Despite the city’s fine locations, the Liverpool Biennial is a bit of a mess – but a few jewels gleam amid the litter For the edgy 21st-century arts curator, mad for site-specific installations, Liverpool is inordinately blessed with remarkable locations. A 19th-century oratory designed to resemble a Greek-Doric temple; a disused Victorian brewery beneath which there lies a lake some 40ft deep; a long abandoned art deco cinema, its ruby interior frozen in time as if its patrons, dressed in their Saturday best, might return at any moment: these are just a few of the city’s more extraordinary buildings, beautiful and mournful in almost equal measure. And also, more to the point, empty and available. But therein lies the catch, of course. If art is not to be upstaged by architecture, the work must either be truly extraordinary, or so powerfully bound to its site that the two can hardly be separated. At my feet swirled little piles of litter: plastic bottles and cigarette butts, receipts and ringpulls Continue reading...
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