Anyone else feeling a tad demoralised?
Yesterday, as Arts Council England announced it’s funding settlements for what are now National Portfolio Organisations, was pretty nerve-wracking. As it turns out the situation was not as dramatic as feared, but hardly encouraging for anyone who cares about the arts in this country.
When fantastic small groups like Urban Strawberry Lunch lose what little funding they did receive from Arts Council England, it puts the cuts to some of my favourite Liverpool arts organisations –for example 4.9% for the Everyman and Playhouse and 11% for FACT (both in real terms over 4 years) – in a rose tinted context.
The official announcements, the tweets of relief and outrage, the newspaper and blog scramble to assess the impact, was utterly overwhelming, especially for someone who isn’t used to thinking about things politically or mathematically. Thankfully, Seven Streets do a very good job of summarising the headline figures for Merseyside organisations.
When Liverpool City Council recently handed out a flat 20% funding cut for all arts organisations, the dialogue was often pushed in the direction that it was a question of either/or… that it’s education and public services against the arts. If you force even the most ardent artinista to weigh the value of a rape crisis centre against an arts centre, there is absolutely no choice. Yesterday this worrying rhetorical trend continued, with my friend and LIPA lecturer Maria Barrett commenting in a tweet: “'Arts Funding or NHS & education?' premise of #radio2 call in disgusting. Looking forward to 'TV Licence or food?' next week. #artsfunding”
I won’t roll out that trite quote from Winston Churchill about arts funding that is doing the rounds, but I will suggest to fuck over the arts is the effectively neuter any city outside of London. This didn’t happen yesterday, but feels like a step towards it. We will be discovering what the decisions announced yesterday really means for the arts in the follow months.
Let’s upgrade demoralised to anxious.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Monday, 14 February 2011
Farewell A Foundation
Farewell A Foundation, we barely knew ye…. Well, I – still a fairly recent import to this city – did anyway.
With the news that A Foundation is now no more, I was initially reticent about joining in with the general wailing and gnashing of teeth, but like the proposed sell-off of the collection of Southampton Art Gallery, I find myself feeling both somewhat quizzical and absolutely disgusted.
Yes, not every experience I had within A Foundation’s industrial walls was gilded. I can count some of the most queasily gauche, self aware and un-self-conscious example of contemporary art that I’ve seen in recent years as elements in exhibitions at A Foundation.
But still, it’s a great shame that it’s been wound up with a whimper, noticed only by premiere Liverpool blog Seven Streets. Whatever the consistency of the work on display, Seven Streets are so right to recognise it’s programme as possibly the most dynamic, challenging and exciting in the city.
Beyond the clearly discernible tragedy for contemporary art in Liverpool, I’ve got two burning questions:
One. What the hell is the point of the Baltic Triangle now? Apart from CUC it has very little to tempt me, and it’ll take something very special to tempt me into the oppressive confines of the Novas Centre. Now, unless I'm buying a shed or getting my non-existent car painted, why would I go to the Baltic Triangle?
Two. What does this spell out for the Biennial? After Biennial Artistic Director Lewis Biggs’ volatile blog about funding cuts back in November – which made the organisations seem to be visibly floundering even before the axe has fallen – the closure of A Foundation can only seem like a body blow. The loss of such a space (in addition to whatever funding disaster it will have to pass through in the following months) will surely have a huge impact on what the Biennial can offer in 2012.
But right now I can only mutter and sigh and ponder what this means for quality visual art in Liverpool. I have no more information than Seven Streets, and I am very aware of the brutality of cuts that are painfully imminent and will be on going for the foreseeable future. Overshadowed by the nose drive the Liverpool Boat Show just took, this won't be the last asset to disappear from Liverpool's cultural ecosystem.
Anyway, bye bye A Foundation, I hope your legacy is more than a swathe of Big Society art students who couldn’t curate their arse from their elbow. Where else in Liverpool would I have been able to re-encounter Jacob Dahlgren’s Colour Reading Context?
With the news that A Foundation is now no more, I was initially reticent about joining in with the general wailing and gnashing of teeth, but like the proposed sell-off of the collection of Southampton Art Gallery, I find myself feeling both somewhat quizzical and absolutely disgusted.
Yes, not every experience I had within A Foundation’s industrial walls was gilded. I can count some of the most queasily gauche, self aware and un-self-conscious example of contemporary art that I’ve seen in recent years as elements in exhibitions at A Foundation.
But still, it’s a great shame that it’s been wound up with a whimper, noticed only by premiere Liverpool blog Seven Streets. Whatever the consistency of the work on display, Seven Streets are so right to recognise it’s programme as possibly the most dynamic, challenging and exciting in the city.
Beyond the clearly discernible tragedy for contemporary art in Liverpool, I’ve got two burning questions:
One. What the hell is the point of the Baltic Triangle now? Apart from CUC it has very little to tempt me, and it’ll take something very special to tempt me into the oppressive confines of the Novas Centre. Now, unless I'm buying a shed or getting my non-existent car painted, why would I go to the Baltic Triangle?
Two. What does this spell out for the Biennial? After Biennial Artistic Director Lewis Biggs’ volatile blog about funding cuts back in November – which made the organisations seem to be visibly floundering even before the axe has fallen – the closure of A Foundation can only seem like a body blow. The loss of such a space (in addition to whatever funding disaster it will have to pass through in the following months) will surely have a huge impact on what the Biennial can offer in 2012.
But right now I can only mutter and sigh and ponder what this means for quality visual art in Liverpool. I have no more information than Seven Streets, and I am very aware of the brutality of cuts that are painfully imminent and will be on going for the foreseeable future. Overshadowed by the nose drive the Liverpool Boat Show just took, this won't be the last asset to disappear from Liverpool's cultural ecosystem.
Anyway, bye bye A Foundation, I hope your legacy is more than a swathe of Big Society art students who couldn’t curate their arse from their elbow. Where else in Liverpool would I have been able to re-encounter Jacob Dahlgren’s Colour Reading Context?
Sunday, 13 February 2011
What would be in your dream art collection?
A Collector's Eye is an exhibition of paintings from the Schorr Collection assembled by a private collector, and it opens at the Walker Art Gallery next week. The exhibition promises to feature five centuries of art ranging from 15th-century devotional images to 19th-century French Impressionist landscapes. Old Master artists Rubens, El Greco, Delacroix and Cranach are included alongside Impressionists such as Pissarro and Sisley.
It’s an interesting departure from the on going trend for exhibitions based upon extremely didactic concepts, an emphasis on telling art as a heavy handed biographical or teleological story I've always round annoying. Some might find a basis in the personal tastes of a private collector problematic, but I hope the selection of works in an exhibition curated along these principals will be much closer to the diverse and changing relationship with art that most of us have.
The organisers also ask the question, what would be in your dream art collection? and I feel compelled to day-dream up an answer.
To start with, if we are allowed to get greedy, can I have a couple of the Marie de’ Medici cycle by Rubens (1577-1640)? If I had to pick just one, give me The Disembarkation at Marseilles (1622-25), deliciously dripping with allegory and bursting with bizarre perspective and plentiful cavorting sea maidens. In a skinny-obsessed world I find the expanses of doughy flesh positively refreshing!
I’d follow this with a healthy slice of Victorian life which a complete de-emphasis on the bloody Pre-Raphaelites. Give me some monkeys and polar bears by Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) and my favourite Polar pin-up Sir James Clark Ross (painted in 1834) looking young and dashing in a dead animal’s skin. Throw in some late J M W Turner (1775-1851) too, to dazzle and shimmer.
Next I would like to get a little patriotic and whimsical, and place the illustrations of John Bauer (1882-1918), Tove Jansen (1914-2001) and Elsa Beskow (1874-1953) next to each other - a delightful flock of trolls, fairies and woodland creatures. Equally whimsical, I’d compliment the visual dreams of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) with the Art Deco graphical delights of Edouard Benedictus (1879-1930).
What else? Getting a little more modern, let’s have a healthy serving of Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and Paul Nash (1889-1946) - skipping over anything too war-focussed for some of their lovely organic-architectural fantasies.
I’d also pinch Eduardo Paolozzi’s (1924-2005) Collage from BUNK from the Tate Modern, and ship Frida Khalo’s (1907-1954) Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird over from the US.
To round things off give me Rodney Graham’s (1949- ) Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, and finally all on it’s own in a big blue room, in absolute pride of place, let's enjoy Henri Rousseu’s (1844-1910) languorous Sleeping Gypsy.
I could go on... but it’s a little akin to torture. Like most people my art collection is just a hodgepodge assortment of tattered posters and prints... *sigh*
Collector's Eye is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 February to 15 May 2011
It’s an interesting departure from the on going trend for exhibitions based upon extremely didactic concepts, an emphasis on telling art as a heavy handed biographical or teleological story I've always round annoying. Some might find a basis in the personal tastes of a private collector problematic, but I hope the selection of works in an exhibition curated along these principals will be much closer to the diverse and changing relationship with art that most of us have.
The organisers also ask the question, what would be in your dream art collection? and I feel compelled to day-dream up an answer.
To start with, if we are allowed to get greedy, can I have a couple of the Marie de’ Medici cycle by Rubens (1577-1640)? If I had to pick just one, give me The Disembarkation at Marseilles (1622-25), deliciously dripping with allegory and bursting with bizarre perspective and plentiful cavorting sea maidens. In a skinny-obsessed world I find the expanses of doughy flesh positively refreshing!
I’d follow this with a healthy slice of Victorian life which a complete de-emphasis on the bloody Pre-Raphaelites. Give me some monkeys and polar bears by Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) and my favourite Polar pin-up Sir James Clark Ross (painted in 1834) looking young and dashing in a dead animal’s skin. Throw in some late J M W Turner (1775-1851) too, to dazzle and shimmer.
Next I would like to get a little patriotic and whimsical, and place the illustrations of John Bauer (1882-1918), Tove Jansen (1914-2001) and Elsa Beskow (1874-1953) next to each other - a delightful flock of trolls, fairies and woodland creatures. Equally whimsical, I’d compliment the visual dreams of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) with the Art Deco graphical delights of Edouard Benedictus (1879-1930).
What else? Getting a little more modern, let’s have a healthy serving of Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) and Paul Nash (1889-1946) - skipping over anything too war-focussed for some of their lovely organic-architectural fantasies.
I’d also pinch Eduardo Paolozzi’s (1924-2005) Collage from BUNK from the Tate Modern, and ship Frida Khalo’s (1907-1954) Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird over from the US.
To round things off give me Rodney Graham’s (1949- ) Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, and finally all on it’s own in a big blue room, in absolute pride of place, let's enjoy Henri Rousseu’s (1844-1910) languorous Sleeping Gypsy.
I could go on... but it’s a little akin to torture. Like most people my art collection is just a hodgepodge assortment of tattered posters and prints... *sigh*
Collector's Eye is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 18 February to 15 May 2011
Saturday, 1 January 2011
2010 in Art, Theatre, Film, Music and Meme
Art
2010 started as the year that my anti-Bansky rant was distributed around London in The Blog Paper and continued with getting very pleasantly freaked out by Ron Mueck's Wild Man at Manchester Art Gallery, discovering Liverpool's Culturepool, becoming reacquainted with an old friend at the A Foundation through to my first ever Liverpool Biennial, which began in August with Laura Belém's Temple of a Thousand Bells.
It will also be the year that technology and art finally coalesced - at least for me - and ended a history of uneasy tolerance and awkward plundering. In October I was enchanted by Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Pulse Room (2006) at Manchester Art Gallery. I didn’t know it then, but Lozano-Hemmer’s work shares many of the delicious tensions and delights with earlier digital art pioneer Nam June Paik, as I found in December at Tate Liverpool and FACT.
Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.
Theatre
In October I did not want Slung Low Theatre’s almost unimpeachable Anthology at the Everyman to end. Brilliant in both conception and execution, I doubt I will ever forget the experience of standing in some university gardens just off Hope Street, holding a feather, in a sudden downpour, watching Eileen O’Brien tell her character’s heart breaking story. Yes, I shed a tear or two.
Honestly, I felt utterly bereft after my last one and envy those who got to experience them all. Short, often sharp, bite sized ghost stories, the experience was somehow more like a radio play than anything else and yet so much more.
Film
Although there were plenty of main stream cinematic treats this year - Scott Pilgrim, Another Year, The Illusionist - I need to maintain my status as a bit of an intellectual snob. My film of 2010 is Skelletons, a very British supernatural comedy that really did deserve to be a box-office hit. A cute, quirky and yet fairly psychologically dark film, the evidently low budget effects added to the charm and never once detracted from an adorably loopy high-concept storyline and well realised adorable characteris. Love Film/Amazon it now, bitches!
Music
Unquestionably my musical crush of the year is Janelle Monae. What make could you want from a beautiful, talented musician who crafts perfect pop albums drawing heavily from a spectrum of sci-fi, pop culture and high brow sources... that most importantly makes you want to dance round the office like a sexy robot loon. *Sigh* If you need more convincing, listen to The Archandroid on Spotify.
Honourable mention also has to go to Quatuor Ebène and their incredible album of film music Fiction (also available on Spotify).
Meme
It might have started in 2008, but with fucking bed bugs Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me series came to everyone’s attention this year. Add to that a demented interview in Vanity Fair, where the interviewer seems to basically plead with Isabella to say she wants to shag animals, and my meme for the year is set.
2010 started as the year that my anti-Bansky rant was distributed around London in The Blog Paper and continued with getting very pleasantly freaked out by Ron Mueck's Wild Man at Manchester Art Gallery, discovering Liverpool's Culturepool, becoming reacquainted with an old friend at the A Foundation through to my first ever Liverpool Biennial, which began in August with Laura Belém's Temple of a Thousand Bells.
It will also be the year that technology and art finally coalesced - at least for me - and ended a history of uneasy tolerance and awkward plundering. In October I was enchanted by Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Pulse Room (2006) at Manchester Art Gallery. I didn’t know it then, but Lozano-Hemmer’s work shares many of the delicious tensions and delights with earlier digital art pioneer Nam June Paik, as I found in December at Tate Liverpool and FACT.
Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from Manchester Art Gallery on Vimeo.
Theatre
In October I did not want Slung Low Theatre’s almost unimpeachable Anthology at the Everyman to end. Brilliant in both conception and execution, I doubt I will ever forget the experience of standing in some university gardens just off Hope Street, holding a feather, in a sudden downpour, watching Eileen O’Brien tell her character’s heart breaking story. Yes, I shed a tear or two.
Honestly, I felt utterly bereft after my last one and envy those who got to experience them all. Short, often sharp, bite sized ghost stories, the experience was somehow more like a radio play than anything else and yet so much more.
Film
Although there were plenty of main stream cinematic treats this year - Scott Pilgrim, Another Year, The Illusionist - I need to maintain my status as a bit of an intellectual snob. My film of 2010 is Skelletons, a very British supernatural comedy that really did deserve to be a box-office hit. A cute, quirky and yet fairly psychologically dark film, the evidently low budget effects added to the charm and never once detracted from an adorably loopy high-concept storyline and well realised adorable characteris. Love Film/Amazon it now, bitches!
Music
Unquestionably my musical crush of the year is Janelle Monae. What make could you want from a beautiful, talented musician who crafts perfect pop albums drawing heavily from a spectrum of sci-fi, pop culture and high brow sources... that most importantly makes you want to dance round the office like a sexy robot loon. *Sigh* If you need more convincing, listen to The Archandroid on Spotify.
Honourable mention also has to go to Quatuor Ebène and their incredible album of film music Fiction (also available on Spotify).
Meme
It might have started in 2008, but with fucking bed bugs Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me series came to everyone’s attention this year. Add to that a demented interview in Vanity Fair, where the interviewer seems to basically plead with Isabella to say she wants to shag animals, and my meme for the year is set.
Sunday, 19 December 2010
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.
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.
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| 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.
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Sound Relay ~ Long Night 2010
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| 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.
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