The third Liverpool Biennial is all about ambition and potential, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.
This year's Liverpool Biennial is the third since its inception as a charitable trust in 1998. It seemed, at the time, that the idea of mounting an international festival of contemporary art in Liverpool was a hugely (even quixotically) ambitious gesture of confidence in the city's cultural potential, and in a way it is still exactly that: all about ambition and potential, with an eye, as well, on 2008, when Liverpool will be European City of Culture. But the biennial has really come on in leaps and bounds, so much so that it has already accumulated the organisational expertise to make a significant impact come 2008.
It owes its existence largely to the continuing commitment to the city of the Moores family. The John Moores exhibition of contemporary painting, which dates from 1957, is an integral strand of the biennial programme and an important fixture for the city's Walker Art Gallery. James Moores was a founding trustee of the foundation that launched and continues to develop the biennial.
Moores was convincing enough in his vision to persuade the then director of Tate Liverpool, Lewis Biggs, to take on the job of chief executive at a time when, in Biggs's own words, the city "was raw from years of neglect and still searching for a sense of direction". He points to the remarkable nature and pace of urban development since then. There have been enormous changes, including ones that would be familiar to Dubliners. Down by the huge docklands, for example, there are new residential complexes, and on the periphery there are vast new retail parks.
Yet one could reasonably say the city still lacks a heart, and has not quite found a way of integrating its history and the infrastructural legacy of its past with its present. It is still searching for an identity, and perhaps it hasn't quite shed its latter-day youth cultural reputation for harbouring interesting places concealed behind drab, run-down facades. In a way, this year's Biennial set out to address these very issues, by inviting curators and artists to make work relating to the city's geographical, historical and contemporary context.
Cultural initiatives can play a significant role in urban renewal. There are several substantial areas of activity and events under the Biennial umbrella. One of these is the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, selected from works submitted by graduate and postgraduate art school students.
This year it is located in one of the city's numerous disused industrial buildings, an erstwhile coach house, at the junction of two strikingly juxtaposed thoroughfares: Jamaica Street and Greenland Street. It's a brilliant venue.
As one might expect of student work, even MAs in their late twenties or older, the New Contemporaries show is chock-a-block with art world and pop cultural references. But the overall feeling is spirited and good. There is an admirable irreverence and resourcefulness to much of the work, which generally uses minimal means in ingenious ways.
Deflationary reworkings of pumped-up originals seem to be the favoured approach. David Rowland's Bill Viola is Rubbish is a lo-tech riposte to the renowned video maker's technological expertise and transcendental aims. Sarah Gilder's Baywatch has her, in a red bathing suit, being drenched by surface water flung up by passing traffic in a city street on a dark, wet day, complete with jaunty soundtrack. Oriana Fox recreates part of an episode of Sex and the City in a drab domestic setting. David Blandy gives impromptu, emotionally charged performances straight to camera, emulating dramatic and musical performers. Douglas White nods towards teen slasher flicks in his sculptural piece.
It's notable that New Contemporaries includes a fair proportion of painting (which is slightly unusual for such a show) and marks yet another move in the perpetually shifting fortunes of painting's art world currency. There is currently a vogue for a mode of painting that combines a kind of oblique, distanced, impoverished realism with humour and knowingness, and that is evident to varying degrees in the work of Thomas Hylander, Robert Nichol, Gary McDonald, James Connelly and Thomas Needham.
Besides those, there are some singular talents - including Karoly Keseru's extraordinary, obsessive grid-based work - plus plenty of photography, all recognisably related to established contemporary genres. With a nod to the location's prior function, Michael Sailstorfer imaginatively reinvents the shell of a bus to make a monumental sculpture.
It may not quite eclipse the other strands of the biennial, including the international strand, International 04, which probably absorbed most of the material resources and occupies the prime location, Tate Liverpool. That said, with its zippy energy and wit, Bloomberg New Contemporaries comes pretty close.
THE INTERNATIONAL 04, it should be said immediately, is worthy and features some great pieces, but there is also an earnestness about it that can be off-putting - a sense that art should be improving and instructive in a way that harkens back to a didactic preoccupation with issues and identity politics. Given the set-up, with curators and artists striving to address the specifics of the location, this is not surprising.
Yoko Ono's platitudinous contribution, My Mommy Was Beautiful, is but one of the lowlights. Still, there are highlights. Spanish-born Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's sculptural icebergs (based on mappings of the real thing), particularly the titanium-clad one in the Tate, are wonderfully imposing and enigmatic objects. Visually, the silvery titanium makes sense against the glitter of the Mersey in the background, and there is an echo of the Titanic.
Oswaldo Macia's Surrounded in Tears, a collaborative piece utilising a room full of suspended bell-like speakers, is a tremendous installation. Yuan Goang-Ming's digitally manipulated film of the city, from the vantage point of St John's Beacon, is amazing. He has removed traces of human presence, leaving an account of the urban environment as a dense network of abstract patterns.
Several artists picked up on Liverpool's Irish connections. Maria Eichhorn's exhibition is an inventory of a two-day trip to Belfast from Liverpool. Dorit Margreiter, with the Lumière Brothers' footage of Liverpool in mind, set about making a street in the city stand in for Dublin - in a particularly slapdash way, incidentally. But one of the best pieces by far in the International is by an Irish artist, Amanda Coogan, whose video, Beethoven, The Headbangers, at the Bluecoat Gallery, has an audience respond to the Ode to Joy as though it were heavy metal. It was done as a live performance and as a video, and it is utterly compelling.
Alexis Harding is not Irish, but he shows regularly at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin, and he won the main prize in the John Moores Exhibition, joining a distinguished roll-call of previous winners including Peter Doig, David Hockney, Bruce McLean and John Hoyland.
He makes grid-based compositions in thick masses of pigment that collapse under their own weight before settling into distorted configurations. The work of Irish artist Blaise Drummond was selected for inclusion. His The Happy Valley continues his exploration of utopian ideals and nature versus culture. Paul Winstanley, who shows at the Kerlin in Dublin, is also there.
It's a Catholic show, with much evidence of the trend mentioned above (Isabel Young, Miho Sato, Joe Packer, Paul Housley, Dale Holmes, Dougal McKenzie, Sophie Aston and - a lovely painting - Sarah Pickstone), but a great deal else besides.
SOME OF THE outstanding pieces include Catalan painter Marta Marce's beautifully measured, vibrant abstract; French-born Martine Dejean's spare latticework composition; Ian Davenport's circle painting; Edward Chell's rigorously worked process painting; Lee Maelzer's strange, hypnotic interior; and another realist interior by Andrew Grassie, with echoes of Vermeer.
Elsewhere in the Walker, there is a survey show of work by The Stuckists. The name comes from Tracy Emin saying that she thought Billy Childish was stuck in the past with his figurative expressionist paintings. Childish parted company with the group since, but they are still going strong. Alas, the exhibition does little more than confirm Emin's harsh judgment.
There are numerous other exhibitions and events incorporated in the biennial. Wherever you go there is background information and couches on which to sit while you read it. Enormous effort has gone into making it all user friendly.
In the international arena, it still faces an uphill battle, but the biennial is surely getting there.