Mapping the Liverpool underground

Liverpool is European Capital of Culture 2008: strange times for my now-home city. But even before I lived here, I already knew Liverpool through its singular culture, and in 2007 Tate Liverpool gave me more glimpses into the city’s otherworld of painting, poetry, performance and music. This review of the Tate's ‘Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-garde’ exhibition is Part One of my personal Capital of Culture extravaganza.

I find myself gazing at the names.

Adrian Henri, Jeff Nuttall, Ken Campbell.

Bill Drummond, Jayne Casey, Stuart Sutcliffe.

I think of a dark-skied Liverpool filled with these people's phosphorescent light; the names evoke chilly bedsits round Falkner Square, paint spattered studios in attics on Gambier Terrace, steamy basement poetry dens and draughty rehearsal rooms with pigeons in the loft. The huge and elaborate mind map that hangs at the entrance to 'Centre of the Creative Universe' at Tate Liverpool weaves a tangled web between all these people and very many more. It hooks in the places where they worked their magic and hints at the mystery of influence; who met who and what did they share? We can't know, but we can wonder.

The mind map is an appropriate place to begin this investigation into the creative currents that have helped shape perceptions of post-war Liverpool. It's like an Ordnance Survey of creative energies laid over the destruction of the Blitz, and from its graphic carriageways and by-passes we move on to Stewart Bale's shocking photographs of Liverpool with its teeth knocked out; gappy and bleeding, it reels from Adolf's punch. Many struggles were to follow, but suddenly, there was space for imaginations to grow unchecked. Under the encouragement of a few iconoclastic individuals, Liverpool drew in extended families of poets, painters and performers who could support each other's existence; as the city's musicians rushed into the spotlight, certain of its artists were not so far behind.

Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough - the art ensemble of Liverpool

The exhibition attempts to pinpoint some of their near-mystical centres of influence; Liverpool College of Art, the docks, the Bluecoat, Eric's and The Cavern, the Walker. Stepping through the galleries is like visiting these cultural nodes at the time of their greatest influence; it's like traversing space/time - a short trip away from Edward Chambré-Hardman's noble city portraits, we find ourselves in a wonderland of free-thinking bohemian Mersey-surrealism. Adrian Henri's painting 'The Entry of Christ into Liverpool' and its accompanying wall-mounted poem are wild flights of fancy that remain rooted in a Liverpool reality - from the first sight of the Messiah ("red hair, white robe, grey donkey, familiar face") through to "walking home, empty chip-papers drifting round my feet". It's a thread that seems to connect many of the strands that follow; there are creative laboratories and imagined dreams, but so often the works are tinged with a sadness that breaks the heart.

There is a lot of photography and a good deal of painting. The exhibition's chief challenge is that the sense of avant-garde energy it discerns pulsing through Liverpool is not always easy to hang on a wall. The poetry, performance and music existed most vitally in the electrifying present of a reading, or a gig, or a blink-and-you-miss-it 'scene'. They are represented by flyers and mags, tickets and photographs; Yoko Ono being bandaged at the Bluecoat is frozen in time, while Keith Arnatt's 'Liverpool Beach Burial' photo has kept a score or so of bodies entrapped in Crosby sand since 1968. It's proof that something happened, but whether it was really like they say...

Well, you know how memory can play tricks.

So is Liverpool - or has it ever been - the centre of the creative universe? On the strength of this fascinating exhibition it was certainly the centre of a creative universe. It's always easier to pan for gold in the stones of history than to find it in the slag heaps of now, and there is plenty here that gives off an authentic glint - particularly from the jewel-box of the sixties. Whether the biennials and council-backed cultural jamborees of today can engender a comparable sense of thrill in the possibilities of creation is another matter.

In years to come, maybe we'll find out whether our own times seem so vital. Is Liverpool still mapping new connections or just retreading the paths of the past? It's easy to conclude that we are constructing a far less interesting, establishment-sanctioned age, but organisations like Static and the A Foundation are nuzzling away at boundaries yet unbroken. Their activities are interesting and difficult to categorise; and I hope there are still strange happenings in those Canning Street bedsits.

We are currently pouring an awful lot of concrete on top of the leylines that connect Now with Liverpool's evocative Then; The Everyman to Hope Hall, John Moores University to the College of Art, or even Tate (the gallery) to Tate (& Lyle). But the avant-garde shouldn't be deterred. In a city of margins, there will always be space for things that shouldn't exist. But gloriously, somehow, do.

 

'Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-garde' ran at Tate Liverpool from 20th February 2007 until 9th September 2007. Liverpool is European Capital of Culture throughout 2008.

 

Text © Damon Fairclough 2007
Images © Damon Fairclough 2007