The Annual Ipswich Biennial

Various locations, Ipswich, England

By Jonathan Field

The inaugural Annual Ipswich Biennial is an assembly of artworks, exhibitions, workshops, films and talks that took place throughout July and August 2018 in Ipswich, England. Set up by artists, the project was intended to appeal to both a specialty audience and a bro­ader, curious public. The strong architectural qualities and rooted history of the town are entwined here with a variety of contemporary practices to give birth to a deeply invested social form of art. The range and strength of work on show augurs well for future iterations of the project.

The Waste Land

“This year the Biennial inhabits the civic wasteland, both interior and exterior,” according to the Annual Ipswich Biennial website. The use of the term “wasteland” is telling. Ipswich, like many towns in Britain today, is struggling with politically generated austerity (and its social fallout), as well as the anxiety generated by a looming Brexit. Consequently, a sense of reflection and rumination is palpable throughout the exhibition. Artists such as Justin Eagle, Karen Densham, Annabel Dover, Alex Pearl, Adam Thompson and others use found materials, ephemera and detritus to connote obsolescence, entropy, the inevitable running down of things. But at the same time, the best work here celebrates the potential of such things to transmogrify, to become something new, to generate a kind of poetry where destruction and creation are not uncomplimentary.

In Postcard a day from LA (2018-ongoing), Alex Robbins paints onto found postcards and mails them daily, for the duration of the Biennial, to Ipswich from Los Angeles. Both the images themselves (crude and jarring after Robbins’ intervention)–as well as their display (dumped unceremoniously on the gallery floor)–speak of abandonment and neglect. “For you know only a heap of broken images,” T.S. Eliot writes in The Waste Land. But there is also an affection here for this outmoded form of human communication and a nostalgia for the analog world of paper, paint and glue.

Alex Pearl presents gimcrack mechanisms comprised of rickety mechanical linkages, video cameras and other sensor devices. These present live feeds of, and responses to, what is going on around them (passers-by are also seen, heard or felt by these machines, becoming a part of their overall mechanism) pay witness, with a melancholic humanism, to the questionable role surveillance and sousveillance play in our civic spaces today.

Maddie Exton, Silent, Again, 2018.

Melancholy also haunts one of the strongest works in the show, Maddie Exton’s Silent, Again. As part of the group show 3 - 5 Silent Street, Exton filled the eponymous street with straw. Existing somewhere between reconstruction and homage, Silent, Again nods to Ipswich’s rich history and the subtle mysteries of daily life. Silent Street is thought to have got its name in the Dutch wars of 1600 when, in order to quiet the noise of horses and carts, the street was laid with straw so the soldiers could rest. In re-creating this historical event, Exton builds a corridor to the past, the muffling straw a reminder of the din of contemporary urban life, her simple intervention speaking to the quiet poetics of seemingly banal things such as the names we give our streets.

I’ve Never Heard of Mr. Pearl

As well as melancholia, there is no absence of humor on display here. In Wondering Ipswich (2018), the ubiquitous Mr. Pearl installed planning application posters throughout the town center for the construction of, amongst other things, a rooftop observatory (including planetarium and radio telescope) and a particle accelerator under the town’s main park. Attracting the attention of local BBC Radio, an Ipswich councilor roundly condemned Pearl’s actions, repeatedly stating: “I’ve never heard of Mr. Pearl.” Impudently, Pearl recorded these words onto an edition of 20 novelty greeting cards and distributed them around the town.

It is also clear that the organizers, as well as many of the participating artists, approached this project in a spirit of good-natured mischief. For a start, it goes without saying that the Annual Ipswich Biennial is a curious title. Speaking to BBC Radio, Adam Thompson, another prominent artist, and the Biennial’s lead organizer said, “Engagement with the biennial model is critical, outlining ideas of multiplicity yet slyly mocking the impact time-based ‘events’ have on the cultural townscape.” This playful relationship with the biennial format was put on display when the following press release was published:

“Atlas House is pleased to present the site-specific work Stone River (for Heraclitus) by John Deeper in the River Orwell…On three different occasions, between 1984-86, he stole a worn gravestone. In the Fall of 1986 he dumped all three stones into the River Orwell from the east side of Stoke bridge where they still lay today. This Press Release marks the first time that this work has been made public.”

However, the press release closes with the note “John Deeper is a pseudonym, an artist and a curator working in Colchester, UK”, thus casting into doubt the entire story.

Earnestness and Irony in Equal Measure

In defining a particular sensibility that runs through recent art, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduced the term metamodernism: “If the modern artists have come to be historicized as an earnest bunch and the postmoderns go into the books as jokers”, they suggest, “the current generation of artists attracts descriptions that speak of earnestness and irony in equal measure.” (‘Art Criticism and Metamodernism,’ ARTPULSE, No. 19, Vol. 5, 2014.)

Alex Pearl, Wondering Ipswich, 2018.

Much of the work in this first Annual Ipswich Biennial maintains this balancing act with a delightfully light touch. Alongside Pearl’s funny/sad machines and Deeper’s honest/bogus confession, Ryan Gander presents us with a minimalist sculpture (It’s got such good heart ii [Life's Consequences]) that serves as both homage to Sol LeWitt and functioning cat-scratching post. In Channeling Ghosts, Hayley Lock and Graham Howes perform a live hypnosis event in the town’s central park. Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest that metamodernist art “negotiates between hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, knowingness and naivety, construction and deconstruction.” Such negotiations can be seen throughout this show. Making a virtue of having limited means, the project is an attempt to initiate and map a reshaping of the town’s visual culture in tune with the early 21st century. Many of the approaches on display have their roots in Dada and Situationism, but the spirit we see in this broad-ranging project has none of the utopian, aspirational qualities of the 20th-century avant-garde. Rather, it is more local, humble, inclusive and generous.

Thompson notes that, “This first Annual Ipswich Biennial strives to create a context for art practice in a culturally undernourished environment, not as a spectacle every two years, nor as an exclusive yearly event, but as an ongoing, supportive and inclusive vessel.” This generosity of spirit, alongside real respect for the town’s collective memory, explains the modesty of scale and intent that characterizes the best work on show. Sensitive to the social fabric of the town and its people-their humor, modesty and resilience-the Annual Ipswich Biennial provides a welcome alternative to the spectacle of many contemporary art biennials.

(July - August 2018)

Jonathan Field is an English artist and writer living in the United States. He is a professor of art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

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