Totally Free by Mike's Studio

Y L L A TOT FREE

AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL THERE WERE 532 INDEPENDENTS IN 2006. FOR THESE ARTISTS, CURATORS AND VISUAL MEDIA ACTIVISTS THIS PUBLICATION IS LITERALLY A SOUVENIR AS IT NAMES EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. TOTALLY FREE ALSO LOOKS AT THE RESPONSES OF A COHORT OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS TO MAKING ART OUTSIDE THE INSTITUTIONAL MAINSTREAM. IT IS INTENDED AS A STIMULANT TO THE DEBATE OF OPTIONS AND TACTICS FOR THE FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY AND SUCCESS OF THE INDEPENDENTS.

INTERVAL (2006), VIDEO, SUKI CHAN IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

NOTHING IS PRIVATE, NINA EDGE 40 KELVIN GROVE PHOTO: PETE CARR

ASYLUM’S TURNSTILE, GINO SARCONNE LIME STREET PHOTO: PETE CARR

ASYLUM’S TURNSTILE, GINO SARCONNE BOLD STREET PHOTO: CARMEN SACCONE

BY ALEX HETHERINGTON

Australian-born, Liverpool-based artist Adam Nankervis works with a collision of tactics, an array of tensions and assemblage, a merger of disputations, negotiations and dialogues and a broad wealth of visual art vocabulary that connects his practice within the territories of artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Broodthaers, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Gregor Schneider, curators like Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick and the strategy of the artist-led project / curator / gallery / space / publisher. And similar to Schwitters’ grotto Merzbau, Nankervis’ home is the site for his art: private home, public space, public life, private life, self as institution, life’s work and man as museum. Rooted in a long-standing history of the museum, collecting, the impulse to travel and obtain, Nankervis is a kind of Pitt Rivers Museum on contemporary topographies. It’s a simultaneous mix of “paleontology, natural history, archeology, ethnography, optics, cosmology, art”, complimented with a notion of abstracting objects, art, happenings, exhibitions, screenings, performances and materials that essentially reinvigorate their original intentions with new, assembled, contrived meanings. His home is at once artists residency centre, gallery, venue, and arena for exchanges, presentations and dialogues. It is a showcase for the incongruent, museum, vehicle for a tension between anonymity and recognition and a place to live. With no minimalism here, thanks; the photographic documentation presented on his web site bombards the viewer with a sense of plenty. As he says it’s never vacant unless it’s selected to be so.

MUSEUMMAN 25 PARLIAMENT STREET ALSO SEE WWW.MUSEUMMAN.ORG

Nankervis describes his activities as born “out of necessity”. Museum Man he describes as “an open cabinet of curiosities spelling a history of two cities with an eclectic mix of art and artifact, which has now manifested and transposed its dialogue of a lived in museum from Berlin to Liverpool.” It is also a mirror to the institution that corresponds a deliberate attempt to question the institution, the collected and the commodity and a pathway between art circuits and art circuses. This is the spectacle of the museum itself on display, the mechanics of its making rendered transparent. He describes it as a mechanism that deconstructs and demystifies the routes in art, and channels resources that result in “entry, accessibility, and validation”. The turnaround is remarkable, with the space / home occupying shows, DJs, performances, screenings, events on a totally super-active, superagitated, super-curious level. How this happens is organic, by word of mouth, by invitation, by being social, democratic and non-judgmental and by retaining a philosophy and vision that is open, encircled by anticipation and accepting of what may occur. The artists and their work, and what they gift, leave behind or install within this scenario is its central modus operandi, and it’s in this collision of potential chaos, unending streams of energy and input, cultures and geographies, people, audiences, artists and party-goers that Nankervis lives. It’s what he describes, with total genuineness, as a “privilege”. And it’s what makes this activity hold such value: the familiarity and informality of home, questioning the rarefied and remote, engaging the display and its audience, the signs of art alternative guerrilla strategist and sybaritic bon vivant emerge as a unified seductive policy. It’s enthralling to hear about installations and performances in the kitchen and bathroom or art agendas and philosophies being scrutinised in hallway and cupboard, of opening up the basement for discotheques and discourses. Nankervis further illuminates this policy with answers about how this comes about and how it can be approached: the disparate in assemblage, the mutating mass of information, the spill of activity and conjoining and commingling, the non-defining and ambiguous tally for the attention of audiences and participants to emerge with their own conclusions and choices, of their own selection, of being their own curators in deciding what to engage with and what to, not reject, but wait off until later. It’s not a factory either; Nankervis doesn’t make a living from this, it’s not rooted in celebrity or in showmanship, or as a vehicle from destabilising the institution to becoming central to it, to be tempted and allured by it. From it’s origins as Another Vacant Space in New York in the early 1990s, where commodity, economic failure and recession and opportunity merged, transforming as a form and function in Berlin (with a stopover in Copenhagen) through transformation to its destination now as residency in Liverpool, for Independents Nankervis, the Museum Man, presents his Blur Prints. Another Vacant Space which represents not a culmination of activity but a slice of it away from his home / space / museum to reinvest and restage its vibrancy in an open arena where it can be shared and experienced. Maurizio Cattelan’s Wrong Gallery project, also in New York, once presented an artwork by the British artist Adam McEwen. It said: “Fuck Off We're Closed”. I could never imagine Nankervis displaying this sentiment, though he might present the artwork. Rather it would seem his sign would say: “We’re having a cherry-bomb pink floor. Let’s Party!”

BY ALEX HETHERINGTON An asylum seeker can be thought of as status sought by a person physically present within a country, having fled their own on grounds that are detrimental to their person, liberties or well being. Further, the individual must have a wellfounded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, if made to return to his or her country of nationality. If the person does not have a country of nationality, then they must fear these grounds upon returning to their last place of habitual residence. One of these five grounds of asylum must be proven in order for the individual to win an asylum claim. Asylees differ from refugees in that the asylee has already entered the country when they are trying to obtain status.

This is paraphrased from American and British immigration web sites. It’s broadly speaking the administrative description, matter-of-fact, general information, fast tracking, deporting, human farming overview of what an asylum seeker is. It does not describe who an asylum seeker is. If we chose to describe an asylum seeker from British, European or Northern American press quotes, we might receive a different kind of description, which is usually bound up with terms – depending on the level of journalism – like: mistrust, alien cultures, difference, them and us, outsider, economic migrant, freeloader, ignorant peasant, job thief, extremist, victim, pretender, coward, freeloader, the dreadful unknown, black, enemy. Refugee meanwhile is bound together with terms like natural disaster, innocent victim, war-torn, escape, sanctuary and Red Cross, United Nations peacekeepers, Bob Geldof and Bono, the BBC’s Michael Buerk. The language and terminology, the premise and definition differ depending on a judgment call of when you think someone in need is the mastermind of their own demise. Or not. And what it is you think they want. Another definition of asylum seeker is; communicative, open, resourceful, courageous, interacting, social, inclusive, participant. Or another: “I’ve witnessed the edge of sanity and barbarity, can you help me because I don’t want to die.”

TURNSTILE FRIDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2006 2.45PM WOOD STREET 4.00PM ST GEORGE’S HALL 5.00PM ALBERT DOCK 6.00PM GREENLAND STREET

This concept of frictions and tensions between detachment and language, awareness and definition, the general, the homogenised and the personal, the social and the intimate is an element at play in the recent work of the London-based performance artist Gino Saccone. Saccone in his devised, community-led performance work, which in the past has also explored relationships of remembrance and interventions between outsider and insider, has a simple goal to reveal the processes of awareness and the production of awareness. In his piece Turnstile, he does this by taking the celebratory aspects of the parade, merged with the immediacy, vigour and enmity of the protest and collapses them together to form a public procession that invites interaction, dialogue, human contact and engaged experience that at once reveals the nature of misgivings and apprehensions, definitions and stereotypes and replaces them with opportunity and communication. The parade and the protest are signifiers in our society which express notions of free speech, celebration, dissent, ritual, memorial, occasion. With mirrored banners and placards Saccone’s Turnstile is a procession of the protective and personal and will feature a group of asylum seekers taking to the streets of Liverpool reflecting back their immediate surroundings, reflecting back their immediate condition and inviting a truth to be manifest, shared and enjoyed. Saccone describes an inventory of injustice, human fears and terrible experiences tempered with a desire for an encounter of assumption, meeting, contact and revelation.

The parade in recent art has taken on different forms; from Matthew Barney’s numerous ostentatious pageants in his work and films, catwalks of the weird, glamourous and superhuman, of ceremonies to fetish, desire and beauty to Francis Alÿs’ projects like Seven Walks that assemble notions of authority, trespass and the transient, or Santiago Sierra’s interventions that reveal, through exploitation, the duality of economic advancements and personal poverty. Saccone, though, presents something that is rooted in a social conscious processed through communication and workshops that feature real people with real experiences that are not bound by either commerciality or art star vanity. At the same time, the location of this work, Liverpool – reinforces its sense of the international destination and origination, of immigration and emigration, of departures and arrivals, of human trafficking, of slavery, of the colonial, of Empire’s built. And at this time where asylum seeker remains such a point of contention Saccone’s performance will remind us of a lineage of barbarity, of a history of exploitation that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Nevertheless, the basis of this work is human contact, something that the parade as a social form has been designed to stimulate.

BY LEO WOOD

Since the birth of representational art, people have been painting portraits as a way to represent and understand humanity. And yet as artist David Hancock sees it, our understanding of portraiture is both limited and stifling. Hancock has chosen to explore and challenge the idea of portraiture, claiming that it can be, ‘so much more than a painting of a little kiddie in the living room’. I’ll Be your Mirror, an exhibition curated by David Hancock, invigorates the idea of portraiture for the 21st Century. Hancock entered the BP Portrait Award a few years back and was disappointed by the stereotyped way in which the sitters were often depicted. When looking at a portrait he would often feel a sense of detachment from the person on the canvas and as if it was actually expressing more about the artist, ‘The works felt false, as if they didn’t get to the heart of the sitter’. Portraiture has mostly made as its subject the great and the good, but to avoid this stigma, the artists of I’ll Be Your Mirror look towards a wider group of people, objects and animals in their paintings, to capture a sense of our globalised society at the beginning of this century, taking many different approaches to the concept of the portrait. I’ll Be Your Mirror includes the work of some artists who do not normally or exclusively make portraits, but work has been commissioned especially for this exhibition, by artists including Leo Fitzmaurice and Rui Matsunaga. Hancock’s own painting featured in the exhibition, I Wear Black on the Outside, is also a slight departure for him, in terms of his body of work thus far. This painting, his most recent to date, marks the start of a series of works that will focus more specifically on portraits and people, up close and personal, rather than depicting figures within a broader landscape. I Wear Black on the Outside is a painting with echoes of the Annunciation, and is based on a real-life story, sent in a letter to Hancock, about a girl who saved her friend from committing suicide in his bedroom when she came across him wielding a knife. The figures in the portrait are not highly posed; the eye of the artist is that of a hidden observer in the bedroom. Life is breathed into the portrait, also thanks to Hancock’s photorealist technique and skill as a painter.

I’ll Be Your Mirror is co-curated by Richard Meaghan, whose work also features here and who helped Hancock curate his last collaborative exhibition, Jerusalem. In this previous showcase, the artists took William Blake’s poem of the same name as a starting point from which to explore the idea and sense of the landscape as it was understood by the Romantics, in all its wild power, with the aim to create, ‘new worlds with a sense of the poetic’. Hancock and Meaghan also co-curated an exhibition at the Liverpool Biennial 2004, Le Petit Paysage, translated as The Small Landscape, and exactly that; an exhibit of small landscape paintings by over 25 artists; both an interesting concept and a practical solution to the difficulties of transporting many artist’s work all across the country for the event. Other artists featuring their work at I’ll Be Your Mirror included Jemima and Dolly Brown, an artist whom Hancock had admired for several years since seeing her work at New Contemporaries in 1997. Jemima’s pieces are based around the persona of Dolly Brown, an alter ego who started life as a blow-up doll and since has developed and is depicted in many different guises in Jemima’s work. In the exhibition, she turns on its head the long English tradition of ‘domestic’ portraiture in a series of sculpted and sort-of dismembered Dolly heads in flowery wreathes, all with a hint of 1970’s interior design. Gordon Cheung, who has worked on several previous projects with Hancock contributed to I’ll Be Your Mirror. Whilst Hancock was reluctant to include artists who had already exhibited at Jerusalem, David realised that Cheung, though he was more well known for his dystopian landscape visions, was onto something interesting in his portraits of the Top 10 Dead Celebrity Earners; personifying a ‘dead rich list’ of people who could almost be the gods of the dystopian world that Cheung had created in his landscape paintings. On a different note, Isabel Young make portraits of animals in her work, and in doing so, elevates the status of the animal at the same time as challenging our understanding of what should and should not be an artist’s subject in portraiture. Isabel remembers famous animals in history, such as ‘Nero’, King James’ lion, and her miniature-style paintings are certainly an interesting alternative to taxidermy. I’ll Be Your Mirror exhibited in a corridor space, on the 6th floor of the Gostin Buildings, Hanover Street, nicely placed between the Tate and the Adelphi. Slightly haphazard maybe, but is in the very nature of Independents to investigate the use of alternative ways to exhibit as all precious gallery space is used up at the Biennial. Appropriately, these alternative approaches to the portrait were shown in an alternative exhibition space.

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR 6TH FLOOR GOSTIN’S BUILDING, HANOVER STREET

BY ALEX HETHERINGTON

Liverpool-based artist Nina Edgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life is her work, in a way that could in principal be related to the ongoing, mammoth Real Life projects of Glasgowbased artist Ross Sinclair. Like him she works with modern motifs, symbols of the institutions that define our lives and institutional contexts, the individual in relation to those institutions and ideas that flicker between the public domain and the private existence, between policy-making, think-tanks of progressive actions, sweeping changes to social dynamics and their effect on life and society. Her array of output in material and conceptual terms is equally broad, from performance to objects, installations to interventions, activated and activist responses and fabric-based pieces and texts. All rooted in a contextual, conceptual response to issues, political circumstances and community-sited actions and activities. These issues and ideas, though, are directly sourced from her own situation not abstracted from objective observations, but from something lived through, experienced and challenged on a day-to-day basis. I conducted a lengthy conversation with Nina over the phone in preparation for her new piece to be shown during Independents. During the conversation we discussed a number of weighty issues, a number of political changes we have both witnessed since Thatcher and the changes she has made to her approach to being an artist and making art. We spoke also about the terror waged by Britain against itself, of Bush and Blair as masters and defenders of the shareholder, the paranoia devised by the media and our politicians, and the journey that we have gone in recent times from optimism to dismay.

NOTHING IS PRIVATE 40 KELVIN GROVE

She started off by describing the installation and production of her new work for Independents. The piece is a specially-made net curtain to be installed in the front room window of her terraced home; the net curtain she explains is a form that at once conceals and reveals, decorates, adorns and disguises, it speaks of a very British phenomenon related to home, class and period. The net curtain I remember was used during an installation at Tramway by Pipilotti Rist called Show a Leg in the early part of this decade. Rist’s video projections light was caught on and spilled through screen upon screen of net curtains beautifying the vast space of Tramway’s main gallery. All frilly forms, whirling stitching, floral patterns and curving fringes filling Tramway with images of outside and inside, vibrant video colours and human bodies in motion and fall. It was a beautiful experience. But Nina Edge’s net curtain is a more rebellious, disobedient piece of work additionally rooted in protest, and polemic and political slogans; it is an invitation to peek and vocalise at the same time. It has been made as a direct response to the disintegration of public and private, of governmental scrutinising on personal affairs, on policies that effectively make communities disappear, of the enrichment of the wealthy and rendering the dissident as extremist, the market-force and profit as paramount and an action to demolish a way of life and homes literally to enhance the portfolios of property developers and replace public and social liberties and responsibilities with private ideologies, agendas and values. The net curtain has been made, as Edge describes: “is the only way she knows how to” in response to misguided social engineering though she is becoming more and more conversant with legal speak, administrative jargon and political policy loops. She divides her time with art production and leading an action group in protest at the wilful destruction of her way of life and the lives of others in her community. So instead of the usual net curtain, familiar, kitschy, floral and feminine we see a beautifully made political graphic sown on a machine that is heading for obsolescence, removal, disappearance itself. Edge is not critiquing progress or change; she is though critiquing changes that defy, devalue and fragment what we come to term as “our way of life”: our free speech, our liberties or our ability to debate and protest. Changes that are replacing core values with profits, social needs with spreadsheets and existence with economics. Nina Edge lives in a community that is being threatened by physical and social annihilation in order for a programme of new house building to occur that will place housing stock in the hands of private concerns. It is a policy of the short-term and abstracted; it pulls resources away from where they are needed and sets up competition where the public and private are merged, mainly to the detriment of the public and the growth of the private. Edge asks a fundamental question: what is the private and what is the public? She is an artist who works at a grassroots local level because it’s happening to her; the threats to her way of life are happening to her and by extension to us all. This work is made from a need to articulate, communicate and inform. It is immediate, tender, desperate, engaging, inviting, social, elaborate, reactive and active. It is finely conceived, in the tiniest of details, inviting inspection and broadly formed, demanding action. Real Life. Indeed.

MUSEUMMAN, ADAM NANKERVIS PARLIAMENT STREET PHOTO: PETE CARR

LEGEND HAS IT..., MICHELLE WREN MUSEUMMAN, PARLIAMENT STREET PHOTO: PETE CARR

SECTOR F13, PAUL MATOSIC WOLSTENHOLME SQUARE PHOTO: PETE CARR

BY NADIM KARAM For better or worse, I have not followed an artist’s trajectory of developing under the tutelage of galleries and institutions, and receiving the exposure critical to the establishment in the art world. I have always functioned on the contextual need to give a sense of place in areas within cities, and thus worked with bureaucrats and steel workers rather than curators and critics. Art is tightly controlled by the few, and this often disturbs a clear understanding of the meaning behind it. I feel better about what makes a city beat; the pulse of its arteries and veins. In each city there is a dormant dream. My projects show that the aims of the system allow for spaces of dreams within itself. The issue is how to deposit, dig into the dormant dream. The unfolding of the dream should be slow, layer after layer until the dream manifests itself to the city. After each layer is revealed, much resistance is encountered. This is normal, as the dream is not yet a reality being lived. The most difficult bureaucracy to unfold is the art bureaucracy. I would like to unfold it so that it becomes prosaic, yet insane and provocative. Over the years I have clarified my ideas for the making of urban projects, learning from experience and defining the essence of creating dreams for cities. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to describe the challenges and pitfalls of three of my projects, in Prague, Beirut and Melbourne. Prague Each project begins and ends with a story. In the middle, there is very little to do with art. The Prague project came to be defined by the juggling of obtaining authorisations and budgeting. The necessity of obtaining different authorisations seemed to

propagate itself in Prague, as the closer I came to the realisation stage, the more authorisations were required from us. Just some of those were from the office of the President of the Czech Republic, The Prague Municipality, The Magistrate, the historical heritage preservation groups for Prague and the nation, the castle of Prague, the owner of the bridge, the group technically responsible for the bridge, the police, the public transportation office... authorisations were extremely tough to get, especially those obtained by being put to the vote. Pockets of reactionary groups were a constant problem, and I felt myself more in the domain of politics than art as I shuttled back and forth to Prague for three years, lobbying for support. The Prague project, true to form, began with many refusals, and ended with the patronage of the city of Prague and the endorsement of the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. Another important lesson I learned during the Prague project was the importance of flexibility. The project was conceived for the Charles Bridge, a European heritage bridge, and I was raising the hackles of different groups with my proposal to install my twenty-two sculptures for two weeks. It was only when I decided that my work would be better seen if placed on the Manes Bridge (parallel to the Charles), that everything began to work. It also taught me a very important lesson in getting the community, and not just the bureaucrats, on my side. The Prague project could not have been done without Czech people to help me negotiate through all the grey areas of local culture which I had no possible way of grasping. In the very end, when I was let down by the

company in charge of the installation of the works, a whole village, roused by supporters, came to Prague with their tractors and cranes to help me out. Beirut In 1993 I returned to post-war Beirut; which was a desolate place. The prevalent post-war amnesia was almost worse than the war years, with a morose population voluntarily under anaesthetic. People defending their allegiance to different religious symbols had created the basis for a long war. I wanted to bring to the city a multiplicity and diversity of signs which could be interpreted by individuals as they pleased. I wanted to break the grim attachment to symbols that had taken us beyond the brink. And, most importantly, I wanted them to be nonmonumental; to appear and move to provoke astonishment, curiosity and amusement, and then to leave. I began with urban art installations at the Sursock Museum (’94) and the National Museum (’95); the first experimentation of the archaic procession in sculptural form. Solidere, the company in charge of the reconstruction of downtown Beirut, had not taken on any cultural projects until then, despite having received lots of proposals. This was probably based on their policy at the time of not wishing to favour an artist from any particular religious group. But I strongly felt that it was time for the city centre to be re-appropriated with cultural projects that would express the mosaic identity of the place. I explained to them the concept behind a project that would move in the city – beginning by the inner ring and ending at the Mediterranean coastline three years later. The idea was that the project and rotation of sculptures would change depending on the development

THE BEIRUT SERIES AND ITS EFFECT ON GLOBAL WARMING – WATERCOLOURS, UPSTAIRS AT EDITIONS, COOK STREET. SKETCH JOURNAL, MUSEUMMAN, PARLIAMENT STREET.

of situations in Solidere and Beirut in general. All of the sculptures would not be placed at one time and I would only change their location at night to create an element of surprise for the city. I explained that I was coming to leave. The discussions took some time. Meanwhile, I was busy with the urban art installation I was preparing for Prague. It was only when the sculptures were installed in Prague in May 1997 that Solidere agreed and the project went ahead. From the start it met with strong political resistance and attempts to take away the sculptures and cancel the project. Their prominent apparition in all newspapers in front of the recently completed ESCWA building in Beirut city centre was perceived to minimise the building’s importance. The project nevertheless continued, accompanied by debates in the press and an official protest from the Order of Artists who, without understanding the temporary nature of my work, bitterly criticised the domination of the city centre by one artist. While the criticism built up around a certain site, I was busy preparing the next stage of transferral to another site, as part of my commitment to create an ephemeral work. The works always moved suddenly, confounding critics and fans alike. On New Year 2000, the sculptures left downtown Beirut. The sculpture I called the Wild Cat, placed on a traffic island in front of the National Museum, was re-baptised by the Beirut population as the donkey with three ears. In the popular imagination, the three ears symbolised the Maronite President, the Sunnite Prime Minister and the Shiite Head of Parliament. I was completely unaware of this, being in Japan on post-

doctoral research, but it seemed that popular lore gained so much credential that a Minister gave orders to remove the sculpture. The then French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac’s visit to Beirut and the National Museum was imminent and they did not want him to see a sculpture belittling the Lebanese government! I returned from Japan to find the Wild Cat placed in the garbage dump. Melbourne For The Travellers, the most recent of my urban works, I was in the apparently comfortable situation of receiving a commission. However, the project had begun very differently. In 2001 I had been invited to lecture in Melbourne and on visiting the Melbourne infrastructure department, I was given a CD about the Sandridge Bridge competition with the five selected finalists. I was convinced that a different approach would be better for the city, and as soon as I returned to Beirut I began working on a counter-proposal which I submitted a month later. The initial competition had given participants the possibility to build up to three floors on the bridge, based on the idea that the generation of funds through commercial development would then pay for the maintenance of the bridge. I felt that any project of that kind would divide the river and both banks of the river into two, in other words it would cut the city into two. But it was equally clear to me that the quality and industrial archaeology of the bridge should be enhanced by restoration. What we were proposing would not generate direct income for the city, but had the potential to become a cultural icon that would revive memories of the migrants who travelled across the bridge on a train. I proposed to place ten

9m high sculptures on the bridge, each one representing a wave of migration to Melbourne. Functioning like an urban clock for the city, the sculptures move out and back on the bridge three times a day. My proposal, it seems, confused previous development plans, but remained on the shelf for three years until the State of Victoria decided to realise it as their major cultural project for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. A further year passed before they could mobilise funding, so in the end a project I had almost given up on was realised in a frantic ten months. In the process towards a creative project, I believe in the importance of flexibility and urban interactivity as compared to rigidity and absolutism. I take up the pen to sketch, but when I begin; several hands come to join my hand, pressuring it to move in one direction or another. At first I am annoyed, and then I begin moving the pen again, sometimes in their direction, sometimes in mine. As we approach the end, the hands retreat to let me complete the sketch.

BY MARK FISHER In the summer of 2006, the new National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) presented two shows. One of them, ‘Realism’ by Anthony Neilson, was performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). The other, ‘Black Watch’ by Gregory Burke, was performed in a specially converted army drill hall as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. To have two productions by one company in rival programmes raises fascinating questions about our understanding of the words “festival” and “fringe”. The same kind of questions might be applied to Liverpool's Independents Biennial in relation to the International Biennial of Contemporary Art. If the same company or artist can appear in either event – or even both at once – how are the two things to be distinguished? How can we say that those artists who feature in the Edinburgh Fringe or the Independents Biennial are truly more “independent” than those in the EIF or the International Biennial if they’re potentially the same people? How can we believe that one group of artists is less mainstream or more radical than the other when, in other circumstances, they could be colleagues? Could it be that fringes and festivals are interchangeable with only an administrative structure to set them apart?

The answer that Edinburgh supplies is that distinctions do exist, but they’re less clear-cut than the simple mainstream/underground definition would make us think. The more closely we look at the two NTS shows, however, the more contradictions we initially face. In the EIF, Anthony Neilson’s ‘Realism’ was a light-hearted theatrical experiment that showed a boring day-in-the-life of a thirtysomething man. Over the course of an uneventful Saturday, he ate, drank, slept, went to the loo and watched television. The novelty was that, in addition to the tedious stuff, we also got a lurid representation of his interior life: daydreams, sexual fantasies, selfpitying musings and all. Some people, most notably Labour peer, Roy Hattersley, found it “pretentious nonsense”. Others were offended by its bad language and explicit sex. Others still were delighted by the boldness of its imagination and comic flair. One newspaper arts editor lambasted the play in print, only to change his mind and publish a retraction a few days later. Gregory Burke’s Fringe play, meanwhile, was a portrayal of Scotland’s ancient Black Watch regiment on duty in Iraq. Based on interviews with soldiers, it was a timely challenge to the liberal-left anti-war consensus and gave voice to a working-class experience that usually goes unheard. It became such a hit that even Prince Charles couldn’t get a ticket. A national and international tour is now being scheduled. So what was it that made one play Fringe and one play EIF? It couldn't be a matter of budget, given that the same well-resourced company was responsible for both. It is true that there were many shows on the Fringe funded by student grants, generous parents and tolerant bank managers, but Black Watch wasn’t one of them. It had a cast of ten, one director, two associate directors and a high-tech sound and video design. The NTS does not make public its budgets, but it’s likely ‘Black Watch’ actually cost more than ‘Realism’.

If you think of the EIF as the “official” event, the embodiment of high-culture values, and of the Fringe as the home of the subversive and the ground-breaking, then you’ll have difficulty explaining how the controversial show turned out to be ‘Realism’ (EIF) and the mainstream hit was ‘Black Watch’ (Fringe). The facts don’t fit. Prince Charles wanted to go to the Fringe, Lord Hattersley regretted going to the EIF. That’s not the way establishment figures are supposed to behave – unless, of course, we’ve made wrong assumptions about EIF and Fringe in the first place. Paul Gudgin, the artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, says the Black Watch / Realism case demonstrates the different ways audiences respond to the two festivals. “They were both incredibly successful in their own way, but they got an utterly different audience,” he says. “If you changed the shows around and put them in different festivals they would have got different audiences. The momentum and near hysteria that built up about ‘Black Watch’ would not have happened if the shows had been the other way around. The EIF audiences are like the horse racing fanatics who have studied the form and they know in advance what they want to do; whereas the Fringe is much more like someone turning up at the race track and deciding what to go and see. A show like ‘Black Watch’ becomes a must-see event and creates an opportunity that you just don’t get in other places.” Before exploring these ideas further, let’s have a recap about how Edinburgh came to be home to the world’s biggest arts festival. It all began in 1947 when, in a mood of post-war optimism and good-will, the Edinburgh International Festival was launched. It was an attempt to emulate the European festivals, such as the Salzburg Festival, which the founding director Rudolf Bing had enjoyed in the inter-war years. In the first programme, the city’s Lord Provost wrote that he hoped visitors would “find in all the performances a sense of peace and inspiration with which to refresh their souls and reaffirm their belief in things other than material.” Bing’s first programme included Glyndebourne Opera, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Ballet, as well as a mix of chamber concerts and recitals by local and international artists. The blueprint has remained to this day.

But that same year, a curious thing happened. Eight theatre companies which had not been invited by Bing decided they would come to Edinburgh anyway. They included Glasgow Unity Theatre and London’s Pilgrim Players and, between them, they staged ten plays in smaller theatres around the city and as far afield as Dunfermline. The term “fringe” was coined the following year – an improvement on “Festival Adjuncts” – but the defining principles of the event were established from the start. Crucial among them was that no invitation was necessary to perform. On a fundamental level, what distinguishes the EIF from the Fringe is not quality or ambition, but the sanctioning or otherwise of an artistic director. From its spontaneous roots, the Fringe began its organic growth. The first Fringe Programme appeared in 1954, a central box office was set up in 1955, and in 1958 a formal Fringe Society was established. Over the decades the event grew at a sometimes alarming rate, eclipsing the size of the EIF and, for many audiences, coming to define the spirit of Edinburgh in August. The 2006 event featured 28,014 performances of 1,867 shows staged by an estimated 16,990 performers. With that huge rise in scale has come an ever more professional approach to the administration of the Fringe. As recently as the late-80s, the whole thing was run by only two full-time employees plus a team of seasonal workers. Today there’s a core staff of 12. Such a professional operation might seem counter to the old “let’s do the show right here” ethos, but the founding principle remains: anyone can join the fun without waiting to be asked. That’s not to say there aren’t costs involved. For an artist to get on the Fringe mailing list for a year costs £10 (email) or £20 (post), in return for which they get bulletins and practical advice. A 40-word entry in the Fringe Programme costs £200 or £300, depending on how close to the deadline you leave it. That fee also pays for the Fringe Office’s services, including the box office (they take a 6% cut on sales), the distribution of listings information and the marketing of the event as a whole.

To an impoverished artist it’s a lot of money, but still only a fraction of the costs of venue hire, accommodation, transport, publicity and staging. You can choose to sidestep the Fringe organisation, but going it alone in the world’s biggest arts festival can be hard work. Surveys suggest that 70% of audiences regard the Fringe Programme as their number one source of information and the Fringe’s box office accounts for about 35% of tickets sold.

Gudgin’s advice to anyone trying to run a fringe elsewhere is to do it for the right reasons. “It comes down to the motivation for the festival,” he says. “A good motivation is to give a platform for a particular style or medium of work. But if you set it up with the aim of killing off a rival festival in five years, that’s the wrong way to be heading. The motivation has to be artistic rather than political. The festivals that start with strong artistic identities are the ones that survive.”

“I love the open access of the Fringe,” says Gudgin, who’s been in charge for nine years. “In some ways the Fringe is more of a federation of venues – some of which are so big they could be festivals in their own right – but still it’s the case that a company will appear from nowhere at a small venue and will do well. That’s still important. Our own R&D is built into the festival.”

A five-minute walk up the Royal Mile from the Fringe Office, the newly installed artistic director of the EIF is musing over the festival phenomenon. Jonathan Mills arrived in Edinburgh in October 2006 with a track record that includes stints at several festivals in Melbourne and Brisbane. Replacing Brian McMaster, who led the EIF for 15 years, he is pursuing a policy of “evolution not revolution” although, significantly, he is planning to commission visual art as well as the standard mix of opera, dance, concerts and theatre. The difference between EIF and Fringe, he says, is to do with the way they are programmed and the way audiences respond.

Although he has no direct artistic influence over the programme, his work during the year does have a bearing on what audiences get to see. “You can have a lot of influence,” he says. “That doesn’t mean your pet shows are going to appear but, for example, we’ve been two or three times to New York with the intention of making contacts over there. We’ve had a significant increase in the number and the calibre of shows from New York. We can’t take the credit because it’s down to the venues to programme them, but we’ve opened up channels of communication. It has a subtle influence on the programme." Learning lessons from the Edinburgh Fringe can be difficult because of its unique history. It has often been emulated, but no city could mimic the spontaneous way it started. “A lot of other fringe festivals programme part of the festival and have part of it non-programmed,” says Gudgin. “That’s difficult because you end up with the haves and the have-nots. Here it’s not so black and white. Other fringe festivals find it difficult to get a sense of scale and openness, yet keeping a threshold of quality.” The success of the festivals in Edinburgh (also taking place in August are the International Film Festival, the International Book Festival and the Art Festival) can be attributed to the profusion of artistic activity in the city. Take any element out and the whole thing would suffer. “I think a catalyst for the festivals being so strong is this balance between competition and cooperation,” says Gudgin. “But Fringe performers are not setting themselves up in opposition to the EIF, it’s not on the radar. They come either just to be part of it or to generate more work for themselves and getting a profile and press coverage.”

“The most important distinction is the scale, the scope and the ambition of the work,” he says. “There’s been plenty of extremely edgy, scabby, difficult sort of work in the EIF that could easily have been in the Fringe programme. It comes down to the curating of the programme, the overall architecture and design of how the programme fits together and what you want to do. “These festivals will only continue to work if they fulfil two fundamental needs: the need to nurture artists and the need to nurture audiences. There’s a profound distinction between finding a show that has an audience and building an audience for a show. These festivals are important because people will accept a different level of participation. They have a different set of expectations. They’re prepared to gorge themselves and go to lots of things in a short space of time and to be open minded in their attitudes.” In other words, the merit of a festival, whether “official” or fringe, is in the effect it has on audiences and artists. It might be generally true that one is more high-brow, the other more experimental – and it could be that the tension between the two is creative – but what’s more important is that a festival is festive. It is a disruption of our normal patterns of behaviour, a celebration, a bringing together of people, ideas and experiences. More than any individual work within it, the festival allows us to take time out from our daily lives and make us look at the world differently.

BY JOHN BRADY Sometime in 2005, after three attempts (1999, 2002 and 2004), the powers-that-be gave up trying to curate the Independents. The Afoundation put its money into Greenland Street – a new, all-year round gallery with its own agenda and curatorial team. A fine addition to the City’s visarts infrastructure, but no more handouts and websites for Independents. Fed up taking flack for inaccuracies in the Independents’ listings, the International Biennial said DIY. The Biennial powers-that-be have always wanted their very own fringe / underground with a vibe of trail-blazing cool and radical fun, but they wanted to control and curate it. Oxymoronic or what? Independence cannot be curated. Wherever quality-control walls with their ‘conform or keep out’ signage are built, groups will splinter and rebels rebel. It’s Nature. And it’s natural that elements of the 2006 programme were embarrassing and others inspirational. And it’s good to pick and choose what you praise or dismiss. And it’s good to resource and word-up your favourites, but whichever way you push it, a door-policy is not the solution. New Kids and Veterans In 2006 a still on-going attempt was made to list everyone who took part and where they came from. The DyingFrogArtsNetwork continues this work begun by Adele Cropper. So far we have 532 records. Several ephemeral events did not upload information to our website. There will never be a definitive number. Of these 532 Independents 99 were foreign nationals, 86 Liverpool-based, 28 from London and 18 from Chester. The remainder hail from 30 other UK towns and cities. However of this total 133 exhibited in ArtinLiverpool’s web-based Digital Show, although this is a good thing, it is not quite the same as spending the time, money and effort in coming to Liverpool. Notwithstanding, it appears, probably for the first time, Liverpool-based artists were not the majority, but in fact the largest minority, of Independents in 2006. To be representative any three Independents would comprise a scouser, a.n.other UK resident and a foreign national. This class of 2006 may be considered as two groups: new outsiders and veteran insiders. The former being the larger. Typically 2006 was their first Independents and often their first visit to Liverpool. The City was a scene they wanted to be on, they got out, networked, had fun and didn’t stay around long, but want to come back for more. Participation was critical to their decision to attend the Biennial, accessing the quality of the International programme as an art-lover was not enough in itself.

Some veteran insiders have issues. Of the Biennial powers-that-be perhaps it is the City itself that deserves their full attention. ACE provided the funding for the Creative Facilitation Office (CFO) and grants to individuals and groups. The International Biennial receives very significant funding from Liverpool City for a curatorial gambit from which Liverpool artists are excluded, namely the invitation to foreign-national artists to come to the City and to make an artwork with Liverpool as it’s subject-matter. The John Moores Painting Prize does not attract such antagonism because it is open to everyone and selected on merit. Liverpool artists submit work and, from time-to-time, get selected and win prizes. Liverpool City can resolve the matter by releasing funding to the Independents and its CFO, thus ending the financial exclusion of Liverpool artists whilst maintaining the International’s curatorial integrity. Website In 2006 the Independents website was independent. Built and managed by Peter Hagerty using free open-source software, the site enabled Independents to upload directly images, texts and information for the 124 exhibitions and events they listed there. Set up in July, it had 47,000 visits in August and a high of 98,000 in September. Its 270 members formed the core electorate in the voting of artist members to the Independents Board of Trustees. Peer Grouping Totally Free is a first step toward the much desired critical scrutiny of the Independents. Several artists and writers (based in Manchester and Scotland) attended during the Independents and authored profiles of Independent artists that featured on the website and are reproduced here. This is the beginning of peer-group review drawing on independent others without local axes-togrind that helps develop a wider audience for the Independents. The CFO made an agreement with A N Magazine (the monthly national magazine for artists) that an Independents Biennial image would be the front cover for either the September, October or November issue. Their editorial team began considering images in August and from their shortlist of Ben Parry, Gino Saccone, Michelle Wren, Nina Edge and Suki Chan selected Wren’s work for the November front cover. More peer group review of the Independents. Note, not institutions or ‘authority’, but other independent artists, artist groups and activists. The CFO welcomes suggestions as to how to encourage and develop further peer group liaison. Could it work both ways, could (should?) there be, e.g. an Independents Biennial Nottingham or Independents Biennial Sheffield? Perhaps at every Biennial there is an indigenous body of artists marginalised by the arrival of globe-trotting Internationalists? Is, what Venice, Sao Paulo and Sydney really lack, their Independents? Would this be the “nurturing of local incompetence” championed by Stephen Wright (Biennale de Paris) as antidote to a globally imposed “international competency”? Future Stuff Pragmatically, will Independents 2008 be predominantly performative and digital as city centre development ends the supply of idle warehouses as alternative artspace? In the Capo’Cul year the International’s public realm pavilions will be up and away in the unregenerated North End. Ironically, 2004’s finest Independents item Further Up in the Air, in a Sheil Road towerblock, was considered too far out at the time. Obliquely, The Art Organisation (TAO) were the 2006 equivalent (although museumMAN’s a contender), not because of any one exhibition, but by what they did. Opportunist and driven, this micro-outfit secured five empty commercial premises and turned them into an artspace network of fast turn-around exhibitions, filmshows, Live Art and an artists hostel – all without a grant! Maybe the future is a mixed economy where the Independent, the bureaucrat and the entrepreneur find common ground.

WITH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO BECKY SHAW AND MARK RAMSDENS’ INSTITUTIONS WITH FRINGES, THE INTERNATIONALER, LIVERPOOL, MANCHESTER, SHEFFIELD, 2005.

The good news is the Independents survived independence. Although size isn’t everything, it got bigger than before, bigger than the International. European, North and South American, artists from more than thirty UK towns and cities and scousers together doing Art is good. However, the Independents CFO is fragile, it has a PO Box address, a website and a laptop. The most important asset is the Independents individually and their input to the recommendations for the future development and strengthening of the Independents Biennial is critical to its future vitality. These recommendations will be presented in April 2007. In the meantime myself and the Independents proto-Board welcome notice of insights, options and initiatives that may be of potential benefit. A monitoring and evaluation exercise will conclude also in April when various figures, most notably audience attendance figures will be made available.

BY KAI-OI JAY YUNG Taking part in Liverpool Biennial 2006 was dynamic; scattering of opportunities, interweaving connections, provoking discussion and extending my art innovation. Graduated from Dundee University, May 2006, my participation in five separate events arrived at an invaluable stage of my professional visual arts career. My return to Liverpool has been influenced by the city’s rapid transformation outwards, yet, characteristic accent, multi-ethnicity, Chinatown... relocates Liverpool as home.

In contrast, I renegotiated Carling’s Trampoline through Trampoline / Distribution at Transvoyeur’s Live Art Platform. I was keen to disintegrate gallery stillness. Collaborating with four pianists, for thirty minutes they performed live score Distribution to Trampoline’s incessant repetition. As moving image / sonic fixated by everyday spiritual jouissance, I transposed thematic concerns onto audience’s seated viewing. What resulted was a sublimely hypnotic experience, suggested shifting cyclical relationships.

My practice springs from compulsion to create, incite exchange and reassess cultural belonging. My sculptures, videos, drawing constructions and performances spew forth from multi-directional fragments of life. They dislocate cultural formers imposing absolute identities and rigid systems of being. Following a French degree and public relations career, it was teaching English in China, that a student’s observation ‘you’re a banana; yellow on the outside, white on the inside’ instigated such art discourse. My formative assertions concerning identity have since dissipated. British born; regular family meals at Far East and Wah Sing schooling cannot cement ethnicity.

Tucked away in Matthew Street, signature red door View Two had communicated profit venture gallery to me; walls adorned primarily with curious framed content. Then I discovered the top floor, and met facilitator Samuel Skinner who voiced programme intentions. From Chaosmos to Kinetic Fallacy’s multimedia, Skinner attracts music and art lovers to unusual, enjoyable art music; a stimulating inversion of the gallery’s perceived representation. Alongside FACT and Arena, View Two has become an important space of exchange for me.

Having exhibited at Gene Culture, meeting Gaynor Sweeney and Transvoyeur was to lead to an awesome collaborative opportunity; Trampoline / Distribution. Held at View Two gallery, the event was antithesis to the International Biennial launch party. Though I showed Trampoline at both, contexts and motivations diverged. The official International launch attempted to link exhibitors to a venue reflecting Liverpool’s history and landmark buildings. I proposed video performance Trampoline as outdoor projection; nine hours of trampoline assault edited into seven minutes immersion, ...Carling Academy saved the launch from health and safety rebukes by The Crypt, Anglican, Bridewell; Trampoline showed where crazy golf was played and drinks poured.

Indeed, Liverpool’s artist community is organic, with space to think, meet and talk. I was generously welcomed and supported by fellow artists, collectives, independent curators. Coinciding Your Fridge Door launch reflected my ignited hunger; to support Liverpool’s exciting growth. Meeting The Gang; the overriding infectious spirit was clearly led by Liverpool’s inhabitants. No need to infiltrate a closed clique or pre-fabricated curatorial presumptions to join in. From artists to taxi driver, people in Liverpool recognise the real social possibilities for art and culture. Port legacy... cages... MetaConceptual... The Caravan... diverse cultural identity... Let’s address the riots and slave history, Metal locates in Kensington, Royal Standard in L8. This is how we get into Liverpool’s neighbourhoods; art dissemination post biennial.

TRAMPOLINE, CARLING ACADEMY TRAMPOLINE / DISTRIBUTION, TRANSVOYEUR LIVE ART PLATFORM THE ROOM, BRACKET THIS III, ARENA HOUSE FRENCH FANCIES, WALK THE PLANK, SALTHOUSE DOCK ALSO SEE WWW.MYSPACE.COM/KAIOI

Indeed, opportunities were pleasantly spontaneous, like encountering New Bird Street’s China Pavilion, or hearing Milk Float’s calamitous melodies. Meeting Walk The Plank’s Pugh and Potter on their Canning Dock ship also proved a loyal upholding of ‘only connect’ epithet. My visceral sonic visual French Fancies contributed to Grow Your Own Cabaret. Initially scheduled for Liverpool Live, even failed generator did not hamper audience spirits. Lower deck beheld a mystic brew of alchemic vaudeville that encompassed esoteric dance to drama. For me, however, the lynchpin of my Independents activity is encapsulated by connection to Mercy organisers Thomas Harold and Nathan Jones. Bridging the divide between printed word, art and performance, Bracket This began with founding premise that artists come from diverse cultural backgrounds, Mercy encourage “vital emerging artists with a critical regional focus”. My commission for Going Native was pertinent; completing circuit between Independents and International efforts for artists to respond to locality. This overriding ‘context sensitive’ impetus had been purveyed by the Board. Cautious of my cue as Chinese artist wrestling with Chineseness in Chinatown, I could not repudiate the simple enquiry: how do people negotiate their understanding of location in terms of where they left? I deployed my Cove Park residency, Scotland to counter-pose regional narratives with my own cultural heritage, extending this into a wider discourse of mythology and notion of self. Curatorial site choice was dilapidating Arena House; its multiple histories fed into my resulting sonic visuals. Through The Room, I opened up rigid systems of looking, splintering illusions of singular cohesive identity. Shot in disused ammunition bunker, projected performance, obfuscated automatic drawings and amorphous collage constructions interspersed and destabilised

Arena’s dimensions. The Room spilled into conjoining gritty poetry performances and musical improvisations. A micro-environment operating within Mercy’s deliberately uncoordinated salon directive. Bracket This III enabled my work to exist on its own terms, whilst navigating audiences beyond building through the socio-cultural economic infrastructure of Biennial and into Liverpool’s streets. All my activity has been catalyst for my reconnection with Liverpool. The infrastructure is being laid – Independent’s website as discursive forum – networks are inviting, physical spaces beg supersocial networking. It is difficult to leave home, but core tenet of the festival reminds us of art’s nomadic expanse. Such are 2007’s parallel investigations; a Munich residency in collaboration with The Royal Standard and Metal; transferring local into artist geo-diaspora. Meanwhile, with Walk the Plank I celebrate Chinese heritage in ‘Beyond The Arch’, re-anchoring the very locality that centres me to Liverpool. It’s promising to hear people are looking Northbound... Liverpool irrefutably nurtures local and international talent. Prior to returning, I feared a mega structure Biennial to be counterattacked, prompting outlawed Independents, fringe art jarring of mechanics; cute. Such is good versus evil neat fairytale; reproduction, commercial market, white space versus derelict guerrilla tactics. Conversely, taking part proves a mutating hyperactive flux of artists and rhizomatic geopolitical histories. From cross-fertilised partnerships, assemblaged happenings, democratic strategic artforms, hybrid audiences, the entire city pulses with all kinds of art for all kinds of people. There is no clear them / us demarcation; it is alongside and within the Biennial framework that Liverpool has welcomed me. How reassuring to be contradicted. Liverpool is fulfiling its potential and I am proud to enriching its story.

UNTITLED, TIM ELLIS THE ART ORGANISATION PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

MANDY ROMERO, TRANSVOYEUR PERFORMANCE ART PLATFORM VIEW TWO GALLERY, MATHEW STREET. PHOTO: PETE CARR

THE REASON OF THE BODY, ROSIE CLARKE WOLSTENHOLME SQUARE (TOP BACKWARD LEAN, BOTTOM FORWARD LEAN ) PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

BY TIM BIRCH

“I went to Goldsmith’s but I don’t really think of myself as a Goldsmith’s graduate.” Michelle ‘Mosh’ Wren laughs — the first of many knowing smiles flashing across her bright, open, youthful face. Instant intrigue: not only did ‘our Mosh’ attend the trendy art school she got a First. “I only applied for it as a last choice,” says Michelle, candidly. “My tutor at school said ‘why aren’t you applying there? — Go on’. I was like ‘oh whatever’, turned up and found out it was a really good art college.” And the First? “Yes. I think it bowled a lot of tutors over. It was really unusual.” Michelle, some might cynically say, looks like an art school dropout. It makes her achievement at Goldsmith’s all the more sweet. “I do photography,” she says gesturing to a scale model of a theatrical proscenium arch, in cardboard, peppered with pictures. “This piece has fallen apart now — it wasn’t made very well but this is my world. This is New Cross (the location of Goldsmith’s).” She points to photos: “This is an amazing punk club... it used to be a massive, dirty big pub it’s amazing. They refurbished it all one year. I superimposed this graffiti from the Berlin Wall on there...” A quick proviso. Mosh is a solid talker. Yet somehow she manages to get through a lot of words without shouting or breathlessness. “This was about reclaiming the space and making your world your world and how like everything was changing all around us but we all used this space for what it was.” The down-to-earth spirit and the girl-nextdoor quality are natural to Mosh. In art terms, she invokes the maverick spirit running throughout art history, enlivening and enriching it. It all makes for an infectious blend.

Zestful Michelle embodies the urgency among some artists to stand up and be counted — to be a signpost for yourself and your soul rather than a weather cock blown about by the whimsical ways of lifestyle choices, regeneration, globalisation, war, you name it. “At uni, for the first two years I was unconfident — I was trying to do things to please the tutors. I was a bit of an underdog there. I’d only ever read The Daily Mirror when I went there because my mum bought it, do you know what I mean? And all of a sudden you’re on this course at Goldsmith’s and I was getting The Guardian every week and stacking them up to read like novels.” That knowing smile breaks again. “It took me two years to realise you are what you are Michelle. And so I did that in my last year and half of the tutors were like ‘what are you doing? Michelle stop it.’ Everyone had glossy prints on nice mount board and mine were all like cut up.” Of course, rough drafts can have greater impact for their honesty. Refreshing too is Wren’s avoidance of wearing her Goldsmith’s first as a badge or stake on those elusive sirens recognition and success. “I could have a job at the BBC now.” She laughs again. “But I don’t crave that... I didn’t really want my photo took.” She laughs further at The Guardian and The Turner Prize. It’s rare to find in a young artist, the knowledge that in terms of its solipsism, its blinkered view of popular and high culture, the right-on left can hinder things just as much as the catch-all, bad old right. “Me and my friends used to work in FACT... we had a great time... people used to walk around in suits in there, thinking they were really important.” (She drops into an impersonation of an art world snob cum knob swollen with selfimportance, complete with smarmy, all-knowing, post-everything grimace).

LEGEND HAS IT ..., MUSEUMMAN, PARLIAMENT STREET AND A N MAGAZINE FRONTCOVER (NOVEMBER 2006).

“This is my problem with the Biennial. It’s just really not attractive to the people. All these other people come down just for the night and say, ‘oh yes, art’. But what they want to be doing is getting the people down here from the city — and actually being like ‘this is a massive festival on your city’... like Adam (Nankervis, who has quietly convened museumMan). He was the first person who said to me you can come and do what you want here — he let us put parties on here... Everyone else puts up obstacles — you can’t fly post anymore unless you pay the Council to fly post for you.” Back to art. Michelle picks up a tiny shrine, which she’s built into a matchbox, in homage to “a hero” — a soldier who stood guard at his posting during Pompeii. It’s an odd story of blind servitude but, also, one of naked loyalty and commitment and resolve. The ability to see the other side to a story sets Michelle apart from many young artists. I am ultimately led to Michelle’s signature piece. “I made this for this exhibition,” she declaims, “it’s like a poem and you follow it round.” We look at the medium sized wall-based piece — again a kind of shrine. “It’s about what’s happening in Liverpool at the moment... you know I didn’t really want to contribute to the Biennial — I just think art can be really self-indulgent sometimes.” True. And a fitting cue for my own brief self-indulgence. My absolute favourite object that Michelle has influenced (arguably a more precise term for her activity than made) is a Rubik’s cube — the coloured panels have been covered with sections of the Liverpool A-Z. A curious thing happens when you hold this in your hand or toy with it awhile trying to reconfigure the messed up cityscape. The simplicity, the clarity of the idea comes through the medium, the object, the handling (hers and yours). It may well remain missed by most critics and audience alike but, in my view, it’s one of the best pieces across both the official and Independent Biennial.

Michelle’s art could be disparaged easily for its literal impact, its playfulness, and the reliance on the ‘easy’ media of photography. But her art actually operates in an intriguing way, pulling in two distinct directions: her pictures display vision as well as reportage. “Nice new apartments get built everywhere but no one can live in them... and there’s this old theme park in Liverpool, it’s incredible. At the end of my (visual) poem everybody goes to live in the old theme park and rebuilds the city.” The cynical might sneer: the faux revolutionary radicalism and idealism of youth etc. But there’s soulful sincerity to Michelle and her work. “Basically the road where I live is getting knocked down (She flicks a hidden switch and a spotlight reveals the road itself).” She talks on as we look at the rubble, juxtaposed with images of regeneration. She summarises: “We’re the capital of culture and everything 2008 but I live on the streets where they won’t get any benefit. There’s all this money that the council are investing, they’re saying they’re investing in tourism so the people from the city can work harder to make the city a nicer place for people to come to.” She rumbles on. Art’s a blast with characters like Michelle in it. Her matter-of-fact style is quite charming. And her curious, excitable mind has made its mark on my own. All too soon it’s time to go, but not before Mosh tells me of a fanzine she publishes with friends. “It’s called Pigeons, Flies and Fleas sub-titled The Revolution of the Uncounted.” Count me in. I hope one day The Guardian and the BBC and, yes, even the Turner Prize ‘discover’ Michelle. But if they ever do, Michelle will not need their credentials as she’ll be too busy building upon her own — the ones she established there and then at the Independents Biennial 2006.

BY LEO WOOD

Huge changes to the physical and social fabric of the city of Liverpool are taking place. In reaction to these changes, Jump Ship Rat (JSR), a local art collective, have chosen to explore Liverpool 08’s prevailing cultural theme ‘City in Transition’, and to make an artistic interpretation of Liverpool’s changing urban fabric. JSR, who have been themselves pushed out of their home by new building developments and as a result do not have a building space to work from, have looked at ways of addressing these changes; finding ways of taking art beyond the city’s interior spaces and onto the streets, extending the notion of temporary public art. Ben Parry, one of the original founders of JSR, says that, ‘to match the city’s development we need to re-invent the way in which artwork is encountered and experienced’. Parry has engaged and explored the changing nature of the physical and psychological urban fabric throughout much of his work, seeking to discover, ‘new and unknown territories where art becomes engaged with the social and political realities of everyday life’. But Ben Parry has mixed feelings towards the rapid development of Liverpool, as he says that having no venue to work from has created new challenges for him as an artist and has been liberating in a way; Ballet Mechanique has been born as a result of this. Collaborators Ben Parry from Liverpool and Jacques Chauchat from Paris, have decided to take their historical practice of working with reclaimed material and kinetic sculpture, out of the gallery and into the street with their sonic junk street machine. A fully charged 1975 milk float picked up from a Dairy Express ‘milk float graveyard’ has undergone a metamorphosis to become an ‘electro-mechanic orchestra’. The float has been built up to a height of 5 meters with an integrated series of mechanical sculptures made from the detritus of the city; discarded objects collected from Mersey Waste’s domestic disposal sites – ‘45 cubic meters of kling, clunk, slash and boom’.

BALLET MECHANIQUE TOURED THE CITY DURING THE INDEPENDENTS BIENNIAL.

In its alteration, the milk float has become a kinetic cacophony of interlocking motors, pulleys, wheels, cogs and other mechanisms, creating a sound to reverberate through the city. Parry calls this, ‘the animation of objects in anarchic motion in which the spectator experiences the poetic language and song of detritus’, resounding the pace, dynamism, movement and infinite chaos of Liverpool. In recycling the actual waste from the city, the milk float also transforms itself into a conceptual vehicle for urban ecology, reflecting the city as a living organism in a constant state of change and modification. Following the transformation of the milk float at the hands of Ben and Jacques, its original function can also still be seen as an integrated unit within the new dynamic and complex art machine; the original milk float being itself a part of the ecological system of a city, enabling the process of food production and supply, mapping the urban terrain and exemplifying the concept of the sustainable community inherent in the milk round. In all these ways, the milk float reflects and represents the past, present and possibly future of the changing city of Liverpool. Yet the irony to this is that as a machine, the milk float is also functionless, a sculpture of the absurd, ‘debris in perfect disorder’. In operation from 14th September, Ballet Mechanique made a journey throughout the city each day throughout the Independents, offering all those it met a surprise encounter and the discovery of the unknown. Ben Parry suggests that this aspect of the piece is important to him; ‘I like the idea of cultural hijack and to stopping people in their tracks’. In this way, Parry’s reference to Dadaism become apparent, a rejection of traditional artistic and cultural values. He regards The Milk Float as an interventionist piece that takes people by surprise, against their active choice to experience art within the safety of an art gallery. This is not a sanctioned artwork. The milk float has a fixed route, reflective of the milk round of old, and Ben likes the idea of building up an audience throughout the duration of the Independents, ‘to have people in offices looking out their windows at a certain time each day’. But the journey of the float will also always have an element of flexibility and openness to change. The milk float will create spontaneous and memorable moments in an otherwise routine day. As well as being an artistically innovative and challenging piece, it is also simple anarchic fun. So keep all eyes peeled not to miss it, though this seems impossible, when Ballet Mechanique hits your street, heads are sure to turn.

BY TIM BIRCH “I haven't got an art degree and there is a certain amount of snobbery around that... I came to this through work first of all as a journalist with BBC News & Current Affairs.” So states Max Zadow as we meet inside the FACT café. Well used to teasing out a narrative then, Max outlines his backstory. "I have a long history with the Biennial. My first commission was when I pitched an idea to ‘White Diamond’ (Liverpool-based art organisation and periodical publisher of an art fanzine). It was a digital art piece. I hate it now but at the time it meant quite a lot to me. So each time I try to do something for the Biennial and this year there are quite a few pieces which have ended up being used in the Biennial. It’s been a good way of coalescing activities — of giving them a focus, a place for premieres, a space in which they can be seen and a focus for collaboration.”

Collaboration is a key word for Max. A strong character and an eloquent speaker, Max nonetheless is quick to emphasise that his modus operandi is teams. He summarises three core group-led activities. “First of all there’s Onteca (a multimedia company and Max’s current employer). Then there’s Digital Production by Disabled People (a local organisation). It’s an art collective I’m co-founder of... with Ross Clark — a good strong local artist, went to Central St. Martin’s — proper artist’s pedigree (he winks). We co-founded this group. There are eight of us currently — we have a strong line up of talented artists who work very well together. And it’s growing. Our main art practice centred on that group — it’s a name we fight under — a flag of convenience. We’re pushing forward a project of films, pushing issues in disability and consciousness and what digital, multimedia art is.” The effort is paying off in terms of bona fide presence throughout the Biennial. Max was involved with work shown at the official Biennial’s launch party; three films were made and shown under the umbrella title, ‘Ghosts of the Future’ as part of the Independent strand; and there’s an intriguing city tour. “Ghosts of the Future was three films by three local artists who happen to be disabled,” says Max. “Each one is designed to be projected onto buildings which are currently not accessible to disabled people but will be in future. It’s a statement of intent by the people who are renovating those buildings —including the Bluecoat — saying ‘we mean it that we’re going to make these buildings accessible. And here are these ghosts of the future, these artworks created by disabled people we are displaying on our walls as a flickering foretaste of what’s to come.”

GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE, A SERIES OF FILMS BY ROSS CLARK, ANNE CUNNINGHAM AND MAX ZADOW. SCREENED AT THE CARLING ACADEMY (BIENNIAL LAUNCH) AND 3345 SLATER STREET. EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ACCESS IN THE CITY, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK: 2, A LIVE-ART COACH TOUR WITH MAT FRASER & MAX ZADOW (TWICE DAILY DURING LIVERPOOL LIVE 06). ON THE EDGE, AT THE ALIMA GALLERY (FOR THE INTERNATIONAL & DADAFEST PROGRAMME). FOR MORE ON MAX ZADOW SEE WWW.ONTECA.COM

It is only when our conversation arrives at disability issues that Max’s own disability is brought to the fore. He walks with two canes. Earlier I’d helped him ease slowly down into his chair — a task by which, he says, the FACT staff know him well. “Interpretation of a Dream was my film — basically my id, ego and superego fighting it out onscreen. It’s about seeing myself as an integrated person in the future.” The different warring parts of Max’s personality, compounded by disability, make for an intriguing multiple personality disorder. “My id was a Ming the Merciless crossed with a businessman / 1930s gangster,” explains Max. “I represented my ego as a gothic Richard III and my superego as a girl in a toga.” I can see the first two ‘in’ Max. What about that last one? “It’s to do with my past, the old anima thing and my religious beliefs — I like techno paganism and I like to shove in at least one reference to the goddess in every piece... my supergo being a Minerva, Athena figure: wisdom and yet that incompletion. Also that was a chance to bring in Rebecca Virgo who’s a disabled artist.” What’s telling is Max’s honesty (“that incompletion”) and his will to empower a team at every opportunity (working with artist Rebecca Virgo).

What about the third core group for Max? “The Gang. We met each other at the show which broke Robin Archer. A multimedia show, the commission for the Capital of Culture. It cost £240,000 — and actually wasn’t all that bad. There were a series of workshops we’d all been brought on to run... well personally I soon realised there are all these people so much better than me.” Graciousness in defeat is another of Max’s traits to warm to. “Liverpool is full of multimedia artists,” says Max. “But, well, we all said actually there’s a lot less pretension about us, and a lot more wit and ability to work together... so we organised a group of us to meet every couple of weeks and discuss matters of mutual interest. We’ve been going about a year and we’ve had Gang shows, swapped skills and resources and so on. In a city where we need more artistic output we have to do it for ourselves.” DIY has been a prevalent attitude in art on the back of those so-called ‘sensational’ 1990s (Hirst et al). But isn’t it downright difficult for disabled artists? “What’s good about this Biennial is that a lot of the high profile establishment venues have really bent over backwards to make sure they are accessible. There was a piece of work which I was involved with shown at the opening party of the official Biennial — they could have got somewhere up ten flights of stairs but they made sure it was somewhere with a lift. The Independent’s opening party was up ten flights of stairs but the reason was they couldn’t find anywhere they could afford... so there’s this tension between what I want to support — work generated by the grassroots and by people doing it right here, right now — and those ten flights of stairs... In fairness the Independents have been thinking access all along — every event had to register whether it was accessible or not.”

Max is an empowered, proactive, generous artist. As we sit in FACT’s café Max loudly chastises FACT for never having dedicated a show in their main spaces to local North West artists but he also applauds the current Biennial showing at FACT. He’s passionate about multimedia art yet bemoans art in general. “Now people can be artists without creating art. And that worries me,” he says. “I think we need to get away from that and get back to the idea of the artist as creator. That might allow us to make a bit more art and spend less time worrying about it.” Ending on a high, Max is in buoyant mood about the tour. “Me and Matt Fraser, him off the telly, are going to do a tour of Liverpool: Disability, Architecture and Access on the 27 and 28 October — organised by the Bluecoat... we’ll visit famous people’s houses like Hitler and the only bloke who shot a Prime Minister — so that’ll be two local heroes.” Max shares the wicked streak of black humour running amongst disabled friends I’ve known. The content of the tour? “An exciting adventure into, er, stuff.” Our Max is not one for the hard sell. “Anyway Matt's writing the script so it should be good,” he summarises. “It’ll be a laugh — Matt’s a fun guy and we’ve got some surprises.”

BY CECILIA ANDERSSON In conversation with Sarat Maharaj, the Chilean artist Mario Navarro spoke about his work in response to the quick pace of the contemporary art world. His most recent work, which is the result of having worked collaboratively with a group of people who have had brain injuries, was exhibited at the Central Library as part of the International Biennial programme. It embraced a multiplicity of ideas introduced in various organisational systems. In another project, Navarro curated an exhibition where the exhibiting artists changed the works on display every day. His aim was to connect things that, in his opinion “should be connected”. In a realm of similar concerns and efforts, the Art Organisation (TAO) currently run five temporary exhibition spaces in Liverpool city centre. All venues are housed in derelict buildings and operated on a shoestring budget. With the encouragement by TAO’s director and curator Gregory Scott-Gurner, complete turn around of exhibitions are done pretty much over night. Furthermore, the process from proposal to exhibition can at times take less than a month since the whole idea is that the concepts as well as the actual installations are worked on by the artists themselves. TAO has over the past six years gathered experience at the 491 Gallery which has run as a non-funded space in Leytonstone. In an effort to expand that experience and to grow with different communities, TAO came to Liverpool in 2004. There was obviously no lack of derelict buildings in the city centre at the time and they basically picked the ones that looked interesting and approached the property developers to see what that they could get their hands on. The results are the five venues now in operation. Approaching dereliction as inspirational and the process of making these spaces habitable empowering, while at the same time trying to get access to free live and workspace, TAO is a grass roots organisation with numerous members and an expanding network. Everyone who wishes is welcome to be part of this slightly anarchic constellation as it works its way through the city. It operates organically and in a completely ‘analogue’ manner which in obvious ways work to the organisation’s advantage as it creates a strong unit between likeminded people. Its temporary and nomadic nature is built on the ethos of recycling; stuff found in the skip on the street, wood from demolished houses, colleagues, friends and family contribute material and objects to the functional, friendly and sparse set up of these spaces.

Walking down the street in summer 2006 I came across the MetaConceptual Gallery on Roscoe Street, fully graffitied and with TAO’s logo on the façade. The meta-concept stayed as a riddle with me for a while, but then I gave up on solving its meaning, at least for the time being. In further conversation with Scott-Gurner who invented the terminology, he explains that it stands for that which we some times are unable to express and possibly feel unable to name as knowledge, but still feel we possess and somehow ‘know’, perhaps as part of a consciousness not fully explored and less understood. However, the meta-concept is intensely real. Meaning beyond concept, it defies intellectualisation and instead demands action. This is the knowledge of a body that makes, and through making that becomes real. Having developed and staged a 24 hour experience in 1999, Scott-Gurner felt the activities mostly fell within what could be called a post-conceptual movement. The current meta-conceptual activities are explored and carried forward in various ways and in various constellations. As a brief overview of the impressive schedule that took place in the five spaces, the Projection Space on 2 Roscoe Street offered classic, silent, black and white films accompanied with a live musical score every Wednesday night. 52 Roscoe Street functioned as a community gallery and rehearsal space for various groups and activities. TAO’s communal living space on 102 Seel Street was open for visitors by appointment and had room for guests who wished to stay overnight. 34A Slater Street hosted the International Gallery which put on three high quality exhibitions and the RE-Evolutionary Gallery (Wolstenholme Square) was home to a series of group shows. It will be interesting to see what implications an initiative like this may have on future activities in the city. In many ways, it would have been great had TAO taken up abode here a bit earlier, but as there is still lots of ‘community regeneration’ to be done, this way of working may well be a functioning model or tool for a grass roots organised regeneration, for example at some of the warehouses along the river. TAO provides a valuable model for thinking about community, about regeneration and about the current role of art and artists in this context.

FOR FURTHER DETAILS ABOUT THE ART ORGANISATION, THEIR LIVERPOOL VENUES AND FEES PAYABLE BY PARTICIPATING ARTISTS SEE WWW.THEARTORGANISATION.CO.UK

AARON STEED / AARON MILLER / ADAM NANKERVIS / ADAM SLOAN / ADAM SLOANE / ADAM WEBSTER / ADAM VINCENT / ADRIAN PRITCHARD / ÀGATA ALCAÑIZ AGNIESZKA SZUBA / AILIE RUTHERFORD / ALAN WHITFIELD / ALAN WHITTAKER / ALAN MCKERNAN / ALAN WILLIAMS / ALBERTIN / ALEJANDRO CASALES ALEX JACKSON / ALEX HARTLEY / ALEXANDRA WOLKOWICZ / ALICE LENKIEWICZ / ALISON BAZELY / ALLEN MORGAN / AMANDA OLIPHANT / AMANDA FERGUSON AMANDA NEWALL / AMELIA CROUCH / AMY CROFT / ANDOR KOMIVES / ANDREA COTTON / ANDREA MORA / ANDREA SZOCS/ ANDREW TAYLOR / ANDREW GALBRAITH / ANDREW HODGE / ANDREW BRACEY / ANDREW MOTTERSHEAD / ANDY MAGEE / ANDY COUNCIL / ANDY SMITH / ANGELA PRESNAIL / ANGELA REDFERN / ANN ELLIS ANNE CHARNOCK / ANNE LISE STENSETH / ANNE-LAURE FRANCHETTE / ANNFRED FOSTER / ANNIE HOUSTON / ANTONIO SASSU ANTONY GORMLEY / ARTHUR ROBERTS / ASTRID STEINBRECHER / AUSTIN HOULDSWORTH / BARBARA LAMB / BARBARA HARRISON / BARONESS VON CARRIE REICHARDT / BARRY COOPER / BEATRIZ GARCIA / BECCY WILLIAMS / BEN ANDERSON / BEN CHAPMAN / BENJAMIN EGERTON / BENJAMIN PARRY BIRGIT DEUBNER / BRENDAN LYONS / BRENDAN BYRNE / BRENDON FLETCHER / BRENT PATTERSON / BRIGITTE JURACK / BRITTA JAGER / C. PARAOAN ADRANEDA / CALLUM MONCRIEFF / CANNON KING / CARLOS SARRIA / CATERINA DAVINIO / CATHERINE SHEA / CHARLENE DAVIES / CHARLES NUTTALL CHARLESWORTH / CHARUVI AGRAWAL / CHERRY TENNESON / CHRIS BOYD / CHRIS WRIGHT / CHRIS DICKASON / CHRIS FRASER / CHRIS HAUGHTON CHRIS BORKOWSKI / CHRISTIAN LINDEMANN / CHRISTINA MAIGA / CHRISTOPHER TURRELL / CIKITA Z / CLAIRE WEETMAN / CLAIRE CHAMBERS / CLAIRE BAITES / COLIN SERJENT / CONSTANTINE SOTERIOU / CRAIG ATKINSON / DAN MCBRIDE / DAN HARVEY / DANIEL CROWE / DANIEL SIMPKINS / DANIEL SHAW-TOWN / DANIEL DERRON / DANTE MARCUCCIO / DANY LOUISE / DAVE BIXTER / DAVE KENT / DAVE BROWN / DAVE MILLER / DAVE REINBOLD / DAVID MILES DAVID HANCOCK / DAVID BUCKLAND / DAVID COWEY / DAVID KNIGHT / DAVID L. KING / DAWN WOOLLEY / DAWN HANNAH / DAWN HOCKNELL / DEREK CULLEY DEREK VERRILLI / DHANANK PAMBAYUN / DIANA KRILOVA / DIANE DWYER / DIANE FRASER-BELL / DOINA STICI / DOLLY BROWN / DOMINGO RODRIGUEZ DOROTHEA FAYNE / E L S KERSHAW / ED BIXTER / ELEANOR HAWKRIDGE / ELIZABETH HODGKINSON / ELLAKASIA NORDSTROM / ELSA TIERNEY / ELVIRA PEREZ EMIL MORITZ / EMILIO MARTINEZ-GONZALEZ / EMMA SWEENEY / EN BURK / ERICA GLASIER / ERIN B LILLIS / ERNESTO SAREZALE / EUGENIA IVANISSEVICH EVA GYORFFY / EVONNE KEELER / FAMOUS WHEN DEAD / FFION DAVIES / FILIPPO BAMPI / FIONA WARD / FIONA SINCLAIR / FIONA CURRAN / FLETCHER KLIMOWSKIL / FONCHON FRUNLICH / FRANK MOORE / FRANK ROONEY / FREDERICK JONES / FUMITOSHI SANO / GARETH KEMP / GARETH HOUGHTON GARY HUME / GARY SOLLARS SOLLARS / GAUTIER DEBLONDE / GAYNOR EVELYN SWEENEY / GEMMA HARRIS / GEORG GARTZ / GEORGE LUND / GEORGE JONES GEORGIA BASSEN / GIANNI BIANCHINI / GILES HINCHCLIFF / GILES CORBY / GINO SACCONE / GORDON CULSHAW / GORDON CHEUNG / GRACE SCHWINDT GRAHAM WATSON / GREGORY BYATT / HAGERTY PETER / HAMID GHALIJARI / HAMISH MARR / HANNAH JONES / HANNAH WOOLL / HARIS ALI MIRZA HAYLEY NEWMAN / HE YUN CHANG / HEATHER ACKROYD / HELEN FROSI / HENNA RYYNANEN / HERVE BERILLON / HIJIRI / HOLLY CORNFORTH / IAN MCEWAN IAN TURNOCK / ISAAC HOLK / ISABEL YOUNG / ISSAY TAKAMADOKA / JACQUELINE MARIE OKUHARA / JACQUES CHAUCHAT / JACQUI CHAPMAN / JAMES BUSO JAMES BENNETT / JAMES HORN / JAMES ROPER / JAMIE TORODE / JAN WILLIAMS / JAN BENNETT / JANE FAIRHURST / JANE HUGHES / JANE OLDFIELD JANE CHAVEZ-DAWSON / JANICE EGERTON / JAPI HONOO / JASON JONES / JAY YUNG / JAYNE HANNAY / JAZAMIN SINCLAIR / JEAN GRANT / JEANNE STURDEVANT / JEIMY MARISOL MARTÍNEZ GALAVÍZ / JEMIMA BROWN / JENNIFER DEAN / JESS MACNEIL / JESSICA BOWSTEAD / JESSIE BLINDELL / JILL ROCK JIM GILES / JO SWIFT / JO GOMEZ / JO HOWE / JO DERBYSHIRE / JO GOUGH / JOANNE MILLEA / JOCHEN ALLARDICE-GREIN / JODIE SVAGR / JOE CLARKE JOE MAWSON / JOE THOMPSON / JOHANN STAFFORD / JOHN O'HARE / JOHN ANGUS / JOHN ANTOINE LABADIE / JOHN DAVIES / JOHN HUGHSON / JON NASH JONATHAN ALDOUS / JOSEPH RICHARDSON / JOSEPH WATLING / JOSHUA TENNANT / JULIA INGLE / JULIE ROBSON / JULIE JONES / JULIE ANDERSON JUNE NELSON / JUNE NELSON / JUNE KINGSBURY / JUNE HOBSON / JUNICHI TSUNEOKA / JURGEN KISTERS / KAI-OI JAY YUNG / KATE DANDIANI / KATE GILMAN BRUNDRETT / KATHRYN KIMBER / KATIE SHIPLEY / KATRIONA BEALES / KATRIONA EDRICH / KATY-ANNE BELLIS / KAYE MARTINDALE / KEITH FARQUHAR

KEN ASHTON / KEN CHASSEUR / KEN BYERS / KERRY MORRISON / KEVIN HUNT / KEVIN GAFFNEY / KIM FIELDING / KRISTY GOSLING / KYOGO / LAILA QURAISHI LARA ALLEN / LAURA BAXTER / LAURA PULLIG / LAURENCE PAYOT / LAURENCE WARD / LEAH HILLIARD / LEANNE ELIZABETH / LEE WELLS / LEIF GAUTE STAURLAND / LEIGH FLURRY / LENORA CLARK / LEO BABSKY / LEO FITZMAURICE / LEON JAKEMAN / LEON ASHLEY / LEONG WAN KOK / LEWANDOWSKY LIN HOLLAND / LINDA PITWOOD / LINDSAY EVANS / LIS EDGAR / LISA WILTON / LISA BARRY / LISA WILTON / LISA JANE WRIGLEY / LI-SHENG CHENG LIZABETH GATLEY / LOUISE BRISTOW / LUCIA LOBONT / LUCY JONES / LUCY SMITH / LYNDA COOKSON / M SITARA KUMAR / MADHURI KATHE / MAGGIE AYLIFFE MANDY ROMERO / MANN / MANO GERANIS / MARCO A DELGADO / MARCUS COATES / MARCUS YOUNG / MARGIT SCHOENING / MARIE HANSEN / MARIE BERGIN MARIE-LOUISE WILLIAMS / MARK HARRISON / MARISA STRACCIA / MARISOL CAVIA / MARIT VICTORIA WULFF ANDREASSEN / MARK LOUDON / MARK FULLERTON / MARKUS SOUKUP / MARTIN HAMBLEN / MARTIN CLARK / MARTIN ALLMAN / MARY FITZ / MARY GREEN / MARYANN TURKERMAN / MATT INCLEDON MATT MIGNANELLI / MAURICIO SALMON / MAX ZADOW / MAX EASTLEY / MEIINDA FARKAS / MELANIE SULLIVAN / MELISSA BUGARELLA / MEREDITH BRICKEN MILLS / MERIJN ROYAARDS / MICHAEL WHITBY / MICHAEL SEAL / MICHAEL COSTIGAN / MICHAEL PACE-SIGGE / MICHAEL AITKEN / MICHAEL RICARDO ANDREEV / MICHELE NOACH / MICHELINE ROBINSON / MICHELLE JONES-HUGHES / MICHELLE JONES / MICHELLE WREN / MIEKO NOGUCHI MIKAIL MAHARADZE / MIKE KERSLAKE / MIKE CARNEY / MIKE CHAVEZ-DAWSON / MK / MOIRA KENNY / MONICA CILMI / NADIM KARAM / NAGACHOO NATHAN PENDLEBURY / NEAL DAWSON / NEIL MORRIS / NEIL PETERSON / NEIL CAMPBELL / NICK HARDY / NICK EDWARDS / NICK ELLIS / NICK WILLIAMS NICKI MCCUBBING / NICOLA BOCKELMANN / NICOLA FITZSIMMONS / NICOLAS KENDALL / NICOLE BARTOS / NINA EDGE / NINA ROWAN ELLIOTT / NORMAN GIBSON / ORAN O’REILLY / OSVALDO GONZALEZ / OWEN LEONG / OWEN WILLIAMS / OYSTEIN AASAN / PABLO BISOGLIO / PAOLA DE GIOVANNI / PARABHEN LAD PATRICK COYLE / PAUL MATOSIC / PAUL LUCKRAFT / PAUL DAVIS / PAUL STANLEY / PAUL NIELD / PENNY WHITEHEAD / PERSEGHIN / PETE CARR / PETE CLARKE PETER HATTON / PETER DOVER / PETER R. SMITH / PETER CLEGG / PETER LEGG / PETER WORTHINGTON / PETER RICHARD SMITH / PHIL DISLEY / PJ COBBS PUI LEE / RACHEL DOBBS / RACHEL WHITEREAD / RACHEL JONES / RADU BIMBEA / RAPHAELE SHIRLEY / RAY LIAM SHUM / REBECCA KEY / REBECCA FRENCH / REBECCA DAVY / REBECCA REID / RHIAN RUSSELL / RICH WHITE / RICHARD WHITBY / RICHARD HOOPER / RICHARD PROFFITT / RICHARD MEAGHAN / RICHARD ASHWORTH / RICHARD SCOTT / ROB DELISLE / ROB EVANS / ROBERT SHEPPARD / ROBIN SCOTT / ROBYN WOOLSTON / RODNEY DICKSON / ROIE CLARKE / ROSIE FARRELL / ROSS PAUL TAYLOR / ROY MUNDAY / RUI MATSUNAGA / RUSSELL WEBB / RUTH GILBERGER / RUTH PIPER RYAN BRAMAN / SACHA WALDRON / SANDRA CRISP / SANDY VIKTOR NYS / SAM WALKERDINE / SARA PREISLER / SARAH RICHARDS / SARAH LAWTON SARAH CLEAVER / SARAH NICHOLSON / SARAH MCCAULEY / SARAWUT CHUTIWONGPETI / SASSU / SCORDO / SEAN HAWKRIDGE / SEAN HALLIGAN SEBASTIAN PEDLEY / SEHER SHAH / SEJMA PRODANOVIC / SEVENSHEAVEN / SHARON MUTCH / SIGAL ANVI / SIMON BENDI / SIMON D. EDEN / SIMON NAISH SIMON TURNER / SIOBHAN DAVIES / SJ HYDE / SONJA BENSKIN MESHER / SONKE FALTIEN / STEFFIE RICHARDS / STEPH PRESTON / STEPHAN FOWLKES STEPHANIE RICHARDS / STEPHEN MCKAY / STEPHEN FORGE / STEVE GATLEY / STEVE GALLOWAY / STEVE STRODE / STEVEN ASHTON / STUART ROBINSON STUART SEMPLE / STUART CAUGHLIN / SUE MASSEY / SUE LEASK / SUKI CHAN / SUSAN SHARPLES / SUSAN DISLEY / SUSAN LAUGHTON / SUSANNAH HEWLETT / SUSANNE CHRISTENSEN / SUZANNE SMITH / SUZY WALKER / SUZY JONES / TABITHA MOSES / TAEHOON OH / TERENCE BURKE / TETSUSHI SEKIYA THOMAS GODDARD / TIM BOL / TINE WILLE / TOM GRANT / TOM GODDARD / TOMAS CYHITSKI / TONY KNOX / TONY SMITH / TONY PHILLIPS / TORBJORN SKARILD / TYLER COLLINS / URNIEZ / VALENTINA FERRANDES / VANESSA BARTLETT / VANESSA CUTHBURT / VERONICA MOOS BROCKHAGEN / VICKY WOODGATE / VLADIMIR MARTINOV / WALTRAUD BOXALL / WENDY WILLIAMS / WENDY MOODY / WILLIAM CURWEN / WILLIAM MONACHESI / XIA LOU / YOKO KOMATSU / YURIKO INOUE / ZIV QUAL / ZOE ANSPACH / ZOE FAGG

TAO COMMUNITY GALLERY, ROSCOE STREET PHOTO: MIKE CARNEY

BALLET MECHANIQUE, BEN PARRY AND JAQUES CHAUCHAT PHOTO: MYRIAM TAHIR

NATURAL SELECTION, KERRY MORRISON VARIOUS SITES DURING THE INDEPENDENTS MORRISON LOCATED AND MAPPED DERELICT SITES TO EVALUATE THEIR POTENTIAL AS A WILDLIFE EXPERIENCE. TO REDUCE THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF THE PROJECT, SHE NAVIGATED THE STREETS OF LIVERPOOL ON HER BIKE UTILISING HER INDEPENDENTS BIENNIAL OUTININOUT CONE. WEEKLY REPORTS PRODUCED BY THE ARTIST AND DR ALICIA PROWSE (BOTANIST) WERE EXHIBITED AT THE OUTHOUSE, MENLOVE AVENUE. SEE WWW.LIVERPOOLWASTELANDS.BLOGSPOT.COM PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

ART CAR PROJECT (TOP TO BOTTOM – HILARY, VIRGINIA, LISA) LAURENCE PAYOT PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

CONTRIBUTORS ALEX HETHERINGTON IS A VISUAL ARTIST AND WRITER. HE HAS WRITTEN FOR STRETCHER AND QUEEN’S NAIL (BOTH SAN FRANCISCO), ANNEX, THE TRANSMISSION GALLERY, MAP MAGAZINE, THE LIST, SCULPTURE MATTERS AND THE GLASGOW FILM OFFICE. VISUAL ART PROJECTS HAVE INCLUDED EDINBURGH ART FESTIVAL, FILE 2006, SAO PAULO, BRAZIL, SOUNDLAB, COLOGNE, 60 SECONDS OF PLAY, ATLANTA, NOTEBOOK, BALTIMORE, F.CITY, LANCASTER. CECILIA ANDERSSON DIRECTS WERK LTD, A CURATORIAL AGENCY WITH EMPHASIS ON WORK CARRIED OUT IN THE PUBLIC REALM. WERK ORGANISES, PRODUCES AND PROMOTES CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS AND EVENTS. SEE WWW.WERKPROJECTS.ORG KAI-OI JAY YUNG IS A VISUAL ARTIST FROM ELLESMERE PORT. SEE WWW.MYSPACE.COM/KAIOI LEO WOOD SINCE COMPLETING HER MA AT EDINBURGH, WOOD HAS FOCUSED ON ARTS FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT. DURING 2006 SHE WORKED AS PRESS OFFICE MANAGER AT THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, AS A YOUTH ZONE VOLUNTEER AT ZIMBABWE’S HIFA (HARARE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS) AND ENGLAND’S HAY LITERARY FESTIVAL. ARTS JOURNALISM INCLUDES WRITING FOR THE SKINNY MAGAZINE AND THREE WEEKS. MARK FISHER IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST AND CRITIC SPECIALISING IN THEATRE AND THE ARTS. HE LIVES IN SCOTLAND AND WRITES FOR A VARIETY OF PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING THE GUARDIAN, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY, THE SUNDAY TIMES, THE HERALD AND THE SCOTSMAN. FROM 2000—2003, HE WAS THE EDITOR OF THE LIST MAGAZINE, GLASGOW AND EDINBURGHS’ ARTS AND EVENTS GUIDE. SEE WWW.MARK-FISHER.PWP.BLUEYONDER.CO.UK NADIM KARAM, LEBANESE ARTIST AND ARCHITECT, HAS REGULARLY HELD ACADEMIC POSITIONS IN TOKYO AND BEIRUT, AND WAS DEAN OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE ART AND DESIGN AT NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY IN LEBANON FROM 2000—2003. HE WAS SELECTED IN 2002 BY THE UN AND THE CENTER OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY AS CO-CHAIRMAN OF THE LONDON CONFERENCE ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF KABUL, AND BY THE FIRST ROTTERDAM BIENNALE AS THE CURATOR FOR LEBANON. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY BOARD FOR THE DUBAI DESIGN FESTIVAL 2007. KARAM’S CROSSOVER PRACTICE FUSES ORIENTAL AND JAPANESE THEORIES OF SPACE, HE DESCRIBES IT AS ‘HAPSITUS’ I.E. THE UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME OF CHOREOGRAPHED HAP PENINGS AND SITU ATIONS. HIS FIRST BOOK, VOYAGE, WAS PUBLISHED IN 2000 WITH BOOTH-CLIBBORN EDITIONS, LONDON. THEY WILL PUBLISH HIS NEW BOOK, URBAN TOYS, IN 2007. SEE ALSO WWW.HAPSITUS.COM TIM BIRCH, SINCE 1995, HAS WORKED AS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST AND CRITIC — COVERING A BROAD SPECTRUM OF SUBJECTS, BUT NEVER STRAYING TOO LONG FROM THE VISUAL ARTS.

EDITOR — JOHN BRADY PICTURE EDITORS — MIKE CARNEY, PETER HAGERTY, ALEXANDRA WOLKOWICZ DESIGN AND PRODUCTION — MIKE CARNEY, MIKE’S STUDIO WEBSITE — PETER HAGERTY MEDIA RELATIONS — WENDY GRANNON ADMINISTRATION — ADELE CROPPER PUBLISHED IN 2007 BY NONCONFORM, 62 HOPE STREET, LIVERPOOL, UK ISBN 0-9550808-2-7 DISCLAIMER OPINIONS IN TOTALLY FREE ARE THOSE OF THE INDIVIDUALS WHO EXPRESSED THEM. COPYRIGHT OF IMAGES REPRODUCED HERE REMAINS WITH THE ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO KINDLY PROVIDED THEM. COPYRIGHT OF WRITTEN CONTRIBUTIONS IS HELD JOINTLY BY THEIR AUTHORS AND INDEPENDENTS BIENNIAL. THEY MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED, COPIED OR TRANSMITTED WITHOUT CONSENT. INDEPENDENTS BIENNIAL LIVERPOOL 15 SEPTEMBER – 26 NOVEMBER 2006 WWW.INDEPENDENTSBIENNIAL.ORG

JOURNEY WITH RESTRAINTS, BIRGIT DEUBNER EN ROUTE TO ST. NICHOLAS’ CHURCH, WATER STREET. PHOTO: PETER HAGERTY

FROM THE BEIRUT SERIES AND ITS EFFECT ON GLOBAL WARMING, NADIM KARAM, UPSTAIRS AT EDITIONS, COOK STREET. PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

PROVIDING CORPORATE IDENTITY AND ON STREET SIGNAGE, THE 2006 OUTININOUT CONE PROVIDED A VISUAL TRAIL FOR ART LOVERS SEEKING OUT THE 124 INDEPENDENTS EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS. VENUES PLACED THE CONES OUTSIDE IN THE STREET DURING OPENING HOURS AND BROUGHT THEM INSIDE AGAIN WHEN CLOSED. THE CONES WERE SOURCED AND CUSTOMISED FOR THE INDEPENDENTS BY NINA EDGE.