pure deconceptualization of reality." ⁸ And what were the variables of aural deconceptualization? Fantasy Heckler. This group show presented Liam Gillick's ultra-lo-fi bleep track David. The same exhibition space also incorporated works by David Robbins, including a side-splitting cacophony of a rehearsal of The Star Spangled Banner in his video Appleton East High School Band. And alongside were the audio cut-ups in the short films Towers Open Fire (1962), The Cut-Ups (1969), and Here to Go (1981), playing as part of a mini-retrospective of that ur-text of the avant-garde, Brion Gysin. It is fitting that Gysin's legendary and hallucinogenic DreamMachine was incorporated into a exhibition space that seemed to reply in the affirmative to Deleuze's maxim, "Imagine that everything that can be attained by chemical means is accessible by other paths." ⁹ Even the self-mutating chromosome-like strands of Damien Duffy's three paintings on display seemed an instinctive echo of William Burrough's descriptions of Gysin's paintings (also on display via slide projections), "There are great flaring movements across the whole canvas...and then they turn into tubes...pulsing tubes. Some sort of energy is conducted through these tubes that run through the whole canvas that has become completely three-dimensional." ¹⁰ In this space Cathy Wilkes' work, Beautiful Human Body, was a 3D illusion, a re-conceptualized body space as installation--a long table with ribbon, stripe, text message--non-organic and virtual yet deliberately physical. Barthelemy Toguo's twelve painted figures, blood red, conceived of the body as organic symbol, a long wall of icons of the visceral spirit. Harmony Korine's (yes, of Kids and Gummo, the same) two series of photographs, Milk Chicken Review and Coke-head Swingers were a magnificently lurid display of the strengths and authenticities within communities of chemical and visceral excess...a natural Biennial experience.

Other vectors of desire and union were mapped in an innovative group-group show, art Lovers, featuring works produced collaboratively by artist couples. Sweet without being cloying, tender without being soft, and naive without being faux, several glorious pieces (videos by Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick, Tracey Emin and Matt Collishaw, Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez-Jonas; painting by Dana Hoey and Richard Phillips; installations by Sharon Lockhart and Alex Slade, Lara Schnitger and Matthew Monahan) developed uniquely celebratory and visionary archetypes of love.

Maybe 350 Artists: 24 Countries: 61 Sites: 1 City (the corporate rallying cry of the Biennial) did contain a hidden numerical code. Any numerical sequence implies the calculated just as much as the random. These grand totals of the simultaneous--the international exhibition Trace, the annual degree-show selection New Contemporaries, the biennial John Moore's painting awards, and the fringe to the Biennial Tracey--were just an invitation to meaninglessness. We were more impressed by Pierrick Sorin, Luis Camnitzer, Annelies Strba, Ceal Floyer, Allan Sekula, Bashir Makhoul, Kumi Yamshita... Simply a small selection of artists we have had no time to feature here. There is however a catalogue, TRACE (£14.99, Tate Gallery Liverpool), and a website. One can use them. They are a fine trace of the event.

1 D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 128.
2 Susan Sontag, Debriefing, in I, etcetera, London: Vintage, 1996.
3 Lawrence, ibid., p. 189.
4 Richard A. Cohen, Notes on Levinas' Time and the Other, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 55.
5 Gilles Deleuze, What Children Say: Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso, 1998, p. 67.
6 Brion Gysin, Here to Go: Planet R101, London: Quartet, 1985, p. 181.
7 Deleuze, op. cit.., p. 61.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, Reality and Its Shadow, in The Levinas Reader, op. cit., p. 133.
9 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 161.
10 William Burroughs, quoted in Gysin, op. cit., p. 177

The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, September-November 1999

Declan Sheehan is a screenwriter and critic (sheehan68@hotmail.com).

Review reproduced from CIRCA 90, Winter 1999, pp. 49-51