A new morning dawns in Manchester and there’s a brief dry intermission, so I walk back to Piccadilly station, grab a sausage and bacon roll and get the train to Liverpool. The ticket is only £8 return, which is not bad, but the 33-mile journey takes a staggering 54 minutes. So we’ll be travelling at an average speed of less than 35 mph, not much faster than a good marathon runner or an average horse. Considering that bullet trains can do around 250 mph it makes me think that the boys in charge of the Northern Powerhouse PR BS have got a lot of work to do.
When the train does eventually sidle into Lime Street station, I’m greeted by a real bit of Scouse Surrealism – a public sculpture entitled Chance Meeting where, instead of Lautreamont’s sewing machine and an umbrella bumping into each other, we get the comedian Ken Dodd and his tickling stick facing off the politician Bessie Braddock and her suitcase. Bizarre by any standards.
Stepping outside the station, I’m greeted by a howling wind and, without much effort on my part, get blown the short distance to the Walker Art Gallery, with just enough time to nod at the twin marble gatekeepers at the bottom of the steps leading to the Gallery. It has to be said that Michelangelo and Raphael are both looking a bit shabby, suffering quite badly from acid rain or some other kind of erosion. It’s not just rounding off their features but in the case of Raphael has actually managed to amputate both a hand and a foot. Notwithstanding this peculiar piece of symbolism, once inside and up the stairs, the actual displays are pretty good. Well, the permanent collection is, anyway. This consists of a chronological tour of four hundred years of Western European art in nine rooms, from Medieval pietas to Victorian Pre-Raphaelitism. There are no absolute stunners to tick off but a lot a very reasonable works from continental stars like Titian, Veronese, Rembrandt and Poussin followed by Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Stubbs and Turner representing the home side. From a purely art historical point of view, Millais’ Isabella is perhaps the most important work here, since it can make a reasonable claim to being the painting that kick started the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement.
As is typical of most British public collections, there’s a sad dearth of decent Impressionist painting or any of the other European or American Modern Art that followed. Art galleries in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and all the other major cities, were built at a time when the country was enjoying the economic boom that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. And while the city fathers, encouraged by the proselytising of Ruskin, felt confident enough to buy into the PRB hype and collect their works to add the earlier old masters, they ran out of courage and money when the time came to stump up for anything more modern and foreign.
The Impressionism and Post-Impressionism rooms at the Walker are, frankly, a bit thin, as is the Modern British selection, with the one outstanding exception being Freud’s Interior at Paddington. Painted with an understated elegance in 1951, it’s resonant of the drab decade, with the diminutive crumpled central figure somehow reminding me of the old boss of one of the offices I once used to work in.
There are two other temporary exhibitions to see, both mildly interesting but perhaps just a tad mediocre. The selection of works from the twenty or so prizewinners from the biennial John Moores competition shows just how hard it is to pick winners. About two thirds of the artists are still recogniseable names but I’m not sure the rest are even household names in their own households. And even when it comes to the familiar star names most of the paintings are a bit disappointing with only a few, like the Hoyland abstract and the pool painting by Hockney, still looking up to scratch. And I’m not sure I’d have given prizes to any of the ten artists that follow Peter Doig, whose Blotter won way back in 1993.
Reality, the other temporary exhibition here, uses fifty paintings to examine a hundred years of figuration in British art. The starting point is Sickert’s Ennui, in which a man sits contentedly smoking a pipe while his wife stands behind him, leaning on a dresser, looking very, very bored. I’m afraid that by the time I left the show my sympathies were with her. The curators have managed to get works from some top rank artists – Rego, Bacon, Bratby, Hockney, Currie – but for some reason seem to have only got second division examples. Freud, John Keane and Anthony Green all fair a bit better but if there is a moral behind the show as a whole, it’s only to highlight the difficulties that artists now find themselves up against when trying to use a simple figurative style to represent the actuality of a contemporary life.
As I step outside the Walker, another gust of wind picks me up and blows me downhill towards the Mersey but fortunately I manage to swerve off to the left just in time to enter the Albert Docks and Tate Liverpool. Sadly, the two floors where they stage the temporary shows are both closed for rehanging but that still leaves another couple of floors where they show a revolving selection of works from the Tate’s large, and ever-growing, permanent collections. He may be down in his lair in Bankside, but it’s clear that Serota, the Tate’s capo di tutti capi, still keeps a firm grip on this northern outpost of his empire and his Post-Modern curatorial doctrine, that forbids chronological displays of art, is rigorously enforced up here.* Constellations is the latest gimmicky metaphorical wheeze for jumbling up the art and randomly distributing it around the rooms. If you want to join in the game then you can try to make links between the artworks. So, see if you can guess the connection between the sewing machine covered in cloth that is Man Ray’s Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a maquette from one of Christo’s magnificently mad attempts to hang a curtain across the Colorado desert and Barry Flanagan’s pile of povera blankets. I suppose the answer has to be that artists sometimes use bits of cloth, but I’m not sure if this helps my appreciation of any of the individual artworks, or teaches me anything, or makes me look at the art in any useful new way. But I suppose it keeps the staff amused, using works from the collection as so many scraps to create curatorial collages of their own construction, and surely that’s the main reason for having art galleries.
Other important reasons for having art galleries is to provide spaces for selling knick-knacks and food and so I dutifully have a quick look in the gift shop before going to the café. And what better to accompany my coffee than a free-range egg and Wirral watercress sandwich. And I can report that the local vegetation is definitely edible.
It’s still wet and windy when I leave the Tate and not really conducive to standing around compiling notes for a report on the architecture of the city but, from what I can see, the place does seem to be looking a bit healthier than when I last visited a few years ago. It’s still a bit of a chaotic mix of old Victorian brick and stone Neo-Classicism alongside Modernist glass, steel and plastic but there are more, newer buildings and fewer of the gaps and half-completed construction sites that seemed to symbolise the place when it was the European Capital of Culture in 2008.
Mann Island is one of the newer architectural additions and currently home to the Open Eye Gallery which specializes in showing photography exhibitions. The current display of portraits by Zanele Muholi focuses on the South African LGBT community which, from the evidence here, is as varied a collection of people, with as varied a collection of poses, clothes and dress styles, as one would expect.
Bluecoats, which bills itself as Liverpool’s centre for the contemporary arts, is one of those old city centre brick buildings that’s been given a successful modern makeover. Glasshouse, the main current exhibition, features the work of Niamh O’Malley and, as the title suggests, shows examples of her work investigating the use of various forms of glass – framing it, drawing on it, smashing it etc etc. It’s diverting enough but I’m tempted to carry on playing Constellations and trying to think of other works that could be incorporated into the show. Obviously, there’s Duchamp’s Large Glass and some of the experimental work of Richter’s and Pistoletto but didn’t Lichtenstein also paint some Pop Art mirrors? I think I’m pretty sharp at this kind of game which makes me think that maybe I should for a job at Tate Liverpool where I could play it for real.
For someone with a terrible sense of direction, the Liverpool city signage is really helpful and, somewhat to my surprise, I manage to get to my last stop without too much trouble. FACT (the acronym stands for film, art and creative technology) is a gallery space that specializes in video and installation art. The last time I was here I saw the famous Pipilotti Rist video Ever is Over All, where she walks along a street smashing car windows with a long-stemmed flower. It’s strangely captivating and lingers long in the mind and I’m pleased to say that Lesions in the Landscape, the current show by Shona Illingworth, is also pretty memorable. The exhibition relates to her time on the island of St Kilda with a three-screen video and sound installation showing the island’s amazing flocks of birds making stunning abstract patterns as they squall, squawk and swoop around the place.
It’s still squally on the walk back to Lime Street and then, an hour later, on the trek back to the hotel in Manchester. Here I change into my ceremonial garb in preparation for the evening’s entertainment, starting with a feed at a secret location somewhere along Rusholme’s Curry Mile. I wonder what’s on the menu?
*Tate Britain has, of course, recently reverted to a chronological display so perhaps the resistance is starting to fight back.