Nam June Paik @ Tate Liverpool & FACT

Something magical is happening in Liverpool... and I don’t mean the snow or the Christmas spirit.

Split across the Tate Liverpool and FACT, Nam June Paik is receiving a very well deserved retrospective. Even though he may not be universally well know, he’s a seminal artists, and there is more than enough artistic ammunition to prove this as gospel truth.

Nam June Paik seemed to consistently produce provocative, assessable artwork without having to belabour a theoretical or political point. It is refreshing and enjoyable, and most importantly not at all worthy or good for you! This is delicious visual and intellectual bubble-gum, sustenance without nasty roughage.

In the Tate Liverpool, you find yourself stumbling from delight to delight. In TV Garden, 1974, a room bristles with tropical plants and flickering tv sets and feels like something out of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. One Candle, 1988 - a video camera focused on a candle, with the image broken down into it’s constituent colours and projected onto the walls - is as beautiful as an abstract painting and lead you to ponder the very nature of light. Also... Robots!

This is not to mention Laser Cone, 2001, over at FACT. If you are lucky you’ll be able to enjoy this experience without aged hippies yelping that how it’s just like acid... but even with that annoying accompanying chorus it is sheer magic.You'll have trouble tearing yourself away from Laser Cone, and not just because being battered and bruised from falling over on the ice makes it hard to get up.

It shouldn’t be startling, but to find an artist who so consistently worked with such dazzlingly originality, ingenuity and integrity with mass technology is just that. It has driven home to me (again) how utterly jaded I am about technology and art; why did I even need to remark on the synergetic skill with which Rafael Lozano-Hemmer wove the two together? Because most artists simply have not been as good as this pioneer!

Nam June Paik has reminded us that art can be magical.

Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard
Laser Cone, 2001/2010
© Estate of Nam June Paik and Norman Ballard
Photographed by Stefan Arendt, LVR / Medienzentrum Düsseldorf

Goodbye Don Van Vliet

If the name of this blog isn’t enough of a give away, the fact that I dedicated my MA dissertation to Don Van Vliet might indicate to you that I am a little bit of a Captain Beefheart fan girl.

With the recent death of Don Van Vliet (1941 to Friday 17 December 2010) I’m guessing a great number of copies of Trout Mask Replica are being dusted off. Now, don’t get me wrong, Trout Mask Replica is an alright album, just as his best known album it is rather overrated and frequently, even to my prog loving ears, unpalatable.

What’s probably not being said is that of this undoubted pioneer of mad, experimental rock music is that he was also an uncanny master of love songs.

Turn to songs like the adorable My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains (The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot), the bitter sweet Too Much Time (again The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot, sadly not on Spotify) and the glorious rolling broken hearted ballad Love Lies (Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)) and tell me I’m wrong. 

A while ago, I put together a Beefheart Love Song playlist on Spotify, sadly missing some real gems that are not available.

... and, it might not be a love song, but little can beat the swirling, foot tapping magic that is Yellow Brick Road for sheer musical manifestation of joy.

Sound Relay ~ Long Night 2010

Photo from Liverpool Echo - see more on LiverpoolEcho.co.uk

In recent weeks - perhaps prompted by budget cuts, perhaps by the many wonderful musical and artistic experiences I've enjoyed - I've been thinking about how art and music provide an essential intellectual life.

As much as I'll defend anyone's right to enjoy Eastenders and Don't Tell The Bride (I'm guilty of both), little beats an exhilarating cultural experience.

Bearing these thoughts in mind you would think that music in art galleries would be a heavenly concoction... and indeed, done in the right manner, it is.

On Thursday night. Ensemble 10/10's (yes, I might have a vested interest here) performance of Jennifer Watson's Reflections, set amongst Magdalena Abakanowicz's Embryology, was simply magical. A quirky, vortical cascade of sound led by a delicious sounding soprano saxophone (not a "fat clarinet"), the piece didn't fall into any of the discordant pitfalls of contemporary classical music.

However - proving there are no absolutes - the rest of the Sound Relay at Tate Liverpool was a very different experience.

Self indulgent art and self indulgent music are seldom of the highest quality. While clattering about the streets of Liverpool after a cacophony of musicians is a lot of fun, the same cannot be said about musicians making the same sound scattered about a gallery space.

The joy of an art gallery is that the environment is tightly controlled, curatorially judged, not to make you buy stuff but to encourage reflective gaze and thought or to create atmosphere and evoke feeling. On Thursday night people in the gallery space just did not know what to do with themselves, look at the fine art or cast awkward regard at the buskers, and it was seemingly impossible to do both. The atmosphere was both oppressive and fragmented, simply put a balance had been disrupted.

Yes, there was novelty in having musicians in the gallery, but novelty is not enough! I'm not casting aspersions on the skill of the Sound Relay musicians, but rather the premiss that it was a good idea effectively executed. Perhaps I'm just not a fan of noodling?

In conclusion, live music in art galleries, not a bad idea. Just needs to be as carefully executed as the fine art and as curated as the gallery space.

The illustration of Tove Jansson

I was a lucky child. Unlike most of British children I wasn’t exposed the Moomins by creepy stop animated felt, Japanese cartoon interpretation or the slightly awkwardly written/translated novels. Looking at these versions of Tove Jansson’s creations, is it any wonder that illustrator Adam Cadwell included Moomin Papa in his list of childhood villains?

“It’s hard to describe but something about their vacant, piercing eyes and their emotionless, mouthless faces used to get me extremely worried and paranoid about what their true intentions were.”- Adam Cadwell

Fortunately for me, one my earliest memories is my mother reading to me in English - translating from Swedish - from Moomin, Mymble and Little My, the very edition she herself had owned as a child. This has recently be translated and reissued, and I feel so happy that British children will be exposed to this wonderful book. Yes, weird, but still utterly wonderful.

As adorable as the characters, narrative and prose created by Finnish-Swede Tove Janssson are, for me the real joy of the Moomins lie her original, delightfully quirky and innocently warped, illustrations. Like Maurice Sendak, or fellow Scandinavian Elsa Beskow, there can surely be little better than strange stories, exciting and engaging for the bizarre peril that permeates them, accompanied by beautiful illustration?

Anyway, what started me on this soliloquy of Moomin-love? Bury Art Gallery currently has an exhibition called Magical Moominvalley (23 October - 15 January 2011) celebrating Tove Jansson’s illustration. Get thee to Bury!

Recorders : Rafael Lozano-Hemmer @ Manchester Art Gallery

Until recently art that was substantively digital or technological seemed to jump one of either two way. It was technologically awkward, light years behind the actual advanced grace of contemporary technology, or it was unengagingly aloof, endeavouring to divorce technology from the throbbing warm of the human experience.

Thankfully this dichotomy is now over, art has finally caught up with technology, and we have artist who are brilliant technologists... or perhaps the other way round?

Recorders, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's solo exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (18 September to 30 January), brilliants elucidates the uneasy, but delicious, relationship between the body- and life-human and technology.

You are greeting by Pulse Index (2010), a work that perfectly embodies the playful, ominous, interactive ethos of the exhibition. The sight of your finger print, so ubiquitously human and essentially individual, enlarged in perfect definition, complete with tiny beads of sweat and grime magnified and glittering like pearls, is both delightful and viscerally shocking. It then flutters off to join the teeming, digitalised hoards of finger prints stored in the work.

As fascinating as all the installations are in this exhibition, none of the joyful wizardry evokes the sheer wonder and consternation of Pulse Room (2006).  The tension that runs through many of the works, that we are all uniquely identifiable humans and yet share essential innately-human functions, is illustrated by a constellation of heart-beat-flickering light bulbs. Standing in the darkened room, as a light bulb pulses in front of you with your own heart beat, followed by watching your rhythm flow and dissipate across the room, is just thrilling.

Recorders reminds you of your humanity, simultaneously evoking your biological uniqueness and your puny organic commonness, like a kindly robotic overlord.  This exhibition is delightful, if you are not too serious about art or technology. Ominous and playful, I feel as though Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work is the first that I've experienced that accurately and beautifully portrays the mood, issues and joys of life in our ubiquitously- digitalised present and near future.


Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.

Biennial @ The Europleasure / Scandinavian Hotel

As many people have commented, one of the wonderful side effects of the Biennial is the access to disused buildings, many that I've previously walked past without noticing. The Europleasure / Scandinavian Hotel, at the top of Duke Street, is one of those buildings.

You can't miss it now! At the front it is resplendent with Will Kwan's Flame Test and the words Touch and Go have been smashed into windows at the side.

I wouldn't have expected the real highlight of yesterday to be two completely dissimilar pieces of video art. We Wish to Inform You that We Didn’t Know,  a three-channel video work by Alfredo Jarr, offers compelling and harrowing, but not gratuitously so, insight into the atrocities in Rwanda. Even if you are familiar with the details, the video articulates emotions and facets that perhaps no written or purely documentary account could manage.

The video element of  Cristina Lucas'  Touch and Go couldn't be more different. At counterpoint to We Wish to Inform You that We Didn’t Know, the video offers a 'making-of' view of the buildings smashed windows. Humorous, in the gentlest and most charming manner, it is a bitter sweet story of urban transgression set to a delightful discordant sound track.

The works in this location are part of the Biennial's Public Realm strand.

Biennial @ 52 Renshaw Street

The old Rapid buildings along Renshaw Street have been used for a variety of interesting purposes recently, but the Biennials residency in the space will take some beating.

The vast and warren-like space is cleverly spotted with art works, some of them good, some of them, frankly, extremely questionable. Unlike most vacant shops I've seen used as galleries, the space has not been white washed to death. Instead the curator, Lorenzo Fusi, seems to have made the decision to leave much of the remaining odds and ends of Rapid's decor intact. Outré patches of painting work, tiles and wallpaper offset the carefully organised art works. These remnants add a intriguing sense of exploring an abandoned civilisation - with bizarre interior design habits - to the visit. 

Although many of the art works are of dubious quality, there are some absolute gems. Saving the best till last, my highlights are located at the end of the long wander through the maze of interconnected rooms. N S Harsha's Sky Gazers blurs the lines of illustration/painting and installation, combining several simple and effective devices in a delightful manner. Go see it soon before visitors' dirty shoes and grubby fingers take their toll! 

In the next room, after you pass through Sky Gazers, uneasily rests Free Post Mersey Tunnels. Let's just say, you know an art work is good when it makes you feel panicky... I know it shouldn't matter, but I do like that fact that a female artist, Rosa Barb, has created such a muscular and mechanically evocative work. 

As one of my first Liverpool Biennial experiences, despite feeling sceptical about some of the works in the exhibition, I really enjoyed exploring what 52 Renshaw Street had to offer... even if that includes violent fez wearing goat sodomy.