TRACE in the context of curatorial strategies

There is no single model for an international biennale of contemporary art.  Venice Biennale was the original and for most of its long history it has been centred on a system of national pavilions that are selected by the agency of the respective governments.  Some countries have a procedure for appointing a jury or a curator while in others the relevant Ministry or its agency make the selection.  Since Venice has always carried a series of prestigious prizes the nations have competed by selecting artists they feel are likely to be supported.  Depending on the mood of the day this could lead to conservative representations or radical gambles.   In addition to the pavilions an Apperto was later established in which emerging artists from around the world were selected by jury.

Sao Paolo and other newer Biennales have largely followed this model with minor variations.  Sydney Biennale however gravitated towards a curated exhibition more along the lines of Documenta.  Until 1990 the curators were selected on the basis of their proposed theme and they played a central role in the selection however the national commissioners often had the power to compromise this process.  Renee Block finally overcame this intervention in 1990 and since then the Curator has had total discretion even though funding agencies often make useful and interesting suggestions.

Istanbul followed a similar model to Sydney and in recent years Sao Paolo and Venice have also introduced thematic and curated sections.  The advantages of this process for the public and for the artists are that a more coherent visual experience can be created.  Common artistic goals bring additional energy to the exhibition as a product of collaboration between artist curator and the public.  Further more by clearly stating the theme and presenting it in public the curator provides a context for transparency and accountability. 

The counter argument to this is that curatorial themes represent unjustifiable influence on the artist's practice and impose meanings that may distort the viewer's appreciation of the work.  I think we have all experienced curatorial themes that do just this and I am surprised that some artists allow themselves to be manipulated in this way. 

The Curator may on the other hand evolve a theme as a response to the work of the artists as an act of interpretation that I believe to be the proper responsibility of a curator in their capacity as art historian and presenter.  It is important to make a clear distinction between this kind of interpretation and (re)presentation.  In the former meaning is drawn out from the work while in the latter the work may be shown in such a way as to distort its connotations. The curator's responsibility to the artist and to himself or herself is to ensure that the context for presentation and the thematic discussion of the work is accurately representing the intentions of the artist.  It should never be a matter of commissioning new work to fit a curator's concept although an artist may well be excited by the company of the other artists and respond enthusiastically to the theme.

Liverpool Biennial decided to invite a curator for the core international exhibition and to allow a loose body of associated events to cluster around this section.  I believe that this was a very sensitive solution.  The international exhibition TRACE provided a centre of gravity and I believe it had sufficient coherence to be able to hang cheek by jowl with other exhibitions and remain distinctive.  TRACEY on the other hand provided an opportunity for local artists and curators to collaborate with colleagues from London and from overseas to make their own statements.  The Education programme provided further opportunities for participation.  In this way virtually any active artist in the community had a chance to become directly involved.  This was critical to the community's acceptance of the Biennial as a whole and it greatly added to its vitality.

I chose the theme TRACE for two reasons.  One was that it arose directly from my current art historical research into the function of objects and materials as triggers for memory, and the other was to do with my desire to trace the exhibition over the physical space of the city.  It is often a mistake to try and conflate two concepts under one theme particularly if it is based upon a coincidence of language however I hoped that in this case the linguistic ploy of remaining ambiguous about noun and verb actually made logical sense.  In other words to trace a path or to search for clues corresponds well with the function of discovery that occurs when implicit memory is unleashed by encountering a bodily sensation.

The difficulty that this raises is of course the apparent divergence between the objectivity associated with realism and the subjectivity of implicit memory.  This is touched upon in the papers presented here by Nikos Papastigiadis and myself but it is necessarily a contentious area in current theoretical debate.  I would simply like to propose here that while an objective view of the world is an essential condition for a progressive society no view of the real could be complete without engaging the reality of affect.

TRACE: An Historical Contextualisation of the Theme

The idea of a crisis in representation has been a recurrent theme in twentieth-century art.  Given the ever-widening chasm between our perceptions of reality and the illusion of its appearance, many modern artists have sought to redefine the relationship between life and art.  The question remains as fundamental at the end of this century as it was at the beginning: what kind of relationship can art have with the real?  TRACE looks to contemporary conceptual art for a rich and diverse range of responses to this question.
 
Fig. 1.  Ian Burn  No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other  (1967)

The artists represented in this exhibition, like a majority of their contemporaries, take it as given that art can engage with complex issues in real life by exploiting the associations of an almost limitless variety of media.  This tendency is often assumed to have originated with the conceptual art movement in the 1960s (and for that reason is often confused with a particular visual style of the �60s and �70s).  In this essay I wish to provide a broader context for understanding the history, and continuing role, of conceptual art with particular reference to the function of the trace.  By incorporating the traces of people, events or natural forces, artists are able to maintain an open text, so to speak, so that the work is recreated anew by each viewer, and in each act of viewing.  In this way the trace connects the internal and external worlds of artist, viewer and object, allowing the work to operate in the present, while also functioning as a sign of past or absent referents.

In the twentieth century, the perennial contest between form and content became a structuring element of artistic endeavour.  Abstraction (as �pure form�) seemed to deny any representation of the real (the banished �content�); yet paradoxically, abstraction paved the way for the emergence of conceptual art.  It did this by breaking the nexus between reality and appearance: a visual logic that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance.  This development is perhaps most succinctly expressed in Ian Burn�s No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other.  The work consists of the title text painted on a mirror.  While reading the words that deny the possibility of visual representation, the viewer confronts his or her own likeness in the mirror.  The obvious contradiction in this work marked a phenomenological impasse in the language of abstraction.   

Burn�s work also foregrounds the contradictions inherent in the reflected image.  Looking into the mirror one has the experience of moving beyond the space of the frame.  As we read the text, however, the surface of the mirror comes into focus as an object in itself.  The mirror was modelled on an ordinary shaving mirror.  This vernacular context for self-reflection provides a contemporary twist to the mirror�s historical association with vanitas: an association that brings us back to the ephemeral nature of appearance in comparison with ideas.  It is Burn�s precise choice of object and text that produces such an elegant and persuasive experience for the onlooker.  With its white text and its simple white box frame the work has all the elements of a sublime formal painting.

Historical ties between the avant-garde and conceptual art movements have meant that textual and conceptual critiques of representation have often been linked.  But there is far more to conceptual art than text-based interventions.  According to Sol Lewit�s founding statement in 1967,  conceptual art prioritises content over form and material means.  This dictum has sometimes been taken too literally as an instruction to dematerialise the work of art, disparaging its aesthetic dimensions.  Conceptual art should more accurately be understood as freeing up the formal and material means of production. 

I would strongly contend that conceptual art did not originate with Sol Lewit�s dictum in the 1960s, but rather had a long gestation in modern art.  Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp are two pivotal figures in this history.  Their aesthetic attitudes were divergent, yet each in his way was a precursor to surrealism.  Both artists looked to non-European and pre-modern cultures for different models of visual representation.  Tribal art, like pre-Renaissance art in Europe, offered an alternative to the Western preoccupation with imitating the appearance of things.  In very different ways, tribal artefacts and medieval icons were traces of the invisible.

Both artists also experimented with re-introducing objects and materials as signifiers.  This was to become a crucial strategy for opening up the boundary between art and life, at a time when the emerging modernist orthodoxy was proclaiming the autonomy of the work of art.  It was not, however, an entirely new strategy.  The religious significance of medieval icons far exceeded their pictorial or iconic content.  Devotional images were treated like relics, imbued with the personality and sacred power of the figures they represented.  Reliquaries, pendants and liturgical objects often combined images of Christ, the Virgin Mary or a saint with their sanctified remains: a piece of the True Cross, a drop of the Virgin�s milk, or a tiny fragment of bone.  As material traces and complex symbolic images, such objects stimulated the intellect as well as the memory and the senses.

The rhetoric of the avant-garde on one hand, and formalist criticism on the other, has distracted historians and theorists from a coherent interpretation of realism in art.  Both limit the interpretation of art to the narrow concerns of either social progress or a transcendent aesthetic.  Together and separately, they blind us to the strategies artists have evolved to make art a powerful vehicle for our apprehension of the world and each other.  Semiotic analysis is another critical tool that has provided a means for excavating the text embedded in the image.  Because of its literary origins, however, it has little to say about the sensory effect of materials that engage bodily memory.

A very down to earth example of layered readings that incorporate this bodily response can be found in Picasso�s Bull�s Head (1942).  The �head� comprises a bicycle saddle and handle bars.  It has the right shape to substitute formally for a bulls face; it is made of cowhide (polished by use); and its shape has been moulded to the contours of the human body, so the idea of being thrown by a bull is also present.  There is a playful association with bike riding, and the thrill of rodeo.  There are air holes arranged vertically down the central ridge of the seat, which in light of Picasso�s tendency to turn the plane of the features through ninety degrees, creates the appearance of an African mask or cubist portrait.  The particular quality of the material, and its potentially fetishistic overtones, could produce further readings.

Some of the most powerful art of the post-war period draws upon the mnemonic function of materials and objects.  Freed from a purely instrumental role, the artist�s materials may be used both symbolically and formally.  The effect is a multiplication of the metaphorical and sensual possibilities of art.  Because every viewing produces a reading based on the memories, associations and sensations of the viewer, there is an indefinite delay in the foreclosure of meaning.  This strategy courts a degree of ambiguity.  Arguably, however, there is sufficient qualitative gain in individual experience to justify the risk.  There are also grounds for anticipating a degree of commonality in our bodily and affective responses, as Susan Best argues later in this volume.

Fig. 8.  Doris Salcedo  Atrabiliarios  (1991)

It is crucial to appreciate the role of bodily memory (and not just intellectual responses) in these processes.  Bodily memory is perhaps most clearly grasped in extreme states of attraction and repulsion.  At the most fundamental level, it functions like instinct: a series of unconscious physical and emotional reactions.  Of the many contemporary artists who have exploited this phenomenon, Doris Salcedo�s work is possibly the most profound.  In Atrabiliarios, for example, she evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that located memory in the body.  The viewer�s response is, in turn, emotional � even visceral � rather than purely intellectual.  Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes donated by the families of people who have disappeared in the political and economic turmoil that has racked her native Colombia.  The niches are sealed with a membrane of cow�s bladder that is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall.  Barely visible through the membrane, the shoes are a particularly haunting evocation of their absent owners.

Salcedo pays obsessive attention to the nuances of material and process in her work.  The suturing of the membrane into the plaster of the wall is done with exquisite care.  Tiny holes are first drilled through the plaster.  The horsehair is then carefully threaded through and taped back while the holes are made good.  When the membrane is stitched onto the wall the holes are once again made good.  The layers of plaster and paint give the work a temporal dimension, as if it has evolved over a long time.  The suturing begins to look like stitches in skin, and the plaster takes on the unsettling appearance of scar tissue.  The effect of this process (which is not known to the viewer) is critical to our empathetic engagement with the work. 

Conventional accounts of representation always present it as a substitution of one thing for another.  A symbol stands for an object; a narrative scene for an event in the real world.  The effect of these substitutions is a closed system of signification that, by virtue of its completeness, excludes both the experience of the real, and the memories or associations of the viewer.  The strategies adopted by artists in TRACE invite the participation of the viewer by transgressing this logic of substitution.  

It is possible to chart the re-introduction of the material trace from Picasso�s Still Life With Chair Caning in 1912 and Duchamp�s introduction of the Readymade in the same year, through the evocative assemblages of Joseph Beuys, to a proliferation of found objects in contemporary art.  While Duchamp�s Readymades were originally conceived as a conceptual strategy to destabilise conventional definitions of art, his use of materials and objects changed dramatically in the major allegorical works, The Large Glass or La Mari�e Mise � Nu Par Ses C�libataires, M�me (1915-23) and Sans Titre.  Etant Donn�s: 1� La chute d�eau  2� Le gaz d�eclairage (1968).  In both cases materials are used for their intrinsic properties, such as transparency and reflectivity.  Glass, of course, has further associations.  It is notoriously fragile and sharp, so a large plate of cracked glass in a public space has connotations of danger.  It is also commonly associated with modern hygiene: a subject of abiding fascination to Duchamp.  His persistent theme of �gas and water on every floor� is an example of this.  The optical uses of glass are also exploited in the Oculist�s Witnesses in The Large Glass.

Fig. 2.  Pablo Picasso  Still Life with Chair Caning  (1912)

In May 1912 Picasso assembled his most important collage, Still Life with Chair Caning.  It is a marvellous and complex experiment that explores the possibilities of a visual language that incorporates the material trace.  He made an extraordinary conceptual leap forward with this work yet simultaneously took a step back in time to a pre-iconic form of representation.  The complex layering of icon and index in this composition turned out to be Picasso�s most conceptual work and in this respect it stands apart from his later experiments.  He never followed up the many possibilities that this collage unleashed, preferring instead to exploit the pictorial adventure that came out of cubism.

The conceptual intentions of this work � in which the visual elements refer to ideas as well as material objects � are evident in many aspects of the composition.  One example of this is the shape of the canvas.  Picasso and Braque often used oval canvases in their analytic cubist works to subvert the tyranny of the rectangular frame, which has traditionally suggested a window onto reality.  Clustered around the centre of the canvas, their cubist compositions challenged the compositional hegemony of the rectangle.  The oval shape in this still life is unusual in being horizontal.  It gives the impression of a circular plane seen in perspective, so that the composition as a whole takes the form of a tabletop.

The subject of the composition is a still life arranged on a tabletop, but the edge of the table doubles as the frame of the painting.  The frame is now an element within the composition, as well as functioning as a containing device to separate the image from the real world.  As a consequence it has at least two, apparently contradictory, functions.  To complicate matters further, the frame is constructed out of a rope coil made by a sailor.  This endless loop binds the work in a literal sense, as if parodying the role of a frame.  The rope also mimics a table in Picasso�s studio that had a carved rope motif at its edge.  In this case it is a real thing standing in for its own representation.  By using a manifestly vertical rope (which we can see and feel) to represent an emphatically horizontal tabletop, Picasso compromises the integrity of the painting/collage as an autonomous, two-dimensional artwork.  This is standard practice in illusionistic painting; with the important difference that here the surface is made real in its own right as a vertical plane. 

Among the painted elements of the composition is a piece of oilcloth: a material that was commonly used to cover tables in Parisian caf�s.  Such cloth was often decorated with photographically generated motifs, in this case a design simulating the caning of a chair.  This raises the possibility that the still life may in fact be arranged on a chair, and not on a table as we had first supposed.  Then again, perhaps the chair caning is simply being the tablecloth!  In Paris at the time tablecloths like this were often held in place by a rope coil, so the table in the studio with its rope motif may also have brought to mind the perfectly ordinary sight of a roadside caf� table.  

Fig. 3.  Marcel Duchamp  Bicycle Wheel  (1912/15)

In the same year that Picasso explored the conceptual possibilities of chair caning, Duchamp placed a bicycle wheel onto a stool.  He later claimed that he decided to do this after taking an apartment with no fireplace.  Duchamp liked to stare into the flames while musing, and the spinning bicycle wheel was to be a surrogate object of reverie.  Three years later, and now living in New York, he wrote to his sister Suzanne asking her to go to his studio in Paris.  His instructions were to sign the assemblage and give it the title Readymade.

This was a simple act with complex implications for the subsequent history of modern art.  The wheel and stool are found objects: objects that were made into art by proxy, at a distance, and according to a set of rules invented by Duchamp.  The title itself is an irrational adjunct that deflects attention away from the purely visual and defers any final answer to the question of the object�s representational status.  In his letter of 15 January 1916 to Suzanne, the artist gave his sister some reassuring advice: �do not struggle too much to understand the meaning: romantic, impressionist, or cubist has nothing to do with it.�

Duchamp�s objects encourage endless conjecture, keeping the process of interpretation and response open.  His ongoing project was to find ways of delaying closure indefinitely.  Works like Bicycle Wheel cannot be reduced to a Marxist critique of the art market, although they produced a good laugh at its expense.  Duchamp�s famous �delays� (of interpretation, of closure) take us, as it were, through the looking glass.  It is no coincidence that so many of his works exploit the reflective and transparent qualities of glass to render the boundary between the image and the viewer�s spatial/temporal reality ambiguous (forty years in advance of Ian Burn�s No Object Implies The Existence of Any Other).  In Etant Donn�s he produces the ultimate delay, by co-opting the viewer as a found object.  In order to see the erotic tableau created by the artist, the viewer must bend down and peer through a hole in a door.  Duchamp not only determines what we will see, just so much and no more.  He also makes the viewer complicit in this act of voyeurism.

Fig. 4.  Dust in The Large Glass  (DATE)  Photo by Man Ray

Duchamp employed other strategies to keep the work open to the world.  By allowing chance to direct his artistic choices, he effectively used nature to contaminate culture.  The dust that accumulated during the production of The Large Glass is a good example of this strategy.  The elements derived from The Standard Stoppages and Lingering Veils in The Large Glass also depended on chance.  The veils, which dominate the upper part of the composition within the pink cloud of the bride�s blossoming, were based on actual veils captured photographically while fluttering in the breeze from an open window.  This breeze becomes the energy that brings on the bride�s blossoming.  The Standard Stoppages, which were produced by allowing three one-meter lengths to fall randomly to the ground, form the capillaries for the bachelors� secretions.

Found materials were used widely in art after Duchamp.  Surrealism, Dada, neo-Dada and nouveaux realisme are some of the more obvious examples.  In music, John Cage�s 4�33� is an acknowledged Duchampian gesture.  Composed in 1952, the piece consists of �found sound� within 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.  In the same decade, Joseph Beuys began to make objects and assemblages that raised the affective power of the found object to a new level.  His work later evolved into an environmental and political campaign, but in all of this he was committed to investigating the boundaries of art and culture.  Beuys made his connection to the real in a less conceptual way than Duchamp.  His great gift was to bring out the inherent voices of objects and substances and to orchestrate them into highly provocative assemblages.

Beuys�s work was informed by two traumatic events.  The first was his near death in a wartime air crash in which he was presumed dead.  He was found and cared for by nomadic people in the Crimea who wrapped his frozen body in animal fat and felt.  This experience, which was easily mythologised, became the basis of Beuys�s subsequent claim on the role of artist/shaman.  The political context of this personal experience was the greater historical trauma of the Holocaust itself.  Beuys had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, revelling in the sense of power and energy it created.  He returned from the war and his physical trials to realise he had been an active and willing participant in the Holocaust.  His subsequent mental collapse is a significant personal fragment of the greater trauma of an entire generation. 

Fig. 5.  Joseph Beuys  Untitled Drawing  (1955)

While Beuys was recovering he spent time on a friend�s farm where he took refuge in the cow barn whenever he was unbearably troubled.  He later recalled how the smell of manure, milk, straw and cow�s breath connected him back to a material � and, he felt, a more feminine � world from which his wartime experiences had separated him.  Beuys equated the feminine principle with a pre-iconic civilisation: a time before language and the knowledge of mortality (Prometheus/Adam) separated mankind from nature.  His many drawings of animals and prehistoric goddesses during the time of his convalescence provide a clear demonstration of this idea.

Fig. 6.  Joseph Beuys  Queen Bee  (1952)

The restorative, organic connotations of the cowshed are revisited in Queen Bee.  In this series of works Beuys used bees and beeswax to make a variety of objects, including prehistoric Venus figures and the cuttlefish pictured here.  The idea of a kind of sculpture or architecture formed out of bodily secretions fascinated him.  If chemical changes in the body were seen as providing the engine (and potentially the medium) for creativity, then nature and culture were one and the same.

In public performances Beuys used his body heat and actions to manipulate materials.  By biting pieces of fat, for example, he left the imprint of his body on the objects themselves.  Some of the photographs documenting these performances � taken by the artist Ute Klophaus � can be seen in this exhibition.  Klophaus used the traditional silver gelatine process and the quality of her printing emphasises the chemical trace of light that makes photographs such a powerful index of a moment in time.  In TRACE she has included 20 photographs of Beuys�s Celtic performances taken in Edinburgh in 1970, along with a series of 20 new photographs commissioned by the Biennial to document the streets of Liverpool at a moment of impending urban renewal.  The aesthetic sensibility Klophaus brings to her current urban photographs is similar to the quality that gave life to the performance works she documented 30 years ago. 

For most of us the enduring images of Beuys from the 1960s and �70s are the photographs Klophaus took as she accompanied him around Europe.  Her photographs of the residues of Beuys�s performances are also unequalled in their ability to capture the intensity of his work.  They are extraordinarily atmospheric, with a dense, grainy texture that reveals the metallic chemistry of the photographic process.  This process � by which the energy of light is transformed into silver salt � is itself a metaphor for Beuys�s theory of sculpture as energy transformed into form.  These are not simply documents.  They are material residues: relics of an ephemeral reality.

Fig. 7.  Joseph Beuys  Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare  (1965)

Photography as trace is a subject in itself.  The photograph has an ambivalent status in relation to representation and the perceived world.  This is partly due to the historical distinction between its documentary and artistic functions.  On the one hand, the photographic image seems to offer an objective record of events; on the other, the photographic print can be seen as an object or process in its own right (in a New Realist or post-minimalist context, for example).  Take, for example, the confusion that surrounds terms like photo-realism.  Works identified in this way take the photographic image as their object, rather than the real world.  They seek to replicate the quality of the photograph, with all its translations of surface and reduction of spatial effect and tactility.  In other words, photo-realism is the opposite of realism.  It is illusionism.  None the less, most people think of these images as �realistic�.  In one sense they are realistic � as faithful renditions of the photographic image � but they bear little direct relationship to the �original�.

The idea of the photograph as a material object implies a different kind of relationship with �the real�: one that is quite distinct from the notion of photography as a representation or pictorial record of the visible world.  This is photography as a physical trace of the past.  When the camera�s shutter opens, light travels from the object to the film where it causes a chemical change to the silver nitrate.  This, in turn, leaves a permanent record of the passage of light, and a shadow (the image) of the object.  Because the resulting print is literally a material trace of the object, it can function like a relic.  A photograph is literally touched by the events of a moment and altered to form the permanent record of its circumstance.  Old prints � especially those in black and white � often carry this association.  The photograph of a loved one that we keep in our wallet is none the less significant for being bent and faded.  The fact that our love is now older, or even lost, makes it an object of deep attachment.  When we take a photo of a lost love from a box or forgotten draw, the shock is not just of visual remembrance: it is doubly disturbing because it seems to be a trace of that person, like finding a strand of their hair. 

While walking in a small town in northern Italy I came across a profoundly moving example of the photograph as reliquary.  In a colonnade near the street corner was a panel extending from floor to ceiling.  It was made up of hundreds of small squares of glass.  Each little square contained an old photographic portrait.  Some had faded in the sun, while others were affected by damp.  Some were cracked, and some of the photographs had become unrecognisable as images.  It was a memorial to the dead of World War II.  The individuals it commemorated would be unknown to the casual visitor, yet the panel itself was a powerful signifier: of loss, the passage of time, and of human frailty.

The photograph is also, inevitably, associated with the news media.  There is something authoritative and iconic about the great news photographs.  The blurred shot taken from a moving car leads us to imagine the photographer�s split-second action.  The lack of focus confirms our belief in the photograph�s authenticity.  This stands in sharp contrast to the photo-realist notion of the meticulously accurate illusion.  In the documentary photograph the emphasis is on process and the feeling of being there.  Many artists have exploited this quality, reproducing it in different media.  Gerhard Richter, for example, simulates the blurring effect in his paintings, while Warhol transferred the photographic image to silkscreen, playing on the mis-registration of the printed photograph in old movie magazines.

Several artists in TRACE have shown an interest in the archival and museological possibilities of film and photography.  Alex Rizkalla collects photographs and other objects that are historically specific, yet have the capacity to exceed their original significance and function.  Rizkalla�s collections occupy the line between archive and Wunderkammer.  He uses his objects to tell historical narratives, while allowing their material qualities to generate a range of associations and emotional responses.  Susan Norrie has edited archival film of the test site at Chernobyl with other fictional film footage to create a chilling representation of the aftermath of nuclear disasters.  The use of the photographic image to create real or imaginary documents has been extensively exploited by Stephen Willats.
 
Fig. 8.  Stephen Willats  Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp  (1968-80)

In 1980 Stephen Willats returned to England from Berlin, where he had been working for two years, to revisit the Avondale Housing Estate at Hayes in West London.  Here he met one of the occupants, Pat Purdy, and together they initiated a new strategy for Stephen�s practice.  His work in the past had always involved tracing social systems and documenting people�s attempts to escape the determinism of a planned environment.  For six years prior to this visit he had been photographing the working or living environments of ordinary people, often focusing on objects he found on their desks.  Through these collections of objects, people were able to tell their own stories and create a personal space.  Together with texts � often quoting the artist�s �collaborators� � the photographs were assembled into graphic structures.  Purdy pointed out that instead of photographing objects, they could be applied directly, and that the text could be written unedited onto the design by the collaborator.

The resulting work, Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp, is an exemplary case of the trace in contemporary art.  Its physical context was a residential tower block originally built to re-house families displaced by slum clearance at the other end of London.  The site chosen for the tower was an isolated area in the middle of a wasteland typical of urban fringes.  Between the wasteland and the housing project there was a cyclone wire fence.  The work took the form of a photographic triptych, with an image from the estate on one side and the wasteland � which Pat called the �lurky place� � on the other.  In the middle was a smaller panel with a close-up photograph of a hole in the fence.  Objects associated with the lurky place were attached to the middle panel of the triptych.

Pat Purdy described how the kids on the estate would crawl through the fence and create camps on the vacant land.  In these camps they escaped the deterministic environment of the project by inhaling the fumes from heated glue cans.  A can of Evo-stick applied to the image of the hole in the fence could be seen to have reversed its meaning.  In the world of the towers it would be a pragmatic object associated with binding and restoring, while once it passed through the fence into the lurky place it became the focus for a dysfunctional ritual of fragmentation. 

Like Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp, many of the images, objects and environments in TRACE can be understood in light of the historical context I have begun to sketch out here, even while they respond to changing technologies and social conditions.  Many of these works convey ideas and engender responses through direct sensory encounters, making for a particularly rich and tactile experience.  A significant number of the artists represented in the exhibition work on public projects alongside architects and planners while still pursuing their studio practice.  They are often at home with new technologies, and use sound and moving image as expressive materials. 

The very different objects that result from these diverse practices may serve a genuine social purpose while still functioning as part of a symbolic economy.  Indeed it is often difficult to differentiate between art objects and their everyday counterparts.  At the end of the twentieth century we have reached a point where artists are working in an expanded field; a point where conceptual art can no longer be considered an avant-garde gesture.

Individual Artists texts

Carlos Arias embroiders immaculate designs with tiny stitches, creating a visual repertoire of images related to the body.  The intimacy of the medium itself, with its suggestion of repetitive touch, lends a peculiar poignancy to these bodily associations.  Traditional folk decorations are also referenced, and one is inevitably reminded of the traditional labour of peasant women who can be seen today on the streets of Mexico City embroidering cloth for the tourist trade.  Like these women � whose motifs are emblematic of Mexico�s indigenous cultures � Arias uses his medium as a kind of writing.  As objects, his designs translate the silences of history into the language of embroidery. 

In his earlier embroideries Arias represented the human body more directly, often using an x-ray view to �see inside� his subject.  Reminiscent of the imagery of Frida Kahlo, this device has its origins in Mexican surrealism.  In more recent works like Autorretrato de Uso (Wearing Self-portrait) Arias represents the body at one remove by making detailed replicas of fragments of his own clothing.  The present work includes a set of 80 small, framed embroideries that hang in a tight grid 780 cm long.  Flanking these are two larger, relatively abstract enlargements of the fabric textures.  The result is a composite self-portrait imaged through Arias�s personal effects: an intimate and ambiguous trace of the artist�s presence.

Miroslaw Balka�s installations transpose the memory of one space into another.  Because their origins are personal and autobiographical � the proportions of the artist�s body, the spaces of his childhood � the installations are seldom site-specific.  As a child Balka spent many hours in his grandmother's house outside Warsaw.  He recalls playing under the furniture and has a vivid memory of the textures and topography of the various rooms.  The house is now his studio, and in many of his sculptures the artist re-works the dimensions and spaces between objects that are so deeply ingrained in his psyche.  His use of materials extends these metaphors of the body and memory.  Salt appears as a residue in channels and on slabs.  Warmth � generated by heating elements contained in fabric and other materials � suggests the presence of living bodies.  Suggestive of hanging figures, these modules create a dialogue between human presence, architectural space, and the time and space of memory. 

In TRACE Balka has installed a soap platform 770 cm square and a few inches high.  Over the window of the exhibition space in the Tate Gallery he has placed a metal grid with lumps of soap wedged into it.  Burnt drawings hang on the walls surrounding the platform.  This work is both visual and olfactory.  From a distance the soap platform looks like a slab of marble, but on closer inspection its softness and soapy aroma reveal its true origins.  The bodily associations of soap link this piece to Balka's preoccupation with the body and memory.  The burnt drawings also have figurative and autobiographical connotations.  Their charred edges draw our attention to the paper itself, while hinting at some past tragedy.  The fragments of soap in the window could be the remains of some dramatic or explosive event.  In fact the drawings were accidentally burnt in a fire that nearly gutted the artist�s studio.  In this way they make a direct link back to the actual history of his house of memories.

Montien Boonma is one of the most gifted contemporary sculptors working in South-east Asia.  His subject matter is profoundly grounded in the spiritual traditions of Thailand, yet he has consistently sought alternatives to the strict confines of traditional art.  Inspired by arte povera and by British sculptors like Tony Cragg and Bill Woodrow, he successfully combines high tech media with the use of junk and perishable materials in his assemblages.  Objects and even entire walls have been coated with aromatic herbs believed to possess psychological and meditative properties.  Other materials, like ash, soil, buffalo hide, gold, terracotta and cement, carry specific associations within the artist�s culture. 

Boonma has used these new forms of sculptural expression to address the tensions and transformations that have defined his country.  Rural and urban, primitive and modern, spirituality and rationality, Third World and First World: these are the recurring themes in his work, and the concerns that set him apart from most Western artists.  An installation he made (at a distance) in Sydney is a striking example of this fusion of technology and tradition.  Four monitors were arranged in a square facing the centre of the gallery space.  Each monitor displayed an image of Boonma�s hand.  As if conducting a ritual, he pointed one by one to characters on a page.  The effect was of a video mantra.  Under each monitor a fax machine endlessly churned out the sacred words on paper sheets.  The sheets were then pasted to the wall from the top edge only so that they fluttered in the air conditioning, just as gold leaf flutters in the draft from a temple candle.  The installation was at once genuine and ironic: a spiritual event and a humorous reflection on the cultural exchange programme between Australia and Thailand.

For TRACE Boonma has made six cylindrical canopies raised on tripods.  They stand like a group of monumental figures under the skylight of the old sculpture court at John Moore University, and are designed so that the viewer can duck under the canopy.  One�s first impression of the dark interior is likely to be the strong smell of spices applied by the artist to induce a meditative state.  The bright autumn light from the skylight penetrates small holes drilled into the sculpture, creating the appearance of constellations in the night sky.  The bodily state of meditation is thus linked to the infinity of space.

Luis Camnitzer: Artist�s Statement
Although I have been working on installations since 1968, it is only since 1983 that I have started focusing on imprisonment.  That year I worked on torture, particularly on the version practiced by the Uruguayan dictatorship during the �70s and early �80s.  Through the use of evocative rather than descriptive stimuli, I tried to blend the perceptions of the torturer, of the victim and of the public with the purpose of blurring borderlines between their respective roles.

In 1988, with democracy restored, I was invited to represent Uruguay at the Venice Biennale.  This time I explored the parallel between the experience of a political prisoner and that of an artist.  According to their disposition, viewers could interpret the installation in one of two ways.  On the one hand, the pieces might be seen as works by an artist who believed himself to be free.  He sought originality, but failed in his quest, imprisoned by stereotypes and aesthetic styles.  On the other hand, the installation could be compared to the world of a political prisoner.  The pieces, from this viewpoint, were hallucinations of freedom.  Here too, they failed, since the author remained caught forever in his acute awareness of the cell.  The image of the jail as a metaphor for the artist�s self-deception still preoccupies me and I continue to explore it.  Ultimately we live imprisoned in our bodies; constrained by the strict rules that determine our acquisition of knowledge; and with our imaginations confined by a web of cultural conventions.  Life in that sense is a jail and physical prisons no more than small, uncomfortable illustrations of that congenital problem.  Making art is scratching traces on the wall to mark the passing of time.  

Photo credits
Camnitzer

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has made the journey from Cuba to America, continuing the displacement begun when her Yoruba ancestors were shipped from Nigeria as slaves.  Her work traces the histories of people for whom the past is not as distant as we might like to think.  Campos-Pons�s grandfather was transported to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation and her family was still living and working on the plantation when she was growing up.  With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist�s friends and family were a living testament to this history of displacement.

The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) deals with this history.  The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool.  The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality.  Campos-Pons also uses photography, film and video in her work.  At Bluecoat Art Centre the seven slave boards are leant against the wall, evoking the Yoruba deities transposed to the new world.  On the floor in front of them texts and small framed photographs of African Cubans are arranged in groups like family photographs.  There is a further suggestion of headstones or silent memorials to the generations uprooted and separated by the slave trade.

Objects associated with forced labour often accompany these memorials.  Unfolding Desires (1997) comprises seven old wooden ironing boards placed in a spiral arrangement, each stacked with neatly folded white sheets.  The worn and chipped boards retain the traces of many years of repetitive domestic labour while the shape and rhythmic arrangement of the boards suggest transatlantic passage.  This piece also includes two monitors installed flush with the wall.  Like the photographic mementos in Seven Powers, the images on the monitors record and commemorate the descendants of those displaced by slavery.

Nicola Costantino has made her installation in a prominent Liverpool shop window.  The window display includes an array of stylish garments presented on mannequins.  Seen from a distance, the costumes could be made from suede, with a fur trim and a subtle pattern of flowers or some other simple motif.  One assumes they are selected from a designer�s seasonal range.  The garments are sufficiently intriguing to attract closer inspection and, as one approaches, the whole ensemble is radically transformed.  The suede turns out to be latex and now seems more like human skin than leather.  Worse still, the motifs that relieve the surface turn out to be directly moulded from the human body.  Far from being florets they are revealed as direct body casts of navels, nipples and arseholes.  The chalk-coated silicone simulates flesh, with a suede-like feel.

The history of bodily imprints in modern art can be traced from Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, through the work of arte povera artists, to contemporary practitioners such as Janine Antoni and Abigail Lane.  Transferring the imprint of the most intimate and hidden parts of the body to the very garments that ordinarily conceal those parts produces a paradoxical inversion that would have greatly appealed to Duchamp.  Contemporary viewers are likely to bring a range of associations to this work.  Some may see it as a statement in support of animal rights, in the sense that Constantino substitutes traces of a woman�s body for the hide of an animal.  Others will see the work as a feminist statement about the rag trade and the commodification of women�s bodies.  It is equally possible to accept both these readings and relish the humour and the sensuality of the objects themselves. 

Melanie Counsell is a rigorous realist.  Her mature work is based on an intense commitment to the specifics of time and place, although earlier installations occasionally allowed the intrusions of memory into the present.  At Matts Gallery in November 1989, for example, Counsell subtly modified the existing space of the building to convey the affect of a previous experience.  She partially stripped back the lino, giving the room an air of desolation.  Along one wall she created a shallow trough above which a curtain was looped over a single wire.  Water dripped steadily from a row of tiny tubes projecting from the wall into the trough, then oozed from a rolled carpet over the edge of the trough and onto the floor.  The artist�s memory in this case was of working at an institution where sensory evidence of lost control seeped out of every room.

In 1992 at the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Counsell had already adopted her more immediate, realist strategy of drawing only on the present moment, and allowing the memories and perceptions of the viewer to interact with the space and time of the installation.  Her site was an old room to one side of the main entrance that had been used as a warehouse, and still contained the original wooden lift shafts and lifting apparatus.  For fire safety reasons, the room had long been disused, and was closed to the public.  Counsell�s solution was to build a simple glass wall supported by a steel frame in the form of a cross.  This wall completely blocked the entrance to the space, sealing off all the objects and the evidence of their use.  The glass was punctured by drilled holes in the shape of a diamond, not unlike the speaking holes in a bank teller�s window.

At first glance the frame of the �window� looked like a hologram of a room, as if the real room had become a representation of itself.  Looking through the holes, however, one could see � and smell � the space directly, thereby experiencing the glass as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of representation.  Counsell�s installations have an indelible logic.  The fact that we can subsequently analyse our first impression and even name the material components that gave rise to it in no way detracts from the poignancy of that fleeting moment prior to recognition and evaluation.  The artist has developed a site-specific work for a space in Liverpool.

The work Dorothy Cross has made for TRACE is an extension of a recent installation, Ghost Ship, realised near Dublin in 1999.  For the original work Cross painted a retired light ship with many layers of phosphorescent paint and moored it out at sea within sight of the esplanade of Dublin Bay.  Every evening just before dusk the boat�s sides were flooded with strong ultraviolet light.  As the sun faded the lights were turned off.  The boat remained visible as a luminous, ghostly presence between the shore and the horizon.  The original purpose of the light ship as a marker of reefs and dangerous waters brings to mind the many ships that foundered in spite of every precaution.  Each evening crowds of sightseers would come to the cold waterside to watch this mystery unfold and speculate about the history of the sea and of this boat in particular.

Cross braved the windswept channel in a dinghy one night to make a video of the glowing boat from the sea.  A projection of this video will be screened at dusk each night along the edge of the Mersey in Liverpool, where boats from Dublin used to moor.  In years past these Irish boats depended on the light ship for their safe passage to England.  At the Exchange Flags the artist has also installed a phosphorescent model of the ship, made in preparation for the original project. 

Domenico De Clario is an Australian artist of Italian ancestry.  He has made use of painting, assemblage, text and performance, as well as site-specific and installation art to trace his memories and family migrations.  Childhood, adolescence and adulthood are explored through everyday objects and personal effects.  As an Italian migrant the experiences of dispossession and migration have been constant themes in his art.  De Clario�s recent performances have often entailed blindfolded journeys to sites of personal significance.  In many of the performances he plays meditative harmonies on a grand piano, occasionally speaking to himself or to an unseen listener.   

In a recent performance in Melbourne Magistrates Court, De Clario sat at the piano with his parents and sister completing a circle around the instrument.  They were all blindfolded and bound by a black ribbon.  Domenico occasionally spoke to them in their native Tuscan dialect and they gently reminisced together on matters of family history.  Their stories were not accessible to the English-speaking audience and yet their intimacy allowed us for a moment to share in something precious: not information about events past, but a sense of mutual trust and family love.  By wearing a blindfold the artist also avoids the confrontational and controlling aspects of performance.  He is himself highly vulnerable, allowing the audience to enter his private world.

De Clario is performing on 14 nights centred on the opening of the Biennial.  (By chance, the opening night coincides with the equinox and is also, unusually, a night of the full moon.)  The artist will travel across seven sites, back and forth over two weeks, following the moon through its entire phase.  Each night he will play the piano accompanied by a saxophonist, and tell stories of the journey and of his response to the site.  The performances will last for the nine hours between sunset and dawn, and the sites will be illuminated with a different colour for each of the first seven nights.  These colours � which are associated with the seven energy centres of the body (chakras) � will then be repeated as he retraces his steps on the subsequent seven nights.  As a lasting trace within the exhibition, each site will be marked with a written text of the stories recounted by the artist during his journey.

Stan Douglas uses film and multiple projections to create slippages in our perceptions and memories.  Working in either film or video as installation, he recreates the look, style and parlance of past periods in cinema and television, often with a heavy dose of irony.  His film installation Der Sandmann dealt with a specific history of garden allotments in Germany.  Two versions of the film were set up to run slightly out of sync, joining in the middle to produce the complete garden (or rather, the studio set of a garden).  The effect was of split attention.  As a viewer, one became very conscious of the time lapses and disjunctions between the two projections.

In Liverpool Douglas is showing Nu-Tka, a video projection with two separate soundtracks.  He has actually used two films of the same landscape in British Colombia, this time running simultaneously.  The images have been interlaced by alternating the lines of each video version.  They resolve into one seamless image when the two films are synchronised.  Sometimes the films are pulled apart, blurring and doubling the picture.  The soundtracks recreate two versions of an actual historical moment.  A British naval officer and his Spanish counterpart give their versions of a contested colonisation.  At certain points � when they talk about the island and the mosquitoes, for example � their narratives merge and become as one.  But when they argue the case for their respective nations as prior claimants, and accuse each other of acting illegally, their narratives become discordant and diverge.  The sound and image convergences are timed to correspond.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have been photographing the entrances to temporary nightclubs in Berlin.  Because they are illegal, these venues are often only occupied for one night, and the signs of the event are ephemeral graffiti and posters.  The artists were invited to seek out and document similar events in Liverpool, a city famous for its club life.  As it turned out, Liverpool did have such clubs 10 or 15 years ago, but these have now become established venues.  The artists decided not to show the entrances of these more established spaces, but instead to find obscure sites where a club could have been (or might one day be held).  They brought with them posters made from their Berlin photographs, which they put up near the entrances of these phantom sites.  They then re-photographed the posters in situ.  The resulting photographs will be run off as a poster series and pasted around Liverpool, suggesting potential or fictitious club sites.

Back in the gallery space the Berlin club photographs and the phantom images will be hung together.  Fischer and El Sani have made interesting comparisons between Berlin and Liverpool.  Whereas Berlin has been attracting thousands of young people since the �90s, Liverpool has been partially emptied since the decline of its shipping industry.  Like the Mitte of Berlin when the wall first came down, there are whole areas of empty buildings that lend themselves to informal occupation.  In Berlin this happened spontaneously.  First came the squatters, many of whom were artists.  The authorities accepted and even encouraged their activities just to get life back into the streets.  It was in this climate that the clubs and bars flourished.  Bit by bit this impromptu occupation has given way to planned urban development.  �Liverpool is hoping for new inhabitants,� they point out.  �There are already a lot of young people, students for example, coming into town.  Maybe the time will come soon when they need the space.  Then the houses in the abandoned streets can be used again.  We have already had a look around the streets, and there are places we would like to turn into bars or clubs.�

Susan Fitch has been making a series of works based on her research into the history of social engineering in Liverpool from the nineteenth century until as recently as the 1950s.  The benefactors of the city in the nineteenth century arranged for �orphans� � a category that included children of single mothers � to be rounded up and sent off to the colonies of Canada and Australia.  While the opportunities presented by life in the colonies might have seemed attractive at the time, we now know about the hardship and brutality that the children actually faced.  The process had its modern counterpart during and after the war.  The Leaving of Liverpool, a recent BBC documentary, exposed the tragic repercussions of this practice.

Documents relating to these children will be available in open drawers for the public to read, while more sensitive items will be displayed behind glass.  There is an extraordinary acoustic quality under the dome in the Library so that a whisper in the centre of the space is eerily echoed at points around the periphery.  Making use of this effect, Fitch is installing a sound piece based on readings of a letter from a 95 year old woman who was deported to Canada as a child.  In St John�s Park opposite, she will construct wreaths made of tiny acetate portraits of 10,000 deported children.  The wreaths will be laid at the feet of the bronze monuments to the benefactors who made this practice possible.  Further tiny portraits will be planted in amongst the ivy in the garden.  These portraits will be the size and shape of the ivy leaves, doubling the commemorative function of ivy and the wreath.  By �growing� out of the soil of the commemorative garden in the city of their birth, the children�s photos act as memento mori.  They also bring to mind romantic nineteenth-century horticultural metaphors for the development of children, and the horticultural practice of transplanting native species on foreign soil. 

Ceal Floyer�s understated installations are visual one-liners; her tools so minimal that they are almost invisible.  Floyer often focuses on a single element, injecting into it a strange familiarity.  By making simple interventions into the gallery space she disrupts the visual clarity of the architecture.  She has also used projected images and other illusionary elements to explore the strangeness of our everyday world.  By simple transformations she turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Next to the lift in one gallery there were two fire doors.  Under one of these doors a brilliant strip of light seemed to be flooding in from an unusually bright exterior.  There was just a hint of strange encounters about this luminosity � until one discovered that the light was in fact coming from a projector placed on the floor opposite the lift.  The means are revealed, but the sensation continues to engage us.  In another installation the text on a light bulb was made visible by the addition of a lens, transforming the light bulb into a projector that projected itself.  For the Liverpool Biennial Floyer is making subtle interventions within her space at the Tate Gallery.  Some of these are discreet sound interventions, alongside other changes such as the modification of the door push-plates which will now read pushed and pulled thereby changing an instruction to a description of the audiences participation.

Julie Gough is an Aboriginal Australian artist who works with ancient and new technologies to negotiate the historical construction of indigenous identities.  Although she has previously focused on eighteenth and nineteenth-century explorations of the Australian/Pacific region, Gough is interested in all histories of migration and displacement.  Using found objects, photographs and assorted icons of popular culture, she raises questions about the mass production of cultural and personal identity, about history, memory and mythology.  She has recently made works that trace her own family history, bringing together the central desert people of Australia with her Celtic ancestors from Scotland.

For TRACE Gogh has turned her attention to the social history of Liverpool.  Since she is exhibiting at Bluecoat Art Centre she has taken particular interest in the life of orphans in nineteenth-century Britain.  On a preliminary research trip she found objects and materials connected with the history of the orphanage.  These have provided the starting point for her final installation, as she explains:

Most of the things I'm working with are materials that children in the Bluecoat School and local Ragged Schools � or children on the streets of Liverpool � handled every day.  For example, the Bluecoat children had to manufacture pins for a time in the 1890s.  In the Ragged School on Liverpool�s Soho Street (near the National Express bus station) the children had to sort bristles from the early 1850s (I've been told these were probably pig bristles), and on the streets children ran around searching for dropped coal pieces.  There are many other materials I found references to, but these in particular have stuck in my mind.  Initially I want to work with all three, before perhaps narrowing them down to one or two.

I went to two beaches north of Liverpool city to search for materials and clear the cobwebs, and that�s where I collected three bags of coal myself, coming upon it completely by chance.  This is North Sea coal washed up onto the beaches, dense and shiny, like little black dots spread out over the beach!  I was reading at the time about the All Women�s Committee in Liverpool last century, which tried to ban children being employed as chimney sweeps - promoting a brushing-machine instead because the work was so dangerous.

Romauld Hazoum� explores signs, symbols and mythologies of West African culture.  In Benin, where he lives and works, these things are not to be taken lightly.  His works carry traditional and coded information, but they are also accessible to a wider public as aesthetic vehicles of a powerful history.  Hazoum�s art is steeped in cultural and personal experience.  His themes are derived from the �oracle� of life, which is to be found in ancient rock engravings between Nigeria, Benin and Ghana.  The artist considers his designs for a long time before executing them very rapidly.

Hazoum� is also known for his lively characterisations based on the subtle modification or re-orientation of found objects.  His choice of discarded plastics and implements always reflects the place and community in which the works were made.  In Liverpool Hazoum� has developed a sculptural installation piece that relates both to the site at Bluecoat Art Centre where his work is being exhibited, and to his experience of Liverpool, including objects found during his stay.

He sources discarded objects from rubbish dumps and from the street such as old plastic bottles, buckets, brushes and even old cameras.  By a minimal re-configuration of these he turns them into masks.  These masks are like African masks in that they represent characters from daily life that may be involved in a masked drama.  They always reflect the place where they were made because he looks for objects that seem to him to be particular to the local scene, in this sense they are site specific.

Pierre Huyghe �text by Allan Dunn

The Liverpool Billboard Project sought artists to respond to particular sites in the city to develop specific works which begin to tell us something about the people of the city of Liverpool. Huyghe was invited to react not only to the location of Seel Street but also to the chance to
develop a sequential piece.

For two weeks, the site hosts a Huyghe work. For the next two, a commercial poster will be installed. This will be followed by a second Huyghe piece for a further two weeks. The artist is thus able to question public perception and memory, playing with small differences between his two posterworks. The piece will become a slow motion flux between the artistic and the commercial use of outdoor advertising locations.

Zuzanna Janin has consistently worked with objects and images that suggest the passage of time, and memories of particular people and places.  There is an element of vanitas to these themes.  In Skull � an installation related to the artist�s work for TRACE - filmed images of a dancer dancing with her own shadow are projected onto the wall through a gigantic wire outline of a human skull.  Shadow lines that follow the contours of the skull blend with the image on the wall, weaving through the dancer�s body.  The projected grid is reminiscent of medical imaging technologies: a reference that reminds us of the frailty of the human body, even while the gigantic proportions of the projected figures give the work a nightmarish quality. 

  The projected images may also be read as memories played out �inside the head�.  Janin�s installations invariably link the body, memory, light and space in this way.  Some of her earlier works recreated spaces recalled from daily life.  Shadows of rooms she had once occupied were reconstructed out of parachute silk.  This material is so light that it moves with even the smallest disturbance of the air: responding, in this case, to the passage of a viewer through the room.  It also holds light in an extraordinarily atmospheric way, creating an ethereal architecture out of light and shadow. 

More recently, Janin has used photographic assemblages to explore the passage of time.  By layering full-length portraits of her own body with photographs of family members who closely resemble her genetically, she evokes a span of ages in one individual.  In this way she creates the illusion of her body aging in front of our eyes from infant to old woman.  Car, the installation she has made for TRACE, also suggests passage.  The car of the title is a copper wire network derived from computer-generated drawings of a car in 3D.  A film in real time of the artist�s daily journey between home, studio and gallery is projected onto the car, casting shadows of its wiry contours onto the wall behind.  The camera has been placed at eye level with a view of the road ahead and the rear view mirror.  The effect is of space moving away in both directions simultaneously, like past and future receding from the present.  All of these works in some way suspend the linear perception of time, allowing us an intimation of eternity.  Yet equally, they all have a documentary quality, as Janin seeks to grasp the elusive structure of memory itself.

The German photographer Ute Klophaus is best known for her extraordinary photographic documentation of Joseph Beuys's performances in the late 1960s and early �70s.  She is also a compelling artist in her own right.  No doubt Beuys chose her to record his events because of the unusually expressive and material quality of her images.  When we recall performances like Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare or Manressa it is invariably Klophaus�s images that come to mind.  The particular printing quality she has evolved emphasises the alchemical aspect of the photographic print.  This emphasis on the photographic trace has been adapted by other German artists, including Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke.

  In Liverpool Klophaus will exhibit 20 early photographs documenting Beuys�s performance of Celtic in Edinburgh in 1970.  Her own artistic practice has often been more concerned with the architectural spaces of cities than with people and action, yet the photographic details of streets and buildings have the same atmospheric quality as the performance images.  They capture the sense of time passed and of ghostly presences.  Her recently commissioned documentary images of the celebrations at Weimar are haunting examples of this.

Eva Koch�s public sculptures often take the form of buried elements that surface, suggesting a world or process hidden below the ground.  For TRACE she has made a video installation based on an experience she had in Bombay.  There is a mosque situated on a rocky island that can only be accessed by means of a narrow causeway to the mainland.

Artist�s Statement written in collaboration with Mai Misfelt
Stretch is a video installation first produced in 1998.  On a thin line � a narrow causeway extended between sky and sea � human figures walk and walk from left to right.  An abrupt cut, and they reverse direction.  Their passage is not without risk.  Powerful waves are constantly crashing on the mole, sweeping over it and the walkers.  Individual features cannot be distinguished; they are groups in movement, from which now and again an individual figure detaches itself.  They walk and walk and while the energy with which they are moving seems to tell of a goal at the end, we never see it.  What is behind is lost; we can only guess at what lies ahead.  The mole, which is at times visible, at times covered in water, is a transition, a place of passage connecting two places.  The mole is also an interval: a gap between here and there.   

The sound is a vital part of Stretch.  It is artificial noise, with elements that mime real sounds.  It shifts between being synchronous and asynchronous.  Suddenly the steps of the walking male figure � which the eye cannot help but follow because it has separated itself from the others � become audible.  For an instant sound and image match, but then the white noise increases and the synchronicity is gone.  There is sound like that of an enormous wave, but is it not the sound of the sea.  It is an enormous wave of white noise.  We hear a muttering chorus of voices, but they are not human voices, and they are moving in the opposite direction to the figures whose voices they might be.  The deep bass sound gives body to the immaterial video pictures.  Sound and image are two abstract elements that our perception automatically tries to link in order to form a meaningful, but actually fictive reality.

The Russian artists Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky have been working together on a film, Incidents depicting objects blown in the wind along the streets of Chelsea in New York.  After a few moments of watching the random motion of these fragments from daily life, buffeted along the gutter, their trajectories begin to look like the actions of individuals.  The objects are transformed into highly individual characters, dancing and encountering each other before continuing on with their erratic journeys.

Svetlana will arrange a performance in the international reading room of Liverpool Library.  It is an extraordinary space, forming a dish at the base of a complete sphere, the top half of which is the main reading room.  Concentric galleries provide shelving and reading desks that descend, following the contour of the sphere to its base.  In this theatrical space six students wearing a very simple costume will sit reading.  Apart from their clothing and their long stay they will be indistinguishable from other readers.  The performance will be videoed for the week and will then be exhibited on a video monitor as a continuing part of the exhibition.

Igor has installed a work at the Walker Art Gallery.  He has been working with the image of a wall in the Poussin room and has created simulacra of paintings that might reasonably be included in that collection.  These immaculate copies have been cut into strips, then rolled up into tiny scrolls.  The scrolls are quite small, perhaps 20 cm by 10 cm.  They are hung with the existing paintings and labelled in the same manner as the rest of the collection.

Sutee Kunavichayanont has installed two large inflatable animals in Bluecoat Art Centre.  Made out of rubber latex, the figures are relatively lifelike, without having the cartoon-like quality of most inflatables.  Instead, the sagging forms of the deflated animals are reminiscent of hides one might find in an abattoir.  The animals he creates are chosen because they are emblematic of Thailand: the tiger, the elephant, and the buffalo.  These animals are also endangered species, and signal the artist�s concern with the effects of rapid industrialisation and urban development in Thailand. 

The objects � entitled Depletion-Inflation � can be inflated through tubes by visitors to the exhibition, so that the breath of the human viewer brings the animal to life.  This can be read as a comment on our tendency to displace nature then attempt to sustain life artificially.  The inflation and subsequent deflation of the animals is also an intentional pun on the Asian economic tigers that have so dangerously sagged in the last year or two.  As they deflate the figures gradually slump, becoming tragic and pathetic sacks of skin.  The interactive quality of the works makes for enthusiastic audience participation, and literally breathes life into art.

Thomas Lanfranchi uses lightweight materials to create environmentally responsive sculptures.  Many of his projects have been wind blown, taking the form of kites or wind socks.  He has installed these pieces at sites across France and on buoys at sea.  On a recent visit to Australia he made a journey around the outback, creating and documenting a new airborne sculpture each day to suit the site.  Working with a type of plastic commonly used for shopping bags, Lanfranchi is able to make very large structures that are capable of being supported by the lightest breeze.  When they are destroyed after the exhibition an object the size of a blue whale collapses into a carrier bag. 

Lanfranchi�s sculptures are have a formal beauty � often incorporating two colours, such as blue plastic and clear plastic, to produce stripes or chequers � and yet they are ephemeral by nature.  As such, they belong in the French tradition of Daniel Buren, with whose work there are formal similarities.  Lanfranchi�s objects are also delicate and playful translations of traditionally monumental land art.  While they are short lived, and often succumb to the wind that is the medium of their structure, they reveal the invisible power nature.  They too are monumental, for a time.  For TRACE, the artist has designed a large kite-like object for the Senate building of Liverpool University.  This venue is an institutional thoroughfare before it is a gallery, and Lanfranchi�s sculpture will be suspended from the ceiling high above the heads of the passing students.  It can be simply fabricated on-site, and will disappear after the exhibition, leaving nothing but the memory of its passage.

Claude L�v�que transforms architectural space with light and colour.  His installations, which are site-specific, render familiar environments ambiguous and disorienting.  Reflective surfaces where we least expect them bring movement into a room while dissolving the stability of walls and ceilings.  For TRACE the artist has developed a piece called War Games.  Upon entering the main doors to the exhibition the visitor is confronted by a barrage of light.  This luminous assault is entirely unexpected: the windows and glass doors of the gallery space are covered with a dark grey solar filter, mirrored on one side.  L�v�que has covered a false ceiling with reflective foil, and all the walls are painted with bright aluminium coloured paint.  On the wall facing the entrance three rotating lamps project bright white flashes.  The entire inner surface of the room reflects this intense light, which appears to rebound endlessly into space.

In 1997 Alastair MacLennan represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with intermedia work commemorating all those who had died as a result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland since 1969.  Political, social and cultural malfunction have been central themes in MacLennan�s work since his extended performance pieces of the 1970s and �80s.  During most of these performances � which lasted up to 144 hours each � the artist neither ate nor slept.  His work for Liverpool is a week-long �actuation� (MacLennan�s term for performance/installation).  Trestle tables running the entire length of his space are set for absent guests.  Their uneaten feast includes pigs� heads, fish and other items symbolic in the Catholic tradition.  MacLennan�s performance will take place, on alternate days, inside and outside this venue.

Artist�s Statement
A primary function of art is to bridge our spiritual and physical worlds.  Through crass materialism we have reduced art to cultural real estate.  Actual creativity can be neither bought nor sold, although its husks, shells and skins often are.  It is possible in art to use meta-systems without over-reliance on a physical residue with its attendant marketplace hustling, jockeying and squabbling.  Art is the demonstrated wish and will to resolve conflict through action, be it spiritual, religious, political, personal, social or cultural.  To heal is to make whole.  As well as ecology of natural environment, there is ecology of mind and spirit.  Each is a layer of the other, interfused, three in one.  The challenge for us today is to live this integration.

ISSUES REMAIN:
ETHICS � AESTHETICS
THE �OUTSIDER� � POLITICAL/SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
RELIGIOUS/POLITICAL BIGOTRY � INCLUSIVE TOLERANCE
�DERELICTION� AND PUBLIC/PRIVATE RESPONSIBILITY
OPPOSITIONAL OR CONSENSUAL MEANS OF POLITICAL/SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT

DEATH � DECAY
NEW LIFE AND MUTATION
TRANSFORMATION

Bashir Makhoul is an English artist originally from Palestine.  His video and sound installation, The Darkened Room, is based on the relationship he developed with his grandmother shortly before her death.  Because Makhoul had grown up in England while she remained in Lebanon, he only came to know her as an adult.  After their first meeting he telephoned her regularly, recording their conversations so that he would have something secure to hold on to in her absence.  The soundtrack is taken from these intimate conversations.  The small room in which the piece is housed has a false floor, underneath which the artist has installed a sound system.  This gives the sound a physical quality, in that it can be felt through the feet as well as heard.  Enveloped in the conversation, the visitor�s bodily responses are magnified.

These aural and tactile effects are complemented by two video images of a single eye, gazing at each other across the room.  They document the artist�s physical response to his grandmother�s recorded voice.  Although he tries not to cry, we watch as his eyelids flutter and pools of moisture form around the rim of the eye, then disperse.  Photographs of Makhoul�s grandmother � in her youth and as an old woman � are installed opposite the doorway.  These two images, of distant moments in one life, make us aware of all the other moments that have passed unrecorded.  A black ribbon signifies her death and Makhoul�s bereavement. 

Pascale Marthine Tayou is an artist from Cameroon who works in a variety of media, often deliberately confounding the expectations of the institutions that seek to represent him.  His mixed media installations � made from objects and materials found on-site � defy stylistic or historical classification and intentionally subvert formal resolution.  They are often politically contentious, though not without humour.  Using images and texts to trace his own history and identity Tayou offers a personal view of the post-colonial situation.  He has also commented on the prevalence of the AIDS virus in Africa, and on the politics of the art market. 

Tayou has used objects found during his stay in Liverpool for his installation in the Exchange Flags building.  The piece, called Le Chantier, also includes a video he shot in Sete in the south of France.  It documents a particularly dangerous local event: Le Joute.  Tayou�s poetic description of this ancient spectacle can also be read as an attack on social and political complacency, a theme he has returned to repeatedly in his writing as well as his art:
Movement / Energy
there is the public . . .
contradiction,
people find pleasure in the tension, like a new fashion of life,
like a new way of social truth
maybe we live with some kind of tension inside us?
and then this can explode,
like some kind of crash,
like volcanoes,
the burning flood
takes everything that crosses its path,
it gets settled into our deepest society.
This will transform in society, and we�ll get obliterated to respect this

Reinhard M�cha uses objects and furnishings to evoke specific memories, and to reflect on the nature of memory itself.  Sometimes he places these objects in boxes lined with dark felt, which are reminiscent of jewellery cases, or cabinets for cutlery or valuable scientific instruments.  Seen through glass against the dark interior, the objects become difficult to decipher.  A clear view is prevented by our own reflection, and the fact that M�cha defines the surface of the glass by adding metallic strips that suggest an elaborate security device.  The works are therefore layered with different views.  We look at the surface of the glass.  We look through the glass.  We look at what lies behind the glass.  And while trying to overlook the glass and its effects, we also look at ourselves and others reflected in the glass.  This Duchampian strategy complicates � if not frustrates � the physical experience of looking.  It can also be seen as a commentary on the processes and structure of memory.

M�cha�s work often concerns (and is literally gathered from) sites of passage or transit.  For TRACE he has relocated the installation Eller Bahnhof to the Tate Gallery.  Originally constructed in D�sseldorf, the work was subsequently installed in Stockholm, where it was set into the newly built walls of the renovated museum.  Mucha was so surprised by the hasty carpentry of the walls that he decided to work with this exposed structure in subsequent manifestations.  He did this by cutting around the segments of wall, removing them from the gallery, and then displaying them in glass cases on the wall of the new space: first at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, and now (in their fourth manifestation) in Liverpool.  In this way, each successive installation contains physical traces and memories of the others.

Vik Muniz has a longstanding fascination with photographic documentation.  He has a personal collection of works by photographers who specialised in recording images of images, such as museological records and archives.  His own work involves a similar layering of representations.  Aftermath and Sugar Children � the two series represented in TRACE � take the form of photographs of drawings done by the artist.  The drawings are, in turn, derived from his photographs of the original subject.  The images in Aftermath contain a further layer of reference.  The subjects are street children in Brazil: extremely vulnerable children with whom the artist established a relationship of trust and collaboration.  In this instance he invited them to find images they identified with in books on art history, then asked them to pose in the position of the principal figure in the selected painting.  This was the starting point for a lengthy series of displacements. 

The reproduced drawings appear from a distance to be almost photographic in their realism, but on close inspection it becomes clear that the materials are far from conventional.  For the Aftermath series Muniz collected street sweepings left over from the Carnivale in Rio and scattered them onto a light box.  He has then skilfully dusted and vacuumed the material away to produce a convincing replica of his original photograph.  In Sugar Children, as the title suggests, he has used sugar as his medium.  In each case there is a resonance between the material and the subject matter.  The process itself is also highly suggestive, particularly in Aftermath where the dust and scattered sequins lend the images a forensic quality. 

Juan Mu�oz has installed three single figures in the Oratory near the Anglican Cathedral where Salcedo is exhibiting.  The Oratory has been used for the display of assorted Victorian sculptures, including a large bronze near the centre of the space.  Mu�oz has installed his resin figures � entitled Broken Noses Carrying a Bottle� within this context.  At first sight these new additions to the space may seem consistent with the existing Victorian statuary.  However, one soon notices their strangely animate character, combined with an equally unsettling dissimilarity to real human bodies.  While the heads of the figures are derived from life, the bodies are made from clothing stuffed with soft material and then cast in resin.  As anatomical representations the figures are loose and provisional, and yet the materials out of which they are constructed contain the traces of other, absent bodies.

Although many of Mu�oz�s sculptures initially seem playful, they also have a darker side.  In reproduction the figures made of fibreglass look as if their skin has been burned, scarred or melted.  In reality they are remarkably similar to calcified objects from a limestone cave, stalagmites that have been polished by the hands of countless visitors.  The figures often seem to be in suspended animation, as if suddenly immobilised � like Medusa�s victims or the inhabitants of Pompeii � but fully conscious.  Sometimes the eyes are propped open with matchsticks.  I recall standing in front of Las Meninas with Mu�oz in the Prado in 1991.  He spoke of the terror of Spanish painting and, rightly or wrongly, it was the terror of fixation or entrapment implied by representation itself that I took him to be referring to.  In his sculptures, with their eyes pinned open, there is no respite from either the world or consciousness.  The figures are like the desperate insomniac in a joke I recently heard: �He had tried everything.  Finally he blasted his head off with a shot gun . . . but he still couldn�t sleep.�

Ernesto Neto has created a world between body and architecture.  His sculptures articulate the spaces of buildings while simulating bodily membranes.  His basic forms are constructed from poliamid: a stretch material like stockingette that he distends into various configurations.  These empty structures are articulated by being pulled across architectural spaces or gorged with substances like powdered turmeric or lead shot.  The process is always intrinsic to the form.  For example, one sculpture � entitled Paff � is constructed by filling the �toe� of a long tube of material with 60 kg of turmeric.  The empty end is attached to the ceiling while the bulky �toe� is hurled onto the floor, stretching the tube taught while creating a globule of rich yellow surrounded by a powdery halo on the floor.

In other installations Neto has created entire rooms out of poliamid material suspended from existing ceiling structures.  The corners are weighted and looped over beams or rings to create a semi-transparent cube with concave walls.  These walls are disturbingly skin-like, an association that the artist sometimes highlights by embroidering small orifices into the membrane.  Other poliamid objects are arranged in clusters, taking the form of soft standing tubes like fungi or crowds of amorphous figures.  In every case the works are highly sensual, an experience heightened by the aroma of turmeric or cloves, which strikes visitors long before they see the installation.

Rivane Neuenschwander creates intricate and ephemeral installations out of organic substances and domestic objects, manipulating the symbolic qualities of materials as ordinary as garlic husks, soap or dust.  In a recent installation at Friedman Gallery in London she traced the outline of the parquet tiles on the floor in fine lines of white powder.  This exquisite and fragile drawing could have been blown away or scuffed out of existence by any inadvertent passer by.  Walking around the edge of the installation made one very aware of one�s own presence as a threat.  By outlining the cracks she also initiated a sense of unease that can come when the gaps in our world are drawn to our attention.  Not walking on the cracks in case the bears get you is a childhood enactment of this basic fear: the fear that our reality may be porous to unknown forces.  The �crack man� is a particularly vivid illustration of this seemingly universal fear.  The Aboriginal people of Australia have a spirit creature called the crack man who is shown as a menacing spidery presence drawn along the crack lines in cave wall paintings.

Neuenschwander�s coconut soap drawings are elegant geometric sculptures that contain linear designs.  Each rectangular block of white soap has been pressed into dust along its narrow edges.  The blocks are then welded together to make a larger rectangle so that the edges show up as a linear grid.  At a distance these objects appear to be elegant modernist designs in marble or some other valuable material.  At close range, however, it is apparent that the sculpture is made of soap and the lines are dust: the intimate residue of a bathroom or some other domestic space.  The rich smell of coconut also belies the initial sense of pristine materiality.

Carsten Nicolai was a member of a small group of artists working through Eigen and Art in Leipzig prior to the reunification of Germany.  Embracing performance and installation art, as well as more traditional media, they were an exceptional group at a time when figurative painting was the acceptable norm.  Since then Nicolai has continued with his varied practice, developing a keen interest in the psychological and physical effects of sound.  This interest has formed the basis of his performance work on the club scene, where he is known as Noto. 

The artist�s work for Liverpool will be an extension of his research on the possible bodily effects of vibration.  Sampled tones, modem beeps, and telephone pops and clicks are organised into loops to produce minimalist cycles of abstract sound.  The result is a manifestation of the invisible energy of electricity: the acoustic trace of an intangible commodity.  Nicolai�s drawings � which might be compared to Duchamp�s explorations of the mechanical metaphor � form the notations for the music he has composed.

Ann No�l: Artist�s Statement
Here�s the way it works:
 Give � I shall exchange up to 300 small books, 14.85 x 14 cm, each unique, with shoppers and passers-by in St John�s Market in Liverpool over a period of 10 days.  In my little book there is an original photographic work of an object I keep in my home in Berlin, Germany.  Each photograph is numbered and signed, and accompanied by a handwritten text about its history and personal value to me.
 Take � In return I shall be asking for a keepsake, talisman or souvenir (no larger than my book) that they may be carrying with them in a pocket or handbag, or would even go home to select.  I shall ask for their names and write down any information they would like to tell me about the object.
 All the special objects that I am able to collect in this way will be photographed and documented in a book and then placed into a transparent pocket, lined with gold paper, sewn onto a length of canvas right then and there in the shopping centre.  After the event in process is over, the completed canvases will be exhibited in a public space in the city for the duration of the Biennial, and then will remain in the city in a suitable collection.
 The first Biennial of Contemporary Art has the subtitle TRACE.  The canvases I make will display traces of people and their lives in Liverpool at the time TRACE takes place.  Give and Take also reflects a concept of living and sharing together in a complex civilisation that becomes ever more fragmented, while people and the things they love most dearly are much the same the whole world over.

History of the Project:
The first manifestation of this kind of art-exchange was devised for an art project, Tuchf�hlung, in the small town of Langenberg, Germany, in 1997, to which I was invited together with two of my colleagues in Berlin.  The three of us: myself, Elke Nord and Rosemary Jarman, formed the group NONOJA.  In German, ein Tuch is a piece of cloth or fabric.  To be in Tuchf�lung implies a feeling of closeness or bodily contact.  We wished to be in contact with the people of Langenberg, to talk to them, and to involve them in the art process.
 We began by exchanging small books containing signed artwork with our friends and acquaintances wherever our travels took us.  By the time we went to Langenberg there were already 150 pockets filled in the canvases we had prepared beforehand.  A book with text and photographs followed.  On August 1 and 2, the group NONOJA was on duty in St Michael�s Catholic Church ready to enter into dialogue with members of the general public or any of the other 200 artists invited to participate in Tuchf�hlung.  The response was overwhelming, and in 24 hours the number of relics more than doubled.  All the objects we traded for were immediately photographed, entered into our register and sewn into the pockets.  The canvases were laid out along narrow tables that reached down the central aisle of the church from the first row of pews to the front portal, where they remained for the rest of the month, even during a society wedding.
Tuchf�hlung was not completed for us until March 1998, when NONOJA exhibited all our projects and editions at the Galeria 13 in Hannover, formerly used as a church.  Here, 384 �relics� pocketed on 10 canvases hung along the back wall where the altar used to stand, and the book, in a golden clothbound case, was placed on a lectern beside them.  The project is now being prepared for exhibition on the Internet at the web site Fine Arts Online <http://www.virtualitas.com/>.

Susan Norrie has consistently explored states of mind through her use of materials and space.  In her first critically acknowledged paintings in the late 1970s she developed her earlier collaged abstractions into deep relief compositions based on paraphernalia from a woman�s dressing table.  These images were intensely claustrophobic, the familiar forms of powder puff or pearls slipping all too easily into a queasy semblance of flesh.  In subsequent paintings the material excesses of these compositions gave way to a fascination with memory, which became the repressed presence in fantastic and often grotesque images.  These forms served as metaphors for psychic states in which consciousness begins to slide out of control. Boundaries of the body are dissolved between the claustrophobic interior and the monstrous exterior of landscape.

More recently, Norrie has used installations to stimulate responses and associations in the viewer.  Her objects animate their environments like furnishings in a domestic environment, yet defy the logic of such functional objects.  Black, shiny surfaces and frames, or cabinets that can have no access, transform these locations into blank, mnemonic sites waiting to be filled in with unacknowledged memories.  Norrie has recently been working with films that are edited and slowed down to intensify the visual and atmospheric effects.  The rooms where the films are shown function as installations.  The claustrophobic presence of the image is an effect of its relative scale, while the furnishings of the space further enhance this impression.  A powerful theme linking all these works is the generation of profoundly disturbing psychic experiences.  Norrie often explores states such as epilepsy and trance, triggering our own latent terror at any slippage between consciousness and the unconscious.

In Liverpool she is presenting a new film installation in which there are two images.  One is projected and is large enough to allow the viewer to experience a bodily sense of compression in the space.  The other is shown on a smaller screen set into the wall.  The room is painted glossy brown, again producing a sense of claustrophobia while emphasising the uniformity of the space.  The images � which combine archival footage with fictional material � deal with human tragedy and personal trauma.  The wall projection includes footage taken from film and documentaries dealing with Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters.  The small monitor set into the wall shows a slowed down sequence from the scene in Woody Allen�s Interiors where the mother is taping gaps round the windows before attempting suicide.  She is both sealing herself into her tomb and desperately trying to keep out whatever constitutes her greatest fear.  When the film is slowed down, the sound of ripping tape becomes ugly and threatening.  As symmetrical images of entrapment, both films link life and death to the obsessive preservation and rupturing of spatial boundaries.

Mike Parr is appearing in several guises at Liverpool.  Two weeks before the opening he will be represented live on video during a performance in Sydney�s Artspace picked up from the Web.  For the 10 days of the performance, which is called Water from the Mouth 1, the artist will be sealed into a steel cube.  During this time he will attempt to speak out loud everything that come into his head.  Sleep deprivation, hunger and discomfort will ensure that his logic becomes increasingly disturbed throughout the period of his incarceration.  

Parr�s second piece is an installation entitled Water from the Mouth 2, which also incorporates an element of performance.  For this piece he has covered the walls of his room with self-portraits enlarged from original studies that he discarded on the floor as he moved around the space.  His working method and the scattered drawings contribute to the sense of urgency that is so expressively rendered in the taught lines and gestures of the drawings themselves.  A video of the drawing process underlines the performative aspect of the work, while four ghetto-blasters proclaim the manic messages of street evangelists.

The third component, Water from the Mouth 3, is a live performance and subsequent projection of its documentation in Liverpool.  In a dark room in the two hours before dawn 60 elderly men sit in rows stripped to the waist.  Lead by Parr they rhythmically clash together 60 pairs of quartz rocks.  The bright sound of these rocks from the Australian outback produces a mesmerising soundtrack.  In time with these rhythms, sparks from the quartz intermittently light up the bodies of the men.  These flashes of light herald the coming dawn, bridging night and day.  Although this shared ritual of healing has a deep personal significance for the artist, whose work is strongly autobiographical, it is intended to address a common need.  Parr has always been concerned to make his art �factual� by systematically testing the limits of his own body and mind.  In this way the personal is made to act as a marker of the political.

Gary Perkins: Artist�s Statement
Proposal for the Remake of a Classic British War Movie
At the centre of the Western Approaches Control Room is a landscape: one that was both a changing political and geographical map, secret and secreted away.  Through the 1940s this was a representation of a time and place like no other, one that changed and shifted daily and even hourly in response to the dramatic horizons, places and narratives happening in real time across thousands of square miles to thousands of lives.  These events were controlled and monitored from various positions at HQ, but our attention is inevitably drawn towards the simple, primary-coloured boat shapes that are pushed and pulled across the scene like the chips collected by a croupier at a roulette table.  Comparisons to Greek gods � or their contemporary political counterparts � are difficult to ignore.

A large model of a submarine (2 metres long) and a German U-Boat, rusted and displaced, rest on the bodies of crushed, burnt-out cars.  Nearby, a tank and a STUKA bomber � again German WWII � have also come to rest on a collection of wrecked Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Alfa Romeo and Honda cars.  The turret of the tank rotates slowly as it looks for a target.  Is this a defensive tactic?  The body of the vehicle has already been scarred, possibly by petrol bombs or by the burnt wrecks crushed beneath it.  The aeroplane, in contrast, seems to have dropped into the scene.  It isn�t going anywhere with a rusted engine and twisted propeller blades.  A large truck circa 1950 represents the only real possibility of movement.  It may be the worse for ware, but is apparently mobile judging from its unlikely cargo of furniture.

As with previous works we are given further insight into the scene by virtue of a collection of miniature colour and black-and-white video cameras that are sealed within the interiors of many of the models.  On a simple monitor nearby we are taken inside the submarine�s apparently still operational engine room; into the turret of the moving tank � more confined and less secure than you might imagine � and into the driving seat of the truck, a crashed car, and the cockpit of the plane.  Our point of view changes, constantly moving us into and then out of the models.  Perceptions of scale and place shift unexpectedly.  Our sense of time is disrupted by the live images, which are reminiscent of fleeting moments from a war movie.  This sense of temporal and physical disorientation could not be more different from the god-like vision of allied and enemy warships in the defunct Control Centre.  Here, the model-maker�s versions of the real open up the official history to the possibility of other, less determined, narratives.

Rosslynd Piggott works in a wide range of media including painting, sculpture and mutable installation.  Her works are characterised by their formal fragility and their use of objects closely identified with the body: particularly clothing.  At the Bluecoat Art Centre she has installed two works responding to two very particular spaces.  In each case the defining characteristics of the installation are the given qualities of the architecture. 

In a small prism-shaped wedge between the garden and the passage at the rear of the building the artist has installed a glass shelf on which there are two engraved drinking glasses.  One reads Liverpool, the other Melbourne.  Each glass contains water from the city it is named after: a poignant detail from the dislocated lives of the Bluecoat children transported from Liverpool to Australia. 

Another room forms a corner between the hall and the main gallery.  An arched alcove dominates one wall, while another contains beautifully framed windows that look out onto the garden.  There is also a large convex mirror above one of the two doors that acts as a surveillance device.  Meaningful intervention into sites as specific as this one is particularly difficult, but Piggott�s La Somnambule elegantly animates the room.  Two suspended silk dresses conjure the ghosts of the building�s Georgian past.  Their implied passage through the space is echoed in the polished surface of the mirror, which repeats the arch and the lunettes of the windows.  

To enter the American artist and philosopher Adrian Piper's installations is to experience, if only fleetingly, the full impact of racial prejudice from the position of the �other'.  The inadvertent glances and expressions of momentary fear in white eyes give a sense of what it is to be black in a white world.  Piper�s statements are uncompromising attacks and invariably on target.  Her directness stems from the combined visual and verbal power of her work.

Safe is a photographic and audio installation built into a small room.  Hanging like an icon across each corner of the room is an enlarged magazine photograph of a group of black people apparently enjoying a relaxed social event: perhaps a family reunion.  Silk-screened texts reinforce this seductively inclusive atmosphere.  �We are around you,� they proclaim; �we are among you,� �we are within you,� �you are safe.�  This comfortable ambience is shattered by the audio track playing within the room.  Piper is heard describing the smiling group portraits as �sardonic.�  The audio script broadcasts the internal monologue of an unwitting bigot for all to hear, mixed with fragments of Bach's Aria No. 4 from St Matthew's Passion � the song that Peter sings when he realises he has denied knowing Christ three times.  Piper holds out the possibility of reconciliation, while simultaneously confronting the white viewer with the hypocrisy of this desire.

Amanda Ralph has created an installation with three life-sized effigies draped with hundreds of found objects.  She is an inveterate collector of bric-a-brac and her studio is a veritable Kunstkammer.  Some objects are gathered together into functional storage arrangements, such as brushes and bristles, while others are more specifically arranged in glass cabinets or on shelves that may already be displays, or may later transmute into some other configuration.  Every available space is occupied by a proliferation of materials and textures.  As in a curiosity shop, the accumulation of these objects is enormously compelling.  The absence of any reference to their original functions or past owners allows the viewer to reflect freely on their possible uses and histories. 

This kind of collecting might be seen as a manifestation of desire itself: a need expressed without any specific object.  By ordering and rearranging matter one gains a measure of solace against the longing for final resolution: or against the desire to find and keep the perfect object.  In this sense Ralph�s studio is a site of ritual.  Her effigies bring to mind West and Central African fetish figures.  These fetishes are traditionally associated with healing.  Objects are attached to the core figure to direct the power of the spirits to the specific need of the patient.  The figures act as a conduit between the spiritual and material worlds.  Many of the Congo figures have mirrors in their stomachs: a reference to the great river that separates this world from the other.  The shiny surface of the mirror is a metaphor for passage between the two worlds. 

Miguel Rio Branco is a photographer who documents the vivid colours and textures of contemporary life in Brazil, in contexts as diverse as abattoirs, brothels and a gymnasium.  (By coincidence, two of these worlds exist in close proximity: a brothel and an old abattoir photographed by the artist occupy adjoining buildings).  Rio Branco has on occasion made a point of equating or at least comparing these places.  All are sites where the experience of life and death is heightened.  Animals take their final breaths on the abattoir floor, while next door in the brothel the prostitutes� clients pay for their own �little deaths�.  These are scenes that mesh well with the iconic images of Carnivale and religious portrayals of ecstatic martyrdom.

Rio Branco captures the intensity of life and death through the materiality of his photographs.  By taking long exposures he increases the depth of field and saturation of colour.  Sometimes this means that the moving figure in the composition is blurred, or even transparent.  In the Tate he is exhibiting two bodies of work in juxtaposition.  Blue Tango comprises a grid of twenty images, each 50 x 60 cm.  This is a series of photos taken of two boys kickboxing, their skinny bodies splayed out in dramatic and angular gestures to create a veritable script of hieroglyphics or a notation for a vivacious dance.  Facing these spontaneous images of the street are a group of four large scale photos, 120 x 120 cm each, taken in the gymnasium.  In these powerful but unstable images figures sometimes dissolve as a result of the long exposures.

Sophie Ristelhueber: Images as crisis points
[Sophie Ristelhueber] is concerned, first and foremost, with the ambivalence of things, the porous borderline between reality and fiction, the dialectical relationship between work and image, and the variable hierarchy of figures of speech, be it iconographic or linguistic speech: the said and the unsaid, more for less, part for whole. . . . One of the artist�s latest pieces, La Campagne (The Countryside/The Campaign) produced in 1991-97, achieves a peak-like form in which the vectors of her particular arrangement all converge.  It is made up of three groups of five to ten large photos stacked higgledy-piggledy against the wall at ground level.  These black-and-white and colour photos were printed digitally, so as to achieve a simple poster-like rendering, and affixed to thin board right to the edges, in such a way as to convey the notion of temporariness and removability.  Vertical in format, some of them actually curve. . . . At first glance, the overall impression is that of a stroll in rural surroundings, where the atmosphere is calm, even bucolic.  The photos overlap, so they are not all totally visible but we glimpse here, a cart horse, there, a pine forest, and bathers in a waterfall nearby a picturesque village, and over there, a meadow dotted with dandelion flowers or alternatively a quite vertical view of a hillside planted with small trees, and, last of all, a country lane apparently cut off by a flooding river. . . . However, in no time at all, the impression of tranquillity gives way to a vague sense of oppressiveness.  The perceptual interpretation, which wavers imperceptibly from the start, becomes blurred, slight signs of destruction appear, and the frail interpretative scaffolding collapses.  We then see that the horse in the foreground is trotting in front of a deserted building whose windows have all been shattered, we realise that the dwellings nestling in the green field near the bathers, as well as the other dwellings in the other photos, are all destroyed and empty. . . . Even without knowing that the village with the bathers is Mostar, that the flooded lane was due to the excavations following the discovery of a mass grave, that the dandelions are growing right beside a brand new cemetery, that the hill is the one the survivors of the Srebrenica massacre fled across, and that, in a word, the place is in ravaged Bosnia.

Alex Rizkalla spent considerable time in Liverpool researching local sources in preparation for his installation.  Part of this research involved collecting a mass of materials from second-hand and antiquarian bookshops.  This is typical of the artist�s practice, which integrates site-specific information with the recurring themes of time, degeneration and mortality.  Rizkalla�s prevailing concern is to create configurations of objects, images, and visual effects that insinuate themselves into the viewer's memory.  His installations are visually active, often using old slide projectors to produce sequences of images.  Beyond this utilitarian purpose, the projectors function as significant objects in their own right, while the sound they produce adds an acoustic component to the visitor�s experience of the space.  For his Liverpool installation, the artist has fabricated a multiple projection machine from the mechanisms of discarded projectors. 

At the entrance to the installation is a shelf holding a case of medical instruments that the artist has collected on his travels.  The walls just inside the space are crowded with boxes and frames containing �60s memorabilia, including remnants of Beatle-mania and anti-Vietnam posters and stickers.  The room is illuminated by a series of projected images.  Shown in rapid sequence the slides animate Eadweard Muybridge�s studies of human locomotion: Man Standing at Rifle Drill, Man Assuming Kneeling Position and Aiming Rifle and Man Falling Prone and Aiming Rifle.  From speakers scattered around the room comes the sound of an old recording of the Surgeon General of Victoria (Australia) making diagnoses.  Heartbeats heard through a stethoscope are identified by name and age, followed by a brief clinical description of the patient�s condition, for example: �Anthony Bond, 55, murmur in the left ventricle.�  All of these forms of representation � the memorabilia, the analytical photographs of movement, and the taxonomy of disease � imply objectivity.  In each, the human and historical circumstances they document are kept at a distance.  At the same time, however, Rizkalla allows another, more subjective and sensory response to such objects through his production of optical and tactile experiences. 

Doris Salcedo traces political and psychological events through the altered materials and circumstances of everyday life.  In her work things that should be comfortable and familiar become strange and even terrible.  This process parallels the distortion of reality that occurs when power and violence are used as means of social control.  What comfort can be left in the bed one�s lover has been murdered in?  What pleasure can one take in the intimate possessions of one�s spouse or child when they have been dragged away with no explanation?  Objects retain traces of those who have used them.  It is difficult to throw away such traces of an absent loved one, and yet it is equally difficult to continue using them as though nothing had happened. 

From a distance Salcedo�s sturdy tables look like ordinary household furniture.  Up close, however, they begin to reveal a fragile covering of human hair.  At first there is simply a subtle distortion of the appearance of the wood, but once the hairs are recognised the table metamorphoses into an animal presence.  There is something terribly beautiful and yet repulsive about these hybrid objects.  Like the memory of a loved one forever contaminated by the image of their death, Salcedo�s fusion of inanimate matter and human remains provokes a sense of abomination.

In another work, wardrobes are doubled so that one structure seems to slide seamlessly into another.  Time and space have been strangely loosened to allow this slippage.  All the holes, gaps and cracks in the wood have been meticulously sealed with white cement.  It is as if they have been rendered blind and mute, just like those whose silence is ensured by the threat of further violence.  This careful sealing of the cracks is also read as an attempt to keep something out or in.  But in this case the �something� is elusive, like the nebulous fear of some unforeseen tragedy.  These memorials will be housed in the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool.  Although churches have traditionally been places of sanctuary, recent events in Rwanda have demonstrated that sometimes there is no refuge from the horrors of political violence.

Maruch S�ntiz G�mez lives in an isolated community in Chiapas in the south of Mexico.  The region has a history of struggle for independence, and its political climate continues to be tense.  In the artist�s village, however, life goes on much as it has for generations.  Local traditions are very much a part of everyday reality, while the world of mass media � and certainly that of contemporary art � are unknown.  Not so long ago Santiz Gomez took part in an education programme organised by her local church.  It was not considered appropriate that she should develop literacy skills, since that would have had a destabilising effect on her family.  Her husband, for example, had no opportunity for such luxuries.  Instead the nun gave her a camera with which to record her world.  There was no training in the conceptual or compositional possibilities of photography: simply basic instruction in the practical use of the instrument.  What followed was entirely her own creative application of the medium.  She decided to document the traditional wisdom of her people.  These well-known sayings provide practical advice for almost any situation.  For example:

To call back home a lost dog, you place a small clay jar in the middle of the doorway, you tap the mouth of the jar, saying the name of the dog three times: Come, here�s your house!  Come here�s your house!  Come here�s your house! is what you say.  The dog will come back the next day or the third day.  If you don�t have a jar you can blow into a gourd three times.

In each case the artist has expressed these ideas through objects that everyone would have in their home.  The photographs � which are mostly very direct and focused � are not illustrations of the sayings, but rather concrete manifestations of their application.  In the case of the lost dog, the jar and the gourd are centrally framed in their place by the door, and seen from above as if from the kneeling position of a person about to tap the jar.  The clarity of the artist�s aesthetic and conceptual decisions contradict any suggestion that these are merely anthropological illustrations.   

Allan Sekula is a strong advocate for the kind of art that reveals the political realities of the artist�s immediate environment.  Growing up near the docks in Los Angeles, he became familiar with the fierce sense of community that exists on the waterfront.  Not surprisingly he was aware of the political and economic forces that threatened to destroy the international solidarity that exists between dock workers.  As the basis of unionised labour, this solidarity has been a powerful weapon in the struggle to secure reasonable working conditions in what has traditionally been a dangerous and difficult way of life.

When the Los Angeles dock workers recently came out on strike in support of their Australian colleagues they were already facing trial for their secondary boycott during the Liverpool dispute.  As such it was a courageous statement of support for fellow dockers.  The Australian Government had previously colluded with a major company to force the workers off the docks, replacing them with a commando force they had rapidly trained in Dubai.  Although the conspiracy backfired on the company, the Australian Government emerged unscathed from the whole unsavoury business.

Sekula made a body of work at the time of the Australian struggle dealing with the Los Angeles docks.  Now he is coming to Liverpool to work with the families of those who were effected by the restructuring of the dockside and the loss of work that has resulted here.  Sekula�s photographic process demonstrates his conviction that art is work, and that artists have a responsibility to work on behalf of the community.  His images are at once aesthetically rich and powerfully articulate documentaries that allow the voices of the workers to be heard. 

Liu Shih-Fen works full-time as a nurse in the Gynaecology unit of Veteran�s General Hospital, Taipei.  Many artists work as architects or academics: medical practitioners are less common.  When one sees her artworks, however, the synergy between Shih-Fen�s two worlds is immediately apparent.  On a formal level, their precise execution and display are almost clinical.  Indeed, the artist has also worked as a medical illustrator.  Her detailed knowledge of anatomy, and of the structures of skin and human tissue, is fully exploited in works like Abdominal Language 365 Days and Sophist�s Tongue.  In this installation for TRACE, Shih-Fen uses her drawing skills to recreate the familiar apparatus of the operating theatre.  In the process, however, she transforms the space into a museum in which nothing is quite what it seems.  Many of her drawings retain gynaecological references, but they also suggest animal and imaginary forms. 

On a row of stainless steel tables in the installation space Shih-Fen has placed assemblages vaguely reminiscent of body parts: the remains, perhaps, of a pathology demonstration or autopsy.  These sculptures are made from a variety of materials, including medical forceps, male human bones, razors, condoms, fish-hooks, pincers (to arrest bleeding) and fine thread for suturing.  While they suggest corporeal forms � and some are distinctly sexual in their formation � the sculptures are sufficiently ambiguous to defy any attempt at identification.  If anything, their monstrous nature and clinical arrangement deflects any erotic response.  Francis Bacon spoke of the aesthetic dimension of wounds and diseased mouths, but here the sensuality of the materials is countered by the taxonomical ordering of the parts.

Much of Roman Signer�s work exists only as the trace of an action.  An object sinking into water, for example, or the splash that registers a fall.  His materials � most notably water and sand � are ordinary, yet in the context of his performances they take on a life of their own, flowing and forming patterns in response to gravity.  At M�nster in 1997 he created a Chaplinesque installation using only a water hose and a hollow walking stick.  The stick hung from a wire over the lake and a jet of water was forced through its stem.  The cane whipped about, creating arcs and spirals, as though wielded by an energetic phantom in a display of cinematic burlesque.  Then again, it could simply have been a pragmatic fire safety demonstration, illustrating the importance of holding on to the end of the hose.  The simplicity and charm of this piece is typical of Signer�s work. 

At Bluecoat Art Centre, Signer has made an outdoor installation, while inside there is a video showing some of his earlier performances.  Just inside the entrance to the courtyard he has parked a large black London Taxi.  With the help of a narrow pipe fixed to the taxi�s roof, the artist has poured dry sand into the vehicle, creating a perfect cone reminiscent of the sand in an hourglass.  With its deadpan humour the work is both puzzling and hilarious: the bizarre trace of an inexplicable act.

Pierrick Sorin is a performance artist who has used video to document his work.  In his earlier performances Sorin often explored his own sexuality, working with the video camera as a voyeuristic partner.  The dysfunctional behaviour displayed in these solitary investigations was disturbing to watch and yet distinctly humorous.  Many of the artist�s recent works approach the level of slapstick.  In a sequence of performances entitled Pierrick et Jean Loup (1994), Sorin documented fictional confrontations between himself and his invented twin brother (alter ego) Jean Loup.  These domestic scenarios often develop into extremely violent actions that only avoid being distasteful by virtue of their Loony Toons absurdity.  Sorin�s performances as a clown are very funny � his on-camera persona is somewhere between Mr Bean and Marcel Marceau.  In spite of this comic aspect the characterisations of the two brothers would lend themselves well to clinical analysis.

It�s Very Nice (1998) is an installation made up of 33 video monitors that line the walls of a small room from floor to ceiling.  Each monitor shows a portrait, but the characters are a bizarre montage of a group of individuals.  The eyes, nose and mouth, for example, have been switched from person to person so that we get 33 possible combinations.  The pasting is sufficiently smooth to create convincing new identities, yet the features remain identifiable as slightly incoherent fragments.  This sense of incoherence is heightened, as parts of the assembled faces twitch or blink out of phase with each other, like bodies dispersed through space in the Star Trek transporter.  At other times it seems almost possible to reassemble the original faces � and their �real� identities � across the grid. 

Annelies �trba juxtaposes personal and cultural memories using photographs, film and sound.  The qualities she exploits in these media are calculated to appeal to the viewer�s own associations.  Much of her material is drawn from her immediate environment, including documentation of her children and, more recently, her grandchild growing up.  Portraits of the artist�s family in domestic settings are often juxtaposed with architectural scenes or other markers of historical and social life.  These images are manipulated to create a specific ambience.  In recent works �trba has projected the photographs in audiovisual displays that suggest a temporal sequence or a private history set alongside a more public or cultural context. 

In the Tate she has created a two room projection.  In one room, six slide projections of Celtic crosses create a heavy, funereal atmosphere.  A projected video image of a dancing woman weaves between the crosses to a soundtrack the artist describes as �dark, like the earth.�  In contrast, the other room is a �light� room, in which projected images of �trba�s grandchildren appear against a video projection of the New York skyline.  The sound, too, is light and optimistic, and the images have been processed in a very high key to produce a luminous atmosphere.

Adriana Varej�o�s paintings are cultural and artistic excavations.  In particular, they trace the historical conjunctions that have produced contemporary Brazilian art, including Portugal�s long history of cultural cross-fertilisation with China.  This complexity is exemplified by Varej�o�s incorporation of traces of the transplanted Chinese artistic tradition with the Baroque influences of colonial culture.  Portuguese Catholicism has produced some startlingly violent imagery, with graphic representations of martyrdom and disrupted flesh that literally dismember the classical ideal of the human body.  These images have been absorbed into the indigenous cultural traditions of Brazil, in turn influencing the style and content of local Christian iconography.

Portuguese artists exploited the narrative potential of Chinese ceramic decoration, especially the cobalt blue that became so popular with Europeans.  It is common in both Portugal and Brazil to find blue tile decoration on the outside of buildings.  Inside churches, panels of these tiles often tell stories from the lives of the saints.  These narratives invariably end badly, with bodily degradation, flaying, dismemberment and various forms of penetration.  A very popular secular use of the same medium is found in butchers� shops to promote their wares.  It is common to find images of joints of meat, poultry or fish hanging on hooks in these situations.  The parallels with religious iconography are hard to miss. 

Varej�o recalls the curious sight of damaged ceramic panels that were restored at some time in the past without any apparent attempt to reconstruct the original design.  As a result, the figures have been fragmented and the frame has appeard within the composition in a bizarre configuration.  For a modern viewer this fragmentation and disruption of the frame has distinctly cubist (and indeed post-structuralist) overtones, but it is also a compelling metaphor for cultural bricolage.  The artist has used this strange history of iconographic conjunctions as a starting point for her paintings, often referring back to the blue tiles.  In the group of works made for TRACE she has cut ragged sections of the painted surfaces and peeled them back like a skin to reveal what lies below.  This turns out not to be the expected dry wall or crumbling plaster, but something closer to organic forms or viscera: a further echo of the flaying of the saints.

Stephen Willats: Artist�s Statement
Democratic Journey is an expression of the basic consensus between people in the process of creating a society and in its externalisation as culture.  The work is an evolving process that, as a simulation, is enabled and enacted by people�s direct participation.  The transience, fluidity and randomness of people�s encounters with the infrastructure of society � the �reality� that governs their daily lives � is manifest in this work as a sequence of interpersonal procedures evolving in time.  These interpersonal procedures take a group of 32 individuals on a journey, both imaginary and actual, in which they build a �society� between themselves.

The formal structure of the work enables 32 individuals, who have not previously met, to become one group of 32 members.  There are six stages to the group�s evolution, each of which is built around a participant�s response to a question concerning the �ideal journey�.  The questions are open: there are no right or wrong replies, no good or bad responses.  They are simply a way of externalising and articulating people�s highly personal, implicit visions of their destiny to themselves and to others.  A dice is thrown before the presentation of the second question to generate random pairings of participants and this procedure is repeated before each subsequent question, leading to larger and larger groupings.

The outcome of the work cannot be known in advance and participants� interpretation of what constitutes the �ideal journey� is completely relative to the models held and expressed by the 32 participants.  However the structure of the work, from the individual towards progressively larger groups, ensures that participants will interact with each other and at some undetermined level influence each other�s perceptual models in the drive towards consensus.  The work is neither analysed nor edited: after the completion of Journey Question six the group disbands. 

American artist Fred Wilson has used the archives of Liverpool universities and museums to develop his piece for the Biennial.  His work explores the implications of historical study within the contemporary world and approaches the theme of the trace through the academic tradition.  Where other participating artists focus on individual memory and personal experience, Wilson�s piece is a reflection on the nature of collective memory.  His interventions re-present objects from museum collections in an effort to illuminate associations that are absent or invisible in the museum context.  In previous exhibitions he has worked with themes such as Memory, Artist and the Community, using archival materials to interrogate social roles, stereotypes and structures.  Within the context of TRACE his re-evaluation and re-interpretation of historical subjects inevitably brings to mind the peculiarly Western desire to trace, preserve and document the past.  But his work goes further than this in its pluralist and post-structuralist intentions.  Wilson�s traces, in the final analysis, do not so much contribute to historical knowledge as deconstruct it.

Jane and Louise Wilson are represented at the Liverpool Biennial by a video installation entitled Normapaths.  The work consists of a double projection displayed with one of the sets used in the original film.  It is installed in a building that is not dissimilar to the brewery in which their spatial and psychological scenarios were originally conceived.  The Wilsons� visions of this fictional setting are sometimes congruent, at other times slightly divergent.  The effect of the latter is of simulated double vision: not two separate views, but rather a sense of two eyes temporarily out of alignment as a result of intoxication.  This doubling is structurally reinforced by the inclusion of the set within the space as an index of its production. 

The different levels and eerie volumes of the brewery become a dreamscape.  A duet performed on a trampoline is slowed down to evoke dreamy images of flight, then re-enters real time at the peak of the twins� ascent.  The figures finally drift slowly back down as if exhausted from their explosive climax.  The atmosphere of the sequence is reminiscent of 1960s TV series like The Avengers or The Prisoner, both of which had strong elements of parody.  Indeed the choreographed bouncing has a further resonance with The Prisoner�s famous bouncing ball, which routinely retrieved Patrick McGoohan on the verge of escape from his Kafkaesque prison.

The set included in the installation reproduces a rather tacky domestic room that was partly destroyed when the women crashed through the walls during the making of the film.  �Normal� women do not, as we all know, leap through walls or engage in aerial fights.  Nor do they walk through fire, or draw glowing orbs from their mouths.  We have labels for this kind of aberrant behaviour, such as �hysterical� or �pathological�.  The Normapaths subvert this language of femininity and the assumptions that lie behind it.

Erwin Wurm�s performance sculptures arise from simple daily actions: trying on new clothing, driving by a billboard, or opening a box.  Superficially minimalist in style, these works are actually more closely related to performance art in their impermanence and emphasis on action.  In earlier pieces, Wurm folded jumpers and shirts in different ways to create different volumes.  The logic of the process was rigorously followed through.  The performances began with clothing worn in dysfunctional ways to produce abstractions and new geometries.  A jumper drawn over the entire form of a crouched figure, for example, produced a symmetrical cube.

At the Exchange Flags in Liverpool, Wurm has displayed copies of drawings he made as instructions for one-minute performances.  Each performance entailed everyday objects being used to complete an action, based solely on the criterion that the action was possible.  For example, a minimum number of tennis balls were used to form a bed upon which participants could lie, supported only at the necessary points.  The process was recorded on video, and is shown in the present installation beside the objects and drawings.  The audience is encouraged to participate by following the instructions in the drawings and employing the materials that have been provided in the installation.  A billboard has been created in Liverpool displaying an example of these performances.

Kumi Yamashita traces figures with the most obscure materials.  Her subjects include shadows on the wall or dirty prints from a pair of old boots.  Her graphic skills are amazingly well honed and the delightful images she produces are even more pleasing because we doubt our eyes when we see how they are produced.  In one installation lifelike forms of the human body in motion are produced by the most unlikely source.  On the wall, illuminated by a single strong lamp, we can see an arrangement of ordinary children�s building blocks.  Some are shaped like block letters or toy animals, but they are random forms in different sizes and shapes.  Yamashita has arranged these so that each throws a particular shadow which, when taken with all the other precisely placed objects, astonishingly adds up to the illusion of reality.

In another piece, bed sheets appear to have been trampled on with heavily soiled boots.  Instead of an image of squalid destruction, the streaks of dirt produce the illusion of a beautiful face.  The sheets hang loosely against the wall like washing so that we can recall that they are indeed sheets, not artist�s canvases.  Even at close quarters, however, with the means of production quite obvious, Yamashita�s piece still retains a certain beauty and mystery.

Peter Zimmerman text by Allan Dunn
The Liverpool Billboard Project, organised by Liverpool-based artists Godfrey Burke and Alan Dunn, invited Peter Zimmerman to respond to a specific billboard site on Hanover Street in Liverpool city centre. The location is heavily commercial, where billboards are at ground level and play a major part in street life.

Zimmerman uses the existing language of such billboards, rewriting the format to reflect what is actually taking place between a commercial hoarding and a passing public. Employing image, language and typography, he breaks down and then re-emits the various messages and signals of outdoor advertising. The artist thus juggles with the various components, normally perceived as a single unit, in a very public setting.