Exhibition Guide

Against a backdrop of Liverpool City of Radicals,the city’s thematic focus for 2011, this exhibitiondraws on cultural and political narratives from the past century to consider questions about how artists engage with the radical in their work. Through artworks old and new, objects,reconstructions, photography, film and otherdocumentation, Democratic Promenade referencesvarious moments considered radical that relate to Liverpool and the wider political environment.Works on show reflect artists’ ongoing relationshipsto ideas around democracy, collective action andindividual expression.

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by Bryan Biggs

DEMOCRATICPROMENADE

The stimulus for looking at radicalism now is that it is 100years since several significant events took place in the citythat had a profound impact – culturally, architecturally andpolitically. In 1911 the critic and artist Roger Fry’s seminalPost-Impressionist exhibition was shown at the Bluecoat1.This important event was only the second group showing in this country by the likes of Picasso, Matisse and Cézanneand the first time alongside UK artists (from Liverpool’sSandon Studios Society, based in this building). It took placein the same year that the Liver Building, a controversial,cast-concrete edifice, pioneering in its design and fabricationand whose distinctive liver birds came to symbolise thecity’s resilience, was erected at the Pier Head. And thatsummer the city was paralysed by a general transport strike, a situation described as ‘near to revolution’2 that so alarmed the authorities that Churchill dispatched a gunship to the Mersey. 1911, with its combination of political and cultural impulses and the changes they brought about, therefore provides a useful reference point for an examination of the idea of the radical.

The exhibition title is taken from Walter Dixon Scott’sdescription of the Liverpool landing stage at the Pier Head in his 1907 book Liverpool 3.This ‘democratic promenade’represented for him a coming together of business andpleasure, the city’s wealthy merchants mixing with its urban poor, Europeans heading to a new life across the seas, and sailors from around the globe dropping anchor on Merseyside. A century later, in the shifting terrain of themodern metropolis, the idea of the city as a democraticpromenade also provides a useful measure of how urbancentres function: Tony Lane describes successful cities inthis new global environment as ‘democratic places whose

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1 The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool staged an exhibition, 24 June – 25 September 2011, Art in Revolution: Liverpool 1911 recreating some of the Post-Impressionist show.

2 Eric Taplin, Near to Revolution: The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911, Liverpool, 1994.

3 Walter Dixon Scott, Liverpool, London 1907, reprinted Neston, 1979, p.39.

citizens are simultaneously intolerant of intolerance andcaptivated by creativity’4. Now though, as ‘the veneer ofdemocracy starts to fade’5 with tensions showing within the financial, political and social structures of developedcountries, democracy seems to be increasingly ‘underduress’. At the same time there are calls from around theworld for democracy and new forms of participation in thepolitical process where none has previously existed. Andartists, alongside thinkers, writers, musicians, performers,commentators and others involved in cultural discourse,articulate such concerns or aspirations in different ways –through direct engagement, or more obliquely in their work.Whilst this exhibition does not claim to reflect the presentturbulence and calls to establish or re-examine democracy,it is however envisaged as a journey, a promenade, througha diverse range of creative practices, across time and indifferent places, which engage in some way with processesof change or of radical expression.

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David Jacques: The Great Money Trick (2010),Banner on Dale Street, Liverpool Image: Liverpool City Council

4 Tony Lane, Liverpool, Gateway of Empire, 1987, republished as Liverpool: City of the Sea, Liverpool, 1997, p.145.

5 Mark Stewart, As the Veneer of Democracy Starts To Fade, Mute Records, 1985.

This exhibition guide is a sort of route map.We start in the Bluecoat’s tall space, the Vide, where Brigitte Jurack’sinstallation, created in collaboration with other invitedartists,6 evokes Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley’s ‘lost’speakers’ platform, originally located at the Pier Head, theinspiration for Dixon Scott’s ‘democratic promenade’ and an important site for demonstrations and rallies in the city.This podium, a sort of ‘Tatlin’sTower by the Mersey’ wasremoved to make way for improvements to the site but never returned, and was later discovered allegedly rusting in a Council depot.The installation, comprising a large redbanner above a collection of models representing proposalsfor new spaces for public protest, is an elegy for the lostpodium. These new models for a 21st century speakers’platform demonstrate an insistence on claiming publicspaces for free public speech and protest, a need notnecessarily satisfied by the Internet nor social media.Spurred on by Dooley’s podium, the installation spans art,architecture, propaganda, utopia and democracy, inviting us to think what form a contemporary platform for collective dissent might take.

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Speakers’ Platform at Mann Island, Pier Head,Liverpool (erected 1973), designed by Arthur Dooley(sculptor) & Jim Hunter (architect)Image: The Arthur Dooley Archive

Pavel Büchler, LIVE (1999), Sound installationImage: courtesy the artist

In the same space Pavel Büchler’s LIVE (first presented at the Bluecoat for the 1999 Liverpool Biennial) is the soundof live audiences collated from the artist’s record collection,echoes of appreciation from performances that, like thespeakers’ podium, are absent. Dave Sinclair’s photographscapture the 1985 Liverpool School Students’ Strike whenthousands (in the days before social networking, anunexpectedly large number were galvanised into action)took over the city centre in protest at incoming job creationschemes, which were regarded as cheap labour ‘conscription’,ending their demonstration at the Pier Head where theywere addressed from the podium by, amongst others,Militant MPTerry Fields.

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Dave Sinclair, Liverpool School Students’ Strike (1985),PhotographImage: courtesy the artist

6 Andrew Burton, Kit Craig, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Volker Eichelmann, Ellen Driscoll, Thomas Hearn, Lightbulb collective, Andrew Lightfoot, Ant Macari, Shaun McGurdy, Mary Maclean, Daniel McMillan, Tess Mooney, Emily Purthoff, Martina Schmücker, Alessa Tinne, George Vasey, John Wood.

David Jacques’ new film commission, The Irlam HouseBequest, is based around the purported discovery of a set of drawings by a caretaker in a disused flat in a Bootle tower block, including templates for 19th century tradeunion banners and DIY agit-prop posters from the late 1960s.Like Jacques’ earlier Por Convencion Ferrer, to which the newfilm is a companion piece – both of them narrated by poetPaul Farley – political threads and fictions are interrogatedacross time. It is accompanied in the large gallery by acomposite text drawing, Serif types, a variation of which is also displayed as a public banner work located on DaleStreet opposite the Municipal Buildings7. The banner wascommissioned to mark the centenary this year of the death in Liverpool of the socialist author Robert Tressell (The RaggedTrousered Philanthropists), whose professionas a signwriter adds resonance to the work with its use of different fonts.

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David Jacques, Serif types (201 0),Gloss paint, biro and varnish on paperImage: courtesy the artist

7 The banner was commissioned by Liverpool City Council and remains in situ throughout 2011. (see illustration on page 3)

Employing a handmade aesthetic and drawing on theintricate designs of the 19th century Arts & Crafts Movement– similar to the garlands and lettering used in the trade unionbanners referenced by Jacques – Rose Vickers’ delicatepaper cut-outs evoke earlier utopianism, that of socialistartists like Walter Crane and William Morris. However,presenting aphorisms like ‘We make our own future’, ‘We want to believe’, and ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery’, these works reflect our present uncertainty and ambivalence about a better future and the contingencyof language in the age of the sound bite, pithy mediaheadlines and sloganeering.

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Rose Vickers,We make our own future (2011), Paper cutImage: courtesy the artist

The Sandon Studios Society was a group of progressiveartists who established an independent art school and, in 1907, a base at the Bluecoat. They were also instrumentalin securing the building as the UK’s first combined artscentre 20 years later. Though the Sandon never recapturedthe radical spirit of its early years when it brought the Post-Impressionist exhibition to Liverpool, it did produce artistsof genuine distinction and experimentation, notablyRoderick Bisson (1910–87), who had a dialogue withEuropean modernism in the 1930s and 40s, reflected in theselection of paintings here. Visits to pre-war Paris, reading of avant-garde art publications, and an early adoption ofSurrealism, all combined to give Bisson a highly contemporaryoutlook and connection to the latest ideas from the Continent.

Bisson’s isolation as Liverpool’s ‘lone modernist’ is suggestedin fellow Sandon artist Donald Lynch’s 1936 painting So youwon’t talk, eh?, in which Bisson is being interrogated at theBluecoat by the Sandon’s Painters’ and Sculptors’ Groupabout his ‘offending’ geometric painting. (Also known asAnd when did you last see your oculist?, Lynch’s painting

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Roderick Bisson, Building Ablaze in Church Alley (1941),Gouache on paper

Reproduced with the kind permission of Universityof Liverpool Victoria Gallery & Museum

is a pastiche of William Frederick Yeames’ popular And whendid you last see your father in the Walker Art Gallery.) Lynchreflects the dominant, more conventional outlook of theSandon in a rarely seen caricature of its life drawing class(featuring renowned Liverpool sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith,a mainstay of the Sandon who occupied a studio at theBluecoat for many years), this tradition going back to thesociety’s early years. Though not an artistic radical, German /Polish émigré Albert Lipczinski (1876–1974) – representedhere by a single life study from this period, probably madein the Bluecoat – had left wing sympathies and paintedportraits of strike leaders Tom Mann and James Larkin,before being deported as an enemy alien after the FirstWorld War8.

Known principally as a poet, Adrian Henri (1932–2000) had parallel careers as painter, performer, musician and critic.The display here of mainly documentary archival materialfocuses on the interconnections between his differentdisciplines and the way he dissolved the distinctions betweenthem, not least in his pioneering performance work.

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Donald Lynch, So you won’t talk, eh? (1936), Oil painting (original in colour) © National Museums Liverpool

8 The Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead staged the first substantial exhibition of the artist’s work, Albert Lipczinski 1876–1974, 2 July –2 October, 2011. The first biography of the artist, 1911: Art and RevolutionIn Liverpool, by David Bingham, also appeared in 2011 (Bristol).

The first artist to present happenings in the UK in the early1960s (as verified by a letter from US happenings originatorAllan Kaprow), Henri’s radicalism was both political, as in an anti-bomb event at the Cavern for instance, and cultural –seen in his breaking down of the hierarchy between high art and popular culture, his democratisation of the creativeprocess through participation and collaboration, and hiscelebration of the local within the framework of aninternational outlook. In his art, poetry and performanceHenri invoked Père Ubu, the monstrous fictional creation of French writer Alfred Jarry, whose absurd, anti-democraticpresence haunts the streets of Liverpool in prints shown hereby Henri and fellow Pataphysicians (enthusiasts of Jarry andhis ‘science of imaginary solutions’), Graham Williamsand Brian O’Toole (1946–2001). O’Toole was a prolificcartoonist, responding with biting satire and surreal wit to the politics of the day, as evidenced by the selection of drawings included here.

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Graham Williams, The Enthroned (1982), Etching and aquatint

Brian O’Toole, Isms (1982), Ink on paper

Courtesy Bernadette Bartley

Adrian Henri as ‘Batman bronco’ in performance (title and date unknown).

Adrian Henri, poster for happening, Death of a Bird in the City (1962)

© Estate of Adrian Henri, with thanks to Catherine Marcangeli

The way that public space is contested is explored in John Davies’ photographs of green parts of Liverpool thathave been privatised, including the International GardenFestival site. Here, public open space has been ‘eaten into’as part of the housing development deal on the site, andsome of Davies’ images of the proposed ‘finger blocks’ forOtterspool Promenade were first shown as part of his expertwitness evidence at the public enquiry, images not seenagain until now.

Pete Clarke’s large mixed media triptych, Poppies and Roses,is from a series of paintings from the 1980s about streets andinstitutions, made in response to central government attackson local democracy. It explores contradictory ideas aboutpolitical change through strikes, demonstrations and streetprotest, or through democratic, though often more problematic,participation in elections and governmental change.Thepainting is constructed – an important formal metaphor – with its surfaces combining images of Liverpool streets andhousing, political posters, processes like woodcuts andcollage, and propagandist methods.

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John Davies, Liverpool Festival Gardens (2006/2007), Photo pigment printImage: courtesy the artist

The public realm itself was the site for Nina Edge’s Sold Downthe River, documented here on video. This participatoryprocessional performance, commissioned by the Bluecoat in 1995, articulated the sense of betrayal felt on Merseysideas a result of neo-liberal economic policies introduced duringtheThatcher era. Edge’s live art practice, often involving largenumbers of collaborators and a combination of elements,from carnival, folklore ritual, dance culture and much more,went in tandem with her studio practice. Fabric works havebeen a continuing thread in her work and include the batikBhopal, concerning the Bhopal disaster in 1984 whenthousands were killed, blinded or maimed as the result of a gas leak at the Union Carbide India pesticide plant, built(apparently avoiding safety requirements) by the Americanchemical giant. Edge was interested in what motivated thecommitment of the event to memory, as well as creating workthat interrogated the mechanics of globalisation – at a timewhen the concept was relatively new to cultural agendas –and the inequalities of how many multinationals operated.

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Pete Clarke, Poppies andRoses (1983), oil, acrylic,construction on panel

Image: courtesy the artist

Nina Edge, Sold Down The River (1995),Performance

Image: courtesy the Bluecoat

Another Bluecoat live art commission, Jeremy Deller’sAcid Brass (1997) – represented here by two prints – broughtabout the collision of two ‘democratic’ musical forms: brassbands and acid house. By asking the Williams Fairey BrassBand to arrange and then perform a night of stomping ravetunes, Deller invigorated both forms whilst drawing parallelsbetween two seemingly opposing participatory musics, bothwith their roots in working class DIY culture.

In the ground floor gallery facing the busy retail streets ofLiverpool One is Oliver Walker’s Mr Democracy installation,reworked from its initial showing in 20089. It features 1,000plastic dolls imported from China, programmed to recite awritten constitution for the UK, which was commissioned bythe artist directly in Shanghai. A response to the fact that theUK is one of only three countries in the world not to have awritten constitution, the work explores ideas around trade,democracy and globalisation.

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Jeremy Deller, Untitled (Acid Brass)(1997), Screenprint Image: courtesy the Bluecoat

Oliver Walker, Mr Democracy (2008),Installation comprising three-channelvideo and objects (detail)Image: courtesy the artist

9 Mr Democracywas shown atThe Royal Standard, Liverpool.

The upstairs gallery focuses on the crowd and on collectiveaction, with images from demonstrations on St George’sPlateau providing a local historical context. The image fromthe Carbonara Studio is from a series, originally produced as postcards, documenting the Liverpool Transport Strike of1911. An estimated 80,000 demonstrators packed the plateauon ‘Bloody Sunday’, when police attacked them.Two dayslater two people attacking prison vans were shot dead bysoldiers. In 1921 another large demonstration against themeans test at the same site culminated in an ‘invasion’ ofthe Walker Art Gallery by unemployed demonstrators whowere trapped inside then beaten by police, whose accounts,and those of the press, offer a fascinating insight into theevent, not least the level of police collusion that the ‘ArtGallery Disturbances’ file displayed here suggests.

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Crowds on St. George’s Plateau, Liverpoolduring the 1911 Transport Strike. Photograph by Carbonara, courtesy of LiverpoolRecord Office, Liverpool Libraries

Another municipal building occupied by a crowd, albeitsmaller and one that was invited in, shows the Beatles at the Town Hall following their triumphant tour of the US in 1964. Asked to bring along friends, the Fab Four wereaccompanied by Liverpool black vocal group the Chants, not by one of the more familiar Merseybeat groups sharingchart success at the time.This choice suggests the debt the Beatles owed to black music and, intentional or not, the acknowledgement was made at such a highly symbolicpoint of civic acceptance, in the presence of the Lord Mayorand campaigning Labour MP, ‘Battling’ Bessie Braddock. The way the Beatles’ and other pop hits were adopted byLiverpool FC fans on the Kop remains mesmerising nearly50 years on from when the famous terrace at Anfield, shownhere, began singing and swaying.The crowd in LFC fanAdrian Henri’s The Entry of Christ into Liverpool in 1964comprised his friends and heroes.The painting, a homage to Belgian artist James Ensor’s The Entry of Christ intoBrussels in 1889, is reproduced on a poster poem here,fragmented impressions of an imagined crowd as it gathers momentum marching into the heart of the city.

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The Beatles with the Chants at Liverpool Town Hall, 1964.Image courtesy Joey Ankarahwith thanks to Jonathan Hitchen.

Unemployed workers ‘invading’ the Walker Art Gallery, 1921.

Another fictional crowd is assembled in A crowd of peoplestood and stared, a fast-moving digital ‘remix’ of an installationcreated at the Bluecoat in 1997 entitled It was thirty years agotoday, which updated the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s recordsleeve with heroes nominated by invited artists. These cut-outfigures have been in store since then, and in this installationdirected by Alan Dunn in collaboration with Derek Horton,Michael Jenkins and Sam Meech the tableau is re-presented,the four central figures now replaced with plinths on whichmonitors show new films relating to contemporary visionariesand crowds. Meech’s video presents Liverpool crowds withthe subject of their attention removed; Jenkins’ video Sleepingon the rope takes an oblique look at overcrowding, re-enactingthe tradition of slinging an old rope across a doss house when all other beds were full; Horton’s text work exploresthe role of ‘the crowd’ in literature and philosophy, alongsidepersonal reflections from within football and protest crowds;and Dunn’s video slideshow presents a series of visionaries that ‘subconsciously shape our everyday actions, ethics,preconceptions and pleasures’.

Peter Walsh’s Demowas filmed at several politicaldemonstrations in London in spring, 2011.The locations andevents are edited so they continually chop and change fromone march to another without a hierarchical order, whilst the camera is directed at other cameras present. Facing thecamera with his back to the protestors and commenting onthe technical specifications of these cameras, it is as if this is all that the artist is interested in, not the demonstrations. It is a device that undermines our attempt to discover what’sreally going on in the events being filmed. In our media-saturated culture when everything, even protest, becomesinstantly commodified, the film also questions the credibilityand effectiveness of political resistance through this type of demonstration.

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It was thirty years go today(1997) installation. Detailshowing life-size cut outsincluding Robbie Fowler,wearing a t-shirt supportingsacked Liverpool dockers

Image: the Bluecoat

Documentation of the Liverpool performance collectiveVisual Stress focuses on their Urban Vimbuza interventionsinto the city’s public realm in the 1980s and 90s. These large-scale ‘urban dance healing rituals’ were based on a traditionalZambian formula used to cure vimbuza, a sickness of themind – from spirit possession to fanatical obsession with all thingsWestern. The performances, employing magicalinvocations of drum and dance with rhythmic elements,juxtaposed with scenes from everyday chaos, were intendedto heal the mental condition brought about by consumer andmedia indoctrination. Death by Free Enterprise, the group’sfirst such ritual staged at the Bluecoat in 1988 (the sameweekTate Liverpool opened) sought to reveal historicalcontradictions in the ‘Port of Empire’ whilst exorcising thebuilding’s, and Liverpool’s, slave trading past. The title isdrawn from the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster,which tragically typified the mentality of putting profitbefore safety and human life.

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Visual Stress, Urban Vimbuza:Death by Free Enterprise (1988),PerformancePhoto: Mark McNulty

Peter Walsh, Demo (2011), video Image: courtesy the artist

Moving through the gallery’s cloister space overlooking thegarden, a succession of objects, photographs, posters andother ephemera relating to radical actions or events fromLiverpool over past decades, provides a sort of fragmentaryand disjointed museum of hidden or alternative histories.The display is eclectic, some of it ambiguous: ingeniousreplications of ‘Smash robots’ (seen in a much-loved TVadvert for instant mashed potato) made by workers on the production line at Ford’s Halewood plant; posters from an anti-ring road campaign and from the 1970 studentoccupation at the University of Liverpool, the latter in thespirit of street posters from the Paris ’68 uprising; a bronzestatuette commemorating workers’ control of the FisherBendix factory in Kirkby; material from the Liverpool Schoolof Language, Music, Dream & Pun, the ‘synchronistic cafe’ on Mathew Street inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s dream ofLiverpool as the ‘pool of life’; and copies of the campaigning,muckraking, alternative newspaper, the Liverpool Free Press.

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Programme from LiverpoolEveryman production of Chris Bond’s Under NewManagement (1974) about the Fisher Bendix workers’occupation.

The Liverpool School of Language, Music,Dream and Pun, c.1976/77.Photo: Sean Halligan

Frank Milner, poster from student occupation of Senate House, University of Liverpool, 1970.

‘Smash’ robot made at Ford Halewood car plant, 1970s.

This space also invites visitors to join The Nineteen Hundred and Eleven Party, set up by artists’ group Dorothyin celebration of the enduring desire for social justice andunique spirit of radicalism that defines Liverpool’s past.Asking if our pursuit of idealism and change is as strongnow as it was 100 years ago, this evolving artwork creates a social movement shaped entirely through its interactionwith the audience. Using social media as well as moretraditional recruitment methods in the gallery, includingslogans on large banners, posters and badges, and a partypolitical broadcast, a party manifesto will be developed overthe course of the exhibition through this interaction, leadingto a culminating event/experience to be announced. Get involved at: www.nineteenhundredandelevenparty.org.

Bryan Biggs is the Bluecoat’s Artistic Director and curator of Democratic Promenade

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Dorothy, The Nineteen Hundred and Eleven Party (2011), Posters

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Exhibition talks and tour

RELATEDPROGRAMME

Tue 4 October 6pm–7.30pmArtist’s talk: Oliver WalkerOliver Walker talks about his Mr Democracyinstallation in the exhibition.Free but ticketed

Sat 8 October 2pm–3.30pmExhibition tour: Bryan BiggsThe curator of Democratic Promenadeleads a tour of the exhibition.Free, just turn up

Thurs 20 October 6pm–7.30pmArtists’ talk: Alan Dunn and Nina EdgeTwo artists in the exhibition discussresponding to critical political and culturalmoments in their work.Free but ticketed

Weds 2 November 6pm–7.30pmArtists’ talk: David Jacques and Brigitte JurackTwo artists in the exhibition discuss theirwork and interests in history, time andimagined futures/pasts.Free but ticketed

Weds 16 November 6pm–7.30pmArtists’ talk: Pete Clarke and John DaviesTwo artists in the exhibition discusscontested public and private space in the city in their work. Free but ticketed

Thurs 6 October 6.30pm–8pm Who Governs Merseyside?25 years since the abolition of MerseysideCounty Council, who wields political powerin the city region and how are theyaccountable? In the first part of this event,combining academic study, public enquiryand theatre, a panel of experts gives theiropinions on who has power. Staged at the start of the Democratic Promenadeexhibition, this is followed by Part 2 at the end of the show when power-holders,identified with the help of local people, are put under scrutiny. Organised incollaboration with the Democratic Audit at University of Liverpool.

12–16 October Chapter & Verse Literature FestivalThe Bluecoat’s literature festival takes up a radical theme this year with aprogramme involving a range of writers,including Ed Vulliamy (The Toxic Elite),Alexandra Harris (Guardian first book prize for Romantic Moderns: EnglishWriters, Artists and the Imagination fromVirginia Woolf to John Piper), innovativepoet Robert Sheppard (Berlin Bursts), acelebration of Wirral-born writer MalcolmLowry (Under the Volcano), and the Allianceof Radical Booksellers Symposium.

Banner displayThroughout the exhibition there will be adisplay of banners in the Hub representingradical people and places related to Liverpoolin the last century, created by communitygroups from across the city working withartist Claire Bates (Landbaby). Participantshave chosen a wide range of subjects fortheir banners including Ken Dodd, Rice LaneCity Farm, John Lennon, and the friendshipbetween Archbishop Warlock and BishopSheppard in the 1980s.

Thanks to the City of Liverpool for its financial support

Friday 30 September –Sunday 27 November 2011Open daily 10am–6pm. Free

The Bluecoat, School Lane,Liverpool L1 3BX

Tickets and Information 0151 702 5324www.thebluecoat.org.uk

www.cityofradicals.co.uk

The Democratic Promenade lettering is adapted from an artwork by David Jacques

Design by Mike Carney www.mikesstudio.co.uk

© The Bluecoat 2011