Sean Harvey

My Biennial Experience

2010-10-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

“Liverpool Biennial is the largest as well as one of the most exciting contemporary visual arts events in the UK, and with 960,000 visits in 2008, it is one of the best attended in the world.” (Liverpool Biennial website)

One of Liverpool Biennial’s missions is to engage audiences in a city which would not normally engage with contemporary art. It has a festival spirit which makes the work approachable and accessible. Its marketing campaign is a good example of this, and so is it’s success in rejuvenating abandoned sites around the city, in one case to the extent of installing a model hanok (traditional Korean house) between two 19th century buildings on Duke Street – Do Ho Suh, Bringing Home, 2010. In commissioning works like these and branching out into the public realm so enthusiastically, Liverpool Biennial seems to be the UK Arts Council’s reaction to the stigma of the private space of the museum and the unpopular ‘white cube’ format of exhibiting work, which has resulted in one monolithic outreach program every two years.

The closed space of the museum is disliked today more than ever because it is contrary to the apparently open space of contemporary media. Today’s globalised media however cannot be open because it is all-inclusive and total. Similarly, art conceived within a media machine of infinite expansion and inclusion is also not an open space but the artistic counterpart of an imperial media hybrid. However, instead of leaving the ‘white cube’ behind as a way of formatting art, public institutions are simply and literally moving themselves outside into places like Rapid Hardware store (one of the many locations for Liverpool Biennial 2010). Under the guise of the “low-fi” and the “user friendly” we find art that appears to have grown apart from the insular market driven establishment and into the street were high and low culture merge.

So although there is plenty more room now for art to take place in the city, all I can see happening in Liverpool is the soft-hand of the same bureaucratic system fixing up the sites capitalism has left behind in the carnage of its own recent economic failure whilst, at the same time, broadening and reinforcing the boundaries that many of the artists showing in these spaces are continually trying to knock down.

So, in retrospect, I found Static gallery’s 2008 (and ongoing) Noodle Bar project a refreshing and tactical move in this suffocating situation. I would argue that Noodle Bar was a move away from the spectacle of Liverpool Biennial (and Biennial’s in general) and was, instead, a direct and confrontational intervention into the fabric of bureaucracy which govern cities such as Liverpool.

Posed in the fashion of illegal DIY settlements in third world cities, Noodle Bar, (a steel container attached to the gallery in Liverpool which contained a fully functioning Noodle Bar), served its purpose as Static became a host venue for the 2008 biennial, offering visitors a place to take a break from the art circuit in the city and chow down on some noodles. At the same time as this, however, it confronted the city of Liverpool’s planning department with the prospect of an inconvenient court battle over planning permission. Liverpool City Council argued that Noodle Bar was an illegal retail outlet constructed without proper planning permission. Static argued that the Noodle Bar was an artistic intervention. In fact, neither could operate as such without the disguise of the other.

One concern in my own work is the kind of pseudo autonomy that art has. The notion that art occupies, or even constitutes, a space outside the order of society and that artists are, as a result, granted infinite freedom to critisise society from their autonomous sanctuary. This notion was called into question by the Noodle Bar project.

The Korean chefs who were employed by Static to work in the Noodle Bar were working in Seoul originally. Usually the chefs could never have passed through UK immigration laws, but were granted permission only under the terms and conditions of an artist’s visa. To acquire an artist’s visa however the project itself needed to be recognised as a piece of art by Liverpool city council. By simply remaining a host venue as opposed to a publicized art project in the Biennial’s visitors guide Static could work outside the funding agenda’s of the council and not have to meet their priorities while, at the same time, maintaining a line of defense against the councils claims it was a business venture. In this way Static’s Noodle Bar project maintains a critical distance from art practice that is sanctioned as public spectacle in the city of Liverpool – investingating the possibility of autonomy which could allow the individual more freedom over architechture, planning, immigration/migration, trade, and art, with little or no distinction between them.

Liverpool City Council planning department were forced to exert pressure on Static Gallery by indirectly threatening to jeopardise other funding relationships that Static Gallery had developed over the years.

Faced with an all-encompassing neoliberalism – Static’s Noodle Bar project identified that to do something different art practiced today can only use the networks and systems that are already in place. Instead of succumbing to societies demand for small creative acts that patch up the social waste land of capitalism’s relentless march forward, art can regain its credibility and legitimacy as an engaged force in society.

The Autonomy Project. (Redefining autonomy in contemporary art)

2010-04-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

me on the mike, everyone starting to lose the will to live.
someone else says something interesting, everyone a bit more cheery.

The fist discussion/seminar for the Liverpool Art and Design Academy branch of the Autonomy Project took place on Friday 16 April at 6.45 GMT.

16 undergraduate Fine Art students, recent graduates, early career artists and industry professionals joined Steven ten Thije (who appeared via Skype) in an initial discussion about the complex territory that is autonomy today.....by addressing the question of how artists, critics, curators, activists etc. could still try to make some kind of difference in an increasingly bureaucratic and globalised neo-liberal economy.
John Byrne
http://theautonomyproject.ning.com

I don't know were to start with this.

2010-04-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

. . . .

Mike Takes Over The World With 25 l of Permoglaze White Egg Shell Acrylic.

2010-04-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Taking the people who work and study here (Liverpool art & design academy) as my audience, I have made ephemeral interventions in the building to illustrate what I see as a problematic divide or separation between an arguably autonomous art world and a globalised Neo-liberal economy.

By employing a local painter and decorator I found in the yellow pages to re-paint all the interior walls in the building a slightly different tone of white, I wanted to give Mike the ‘painter’, a contradictory role, arguably an ‘artist’ or ‘civilian’ in society.

This was a way to understand how a real world exchange like this, and the paint job that came out of it, could be valued in an autonomous art world which seems strangely separate and disengaged from the political realities of the everyday. Equally, it was to see how my artistic intervention into the environment could be elaborate yet had little effect on the perceptions of the people who inhabit it, except for the fictitious rumors / Chinese whispers that have emerged as to the actual paint used and whether or not I had actually done anything at all. What followed was a few difficult conversations with the building managers and a bizarre decorating job being awkwardly played out in the fashion of a conceptual performance piece.

The document of this is a film, also concerned with situations (SI), documentation, and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of a supposed ‘hyper-reality’

To gain permission for my project to go ahead at all I presented one version of my plans to the director of the school and made an agreement. The university pays for the paint job if I agree to use the same shade of paint as on the walls originally. I agreed, but instead used the funding to buy a different shade of paint.

This was a decision to lift the ‘site’ of my work, or the knowledge of the buildings new colour, from any physical space (the exhibition, performance, installation, video, or even the walls themselves) solely into the exchange of information passed around the community of students and staff in the building via the rumours I invented. A placebo effect. On the release of the degree show publication the text describing the project served a similar purpose. I moved the significance of my work from the painting itself to the mediation of it. It also gave all meaning to the 3 hour long film were my audience were literally watching paint dry.

The ‘delivery of paint’ installed in the lobby caused the operations staff daily consternation. The weekly routine of painter-decorators as a ubiquitous presence in the building acted as visual reminders to the project. In group crits, conversations, confrontations and through anecdotes, my answers to questions about the project frequently changed even to academic staff. Through the rumour I gave the project form and meaning until the truth became irrelevant. This rumour or mediation was intended to investigate both the current ‘site’ of art production and its reception. It also investigated the threshold between a reality and its re-presentation, which has arguably no real definitive point of transition anymore.

Cultural Activism Today, The Art of Overidentification.

2010-04-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

If, as claimed within the autonomist tradition, capitalism derives its lifeblood from attempts to negate it, where does this leave the position of the subversive artist? Of the aesthetics of resistance? At a point where the distance between the legacy of the modernist avant-garde and the advertising industry grow ever slimmer, or disappear completely, how is it possible to assert an aesthetic or cultural practice that is not immediately utilized against itself by capitalism and the state?

BAVO, 2007

"Swimming is an inscription, just like painting" Jean-Francois Lyotard

2010-04-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

Media theorist Jean Baudrillard suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. He is concerned with a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal.

Liverpool : Shanghai - Online Community Project with e -Space Lab.org

2010-04-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

This is a poster I made for when E-Space Lab Project came to liverpool to build a virtual community of artists via Skype. We spent a long time setting things up but worked out in the end. As usual not many people from England turned up, and the technology broke down more than a few times. The communication is slow and irritating at times, but we are getting there and with a few more links we might form the basis for a collaboration between architecture students in Shanghai. Vids from the Bluecoat and ADA are bellow. The project is encouraging the use of Skype to make live interactions between groups of artists which break down eurocentric relationship to the east. They are focusing there research on the potential for live streaming video as an aspect of a performative art process. They are all about creating diverse networks of association witch are constituted by that association.

Talking with Philip Courteney, the project leader, he thinks it could open up a space for some kind of 'post autonomous' practice. Something definitely to keep an eye on, Shanghai trip may be in order in the future.

http://e-spacelab.blogspot.com/

Woolworths Project

2009-04-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

I tried to play around with a few letters I 'took' from a local Woolworth's store in Liverpool as it went into administration. To see how far peoples recognition of the brand went, I tried my best to pull apart it's original meaning which has been so synonymous with everything British for ages. Putting it into the complicated ontology of an art gallery, making abstractions from the letters, using them as film props for 'Action Diana' a film/installation by The Centre of Attention, and recently, and rather surprisingly, managing to sell them on e - bay for £67. The buyer was a woman who lives on a house boat / island outside London and wanted the letters to make part of a sign for it because they don't have any numbers.

The Centre of Attention

2009-03-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

action diana

The contemporary exhibition as a display of inert, finished product has run its course. For the Centre of Attention, the moment of the exhibition is a locus for intellectual and aesthetic play and experiment as well as the opportunity to generate together material to work on at a future date.

messin around

2009-03-17T10:00:00.000-07:00