My Biennial Experience

“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.