‘Turning the place over’ by Richard Wilson
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/671596[/vimeo]
Richard Wilson’s architectural work ‘Turning the Place Over’ is one of the key public art projects in Liverpool for it’s year as the European Capital of Culture, and it is a fitting tribute that a combination of art and derelict space has been commissioned as an icon for the celebrations. Derelict buildings and cheap rent are key components to any avant-garde, and this has been witnessed and utilised throughout the 20th century – 1970’s New York and London’s East End in the 1990’s. Gordon Matta-Clark was part of the New York scene of that period and his work is the obvious source for ‘Turning the Place Over’, where Wilson cuts a circular disk into the facade of a building and rotates it, both inside and out. In 1975 Matta-Clark made ‘Conical Intersect‘ in empty houses earmarked for demolition by de Gaule as part of the regeneration scheme of Les Halles, Paris around the Pompidou Centre – a conical shape cut through houses that pierced the exterior wall at the widest point.
Liverpool is changing and is already very different from when I first came in 2000. It has become the most established art centre in the North of England with the Biennial, the Tate (housing the National Collection of Modern Art in the north of England) and the art institutions/galleries: FACT, the A-foundation and Bluecoat amongst others. We picked up our slab of a programme for the Capital of Culture in Waterstone’s and although the usual suspects are there (Atomic Kitten, Yoko Ono and all things Beatles related) the overwhelming impression is one of the civic commitment to culture, out of the derelict warehouses have come galleries with wi-fi cafes and a whole tribe of creatives using them.
FACT, FACT cafe
