18 Bido Lito! <strong>August</strong> <strong>2014</strong> Gold lamé underpants are not the sort of thing you expect to poetry itself was being questioned.” This diversity, and acceptance be greeted by when you enter a contemporary art exhibition, but of pop culture as a uniting force, is one of the reasons why the then this year’s eighth edition of the Liverpool Biennial is hardly exhibition is called Total Art (as well as it being the title of one of conventional. When taken in context alongside some of the <strong>2014</strong> Henri’s books). “Adrian said ‘apart from limitations of time I see no Biennial’s other featured works – concrete sheep, a branch growing reason why one shouldn’t be a painter, a poet and work in all the out of the wall and doors that are wired up to hack a computer different media’.” game – perhaps the oversized pants aren’t quite as anachronistic When the pop music boom died down in the late 60s, Liverpool as they seem. took up Pop Art, and smashed the conventional boundaries Tucked away in LJMU’s Exhibition Research Centre on Duckinfield between performance art, music and poetry. The Bohemian enclave Street, the ADRIAN HENRI: TOTAL ART retrospective features a of Liverpool 8 – from Upper Parliament Street down to Hope Hall collection of memorabilia and works curated by art historian at the end of Hope Street (subsequently to become the Everyman) Catherine Marcangeli, from whom I was lucky enough to get – was the breeding ground for this, with Adrian Henri as one of a guided tour on the exhibition’s opening day. As Adrian Henri’s its agent provocateurs. There was a sexy, disreputable atmosphere partner of fifteen years, Marcangeli is well across the country playing venues like The Albert Hall, before they that attracted the burgeoning new crowd of socialist intelligentsia were invited to tour the USA with Led Zeppelin. Were it not for the which sprang up around the university campus that butted on to gig posters and newspaper clippings on show in the exhibition L8. “It was a very effervescent time,” Marcangeli explains, “where a you’d be inclined to think that The Liverpool Scene’s history was lot of poets, painters and musicians collaborated.” This glamorous a pretty tall story. But such was the pull of Henri’s alternative non-conformity with a radical edge made heroes of Henri and his celebrity standing that he could go from pub poet to Isle Of Wight contemporaries, not just to the people for whom they performed festival star in one seamless leap. And this is precisely how Total but also to the wider artistic world. Henri and Patten hosted Art’s curator wanted to open her telling of the story. counter-cultural icon Allen Ginsberg when he visited Liverpool in “This first part of the collection is The Liverpool Scene, and 1965 (when he famously declared that “Liverpool is, at the present also poetry and performance, because that was a very important moment, the centre of consciousness of the human universe”). thing in the 60s,” continues Marcangeli, “the notion that poetry Henri also exchanged regular correspondence with William was something you perform, but also something that you perform Burroughs and Allan Kaprow, and found an admirer in future Poet to an audience. Adrian always used to say it was interesting that Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who applied to the University of Liverpool the front row of an audience at one of his poetry readings was to study Philosophy just to be near him. He was the Pop Art rock the same as the front row of an audience at The Cavern for a gig. star of his day, Liverpool’s madcap, roly-poly Andy Warhol. They performed it to a ‘pop’ audience: remember this was the first generation of working-class people who went to university en masse. So it was really a moment of transition, where the notion of bidolito.co.uk The main exhibition of this year’s Biennial – titled A Needle Walks Into A Haystack and curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman – is housed in a building on the corner of Hardman Street and Hope Street. The Old Blind School has an illustrious history all of its own, having famously been The Trades Union Centre and The Flying Picket. Walking round the old building, with its character still present on the crumbling, naked walls, I can’t help but think that the story of Adrian Henri would hold more resonance in this space, on the very road where he was once a prince among men. By the same token, Total Art’s location at the ERC gives it a distance from the Biennial’s overarching clunky, abstract theme, and the freedom to explore its own ideas with impunity and a certain amount of humour. Where the first part of the Total Art exhibition lays out the scale of Henri’s celebrity status in the 1960s, the second part goes on to describe how this was just the beginning. The collection of artwork gathered under the titles ‘City’, ‘Love’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘America!’ shows how diverse Henri’s talents were, in both placed to lay out the story of one of Liverpool’s painting and Pop Art collage. As a painter he most influential, if perhaps overlooked, artists. Adrian Henri: Total Art wasn’t merely a slapdash creator, but a well- Birkenhead born and Liverpool raised, Adrian versed student of the form’s history – what Henri was something of an artistic polymath. perhaps marked him out from others was the Having trained as a painter at King’s College, fact that he could at once be taking inspiration Newcastle under Richard Hamilton in the 50s, from the past, but rooting everything he did Henri returned home to a city bubbling with in cultural references of the modern day. He possibilities, and with a desire to make his once declared that “the pop artist stands with mark on a place that was fast-becoming what one foot in the gallery and one foot in the George Melly called “the crater of the volcano… supermarket”. Scouse populism and quotidian Liverpool 8 had a seedy but decided style; its observances dominated not only his lyrical own pubs and meeting places; it was small themes but also the reference points in a lot enough to provide an enclosed stage for the of his visual work. Henri understood that to cultivation of its own legend.” Here Marcangeli connect with people, everything, from his takes up the tale: “In the early 60s when Adrian artwork to his poetry, had to have a surface was teaching painting in Liverpool, he initiated a meaning. Working across different forms too poetry scene in Liverpool with Roger McGough, helped to take the message of questioning Brian Patten and Pete Brown.” The Mersey your own comfortable notion of reality into Sound, a poetry book published by Penguin in a bigger, more accessible sphere. “Adrian 1967 featuring works by Henri, McGough and wanted to be popular, he never apologised Patten, would go on to become one of the bestselling poetry anthologies of all time. But Henri his paintings there are a lot of references – didn’t see himself as just a poet or just a painter, some symbolist Belgian artist here, some but more as a performer. So when he saw the playwright there – but it never gets in the way ease with which his fellow Liverpudlian mates of communication. He once said, ‘I’d rather had conquered the world with rock music he the poetry suffered than the communication.’ decided to give it a go himself. Henri patched He just felt that you had to give people together a band, The Liverpool Scene, from a something that they could listen to without collection of mates who were members of the switching off.” groups The Scaffold, The Clayton Squares and In 1967 The Daily Telegraph produced for it,” Marcangeli explains. “If you look at The Roadrunners; their first record, The Amazing Words: Christopher Torpey / @CATorp Adventures Of…, was produced by John Peel and Illustration: Mook Loxley / mookloxley.tumblr.com released on RCA Victor; their first tour took them a weekend special feature on “the New Culture of Beat City”, which documented this burgeoning pool of creativity that was a huge influence on the post-Summer Of Love generation. This magnetism is what brought Yoko Ono to The Bluecoat in the same year to host her own ‘happening’, with Henri and Patten among those in attendance. Henri had staged his own happening in 1962, the first such an event to take place in Britain. It was an arty, protopsychedelic affair with no set structure, and the fad soon caught on, particularly among the UFO Club crowd in London. Marcangeli explains that Henri’s motivation was borne out of something far more innocent. “Adrian was interested in trying to get the audience to have an experience, that wasn’t just swallowing reality, but constantly creating a new relationship with reality. This notion that you need to shake people was pretty central to Adrian – and have fun while you’re doing it!” adrianhenri.com biennial.com Adrian Henri: Total Art runs until 26th October at the Exhibition Research Centre, as part of Liverpool Biennial <strong>2014</strong>.
Bido Lito! <strong>August</strong> <strong>2014</strong> 19 bidolito.co.uk