Throughout the 1960s and 70s Liverpool was an important site for
experimental art and happenings. Yoko Ono performed Concert of
Music for the Mind and the premiere of The Fog Machine
at the Bluecoat Gallery in 1967. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills also presented
work at the Bluecoat that year, staging two psychedelic Son et
Lumière performances. They later returned to the city in order
to create large-scale casts of Herculaneum Dock for the Family Boyle’s
Liverpool Series 1976, shown
in the next room. These works were part of a massive Boyle Family
project Journey to the Surface of the Earth, which involved
various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the
Earth's surface, and then represent this slice of reality as objectively
and truthfully as possible.
Keith Arnatt, who in 1968 buried several of his students up to their
necks in the work Liverpool Beach Burial 1968, was one of
a group of conceptual artists gathering around Liverpool College of
Art, including figures such as abstract painter John Edkins and filmmaker
Dave Clapham. Stephen Willats was a visiting lecturer at the art college
when he devised the system-based artwork A Moment of Action
1974, originally shown at the Walker Art Gallery in 1974.
At the Walker the previous year was the week-long expanded cinema
event presented by members of the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative.
Under the group label of Filmaktion, a range of screenings, installations
and workshops were instigated in order to examine and demystify the
processes of cinema. John Latham’s 1969 performance work at the Blackie
highlights the importance of this community-oriented arts centre for
avant-garde art in the 1960s and 1970s. In an extract from a documentary
film made by Roger Tucker for Granada in the same year, we see Latham
dressed as a barrister using an electric saw to cut in half a book
called The Christian Life.
Keith Arnatt
Liverpool Beach Burial 1968
© Keith Arnatt
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Sheridon Davies
Yoko Ono Bandaged 1967
© Sheridon Davies
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In the week of 22 to 28 June 1973, a unique, unprecedented series
of film screenings and events took place at the Walker Art Gallery
in Liverpool under the title of Filmaktion. A group of British avant-garde
filmmakers associated with the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative presented
works infused with the political and cultural influences of the underground
counterculture, calling into question existing notions of the cinematic
viewing space and the role of the spectator. As William Raban noted
in a letter to the Walker’s curator, ‘[F]or some of us who are using
projection as part of the creative film process the conventional cinema
is redundant.’ A selection of the material shown at the Walker in
1973 is re-screened here, including William Raban’s Filmaktion
Timelapse, which, within the space of a single shot, condenses
the week of activities into a few short minutes.
