Wednesdays 2 May 2007 – 30 May 2007, 12.00–13.00

A series of five interdisciplinary art lectures at Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, to complement the ambitious major exhibition ‘Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde’. Five invited speakers will explore aspects of Liverpool’s culture from 1945 to the present day.

Wednesday 2 May – Centre of the Creative Universe: A Curator’s View

Robert Knifton, co-curator of Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde, discusses the ideas, art and people that inspired the exhibition. From the immediate post-war years through to the present day, artists have helped to create an external view of Liverpool, both examining and challenging myths of its creative scene. By developing an interplay of these external perceptions and creative influences, this talk will outline Liverpool’s relationship to national and international avant-garde tendencies, revealing the city to be both the inspiration and site for radical and unexpected artistic activity.

Wednesday 9 May - Reading Liverpool’s Urban Landscape through Film

How has the city of Liverpool been portrayed in film and how have these filmic portraits contributed to a cinematic iconography of the city? Dr Richard Koeck will explore narrative, cinematographic and spatial ways in which themes such as presence and absence, distance and closeness, mobility and stasis are expressed in post-war feature films about or shot in Liverpool.

Wednesday 16 May - Liverpool Photography and the Open Eye Gallery 1979-1981

Dr Peter Hagerty was Director of the Open Eye Photography Gallery during the years 1979-1981. In this illustrated talk he describes the Gallery’s exhibition programme in the broader context of British photography.

Wednesday 23 May - Performance Poetry: origins, extensions, examples

Michael Horovitz traces the (r)evolution in the ways poetry, music, song and politics have overlapped, interpenetrated and enriched each other and the world since he first brought an early jazz poetry troupe to Liverpool’s Crane Theatre in 1962; brought Allen Ginsberg to read in, relish and celebrate Liverpool in 1965; and brought together such pioneers of these arts as Adrians Mitchell and Henri, Brian Patten and Jeff Nuttall, R McGough and P McCartney, on stage and page in his continuing New Departures publications and Poetry Olympics Festivals.

Wednesday 30 May – Tate Liverpool and the Value of Art Politics

Prof Jonathan Harris examines the origins of Tate Liverpool in the mid-1980s and the difficult socio-political situations out of which art museums have often sprung. It then moves to ask: does it really matter? Isn’t art in the end apolitical? The lecture then considers how the situation in Liverpool in 2007 is different in terms of politics and art.

In collaboraiton with Continuing Education in the Centre for Lifelong Learning, The University of Liverpool

 

Tate Liverpool  The Auditorium
 
£23, £18 (concessions) for full series For tickets, call Continuing Education in the Centre for Lifelong Learning, The University of Liverpool on 0151-794 6900.

This event is related to the Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde exhibition