A packed visit, a visual feast

On Saturday 29 September twelve visual art students and two staff from the OCA visited four venues at the Liverpool Biennial (Separately a bunch of photography students from OCA accompanied by tutors also took a different route around the Biennial).
Gerald Deslandes, study visit leader, reports back from this busy day….
At Tate Liverpool and the Walker, we worked in pairs to choose and present works to the group. At Tate Liverpool these included stereotypes of national identity by Martin Parr and Mark Wallinger’s and Gilbert & George’s cynical portrayals of authority and class in the UK. Some of the most lively debate was about whether Keith Arnatt’s ironic murky photographs of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty represented gritty realism or a kind of wistful English romanticism. We were to pick up on similar themes in Sarah Pickstone’s self-consciously eccentric portrayal of Stevie Smith’s poem at the Walker.

The highlight of our visit to the Walker was the fact that we bumped into the Chair of the Selection Panel of the exhibition, which is the largest open award-giving exhibition of paintings in Europe. Amanda spent twenty minutes talking to the group about the work, which prompted an interesting discussion about what constituted a painting in a show in which many of the artists were deliberately working in idioms that included three-dimensional constructions, photography and images that had been borrowed ready-made from other artists.

At FACT we saw the work of Akram Zaatari, one of the founders of The Arab Image Foundation, which collects, preserves and studies photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora taken over the last hundred years. His video focused on an interview with a veteran studio portrait photographer in Cairo. You can see some pictures at the website www.fai.org.lb. We also saw the work of Anja Kirschner and David Panos whose flickering video of male nudes concerned the creation of the first currency in ancient Greece, which the artists suggested introduced cerebral, formal concepts to a traditional and more sensuous society.

The group explored an even more overt portrayal of male sexuality in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s night-time photographs of casual sexual encounters in parks that were shown at the Open Eye. The exhibition was twinned in an interesting way with photograms by Mark Morrisroe created in his hospital bathroom at a time when the artist was dying of an AIDS-related illness.
We also visited Hirsch’s Tardis-like public sculpture, The Lift, near the Bluecoat and four of the group later visited the gallery to see John Akomfrah’s powerful three-screen video installation about the work of the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall. The writer’s political activism was evoked by newsreel footage from the fifties to the eighties and readings of works by Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Mervyn Peake.

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