For the Liverpool Biennial programme Service Provider, FormContent conceived a new part of its on-going programme It’s Moving From I to It. This new scene, which fictionalises the relationship between host and guest, is framed by location, character and time.

What happens when all characters leave the stage?

FormContent is a non-profit organisation founded in 2007 currently directed by Francesco Pedraglio and Pieternel Vermoortel with Anca Rujoiu as curator. Established as a curatorial project-space in London, FormContent gained international recognition through an experimental curatorial approach, collaborative endeavours and engagement with innovative artistic practices while producing new works. After five years of intense work, more than 35 exhibitions inside and outside the UK, and a programme of performances, events, publications and commissions, FormContent closed its space to work on It’s moving from I to It. With a nomadic format and limited time span, It’s moving from I to It uses fiction as its main tool to reflect on cultural production. The programme takes the format of a script and develops gradually through insertion of scenes, which may be commissioned texts, events or exhibitions, based on an outline written by FormContent.

HOST was a collaboration between artist Sovay Berriman and curator Laura Mansfield, seeing the development of a relaxation booth for biennial workers, providing a service for the service provider and allowing the host to become the hosted.

In their individual practices, Sovay and Laura acknowledge the importance of good hosting, both in programming and development. Through the creation of a relaxation booth, they aimed to draw attention to the crucial role hosting plays within the visual arts, highlighting its importance across institutional and sectoral hierarchies. In providing a service for biennial workers, the project offers room for thought on the priority of hosting within the practices of large arts organisations, independent practitioners and individual audience members alike.

A selection of services was on offer in the booth, provided by a team of trained HOST staff. The public were invited to view the hosting and absorb some of the atmosphere, though the services were reserved for biennial staff only.

Searching for a sense of value, Dundee-based GENERATORprojects were packaged and sold to a consuming public, lead by Head of Sales and invited artist Catrin Jeans. From shop fit to live office environment, The Agency functioned as a platform from which the role of the artist-led space was dissected within the context of the Liverpool Biennial. Bureaucracy was established and training days were held for the current GENERATORprojects committee as Catrin played with the power structures of the organisation and explored the role of the individual committee member as a service provider against the backdrop of the voluntary nature of the position. The culmination of the two-week project was an event hosted by Catrin that juxtaposed and punctuated the precursory disambiguation of place. The Agency was a paradigm of the cultural economy, an articulation of the values of an artist-led space through the commodification of another.

www.fruitcakeseeksicing.tumblr.com

www.generatorprojects.co.uk

Sovay Berriman and Laura Mansfield / Bubblebyte / FormContent / GENERATORprojects / Tether

As an official partner of Liverpool Biennial 2012, The Royal Standard presented Service Provider; a ten week programme exploring notions of both private and public hospitality within the context of a biennial structure. The unique environment of an international biennial gives The Royal Standard an opportunity to examine the role it plays as an autonomous organisation in a regional and national arts ecology built on individuals, collectives, organisations and institutions. By exploring the broad notion of the service sector as anything that does not produce tangible products, The Royal Standard opened up a dialogue around the artist led space as a location that facilitates cultural production and the dynamics of the relationships formed during this process.

The Royal Standard commissioned four artist-led organisations and a collaboration between Sovay Berriman and Laura Mansfield to occupy the gallery space for two weeks at a time. The only requirement was that during this time, they must use the gallery as a base from which to provide a public service. The groups occupied The Royal Standard’s galleries and online presence, with their every move viewable through the Foyer – a purpose-built observational zone. Each group controlled methods of entrance and exit, managing interactions an access to the provision of services.

Through a process of outsourcing to selected organisations, The Royal Standard became a guest in its own territory and experienced firsthand the interface between the public encounter and the provision of the event and observed how these movements are affected by the imposition of borders, values and procedures. For the duration, the commissions will function as a micro-biennial state; one populated by transient workers and accumulated in a collective research through aggregate models. The modes of attention of the public are what we perceive to be important when developing a critical understanding of how a city is activated during a biennial.

The gallery was open throughout this ten-week programme and the commissions were supported by the development of an evolving publication and an expansive series of related discussions.

When you’re talking about the fall of an empire or the loss of an icon, at what point do you become aware of destruction and embrace it?

This Is It incorporated an installation, a parade float, a studio production space and a series of public events which are used as tools to capture and unpick the way the human race recognises, records and responds to history that has happened, is currently happening and will happen in the future.

During This Is It, Tether hosted two artist cook nights, an all night discussion, a cocktail party, a screening and a parade float. This drew on the organisation’s activities, including the opening of a temporary bar in Nottingham, and examining an interest in creating intimate, informal meals for a few people which pioneer authenticity. To conclude the event series, the parade float ventured out into Liverpool to interact with other events and exhibitions taking place as part of the Biennial.


www.tether.org.uk

Paul Flannery / Hannah Perry / Jon Rafman / Travess Smalley

For Il Cavaliere, bubblebyte.org invited four artists to work together on four individual elements of The Royal Standard’s website in response to the TV series Knight Rider, which featured a high-tech modern-day knight fighting crime with the help of an advanced, artificially intelligent car. The role of the modern knight devoted to save others as well as its intelligent car are a point of departure for the reflection and experimentation in the context of the Service Provider project. The artists, selected for their relevance and the excellence of their practice, engaged with the structural part of The Royal Standard’s website, and transformed its variables whilst adding different features, proposing new ways to visualise data, content and information.

www.bubblebyte.org

Jeanine Woollard was The Royal Standard’s Artist in Residency 2012.

Her work is in a constant dialogue with sculpture, recalling a nostalgia for art historical tropes and artisanal methods whilst utilising mass produced objects and images as a onduit for this romance. There are no bounds to what can be called working materials; any found thing or place has the potential to be monumental and part of its own high-octane opera. Her photographs are often the documentation of sets that are assembled from the carefully hashed together detritus. Held together by composition rather than structure, this found imagery is so disposable and mass-produced, yet this is somehow its strength.

The Royal Standard presented the first Liverpool solo exhibition of painter and songwriter Mikey Georgeson. Bringing together a varied body of work from Mikey’s extensive career, the exhibition aimed to explore and resolve the tension between art and life.

Mikey identified the ‘Trope’ – a motif or device that while suggestive, does not carry the stigma of cliche – as the crack that opens between the audience and the artist. Eleven paintings focus on Mikey’s ongoing love of Liverpool Football Club as a trope through which he can explore ‘sending an emissary from his adult self to mix with the transcendental awe of his childhood’. He taps into memories of his boyhood bedroom in which his father had recreated the Kop, pasted together with faces cut from the Observer magazine.

Alongside his work as a visual artist, Mikey is also an accomplished musician. As ‘the vessel’ he is singer and songwriter in the cult rock art-band, David Devant and His Spirit Wife. In 2005, he began his solo career using the stage name Mr Solo and he performed at The Royal Standard private view on the evening of Thursday 7 June.

Jon Barraclough / Hannah Bitowski / Mike Carney / Adam Cooper / Rhonda Davies / Frances Disley / Dave Evans / Zoe Fagg / Henry Finney / Andrew Foulds / Kevin Hunt / Madeline Hall / Brigitte Jurack / Flis Mitchess / Elizabeth Murphy / Laurence Payot / Laura Robertson / Emily Speed / Tether / Linny Venables / Sam Venables / Matt Welch

Favela was a two day event celebrating the work of current studio members. For 48 hours, Favela occupied the entirety of The Royal Standard, integrating the gallery and studios. Using this new space to present a series of events, screenings, barbeques, beers, presentations, discussions, collaborative projects and exhibitions.

Subverting the traditional format of an open studio as an ‘event’, Favela aimed not to isolate individual pracitices confined to the work space but to understand how work and movements coalesce around the notion of an active artist community. By creating a multi-purpose social and education space, Favela questioned, discussed and celebrated the methodologies of building DIY communities and the organisation’s position within Liverpool’s existing networks.

The fabric of Whitby’s work appears to be on the verge of collapsing – degenerating into its constituent parts. Through the use of hand-made objects, props and amateur performances, Whitby invokes the monumental whilst undermining the implacable facades of such structures and images in an age of fake democracy. The exhibition’s title was lifted from the dialogue in David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune, referring to the scheming nature of one character who is exposed as engaged in layered plots. Whitby’s work often foregrounds the artist’s own position as maker and as complicit agent within the systems that the work seems to critique. Consisting of video, writing, printed posters and sculpture, the exhibition was concerned with layers of meanings and interpretations.

Whitby showed three videos. Using different modes of presentation and modelling, they explored the commonality between architectural pre-visualisations, cinematic special effects, stage-set designs and the propositions of contemporary advertising. A Time to Love and a Time to Die adopted the title of a Hollywood melodrama from 1958 by German director Douglas Sirk. In Whitby’s video, computer generated 3D models draw inspiration from the cover of the soundtrack of the film; the embrace of two lovers is repeatedly rendered in abstracted blocks and cylinders. The Beating of Vast Wings was made in London in 2011 and takes the story of Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera Salome which Whitby juxtaposes with a narrative of urban renewal in London. A new video made in Liverpool with local actors was a response to the new architecture of the city. Each actor improvises with models made by the artist; they play the role of architect, describing their invented aspirations for the building’s designs.

www.richardwhitby.net

Oliver Braid / David Hoyle and Lee Baxter / Maayke Schurer / Patrick Staff / Tether / Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould

Oliver Braid / It’s Our Playground

In 2011, Oliver embarked on a mission to develop relationships with the five most attractive young male undergraduates from the Glasgow School of Art. The documentation and interpretation of these encounters formed the basis for My Five New Friends. French artist/curatorial team It’s Our Playground worked alongside Oliver on this journey to build an online database housing the archive of his relationship documentation.

The developing narratives documented during this process were further interpreted by five selected film artists given private access to the evolving online database for five months leading up to the exhibition. Their engagement acted as an online residency and the culmination of which was the newly commissioned short films made in response to the monitored relationships.

The exhibition at The Royal Standard juxtaposed the films alongside meticulously handcrafted gift objects created by Oliver – one for each of his new friends – presented in an installation environment designed by It’s Our Playground.

Supported by The Hope Scott Trust, Arts Trust Scotland and Glasgow Visual Artist Award.

www.myfivenewfriends.com