Liverpool Biennial shows the future of art is improvised
Liverpool has made huge economic strides since its Eighties low point, but many of the city’s greatest buildings are still tragically underused. This may not help morale among residents, but it provides a compelling setting for Britain’s biggest festival of contemporary art.
Contemporary art festivals thrive on unlikely venues, and the 2016 Liverpool Biennial unfolds across a succession of off-beat locations. Featuring specially commissioned works by 42 artists from 15 countries, this is the best possible opportunity to take the temperature of art today and find out what’s to come.
This edition has been conceived as a narrative, developing in “episodes” through the exhibitions and installations, each relating to an aspect of Liverpool’s past, present and future. Yet while each episode has a notional focus, they also cross-reference and recur in other events and venues. Sound confusing? Trust me, it makes even less sense when you’re there.
Tate Liverpool’s exhibition in the “Ancient Greece episode”, which mixes contemporary works with marble statues and ancient vases from Liverpool Museums’ collection, transports us to the past. However, it isn’t to the age of Plato and Aristotle, but to the queasy Eighties of legwarmers and Duran Duran invoked by the clashing installations in pinkpainted metal piping — the work of Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer — that frame the classical artefacts.
What this signifies isn’t explained, but the edgy mood of the early and mid-Eighties, when Liverpool saw widespread rioting and the Rise of the Militant Tendency, recurs in exhibits at the Biennial in a way that suits the uncertain mood of Brexit Britain.
The edgy mood of the early and mid-Eighties recurs in exhibits in a way that suits the uncertain mood of Brexit Britain.
For instance, Japanese artist Koki Tanaka has recreated a 1985 protest by Liverpool schoolchildren against the then government’s Youth Training Schemes, using a book of wonderfully gritty black and white images by the local photographer Dave Sinclair.
A sense of the calculatedly shambolic permeates the “Children’s episode” at Cain’s Brewery, a Victoriangothic behemoth of a building, where the film Dogsy Ma’ Bone by the British artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd is being screened in what looks like a makeshift indoor campsite.
Every surface of her installation is covered in animal-print plastics, as are the performers in her bewildering film. With the surrounding galleries filled with improvised sculptures by a trio of Dubai-based Iranian artists and apparently halffinished works in clay by Indian artist Sahej Rahal, it feels like a hastily thrown-together student exhibition — an effect that is entirely deliberate. On this showing the future of art will be messy and improvised, but in a highly knowing way.
Elsewhere in the Biennial there’s the sense that art is almost morbidly preoccupied with the recent past. In the once riot-torn Toxteth, a marble monolith by Italian artist Lara Favoretto stands in one of the remaining boarded-up streets, radiating a sense of surreal alienation. If the Biennial seeks to deliver a positive message about Liverpool, this stark work is a reminder that art will always deal in less comfortable, less easily definable truths.