VARIOUS VENUES generally undergoing a notable cultural revitalization.

VARIOUS VENUES

generally undergoing a notable cultural revitalization, the port of Liverpool was the hitherto unlikely venue for the latest addition to an increasingly--and, many would argue, unnecessarily--long list of biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world. The Liverpool Biennial comprised four separate shows: "TRACE," an international exhibition curated through Australian Anthony Bond; a lively and extensive replication to this show initiated by means of local artists and irreverently titled "Tracey"; the twenty-first John Moores painting prize, awarded biennially; and the similarly well-established annual "New Contemporaries" display of student work.

The catchall thematic of the "trace" was, according to the catalogue introduction, intended to move "materials or objects that allow us to rebuild histories through our personal memories and associations." This formulation was sufficiently vague to allow fastening to enlist fifty-six artists from around the world for his point out to including both lesser-knowns and a lineup of usual suspects (Miroslaw Balka, Stan Douglas, Juan Munoz, Roman Signer, et al.) to engage with locations around the city. Bond's selection favored work with a powerful visual and frequently visceral impact. His taste for Grand Guignol was especially evident in the queasy anatomical approximations fashioned from stockings, condoms, thread, and assorted medical instruments by means of gynecological-nurse-turned-artist Liu Shih-Fen and in Alastair MacLennan's ghoulish abandoned feast of pigs' heads, part of the artist's ongoing series of performances and installations commemorating the victims of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" the two of these works were e xhibited in the rough-and-ready, warehouselike environment of the Exchange Flags building, common of the two principal "TRACE" venues

At the opposite close of the spectrum from like histrionics, in the more refined environs of the Tate Gallery Liverpool, were works like Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky's fifteen-minute video of everyday butt; goals tossing in the wind upon a New York street and Ceal Floyer's low-key projection of a ball that appears to brag repeatedly against a wall and the floor. Humor of varying sorts was provided elsewhere according to Erwin Wurm's dumbly charming One-Minute chisels in which ordinary objects are used to perform an action for which they were not designed, and Pierrick Sorin's rather more disconcerting video installations. These ranged from Pierrick et Jean Loup 1994 featuring the artist and his invented alter subject to It's Very Nice, 1998 thirty-one monitors displaying varying composite faces with recurring features, which voice a stream of preview-night platitudes.

The boldest curatorial gamble was the decision to amass an impressive array of Doris Salcedo's gravely melancholic sculptural combinations of antiquated wardrobes, dressers, chairs, and bedsteads filled with unite Fourteen of these undeniably poignant works were placed in Liverpool's massive Anglican Cathedral. on the contrary the gamble didn't quite pay opposite to The works' inherently powerful port generally draws added resonance from the implied associations with the ongoing social strife in Salcedo's native Colombia. Here, however, the sculptures' emotional charge was diminished rather than amplified at the grandiosity of the surroundings.

throughout at the Walker Art Gallery, Michael Raedecker was a worthy if predictably fashionable winner of the John Moores painting prize. The Dutch-born, London-based painter showed a larger-than-usual version of undivided of his distinctive landscapes execut in acrylic, thread, and sequins upon linen (Mirage, 1999). With fifty painters take the part ofed the hang was perhaps unnecessarily overcrowd and, unfortunately, unimaginative, with paintings insensitively assign places toed according to superficial formal similarities. a certain quantity of works were cruelly compromised as a arise in particular Jonathan Hatt's trompe-l'oeil take upon classic Minimalism, Empty Louvre, 1999 whose rudimentary illusion was shattered by dint of two all-too-visible wallpaper seams onward the wall behind it.

Highlights of the final portion "New Contemporaries 99," also forward view in the Exchange Flags building, included Kenny Macleod's deadpan pseudo-confessional video Robbie Fraser, Ian Kiaer's enigmatic sculptural tableau of an elderly Testament landscape, and Andrew Currie's high-jinks footage of a menagerie of endearing kinetic biomorphs created from tiny motorized fans, plastic trash bags, cotton thread, and electric cable, among other materials. cheap points included some pointless digital manipulation of originate imagery and the inevitable full quantity of overly derivative work. The overall impression given by dint of this otherwise welcome addition to a busy art calendar was of a biennial in which quantity was at least as important as quality.

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