Meta-Press For The Liverpool Biennial

I wasn’t plan­ning on head­ing down for the Liv­er­pool Bien­nial, but today I’m not so sure, after they sent out the best press release I’ve ever seen.

Titled 11 para­graphs: A brief explo­ration of the Liv­er­pool Bien­nial Press Release, the doc­u­ment - after a nice ref­er­ence to ‘the new ter­tiary level of rehashed, repro­duced inter­net wordage’ - con­sid­ers the press response to the Bien­nial, noting that 70% of head­lines gar­nered focus on Yoko Ono’s con­tri­bu­tions, match­ing her pole posi­tion in the first para­graph of the pre­vi­ous press release, with the remain­der of the cov­er­age tack­ling Jarvis Cocker’s cura­tion, and other projects given second billing first time around.

Then it gets really good:

Clichés aside, are we there­fore to con­clude from these brief obser­va­tions that the amount of column space per Bien­nial strand directly equates to the selected infor­ma­tion given in the offi­cial Press Release?

…There is also the accu­sa­tion that the press had pretty much writ­ten their reviews before even arriv­ing in Liv­er­pool. This is an area that Press Corps will be inves­ti­gat­ing more fully over the coming month but it is clear that many of the broad­sheets have not only fol­lowed the tem­plate of the 2004 Press Release, but they have also shad­owed each others arti­cles, coun­ter­act­ing or agree­ing with cer­tain obser­va­tions or stereo­types, or even jostling their egos a little as many of them actu­ally sug­gest that they indeed should be on the next John Moores jury.

…Therefore, on one level it shows the power and direct­ness of the Press Release to get to where it needs to go in order for the issues con­tained within it to be cir­cu­lated widely, irre­spec­tive of whether those issues are out of con­text, or of the opin­ion of the organ­i­sa­tion who sends it, rather than the opin­ion of the artists that it pur­port­edly rep­re­sents. In some ways, it could be argued that the jour­nal­ist is the instru­ment of dis­tri­b­u­tion, the thing that sits in-​between the press offi­cer and the public they seek to reach. On another level, it demon­strates that if the press follow the key indi­ca­tors of the Press Release with­out sub­se­quent inter­ro­ga­tion, they are not nec­es­sar­ily being crit­i­cal of the work on show but are in effect respond­ing to the propo­si­tions and sen­ti­ment con­tained within the text, a com­plaint that has been aired widely espe­cially by artists and organ­is­ers during both the 2002 and the 2004 Biennials.

Wow! I’m not sure if Press Corps, the folk behind the release, are quite, quite mad in send­ing this out to the very people they take a pop at in the course of their meta-​release, or bloody geniuses.

Either way, I’ve long wanted to curate a show fea­tur­ing a dis­play of press releases (with small works of art sent out to pub­li­cise it, nat­u­rally) becuase, as Press Corps point out, they’re so often a ready­made source of crit­i­cal appraisal and a lazily adopted route to under­stand­ing; and so often have a far greater impact on a show’s recep­tion than - gasp! - the work itself.

If I ever find anyone daft enough to give me space to mount such a show, one thing’s sure: 11 para­graphs: A brief explo­ration of the Liv­er­pool Bien­nial Press Release will be the cen­tre­piece, one of a tiny number of these mis­sives that rises to the level of being an inter­est­ing text-​based work in its own right, which, of course, ques­tions the con­ceit behind exhibit­ing press releases in a gallery space in the first place.

Posted at 3pm on 20/10/04 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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Tags: art, journalism, liverpool