Touched - Liverpool Biennial (18 Sept - 28 Nov 2010)

"Touched presets art with emotional impact. Art that can not only gain our attention, but that can move us, motivate us, and allow us to find away to change ourselves. Art without emotional force is without intellectual power"

Although I think this statement is by no means true of all the pieces involved in this years biennial,  most of the art i have wrote about in my blog has 'touched' me on some level.

I think the title 'touched' is also relevant to the effect this years biennial had on the city itself. Even without mentioning any of the art pieces you could see something going on all over the city - through the black and red wolves on signs, painted on walls, and outside shops, without having to know anything to do with art visitors to the city must of wondered what was going on.

The biennial also 'touched' and made use of the empty spaces in our city, from literal gaps between buildings, to making abandoned and unused buildings into gallery spaces, like the 'old rapid building' on Renshaw Street.

At the beginning of the 'Biennial Guide Book' Lewis Biggs says,

"to be touched in the heart or the gut is to fell the pull of tragedy in another persons situation; maybe as a result to be moved to horror turning to anger at the desire to do something about it, as in Alfredo Jarr's documentation of the massacres of Rwanda; but to also be moved to by beauty and wonder, as in Danica Dakic's film 'Grand Organ'. As Alfredo Jarr has noted: 'if images loose their power to affect us, we have lost our humanity'"

I would say that sums up alot of the pieces i saw in this years Biennial <3

Ryan Trecartin - Trill-ogy Comp (2009)

Three of Ryan Trecartin's videos were being shown in the basement of the main Biennial site, 52 Renshaw Street, and were one of the first Biennial pieces i saw.

In the 'Biennial Guide Book' Frances Loeffer says,

"Trill-ogy Comp doesn't so much 'touch' you in the gentle sense, as pull you in, shake you up, absorb you, and then set you down, reeling. The works are visually, aurally and emotionally assaulting, leaving our senses disrupted and our thought processes open to new perspectives on the world."

The three pieces 'K-CorealNC.K (section a)', 'Sibling Topics (section a)', and 'P.opular S.ky (section ish)', all feature strange, high-energy, almost genderless characters, who make little sense, repeating the same odd catch-phrases over and over again. 

After moving through the videos, and beginning to become accustom to the choppy cutting, and editing i began to see the similarities to the types of shows been shown on MTV - the same over the top characters and dramas. The same realisation that what i was seeing made no sense, and the same compulsion to keep watching anyway.

These videos definitely influenced me into looking at how these 'reality dramas' could be used in my own work.

 

  U B U W E B - Film & Video: Ryan Trecartin - K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (2009)

- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Gardenia

Gardenia - Official Trailer from Andrew J. Rutter on Vimeo.


Trailer for my amazingly talented friend  Andrew John Rutter's new film Gardenia - take a look :)