Liverpool John Moores University
Art & Design Academy
Duckinfield Street
Liverpool
L3 5YD
Merseyside
18 September 2010
11:00 - 12:30
The conference is part of Touched, the International exhibition for Liverpool Biennial 2010, running from 18 September until 28 November.
www.biennial.com
From the organisers:
As the story of Doubting Thomas tells us, to touch is the mark of truth, the most intimate gesture and the greatest commitment. To touch or to be touched is the performance of truth, when incredulity is displaced and the world condenses into a moment of all enveloping realisation, changing everything. But let us not limit touch to mean touch physically, even that lowliest of senses, smell, can touch us deeply. To be touched arrives unexpectedly though every sense – including thought itself – locating our most intimate moments in space and time. How to live by these moments where strength and vulnerable.
Performing Truths - Moderated by Mark Waugh, Director of Afoundation and Co-director of the International Curators Forum (ICF)
Particpants: Tehching Hsieh (artist), Alfonso Lingis (philosopher and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus of Penn State University), Coco Fusco (artist, writer and Chair of the Fine Art Department at Parsons/The New School for Design), Tania Bruguera (artist)
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30- 15:00 : Between the Senses - Moderated by Peter Gorschlueter, Former Head of Exhibitions and Displays Tate Liverpool, now Deputy Director of the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.
Participants: Steven Connor (writer, critic, broadcaster and Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College, London), Tony Chakar (artist, architect and writer), Jamie Isenstein (artist), Danica Dakic (artist)
15.00-15.30 : Tea
15.30-17.00 : The Beauty of Commitment (working title) - Moderated by Lorenzo Fusi, Curator Liverpool Biennial
Participants: Freee (artist), Minerva Cuevas (artist), Alfredo Jaar (artist), Will Kwan (artist)
www.biennial.com/content/LiverpoolBiennial2008/LiverpoolBiennial2010/ProfessionalAccreditation.aspx
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At the Liverpool Biennial. Lorenzo Fusi's curation proving pointed, tight and so far political
twitter.com/olibasciano
Liverpool Biennial, which this year celebrates its 6th edition, is one of the UK's most prestigious visual arts events and an unmissable international appointment renowned for presenting works focused on hot, current, political issues. In August, a video shot as part of Touch and go by the Spanish artist, Cristina Lucas made the haedlines. It documents a group of now-retired factory workers throwing stones at the façade of what is now the ghost-like building of a former company's warehouse as to symbolize the decline of industrial production in the city symbol of the Industrial revolution.
Pinnacle of the Biennial is Touched, the International 10 exhibition organized by several curators, among which features only one Italian, Lorenzo Fusi who had the daunting, yet exciting, task of being responsible for the section exploring the most unusual spaces. One of the chosen venues is a former homeware store in Renshaw St famous for having one of the longest shop window in the UK which hosts Re:Thinking Trade based on the idea of looking at the concept of "trade" with new eyes; the paintings by Human Stain and a series of performances by Tania Bruguera (the last and conclusive chapter of the history of Cátedra de Arte de Conducta dedicated to Allan Kaprow's Happenings).
The number of installations, projects, presentations and events taking place is impressive. To get an idea, just think about the long list of themes the Artistic Director, Lewis Biggs, has chosen to include in the current Biennial: "The team of curators has explored the concept of matter, metaphor, duration, embodiment, family, fiction, disengagement, desire, attachment, creativity, uncontrollability and neurosis". One wonders whether the intent of Liverpool Biennial was to represent life in all its nuances, vicissitudes and contingency.
Encouraging the viewer to get fully involved - mind and body - in the works he/she sees, Bigg's Biennial comprises the works of 60 artists, 30 of which were specially created to be presented at the event, and will be scattered all over the city in the most unusual places, including abandoned shops and massive warehouses. Right inside one of these unusual venues is Raymond Pettibon's work entitled Sunday Night and Saturday Morning (2005). The American artist who is known for mixing Pop Art, cartoons, punk aesthetics and social critique all together has chosen a vacant, dilapidated building, sprayed with graffiti in a rather seedy area of Liverpool to host his animation work.
Liverpool Biennial, which this year celebrates its 6th edition, is one of the UK's most prestigious visual arts events and an unmissable international appointment renowned for presenting works focused on hot, current, political issues. In August, a video shot as part of Touch and go by the Spanish artist, Cristina Lucas made the haedlines. It documents a group of now-retired factory workers throwing stones at the façade of what is now the ghost-like building of a former company's warehouse as to symbolize the decline of industrial production in the city symbol of the Industrial revolution.
Pinnacle of the Biennial is Touched, the International 10 exhibition organized by several curators, among which features only one Italian, Lorenzo Fusi who had the daunting, yet exciting, task of being responsible for the section exploring the most unusual spaces. One of the chosen venues is a former homeware store in Renshaw St famous for having one of the longest shop window in the UK which hosts Re:Thinking Trade based on the idea of looking at the concept of "trade" with new eyes; the paintings by Human Stain and a series of performances by Tania Bruguera (the last and conclusive chapter of the history of Cátedra de Arte de Conducta dedicated to Allan Kaprow's Happenings).
The number of installations, projects, presentations and events taking place is impressive. To get an idea, just think about the long list of themes the Artistic Director, Lewis Biggs, has chosen to include in the current Biennial: "The team of curators has explored the concept of matter, metaphor, duration, embodiment, family, fiction, disengagement, desire, attachment, creativity, uncontrollability and neurosis". One wonders whether the intent of Liverpool Biennial was to represent life in all its nuances, vicissitudes and contingency.
Encouraging the viewer to get fully involved - mind and body - in the works he/she sees, Bigg's Biennial comprises the works of 60 artists, 30 of which were specially created to be presented at the event, and will be scattered all over the city in the most unusual places, including abandoned shops and massive warehouses. Right inside one of these unusual venues is Raymond Pettibon's work entitled Sunday Night and Saturday Morning (2005). The American artist who is known for mixing Pop Art, cartoons, punk aesthetics and social critique all together has chosen a vacant, dilapidated building, sprayed with graffiti in a rather seedy area of Liverpool to host his animation work.
www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/art-photo-design/2010/09/liverpool-biennial---touched
Liverpool Biennial Director Lewis Biggs on Why Conceptualism Is Out and Materiality Is In
In 2008, the city of Liverpool was named Europe's Capital of Culture. The Liverpool Biennial's chief executive and artistic director (and former director of Tate Liverpool from 1990-2000) Lewis Biggs can take a lot of credit for this achievement. The Tate Liverpool and Biennial broadened the expansion of arts programs in the northwestern city, which wasn't known for much more than being England's first major port city and the birthplace of the Beatles. This year, Biggs and his curatorial team, comprised of Lorenzo Fusi (Liverpool Biennial curator), Peter Gorschlüter (of Tate Liverpool), Patrick Henry (of Open Eye Gallery), Sara-Jayne Parsons (of the Bluecoat), Mike Stubbs (of FACT - Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), and Mark Waugh (of A Foundation Liverpool), are putting together one of their most controversial and exciting editions since the biennial's inception in 1998, titled "Touched." I sat down with Biggs to talk about the recently opened biennial exhibition.
LB: We start out discussing the theme and then I ask each curator to come up with one artist who is quintessential to their viewpoint about what the theme is; then we discuss that and out of that we then ask the curators to articulate the field that interests them and then to populate that field with other artists work, building on the relationship with the first artist. That means that there are coherently different points of view within the exhibition because each curator is very much in control of not only their intellectual territory but also their physical territory. For example the curator from the Tate is responsible for the artists who work with the Tate, and the curator from the Bluecoat is responsible for the artists who work with the Bluecoat, et cetera. You will notice going from one bit of the exhibition to another the interests of the gallery and the curator and the possibilities of the gallery. Because there's a gallery like FACT that's digitally- or moving image-orientated so naturally they tend to go with artists who [work in that medium].
So you'll see the difference within the show but there's always a hotly debated rationale on why each artist should come into the show. And it's not done by consensus because I think consensus is a bad way to do things. I have override. I have an editorial position so if I dislike an artist's work, I can ask a curator to remove the artist.
LB: We'll have to see but I wouldn't be surprised.
I do think painting is back on the agenda in a big way. I also think that materiality is back on the agenda in a big way, including notions of craft and connoisseurship, because there are so many people who have a training in art history; and if you've spent time looking at old art, you become attuned to what art does through materiality and so you begin to look to that in contemporary art as well. And anyway, I do think that matching one's experience with what you're looking at and questioning what you're looking inevitably involves materiality, just like it involves the sense of place.
We use this word "emplacement" a lot in this show because ever since Feminism in the 70s there has been a focus on the body as a site, a political site and a site of subjectivity and I think that yes, our bodies are involved, but it also happens to be where we are at this place at this time at any given moment that affects our subjectivity. That awareness of context all the time is much more present to people now and much more present to people through studying the history of art and materiality of art. So 20 years ago when artists put statements on the wall and expected that statement to mean the same thing, whether it was in Sao Paolo or... that brand of universality conceptualism is pretty dead in the water.
www.huffingtonpost.com/marina-cashdan/liverpool-biennial-direct_b_718230.html
Now in its sixth incarnation, the cultural and economic impact of the Biennial on Liverpool is undeniable - 975,000 visitors came in 2008. Its visibility within the city is assisted this year by a striking ‘brand identity’ featuring red and black wolves, designed for the first time by an artist, Carlos Amorales. The wolves echo an eternal, universal city yet describe something feral and disruptive of everyday experience.
www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=495
Since its start in 1998, the Liverpool Biennial has grown to be the largest and one of the most visited biennials in the world. Given that today there are about 250 biennials and triennials for contemporary art, basically opening one every other day, that is no mean achievement. This year’s sixth edition is the most ambitious with more than 60 national and international artists and more than 45 commissions for new work.
To stay in that league requires a combination of clever marketing and good programming, and with this year’s central theme ‘Touched’ the marketing aspect was covered since it has a good ring to it––and it, thus, will no doubt stand out among the many biennials and triennials going on in the world. Content-wise it is quite a timely theme, too, as it responds to the recent bank crisis and the recession that followed upon it, urging for a more in-depth approach by demonstrating an emotional involvement that comes in a multitude of forms: social-political, poetic, intellectual, humoristic, but also quite literally ‘touching’.
leonardo.info/reviews/oct2010/doove_liverpool.php
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