Ian Jackson's Liverpool Arts and Culture Blog
The auction to raise funds for Arena Studios last night seemed to be a great success. The art was good, there was a big crowd, every piece was sold for anything between £10 and £200 many of them real bargains and it was all great fun.
Well done to all involved.
(I didn’t overspend this time, I sat on my hands)
Its difficult enough for any artist to find a place to exhibit their work. Its doubly difficult if you are a student or recent graduate. So if you are a student or recent graduate working in time-based media – no chance! But at least Sean Hawkridge at Static gallery is doing his bit to help. He’s set up a venture called Skylight Projects (no website to link to yet) and last night was their first ‘Thursday Show’ which aims to give artists working in time-based media (video, performance, sound, web-based practice and installation) the chance to air their work to their peers, artists and visionaries (that’s me).
The first exhibit just after entering the gallery was an untitled, mixed media work by Rebecca Key which I think was the empty wine bottles and drinks cartons left over from last weeks Hirst exhibition. Reminiscent of Hirst’s own ‘rubbish’ piece that was binned by a cleaner at the Eyestorm gallery a few years ago. Should have called it ‘After Hirst’.
There were two pieces by Zoe Langdell; a video called ‘Reading Room’ in which fellow students and friends were filmed reading extracts from books and papers. Small sections were at normal speed so I could catch a few words then it would spring into fast-forward mode then back to normal again. The second was a collection of mp3 recordings of the artist’s ‘Degree Diaries’. I put on the headphones and selected some at random.
Rhian Russell’s ‘Untitled’ is a rather cute piece. An old very basic cine projector with the film looped over a reel nailed to an overhead beam is showing a short film onto a very small area of the wall. Its only about 15 x 10 cms and appears to be the artist moving across frosted glass, I could just make out the hands and arms.
‘Easy Listening’ by Gordon Culshaw and Jamie Torode is anything but ‘easy’ listening. A large metal sheet bangs against a rail and the ‘clang’ is amplified through a huge speaker above my head. It keeps on banging because an electric fan is directed at it so its never still. There’s another sheet of metal on the floor to amplify peoples footsteps as they walk in and out and another couple of contraptions for making strange noises. Its a great bit of lo/hi tech interactive fun that looks like it was designed by Heath Robinson.
There’s a ‘Kylie Remix’ video from Medlo (medlo.net) which is just that – a remix of Kylie Minogue video(s) which now I can’t get out of my head!
Sean Hawkridge contributed a work of his own as he wanted to experiment with the latest technology. ‘Aeroplanes Landing’ is a short film taken that morning at Liverpool airport with his mobile phone, then loaded onto the mac laptop and projected onto a screen.
Unfortunately, the show was for one night only. So if you weren’t there, you’ve missed your chance. But, hopefully, the Thursday Show will be a regular event. I’m certainly looking forward to more and the artists can only benefit from the experience.
Support Liverpool’s largest and longest-standing studio group in their hour of need.
Your chance to bid on original artworks in a variety of media by over 30 of the best artists in the city.
Viewing from 6pm – Auction starts 8.30pm – Live Music into the night – Refreshments Available
All artwork sold is available to take home on the night. Cash or cheque.
Daily Post Story
On Saturday April 30th from 12.00 noon until 18.00 the Loop Gallery are presenting a live event entitled RAW at 12 Princes Dock.
Free & Open to the public.
Glenn Humphrey will produce a large abstract painting
Music is provided by Frakture, the local free improvised music project
Barbara Jones will be photographing the event
Jason Thompson will be in charge of the video and
Julie Swallow will provide the textual element.
Adrian Searle’s reviews in the Guardian are always a good read. Yesterday he reviewed Glasgow’s first International Art Fair and the following caught my attention…
‘Glasgow is the only city in Britain that has a strong enough community of resident artists to approach an international standing independent of London. Most other cities in the UK are places where artists come from, but which, if they are ambitious, they leave as soon as possible. This is not cosmopolitan snobbery, but a fact of life. One can be a novelist anywhere, but artists need a community of like-minded souls, a structure for showing and earning a living, and a good enough reason to stay. During the 1990s, Glasgow precariously achieved the right microclimate for such a situation to be possible. In part, this was the result of the liveliness of Glasgow School of Art, cheap rents and the existence of sympathetic and artist-run spaces, such as Transmission, where work could be shown. For reasons that remain opaque to me, Edinburgh is not nearly so interesting.’
It would be great if Liverpool could do the same. I can’t really see it though, not for a very long time anyway. The Biennials and 2008 help but its not enough, artists need more public support, preferably by buying their works.
CulturEuro Seminars: EU Funding Opportunities for the Cultural Sector
EUCLID, the official UK Cultural Contact Point, appointed by the European Commission and the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, are pleased to announce that we are once again running our popular series of CulturEuro seminars for the arts and cultural sector, providing information and a summary of existing and future opportunities to access funding from the European Union.
The CulturEuro seminars will be held in 19 major cities, including Liverpool on Wednesday 4th May (at the Blackburne House).
The seminar will be covering the full range of EU funding programmes, including the Culture 2000 programme, other trans-national funds, programmes for “third countries”, and the Structural Funds (the seminar will cover remaining opportunities from the current round as well as a brief outline of the proposed new Structural Funds programme from 2007).
The registration fee per person is £66 + VAT. The seminars will run from 1:30pm – 5:00pm. Delegates will receive a full information pack including notes on the presentations and extensive contact details.
For full details of the CulturEuro seminar series and to book online, please visit www.euclid.info/uk/seminars
CHRISTINA MACKIE WINS BECK’S FUTURES 2005
Mackie’s work is characterised by an interest in the connection of objects – specifically made and complete in themselves -and how their being and meaning can be transformed by relativity, by their placing. Her work might use any number of different materials, and is also driven by an interest in translating the abstract -emotion, thought, intangible sensibility- into a more concrete and visible form. Through layering different elements, she seeks to create a new dynamic, to suggest relationships between different objects that might evoke an ‘emotional landscape’
Link
‘Contemplating One’s Navel’, surely the phrase was invented for this guy. He is (or rather was) obsessed with the body. “I had to try out [try on] my body, test my body, find my body, use my body, day by day”. This was from the late 60s / early 70s and is a bit of its time really. So he filmed himself pulling all the hairs from around his navel till its completely bald. I don’t think that video is shown here but you can watch him burn the hairs from his chest with a candle or rub a live cockroach into the skin of his stomach. There’s also the infamous ‘Seedbed’ where he’s masturbating (all day for several days!) under the ramped floor of an art gallery.
All of Vito’s work starts with text so there’s masses of typed, printed or handwritten pieces on the walls as well as still photographs. The first things you see on the wall as you enter gallery 1 are some concrete poems.
All this bodily stuff is not really to my taste. I can see that in its day it was groundbreaking and challenging and influenced and inspired a lot of artists and performers so, if you have any interest in art history, you have to go and see it. But standing in a modern gallery watching this long black & white footage of an old wanker (literally and metaphorically) is really dull.
As you walk up the stairs to gallery 2 you see that Vito has moved onto more installation work using objects and sound rather than his body. I quite like the one of the long table which extends out of the window, thus becoming a sort of diving board.
From around 1980 he moves onto architecture. The Acconci studio was set up to create public art, furniture and mobile architecture. Now, this I like. Some of the studio’s very latest designs are on the walls outside gallery 2 and inside you can watch videos about some of the projects whilst ’sitting’ in cool-looking but uncomfortable Vito-designed seats. I’m not sure that many of these projects ever actually get built but they stretch the imagination and have a sense of humour.
Of course, I could not resist calling into the Media Lounge to create some music on the Macs using samples of Vito’s voice and adding instrument tracks using Garageband software. Then copied to CD, great fun.
The exhibition is subtitled Self/Sound/City and runs till June 12th 2005
Yannick Boussemart at Liverpool Academy of Arts.Yannick is a Frenchman living in Birkenhead. No wonder his paintings are so abstract! There’s also a mix of media, batik on silk, oil, acrylic on canvas or board and most are brightly coloured even using luminous pigment on some works. The frames of unstained softwood are interesting too. I find a whole room full a bit overpowering but individually they’re nice enough.
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