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EXHIBITIONS

Liverpool Biennial Liverpool

by ISABELLA MAIDMENT

A PROFESSIONAL BOUNCER in a black suit and tie stands in the centre of a city street 78. Installation guarding a freestanding stainless-steel door view, the engraved with the sign ‘VIP’. Slightly ajar, this Cunard Build- life-size sculptural doorway leads nowhere; ing, Liverpool, showing Liver- on approaching the entrance the visitor is met pool to let, by with the curt announcement: ‘Your name’s Superflex. 2012. not on the list’. Part sculpture, part delegated Mixed media, performance, the work is an installation by the dimensions Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset variable. commissioned as part of the seventh edition of (Commissioned 1 by Liverpool the Liverpool Biennial (to 25th November), Biennial). the largest international festival of contem - porary art in Britain. Staged to appear interac- video and photography visually punctuated beads follow the contours of a map the artist tive yet ultimately denying the viewer’s direct by sculptural pieces by Mona Hatoum and found delineating the territories that were participation, But I’m on the guest list too (2012) Pamela Rosenkranz. The latter’s contribution intended to be returned to Palestinian control is both a humorous nod to Liverpool’s infa- is Bow human (2012), a series of seven floor- after the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement with mous club culture and a critical reflection on based, mixed-media sculptures: semi-abstract, Israel. Hatoum’s response to this problematic restricted access made in response to the recognisably human forms shrouded in metal- model of peace rendered in a local, domestic theme of this year’s biennial: hospitality. lic gold and silver blankets. Their identities material encapsulates the transience of political Under the artistic direction of Sally Tallant, hidden, kneeling perhaps in shock or in borders and the promise of their dissolution. this year’s ten-week festival sets out to explore prayer, they cluster on the outer edges of the The individual works on view at the Cunard hospitality through the commissioning of hall alluding to the seeking of refuge and Building form just one component of the permanent and temporary works of art, and asylum. Hatoum’s Present (1996; Fig.80) exhibition’s discursive framework that includes community-based projects. Central to the occupies a nearby office space. Born in Beirut multiple sites, talks and an anthology of newly theoretical framework of the biennial is The in 1952, Hatoum settled in in the commissioned writing. Unexpected Guest, an exhibition of works by mid-1970s after war broke out in Lebanon. Distinct from The Unexpected Guest, yet over sixty artists presented across the city. Working across media, she travels extensively, significant within the biennial’s curatorial Conceived as a means to develop a deeper creating works in direct response to specific agenda, is a new public commission by the Los knowledge of hospitality through interpre - geopolitical contexts. Present tense was orig - Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken. Situated tations of the theme that encompass colonial inally created in Jerusalem on the occasion of on Liverpool’s Albert Dock, The source (2012; history, spatial politics and the ethics of the artist’s first visit to the city in 1966. The Fig.79) is a multi-part video installation the host–guest relationship, the exhibition is piece comprises 2,400 bars of local Palestinian housed in a temporary pavilion designed by articulated most clearly and effectively in soap assembled together as a single grid the artist together with the British architect its temporary occupation of the Cunard measuring 299 by 241 cm. Placed directly on David Adjaye. The circular pavilion presents Building, one of Liverpool’s historic ‘Three the floor, the work recalls the minimalist six screens of videos projected inside by day Graces’. Built in 1917, this waterfront site, the sculpture of Carl Andre, yet closer inspection and outwards by night. Their content is a former headquarters of the world-famous reveals tiny red glass beads pressed into the series of filmed conversations between Aitken steamship company, functioned until the waxy ivory-coloured surface of the soap. The and eighteen so-called ‘established creative 1960s as a passenger terminal for the trans - atlantic line. Serving as an architectural meta - phor for the transitory nature of hospitality, for migration and the movement of people, the Cunard Building forms the heart of The Unexpected Guest’s ambitious curatorial endeav- our, with the exhibition occupying the two main halls and antechambers of the building’s ground floor. On arrival into the former departure hall, the viewer encounters rows of estate agent signage, hand-painted replicas of existing ‘To Let’ signs sourced from the abundant empty offices and commercial spaces in Liverpool’s financial district, and suspended from the ceiling like bunting with their original location detailed on the reverse. Staged as a single installation by the Copenhagen-based artists’ collective Superflex in response to the city’s current socio-economic climate, these signs lend a melancholy feel to the sparsely 79. Sky arts ignition: Doug Aitken – The source, by Doug Aitkin. 2012. Six-screen video projection, each 4 mins. occupied hall (Fig.78). (Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York; Gallerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; , London; and The majority of the works exhibited here Regen Projects, Los Angeles). Pavilion designed by David Adjaye and Doug Aitken. (Exh. , Albert are lens-based in medium, with installations of Dock, Liverpool).

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protruding from a makeshift bed, becomes Sarah Lucas sculptural in non-biographical terms in as Leeds much it ‘lowers’ objects to the level of an activity that is already low – in this case by BRANDON TAYLOR having sex on a dirty mattress on the floor. Yet the power of analogy is already clearly in play; or, if not analogy, then metaphor and DURING THE 1990S, the British artists known metonymy, as in the placement of concrete- as the YBAs were praised or vilified in moulded army boots astride an upright surprisingly narrow terms. Beginning with six-foot neon pole in The unknown soldier at the , (2003), in which war and sex are made to London, from 1992, followed by Brilliant! in inhabit the same semantic space. And that Minneapolis in 1995, and then at Sensation at casual play with language is surely what Lucas the in 1997 before its the sculptor does best. In the series she calls transfer to New York in 1999, the loudest NUDS (2009–10), she takes the stuffed-tights claim made by critics was for a nihilistic sensi- method used in her earlier Bunny sculptures bility revolving around casual sex, tabloid and raises it to a new level of sophisticated headlines, cheap alcohol and take-away food. suggestiveness. Imagine Barbara Hepworth’s For a while, the critical telegraph wires polished wooden and marble forms folded buzzed excitedly with talk about the place of in upon themselves, their holes filled with ‘the popular’ in high culture. One version flesh-coloured limbs, forearms and goodness of the commentary suggested that the YBAs knows what other body-parts. Proper felt themselves to be part of the common upstanding modernism is now translated into culture because their risks and pleasures were writhing, violent couplings; the hint of an essentially the same; another, that no art could elbow here, an anus there, legs and arms 80. Present tense, by Mona Hatoum. 1996. Soap and compete with the common culture since wrapped around each other in what remains, glass beads, 4.5 by 299 by 241 cm. (Courtesy of the only the latter promised real experiences of for all the scatology, an art-historically very artist; exh. Liverpool Biennial). abandonment and delight.1 It became con- knowing and respectful register (Fig.81). I ventional to describe YBA work in terms have always thought that Lucas’s earlier Two individuals’ including the artists Thomas that belonged to the artist rather than to the fried eggs and a kebab (1992) should be placed Demand and the late Mike Kelley, the archi- art – tawdry confessions (), riffs alongside a Henry Moore reclining figure, tect Jacques Herzog, and the actress Tilda on death and survival (), the their body-postures being almost exactly the Swinton. Avoiding distinctions between spe- culture of the night club, the street or the same; while Beyond the pleasure principle (2000) cialist fields, the films are structured around pub; or in Sarah Lucas’s case, the laddish was always interesting less for its Freudian two key questions: where does the creative world of page-three girls, masturbation and references than for its casual cleverness with a idea start, and how is it realised? The resulting booze. In her case, the comment was often bucket, light bulbs, and neon tube penetrat- dialogues are intensely edited, the simple act about class. ‘Her appropriation of a young, ing a dark red futon. Slackness can be seen as of talking becoming heavily stylised as con- working-class male’s interest in violence, versations repeatedly return to similar themes. sex and alcohol was unapologetic’, Martin Each video has the same running time of four Maloney wrote in the catalogue to Sensation. minutes. At any given moment the viewer ‘By adopting it she exposed it’.2 encounters six conversations playing simulta- The recent exhibition at the Henry Moore neously. This effects a frustrating spectatorial Institute, Leeds (closed 21st Oct ober), by situation in which the multiple dialogues contrast, entitled Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things, begin to morph into one, into a cacophony of went at least some of the way towards show- noise in which the participants’ diverse takes ing Lucas to be a sculptor, as much as, if not on the complexities of creativity become more than, the sensationalist she was once one and the same. The limitations of this claimed to be.3 A sculptor, that is, concerned installation point to a problem at the core of with sculptural procedures and traditions, this year’s biennial. processes of making and assembling, the lan- The 7th Liverpool Biennial successfully guages of material and form. In such a case, examines the notion of hospitality from a one might expect to find a hermeneutical multitude of trans-national perspectives and method in which Lucas’s low-culture refer- simultaneously engages on a local level with ences appear as something else entirely: a the city’s history and contemporary status. Yet decoy, even; at most, a pretext for a fairly its success ultimately relies upon reciprocity, consistent style of play with sculptural upon dialogue with the inhabitants of the city technique, and without the addition of and its itinerant visitors. The biennial, like biography. The Leeds show confirmed that Aitken’s pavilion, is intended as a platform production values are central to the things for conversation, as a means to promote Lucas likes to make. Expediency, slackness productive discussion beyond the actual and humour – approximately – in the selecting works exhibited. But at times it feels as if and arrangement of fairly ordinary things is a the biennial loses sight of the public as an posture in which happenstance is also often integral part of its composition. made to provide the key. The show does not attempt to apply the rubric to all of Lucas’s works. The Fag 1 Catalogue: The Unexpected Guest: Art, Writing sculptures and the photographic productions, and Thinking on Hospitality. Edited by Sally Tallant 81. NUD 26, by Sarah Lucas. 2009. Tights, fluff, wire, and Paul Domela. 320 pp. incl. 243 col. + 65 b. & w. for instance, are both excluded. Certain early breeze-blocks and MDF plinth, 100 by 43 by 43 cm. ills. (Art Books, London, 2012), £18.95. ISBN pieces including Au naturel (1994; Fig.83), (Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London; exh. Henry 978–1–908970–03–9. with its sexualised fruit and vegetables Moore Institute, Leeds).

808 november 2012 • cliv • the burlington magazine