As part of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, running into late November, the Royal Standard gallery will be staging a sly joke: one that locates artists, biennials and galleries – all players in the awfully dubbed ‘creative industries’ – in the wider socioeconomic model. Service Provider, whose programme changes each week, will be ‘outsourced’ – as the curators term it – to five artist-run spaces from across the UK, aping the subcontracting and industrial fragmentation of late capitalism. The five guest organisations will eschew physical exhibitions in favour of intangible, temporal events: Nottingham-based Tether will set up a television production studio, Dundee’s Generator Projects is working with artist Catrin Jeans to run teambuilding and morale-boosting workshops, Sovay Berriman and Laura Mansfield, from London and Manchester respectively, will run a relaxation booth for biennial staff, and London’s FormContent will produce a series of events under the banner The Host. In addition, Bubblebyte.org will take over the Royal Standard’s website for the duration of the programme.
This curatorial theme seems an ironic comment on the role national and local government funders want public galleries (including Liverpool institutions Tate, the Bluecoat and the Walker Gallery, all Royal Standard exhibition partners in the wider biennial programme) to play. It also draws the biennial visitor’s attention to the freedom with which organisations that don’t draw on regular public support can operate (though the Royal Standard does receive occasional project grants from Arts Council England). The taxpayer’s shilling comes with pressure (however indirect) to serve the economic or social interests of the day – be they regeneration, tourism or public education. This is especially marked in postindustrial Liverpool, which over the past decade has worked harder than many cities to position itself as a cultural epicentre (building on Tate Liverpool’s inauguration in 1988 and the city’s profound popular-culture heritage). In 2008 it was named European Capital of Culture; the 2012 biennial is the city’s seventh. With Service Provider, the Royal Standard’s volunteer directors have launched an elegant curatorial investigation into what role the artist-run model – which, apart from when it receives cash for particular programming, has no responsibility other than to the artist – plays within a city rich in art.
The gallery was established in 2006, and until 2008 was based in a former pub – the Royal Standard. Now the organisation operates from larger premises on the northern periphery of Liverpool’s city centre, where it is a workplace for 27 artists. The directors change every two years, with the current crew – artists Dave Evans, Madeline Hall, Frances Disley and Elizabeth Murphy – doing its best to steer the gallery through financially perilous times. In his ArtReview column last month, J.J. Charlesworth, bemoaned the ‘cultural animosity towards things’, citing a growing presence of digital, video and performance-based practices. While Charlesworth identified various causes behind this trend (the increasing digital abstraction of our everyday life and a perhaps laudable antipathy towards the megabucks blue-chip art objects of the salesroom), there is also a more prosaic reason for this object- avoidance by younger artists: their ever-reducing personal finances as the UK economy double-dips. The material cost of producing objects far outstrips the cash needed to stage performances, give talks or works on an iMac. As emerging artists struggle to afford work that requires manufacturing, perhaps they will move – following the trajectory of the postindustrial West – from being producers to becoming experience and service facilitators. The Royal Standard’s sardonically titled programme might, for better or worse, be a sign of things to come.
