Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014

Alli Sharma attends this year's Bloomberg New Contemporaries Exhibition at the The World Museum, Liverpool and provides an insight into four of this year's 55 chosen artists. Expect video journals, social media references and (of course) Marxism.

The selection of 55 artists by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Enrico David and Goshka Macuga reflects diverse media, processes, themes and approaches. Abundant video works are neatly presented on identical screens, creating repetition throughout the exhibition whilst allowing each its own space. Printmaking, painting and sculpture are also in evidence in an insightful and polished exhibition.

A sense of self-discovery and unpicking of history permeates some of the works by younger artists, and exploring how individuals fit into the global picture could be seen as a natural thing to do in our increasingly fast paced, changing and uncertain world.

On the face of it Xin Shen documents her artist father in his search for authentic images of Tibetan people to use in his own practice. We find that his ‘romantic’ realist paintings feed into the Chinese market and this seemingly simple video journal unfolds to reveal deeper complexities between cultures, art making and global economics. Examining the elaborate systems in which she finds herself operating as an artist, Shen also follows in her father’s footsteps with a parallel practice that supports her studies in the Western world. Globalisation, domestic Chinese politics, economics and art making are all bound together within the story of a touching father/daughter relationship.

Xin Shen, Counting Blessings, 2014, still from video.

A World of Interiors

This year's Liverpool Biennial is themed on the domestic. Not content, however, with the properly house-trained Tate Liverpool contribution, Cathy Lomax goes to the Old Blind School in search of something altogether less obedient.

The Old Blind School

There are two big group shows at the 2014 Liverpool Biennial, which has the banal biennial name of ‘A Needle Walks into a Haystack’, and an overarching theme of the domestic. Tate Liverpool has plucked work willy-nilly from its collection to put together a bunch of things that in some way refer to the domestic, but don’t really do much more. The group show at the Old Blind School is a very different proposition. It manages, by thoughtfully combining an eclectic group of artists whose works when placed together makes something that is bigger than the collection of its parts, to create an cohesive, atmospheric but also difficult show.

Space-Time: The Future at Wysing Arts Centre

Garageland reviewer Alicia Rodriguez visits the future (which turns out to be in rural Cambridge) and is satisfied to find that the world has been overrun by experimental female pop/rock bands.

Ravioli Me Away

Space-Time: The Future is almost like a fleeting glimpse into a micro-culture where the patriarchy no longer exists. That wound, shaped by male-dominated art events and music festivals, is transcended by a cosmic line-up of powerful women, leading us into a furious celebration.

What is so exciting about this year’s incarnation of Wysing Arts Centre’s annual music festival, curated almost flawlessly by its director Donna Lynas, is its confidence not to brand itself as a gendered event or defend its decision to feature only women. The sheer intelligence and quality of the performers is at the forefront of the festival.

Painting the People

'Art is not something to, you know, superimpose over everyday life if it’s any good it has always come from everyday life.' 

Jack Smith

Dave

ACTION! 

Melancholy, jangly-jazz music underscores moodily monochrome everyday is like Sunday tracking shots. Buses drive through the Maudlin Street backstreets of industrial Northern towns where Tom Courtney’s skinny borstal boy is long distance running through loneliness to dissent. Whilst  Bardo blonde-beehive-backcombed, mini-skirting, stiletto-cobblestone-clicking teen-girls rage against their apron-pinny-ed matriarchs. All the fragmentary mise-en-scenery of post war Kitchen Sinkery, that much Morrisey loved, lost land, when a Working Class hero was still something to be has long since faded to grey.

New York: Art City (Part 2 - Escape from New York)

Garageland writer Debbie Ainscoe visits New York. On the second leg of her trip she investigates the confluence of artistic invigoration, gentrification and rent hikes, crossing the bridge from Manhattan to Williamsburg and then Bushwick. (Part 1 – Following the Art)

As a visitor to New York in this short time I saw a very clear view of a pervasive attitude that is being allowed to happen in cities globally. And only in New York does the creative element raise itself so sharply. 

Due to a culturally rich and vibrant past, and a historic encouragement of the arts, this has been the basis of the solid New York art market that exists today within the global one. Small wonder it is such an intense draw for so many artists now.

I took a trip to Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn via the Lower East side. Its galleries are only a hop, skip from Williamsburg’s bright, young trendy professionals over the river. 

New York: Art City (Part 1 - Follow the Art)

Garageland writer Debbie Ainscoe visits New York. On the first leg of her trip she searches for the city's creative edge, following the art through Central Manhattan to Chelsea and then North to Harlem.

From Chelsea High Line

I visited New York.

And I specifically visited New York for its art. A visit, that on reflection confirmed to me that this is indeed one hell of a place to see it. And yes, people will disagree about the relevance of some, stacked up amongst all the art business hype. Which I get too. But from where I stood, I was pretty much blown away, and not least with the attitude of the artists and gallerists I met. 

Aurélien Froment's Fröbel Fröbeled at Spike Island

Garageland reviewer Travis Riley pays a visit to Bristol’s harbourside to take the benefits of the thoroughly un-English weather, and what better way to enjoy the summer sun than indoors playing with building blocks designed by a German educationalist. 

The walls of the high-ceilinged, Spike Island gallery space are dotted with photo-realistic pencil drawings in thin, white frames.

One series depicts wooden blocks in various formations; simple, cuboid children’s toys in little stacks. The images are central on the white pages, and no evidence is given of the surface upon which the wood rests or any space that it might inhabit – the blocks are isolated in the mode of a study or schematic. They are filled out in soft-pencil tone that perfectly captures the shade of the wood grain.