Laura Belém's The Temple of 1000 Bells @ The Oratory

If I needed reminding - and I don’t! - that it’s less than a month till the 6th Liverpool Biennial, last night was a special preview of Laura Belém's The Temple of 1000 Bells at the Oratory.

The Oratory is the small, square, classically-pillared building down from the front of the Anglican Cathedral. I've always thought that there is something restrained but slightly distorted about 19th Century funerary sculpture, and the light coloured but monumental stone of the sculpture counterpoints Laura Belém's incorporeal installation.

The sight of a thousand individually created glass bells hanging in the central light well is both beautiful and intriguing. It’s everything it promises, a diaphanous suspended layer of glass objects, each in the same form but each visibly distinctive. Quite simply, The Temple of 1000 Bells is lovely to behold.

If only it had been left as that! A simple and arresting installation with an evocative title would have been much preferable to final form of The Temple of 1000 Bells. From speakers around the room emanates a voice, telling a story in that overly earnest, childrens’-programme-on-Radio-4 type manner. Accompanied by some half-arsed hippy, hypno-meditation type music, it's unbearably twee. Seriously peoples, “a symphony which cannot be described in words” is not audibly conjured up by a few plinks on a bloody xylophone!

Hmmm...  the only option seems to be to recommend ear plugs.

Endurance @ Merseyside Maritime Museum

Stuff the A Team, the only display of hyper-masculine tomfoolery I have any time for right now is down at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

I grew up with the sagas of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Huntford’s book on Scott and Amundsen pretty much held the place a bible might have taken in a religious household. Polar opposite of the heroic, but ultimately unforgivable, bungler Scott Falcon Scott stood Ernest Shackleton. Steadfast, tenacious and just kick-arse, Shackleton is a colossal but approachable figure.

Preening martyrdom on the ice was not for Shackleton. How is it not possible to admire a man who achieved so much and could still wryly say "Better a live donkey than a dead lion"?

If you do not know the story of the Endurance (or should I say the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition?), look it up. It’s is an incredible story of persistence, survival, practicality and, yes, heroism on the ice. Frank Worsley's book Shackleton's Boat Journey is particularly fantastic.

And perhaps the best part of the story? That it rests in the period when photography in such harsh conditions was becoming possible while remaining a true technical and photographic feat. That these laboriously created glass plate negatives remained unscathed is remarkable in itself.  In a digital age, when we are so used to images being composed from intangible data, the physical nature of these negatives is almost extraordinary to regard.

Words cannot convey what Frank Hurley’s lucid photographs manage so eloquently. The strange and beautiful nature of the ice, the startling vision of the Endurance caught in the ice flow and the inscrutable Edwardian explorers, I love all of it.

I may be a polar exploration fan girl, but I will fight anyone who says this is not visual story telling at its very best. It is wonderful to see photographs I know from books displayed so prolifically in this compelling exhibition.

Trash Humpers @ Wolstenholme Creative Space

For a film that features bin fucking, baby doll abuse and hippy murder, Trash Humpers is a surprisingly dull experience.

Presented on Saturday night in the earnestly edgy Wolstenholme Creative Space, screened from VHS on a pile of knackered TV's, the setting and medium for the evening was actually rather pleasant. I'd gladly pay a fiver to go to a showing of the Twilight Zone in such a manner... or even better Doctor Strange!

But the film itself? Over indulgent hipster shock fare. To call it pornographic, hell to call it shocking, is to dignify it. Nothing that Harmony Korine put in his film, in either style or content, came near to the sight of a drunk girl sitting in her own piss on Wood Street.

Not even the demented posture it strikes or the directors hipster credentials can raise this film above masturbatory pubescent scheme. It is just too boring to be vilified or event found that offensive. Yawn.

Having A Do @ St Luke’s Church

Keep it simple, stupid. Who hasn’t been assaulted by this exhausted phrase? It might make me want to obstinately elaborate, but that doesn’t stop it being irrefutably true.

Fab Collective might have a stated passion for capturing the city of Liverpool and its residents in their pictures, but seem to miraculously avoid those acceptable stereotypes we are so familiar with. With beautiful, almost brutally honest, photographs, sparsely curated by only one loose theme, they have created something brilliant.

It’s all too easy to be abstract and hoity-toity about art. Setting aside the high-art sensibilities I do love to lug about, Having A Do is simply a small collection of brilliant photographs adroitly, and often tenderly, illustrating the many agreeable ways we celebrate. Unique and defiantly ungentrified, "The Bombed Out Church" is the perfect venue for this stubbornly simple but perfectly realised exhibition.

This month, if you find yourself at the top Bold Street with half an hour to spare, Having A Do is well worth a look.

Intuition @ Whitworth Art Gallery

Outsider Art is interesting because of its inherently problematic nature. In the same way that you can never really safely define art - earnestly asking “But what is art?” is simply unforgivably gauche - you can’t plot the boundaries of Outside Art. Even to define it by the artists’ faculties or training is to wander into crude, and restrictive, waters.

Intuition at Whitworth Art Gallery tests, and yet does not plot, the limits of an art form which has always sat uncomfortably at the periphery of the contemporary mode. Gloriously bursting with all forms and styles of Outsider Art, this exhibition forces you to redefine your artistic context. It is easy to lose track of time among the obsessive, riddle-like form and the clumsy, but somehow precise, energy of the works means this exhibition is crackling with strange electricity.

Perhaps then, it is much wiser to define Outside Art by the impact it has on the viewer? Always unsettling in the manner it strays from the well plotted paths of fine art and evoking, often, equal measures of disquiet and amusement. However, even this loose statement about affect, rather than cause, hampers understanding. It's a conundrum that has no absolute answer.

The Whitworth Art Gallery do a wonderful job of displaying this collection of work, creating, instead of something sensational and titillating, a restrained, thoughtful, thought provoking and delightful exhibition. I doubt any other institution could have done such a brilliant job of exhibiting the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection.

And, at the end of the day, how often do you get to read “The shoes are made of bread” about a work of art?

Picasso: Peace and Freedom @ Tate Liverpool

Pablo Picasso, Lobster and Cat, 1965

Ah! Picasso, a deeply flawed man and an exceptionally talented artist. The Titan of 20th Century art is receiving an indubitably deserved solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Picasso: Peace and Freedom explores Picasso as a political artist... e.g. a dirty commie.

One of the joys of Picasso’s prolific output and the Tate’s ability to draw art works from the finest collections across the world is that in every room is an unfamiliar work. However different they may be, such as the Lobster & Cat, the use of line, form, colour and painterly texture always manifest the power of Picasso. A whole room is devoted to Picasso’s serene doves and a large space filled with posters and lithographs, the abundant variations on themes feel both delightful and generous.

The framing of Picasso as a history painter is rather awkward, but there is absolutely no denying the pathos and power of his depiction of war. His doves are just gorgeous, his sleep eyed ladies sensuous and the plentiful snatch singularly un-erotic. Peace and Freedom, at it's heart, is simply Picasso on blockbusting form.

So while some wonderful choices are made about how the works are displayed, the counterpoints and repetitions of themes, devices and images are delicious, I feel there are some small but intrinsic flaws in the argument that the exhibition attempts to make. Great artists do not necessarily make great political figures, and this exhibition seems to shy away from this important distinction.

Pure artistic magic... if you insulate yourself from a slightly over zealous attempt to form a new hagiography.

Filip Gilissen, Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? @ Liverpool Biennial

I’ve always known that I was a primodial-magpie, but last night Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? proved that everyone else is as well.

Part of Light Night and launching the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, the Artist Filip Gilissen's installation turned, for one night only, a ratty warehouse on New Bird Street into an idolatrous, shimmering exposition of Midas dreams.

My inherent love of gold overcame cynicism, and combined with my dorky ability to always be early, mean that I managed to stumble through the first half of the installation before queues formed.

The concepts behind the installation might be deceptively simple, but like most art that has moved me recently, it was a triumph of elemental ideas and well-executed all-encompassing practice.

Disorienting, magical, sinister and slightly erotic, like an artistic equivalent of a roller-coaster, the installation seemed to suspend sequential moments, so you become uncertain if many minutes or just a few seconds has passed.

The finale, later that evening, a highly anticipated yet miraculously unexpected explosion of dense, effervescent gold and smoke, was spellbinding. Magical, elemental and ominous, I felt like an oracle trying to discern ancient truths by gazing into the swirling smoke and glitter. Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca? begs an ancient, classical context in order to speak about it. Reactions in the crowd were rapturous and joyful. The sense of elation was palpable, and this was swiftly followed, once the shimmering plumes had died out, by an disorientated, artistic kind of post-orgasmic chill.

Like any art that utilises so fundamental devices and plucks antediluvian heart strings, it’s completely open to interpretation. To link this work too closely into it’s stated role as a tribute to Felix Gonzalez-Torres can only damage our experience of it by inviting comparison. I want to scream “step away from the explanation!” I for one want to keep the memories, barely comprehended, in my hind brain. An ecstatic eddy of gold is enough for me.