OPENING

OF

OPENINGS

To coincide with the opening of the Exhibition Research Centre at Liverpool John Moores University, Jacques Charlier launched Photographs of Openings in the Art and Design Academy exhibition space. The photographs chart the development of the art scene in Germany, Holland and Belgium between 1974 and 1975 and are being exhibited for the first time in this country until 1st March.

Although the photographs could be interpreted purely as a documentation of events, Charlier attended each opening with a strong intention towards his conceptual work. He allowed friends and colleagues to take photographs under his strict instruction in order to capture fleeting moments of interaction, creating a method that had not been used before in art.

There are many famous faces in the photographs including Gerhard Richter, Daniel Buren, and André Cadere, who can be seen in several images with his Barres de Bois Rond.

At the opening of the exhibition at the Art Academy, Charlier was keen to quiz the attendees about their knowledge of the people in each photograph, some of whom were present on the night. This reinforced the potentially endless cycle of observation and interaction between the people in the images and those at the opening. This process represented the overtaking of art by the event that surrounded it, to the point of almost rendering the art itself obsolete.

Charlier describes this as ‘social theatre’. In observing these photographs in an exhibition, we are allowing ourselves to be seen in the same way the people in the photographs are ‘there to be seen’. The moments captured in Charlier’s photographs are very much about the social context of art; they frame a world in which art had radically different values to those it holds today

Looking at these images now is impossible without a sense of nostalgia. At the time Charlier was at the cutting edge of art and his Photographs of Openings represent a high point in the history of conceptual art. However, the photographs function on multiple levels as we now see them as harking back to a better time, in contrast to the art world today. Charlier himself stressed that art changed after 1975 – a progressive and experimental community turned into one whose main intention was to make money. Since the 1970s, when these photographs were taken, Charlier has resisted being pigeonholed – it is impossible to look at his entire body of work and apply a single definition to it. He claims to be a ‘new artist every year’.

In Charlier’s photographs the viewer becomes equally if not more important than artwork itself; they question whether the significance of art lies in the creation or in the reaction that it triggers. Charlier exposes the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer to be something that turns away from art and into a system that gives significance based on stature as opposed to skill. Art, for its part, is then free to become something that is given a higher meaning, transcending all preconceptions in what Charlier defines as ‘The New Religion’.

Photographs of OpeningsExhibition Research Centre

30 January–1 March 2013

Image: courtesy Jacques Charlier

Alexandra Martin and Billie KirbyCurrently studying History of Art

at Liverpool John Moores University. They are regular contributors to

on- and off-line arts publications.

GLAMTASTIC!

Glam! The Performance of Style has arrived at Tate Liverpool and is set to be the exhibition of the season combining pop culture and art. This is the first exhibition to focus on the Glam period, exploring the cultural shift in Britain between 1971 and 1975, through painting, sculpture, installation art, film, photography and performance. The result of a combination of flamboyant style mixed in with high and low cultures – fashion, art and music – Glam is glittery and transcends boundaries through the reinvention gender and identity.

The so-called ‘Glamscapes’ in the exhibition display ephemera of the period and demonstrate that Glam was more than just a style: it was a period of creativity and new ideas. The exhibition features over 100 works by artists such as Peter Hujar, Cindy Sherman, Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol and David Bowie. This combination of iconic names ensures that the exhibition is as extravagant as the era it explores.

The artworks selected by the exhibition’s curator Darren Pih illustrate key themes of the period, namely glamour, camp, exaggerated identity, androgyny, eroticism and dandyism. One of the works in Glam! – Roxette by John McManus – is a particularly vivid filmic essay made by and about art students from Manchester in the 1970s. Roxette shows teenagers in their finery, glittered up and posing against the dark post-industrial Britain. The film explores the tensions that Glam emerged from, in particular the hierarchy of low and high culture of the art school of the 1960s. Glam! further explores this tendency through its inclusion of artist Richard Hamilton and Roxy Music (arguably the ultimate art-school group) whose singer, Bryan Ferry, studied under Hamilton in 1960s.

Glam introduced radical art ideals, practices that popularised the mainstream and propelled it back to the art world. As a post-hippie pop cultural phenomenon, it remains unrepresented, often over-shadowed by its successor Punk. What Tate Liverpool achieves in this exhibition is a colourful depiction of the period embracing the full spectrum of arts and music. It is critical, engaging and most importantly enjoyable. Whether you remember the 1970s or not, put on your glad rags and ‘glam up’ for a highlight of the Liverpool’s arts calendar.

Emma E. Ashman Liverpool-based researcher

and lectures in History of Art.

Glam! The Performance of StyleTate Liverpool: Exhibition

Until 12 May 2013

SEVEND A Y S

I N

Upon hearing that an exhibition based on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was coming to the temporary space at the Walker Art Gallery, I was enthused, particularly since political art has always been high on my list of preferred exhibition subjects. But I was quickly deflated when I visited ‘In Seven Days’, an exhibition of seven silkscreens on paper by Nicola Green, the result of her time spent on the campaign trail with the Obama election team.

A Guardian article was partly to blame, building up my expectations with quotes of the artist such as this one, in response to Obama’s request to see her sketches in progress: ‘No! You wouldn’t show me your half-finished speech’. The exhibition includes only two portraits of the presidential candidate; the remaining five are pop art/neo-pop-influenced abstractions, with almost no visual hint as to their political context. The Walker’s website does little to enlighten the perplexed visitor, describing the works simply as ‘seven powerful images’.

Another reason for my disappointment was the various cabinets displayed around the exhibition space containing small pieces of kitsch and mementos from the Obama presidential campaign – newspaper cuttings, articles, photos, campaign badges and sketches. These items would be fascinating if they were relics or artefacts, but in the absence of direct impressions of the artist’s proximity to Obama, they, and the exhibition as a whole, exude a sense of mild despair that these publications and buttons, housed neatly in glass, coffin-like containers, cannot offset.Regardless of the danger of romanticising a man who has not yet served two terms, the silkscreens and objects fail to convey Green’s intense interest in Obama. Collecting and acquiring all the campaign ephemera on display was certainly no small task, but they do not manage to save the seven images.

Is this exhibition – amply covered in the press – subject to a similar media hype as that lavished on Obama? Contrary to the many voters energised by Obama’s rhetorics and media-savvy appearances, I spent my time in the exhibition filled with a sense of ennui and mild somnolence. Time is what these works may need most. Perhaps when exhibited again in fifty years, the memory of Obama’s election will shroud them in a different, more powerful aura. In the meantime, I suggest you see them for yourself, whether you are a committed Obama fan or not.

‘In Seven Days…’Walker Art Centre, Liverpool

Until 14 April 2013

James Craig currently an MRes student at

Liverpool John Moores University.

DIGITAL SOCIAL CONDENSER

This project is based on Soviet constructivist theory. The Social Condenser is a spatial idea practiced in architecture. In the opening speech for the first OSA* Group conference in 1928, architect Moisei Ginzburg claimed that ‘the principal objective of constructivism...is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age’. Central to the idea of the social condenser is the premise that architecture has the ability to influential social behaviour. The intension of the social condenser was to influence the design of public spaces, with a goal of breaking perceived social hierarchies in an effort to create socially equitable urban spaces.Approaches to creating the architectural form of a social condenser include the intentional overlapping and intersection of programmes within a space through circulation. In this example, shared circulation nodes (or hubs) create collision zones of varied constituencies. The premise is that these areas of collision create the environment where there is potential for otherwise disperse social communities to interact.In the OMA/Rem Koolhaas book Content a social condenser is described as ‘programmatic layering upon vacant terrain to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented events’.* Organization of Contemporary Architects.

Site: Adjacent to St Anthony’s of Egypt, Scotland Road, Liverpool. A group site model is to be made at the start of the project.Events: The Social Condenser should overlap and morph with a Medical Practice (we will have a seminar with Everton GP Dr Simon Abrams to discuss the project), Dental Practice, Digital Info-Library (we will have e-mail correspondence with GP Dr Malcolm Rigler who is investigating the future role of Digital technology in General Practice), Children’s Creative Activities Space, Fresh Healthy Food Market (fruit/vegetables/fish/meat), Therapeutic & Artistic and creative writing activities with spaces for filmmaking (we will have a seminar with The Sound Agents, Moira Kenny and John Campbell, who are community based Film Artists) and a Public Transport Bus Stop Exchange.Enjoy de-constructing and reconstructing Scottie Road!

Robert MacDonald An architect and a reader in architecture

at Liverpool John Moores University. He is currently developing research about drawing

and urbanism.

SHIFTING SANDS

Photography

by Stephen Clarke

Situated within the oldest theatre in Wales – Theatr Colwyn in Colwyn Bay – is, paradoxically, one of the newest galleries: Oriel Colwyn. The venue will be showing photographic work and recently exhibited ‘Shifting Sands: Photography by Stephen Clarke.’

Clarke’s subject matter is the nearby seaside resort of Rhyl, the once thriving tourist destination of Victorian holidaymakers. Over several decades, and with different media, Clarke has documented the town’s shifting fortunes and ephemeral landmarks. This exhibition integrates his various projects so that viewers experience an interpretation of the resort that is complex and considered, at odds with the conventional view of Rhyl as second-class. In the words of John Urry, author of The Tourist Gaze, such ‘resorts were believed to be extraordinary… but in recent years a number of transformations have changed all this… the relative attraction of the sea itself has also declined.’ By contrast, Clarke depicts the town with compassion, respect and directs the viewer seductively to recognise and then embrace the significance that the destination has for its residents and tourists.

Clarke created the larger and colourful works in the exhibition using vintage postcards and personal photographs from his family archive – photomontages that abound with exuberance, nuance and poignancy. Beneath these, and acting as quiet counterpoints, are his smaller black-and-white photographs. Across one corner of the room, a screen relays snatches of conversation from the artist’s family cine reels; these provide additional texture to the experience of viewing the artwork, and increase the sense that the viewer is required to penetrate multiple layers of information and meaning for the full significance to become clear.

Indeed, like the shifting sands of Rhyl in the exhibition’s title, meanings gradually materialise and change with each viewing. For example, it becomes clear that the order of the large photomontages is specific and can lead the viewer on a nostalgic journey, as an object within one image – say, the pink elephant of a Rhyl amusement park ride – is repeated somewhere within the one that follows.

Whilst seeking the clues that form a narrative, one becomes aware of the unconventional beauty of the scenes. One photomontage depicts a street lined with 1960s cars of colours so vivid that they seem to contemporary eyes to be airbrushed. In the same image, a 1960s concrete building, which would conventionally be perceived as ugly, surprisingly coheres with its environment as the colour of its beige vinyl window panels is repeated in the now funky VW Transporter van nearby.

Underneath each photomontage, the black-and-white photographs perform similar tasks but use different, more restrained methods: in one, a kitsch funfair bounding tiger placard is juxtaposed with the prim ‘No Dog Walking’ sign. Bittersweet emotions thus result from the wave of nostalgia provoked by the collated imagery, encouraging the viewer to observe and appreciate the environment of much-maligned Rhyl. Clarke beguiles us with the quirky and forgotten scenes so that we leave the exhibition longing for what we previously denigrated.

Shifting SandsOriel Colwyn

Colwyn BayDecember 22nd 2012–28th February 2013

Emma Roberts Programme Leader of BA (Hons) History of Art at Liverpool

John Moores University. Her research interests include public sculpture, Cunard and Disney.

P E T E R

FRASER:

An Act of

Kindness

Our lives are made up of a multitude of small moments that go largely unnoticed yet are the shape of our experience. As a student in the mid 1980s I had a tutorial with Peter Fraser. As a visiting lecturer he was there to talk to me about art and photography. What I remember of this moment in the past is not what was said but instead the consideration Fraser gave to my work. This act of kindness stayed with me.

How can we talk about art and photography? Peter Fraser’s own education in photography was at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1970s. The photography course at Manchester had been designed to train commercial photographers in their craft, concentrating upon how to make a photograph but not on the reasons why a photographer should make a picture. A group of young photographers on this course, including Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows and Brian Griffin, would attempt to fill this gap in their education. Extending the possibilities of straight documentary photography they took their lead from American examples Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus, as well as British photographers Bill Brandt and Tony Ray-Jones.

At the same moment a different practice for British photography was being shaped from a mixture of Conceptual Art, and writings by Roland Barthes on semiotics. A staged photography promoted at the Polytechnic of Central London by the photo-artist and lecturer Victor Burgin advocated a theory-based approach to photography. By the end of the 1970s this would result in a split between the traditional photographers and the radical art photographers. An artist that nimbly crossed this divide was Keith Arnatt. Arnatt, who became a friend and colleague of Fraser’s in the early 1990s, made the transition from Conceptual artist in the late 1960s to artist as photographer in the 1980s.

Fraser and Arnatt both shaped a different path for photographic practice. Although Fraser graduated in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that his practice emerges. Between completing the course at Manchester and his return to that city in 1981 Fraser had spent time looking and thinking. He had already decided upon a basic principle: ‘I knew at the end of the first year that I wanted to work from a direct experience of the world and did not want to set things up. This seemed to me to be by far the most profound challenge – to try to say something interesting about the experience of the everyday that

we all have, or feel that we all have, regardless of the specifics’. At first this appears to be a principle of traditional documentary photography, but the last part of the second sentence uncouples the story from the fact.

A new generation of American photographers began to influence British practice in the early 1980s. The New Topographics photography by Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams encouraged the black and white work of Keith Arnatt whilst Fraser looked initially at the colour photographs of Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz. Fraser’s photographs of Manchester at this time describe the place with the cool eye of the American landscape photographers. Still grounded in the specifics, however, his project ‘Twelve Day Journey’ (1983) takes this influence in a new direction. The photographic journey that began at St Just in Cornwall, from which Fraser headed off in a roughly north easterly direction, is less about place and more about the moment.

As the documentarists and theorists battled in the photography fields of Britain, a less definable influence had come into the fray that would have a significant impact on a number of key figures, notably Martin Parr, Paul Graham and Peter Fraser. Graham and Fraser identify key books by William Eggleston that shaped their practice, and consequently shaped British photography. In the summer of 1984 Fraser worked with Eggleston in the American’s own environment of Tennessee. The two months that Fraser spent with Eggleston seem to have confirmed the path that Fraser would follow. Fraser’s work would offer British photography an alternative to describing and explaining – that of observing and thinking.

In 1988 Fraser’s landmark book ‘Two Blue Buckets’ was published, bringing together photographs from a number of projects including ‘Twelve Day Journey’. These photographs are neither conceptual nor documentary. They depict ordinary things in an un-dramatic way. A red suitcase lies on a railway carriage luggage rack and a blue chocolate tin sits on a stone wall. What we are given in this act of kindness is a moment of contemplation. This is slow art that requires the viewer to look but not speak. It contrasts with the bombast of expressionist painting of the same period that shouted at the viewer.

In the 1990s Fraser taught alongside Arnatt at Newport, South

Wales. By 1986 Arnatt, too, had moved to colour photography. It is revealing to compare the work of the two artists at this point. Arnatt had started to photograph objects in his studio that he had found in rubbish dumps. These fouled objects find their alternative in the immaculate objects of technology photographed by Fraser for his project ‘Deep Blue’ (1997). Running in parallel to this Fraser was also photographing lowly stuff for his project ‘Material’ (2002). How do these works reflect our times? Perhaps they have something to do with our meditations on the clinical hyperreal and the defiant abject.

A thoughtful artist, Fraser responds to change. Finding his own path early on, he neither theorised his practice nor stayed with tradition. At the forefront of new colour photography in the 1980s, Fraser now works with digital photography. Perhaps the moment of ‘analogue’ photography has past. The ‘how’ that he learnt as a student at Manchester is now outdated and it is the ‘why’ that is essential. ‘Why’ is not communicated to students through what is said but through acts of kindness.

The exhibition Peter Fraser is showing at TATE St Ives until 6th May 2013. Peter Fraser is represented by Brancolini Grimaldi, London, who have kindly permitted the use of

Fraser’s untitled image from ‘Two Blue Buckets’ (1988).

Stephen Clarke An artist, writer and lecturer based in the North West of England. He studied at Newport

Art College, Goldsmiths College, London, and Winchester School of Art.

Ideas to Change British ArchitectureVENICE TAKEAWAY

For anyone who has an interest in art, exhibitions, Venice or all the three will most likely have heard of the Venice Biennale. Since the Biennale’s foundation in 1895, the event has grown into one of most prestigious cultural institutions in the world for promoting new artistic trends through exhibitions and events. The exhibitions organised by the Biennale and the participating countries are traditionally held in the Giardini de Castello, but from the 1980’s exhibitions have also been held at the city’s former military warehouses, the Arsenale. And in 1980, the Architecture Biennale was founded, held in alternative years to the Art Biennale.

Since 1938 the British Council has been responsible for the British Pavilion in the Giardini, and since 1991, the pavilion has also played host to the British entry in the Architecture Biennale. For the thirteenth edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale last year, the British council commissioned ten architectural teams to travel across the world to research current issues related to architecture that could be brought back to the UK and initiate debate to the development of British architecture. The curators Vanessa Norwood and Vicky Richardson presented the teams’ research in an exhibition entitled ‘Venice Takeaway: Ideas to Change British Architecture’. Common Ground was the overall theme of the Biennale set by the Director David Chipperfield and the exhibition responded to this theme by emphasising research as a significant element of contemporary British architectural practice.

Instead of displaying architecture only through models, drawings and photographs, ‘Venice Takeaway’ documented the research collected by the architectural teams in a ‘Research Emporium’. The latter was a crucial part of the exhibition: in addition to being the first visual element of the show, it presented photographs, drawings, films, sketchbooks and reference

books of the research teams’ expeditions. It also gave visitors the chance to engage directly with the exhibition by allowing them to browse through reference books, videos and wall-mounted documentation. Throughout the gallery spaces of the pavilion, the teams’ research was further captured through video, interactive ‘photograph booths’, models, drawings and sculpture.

Two architectural research teams – Aberrant Architecture and drMM – produced particularly interesting research. Aberrant Architecture travelled to Rio de Janeiro to study CIEPs (Centros Integrados de Educação Pública), prefabricated modular primary schools designed by the Brazilian Architect Oscar Niemeyer. drMM studied Ijburg, a small prototype floating community in Amsterdam, by living in the village for a week. Their research was conveyed through a video projection and a 1:1 installation piece of a floating ‘boat’ platform that was driven down the River Thames.

The exhibition raised critical questions about the evolution and current state of British architecture. Through the Research Emporium and other displays, the exhibition underscored the research aspect of the practice of architecture. For the first time in the Architecture Biennale’s history, an exhibition from the British Pavilion will be displayed in the UK: ‘Venice Takeaway’ opened on the 26th February 2013 at the RIBA gallery in London. It will be interesting to see if the RIBA curators will be able to recapture some of the excitement produced by the exhibition in Venice.

Lizzie EdgeArchitectural student based in Liverpool,

currently studying for a Masters in architecture at Liverpool John Moores University.

RIBA66 Portland Place London W1B 1AD

Until 27 April, 2013

THE OBJECT IS DEAD‘The object is dead. The object remains dead. And we have killed the object.’ This may have been what Nietzsche would say if he were around today, or at least tweeted.

All over the world a new phenomenon is taking place: people are doing away with their worldly possessions, their books, their CDs and photo albums. This change, however, is not the product of some Orwellian nightmare coming to fruition, nor is it due to the teachings of a messiah, barefoot and draped in cloth; it is in fact the result of a far more subtle revolution that began with the invention of the silicon chip, and recently culminated in the advent of the handheld device and rise of social media.Yet the shadow of the object still looms. We have to decide whether new media can ever really replicate or replace objects. People are still buying high-value items – your 1st edition books and your Rolex are still safe. This leads to the subject of authenticity and our desire to achieve it. When everything is conceived in a hyperreality, we strive for the purest form of object to differentiate ourselves from others.

Maybe it’s an age thing. My generation having been the last to be born into a world without widespread day-to-day use of the Internet. Think of the Nexus advert showing a father taking his son on a camping trip only for it to transpire that they are in fact in their back garden carrying out their bonding activities through the magic of a Tablet; or Holly Willoughby who – when not on TV – apparently doesn’t leave the house thanks to the Kid’s Corner of her Windows phone, which aids her with a range of tasks including cooking and the pacification of her children. Newer generations have grown up with an ever-present and increasing number of interactive devices, leaving the toys of the past to gather dust in the attic. Who wants to play with action man when they can play as a soldier in high definition 3D games? Parents aren’t going to complain since it gets them ever closer to achieving their object-less minimalist utopia.

The object, however, is far from extinct. Perhaps recent developments in technology do not so much herald its death as represent the next step in its evolution. Other great advances in recreational technology such as the radio or television are yet to have eradicated the object, so who is to say that Facebook or the iPad will?

Rebecca H. SmithFrom a Fine Art background, currently reading History of Art

at Liverpool John Moores University. She is interested in modern and contemporary art and our relationship with popular culture

Contributors

Patrick Duffy - David Dodd -

Rob Headley - Jim Hough -

- Opening of Openings Jacques Charlier

- Glam & The Object is Dead Rachel Davey

- Shifting SandsStephen Clarke, Postcard No2,

Monorail, master digital ‘C’ type print, 2006 (courtesy the artist).

- Editor Antony Hudek- Art Director Sara De Bondt- With Thanks to Holly Gleave Lottie Brzozowski

Exhibition Research Centre:

Liverpool School of Art and DesignArt and Design Academy2 Duckinfield StreetLiverpoolLP5 3RD

- Alexandra Martin and Billie Kirby- Emma E. Ashman- James Craig - Robert MacDonald - Emma Roberts - Stephen Clarke - Lizzie Edge- Rebecca H. Smith Designers

Images

Publishing