National Museums Liverpool Blog - Thursday, October 26, 2006

Thinking ahead to bonfire weekend – BBC Radio 3, and BBC Radio Merseyside’s Free Thinking Festival is kicking off with an electric programme of stimulating debate, innovative lectures, thought and ideas.

Our Chairman, Loyd Grossman, will be hosting a special debate entitled, ‘It's not where you've come from, but where you're going that matters’. The debate will focus on our national obsession with the past – from family trees to apologising for historical calamities. Loyd’s guests include novelist Howard Jacobson, historian Joanna Bourke, Professor of Innovation James Woudhuysen and writer Kenan Malik.

The event takes place on Saturday 4th November at the Walker Art Gallery from 7.30pm – and tickets are free. To be a part of the audience for this exciting evening call 08700 100 300 or collect tickets in person from FACT on Wood Street.

This is just one of many events taking place as part of the BBC’s Free Thinking weekend in Liverpool, where other guests include Brian Eno, AS Byatt, Jude Kelly, Linda Grant and Carl Djerassi to name but a few. You can find a full timetable at the Free Thinking website.

Lali Chetwynd with Cousin It at the Walker during the last biennial

I noticed that the London based artist Lali Chetwynd will be returning to the north west in a couple of weeks to give a talk at the Cornerhouse in Manchester on 7 November.

Two years ago during the last Biennial, Lali organised some gallery talks at the Walker by a very unusual art critic, in the form of 'Cousin It' from the Addams family.

Lali acted as a translator for 'Cousin It', as he took visitors round some of the highlights of the collections. The hairy critic seemed to favour animal paintings and was very knowledgeable about Liverpool-based artist George Stubbs.

This time the artist herslf will be giving a talk about her influences and practices. So if you were lucky enough to see her performances at the Walker and would like to find out more then head over to the Cornerhouse.

On Tuesday we recorded Paul O'Keeffe's latest Lady Lever Art Gallery sculpture of the month talk on John Gibson's 'Pandora' (mp3/transcript/links).

Paul discusses the controversy that the sculpture caused when it was first exhibited (alongside a version of the Walker Art Gallery's 'Tinted Venus') in the 1862 Great Exhibition. His talk also looks at the complicated commissioning process for the sculpture and the Greek legend of Pandora.

Google Custom Search Engine allows any user to create their own customised google search engine. It's very easy to use and in minutes you can produce your own version of Google that returns results according to your own preferences.

To test the service I've quickly created an unoffical UK National Museums and Galleries version of Google. As its name suggests this search engine only returns results from the websites of national museums and galleries in the UK.

Try searching for 'current exhibitions' or 'job vacancies' and you'll see how useful these customised search engines can be.

There is loads of potential with these. Art in Liverpool could have their own search engine that only indexed results from art organisations, artists, museums, funding bodies and galleries in Merseyside. The Chamber of Commerce could customise to only index results from their members' websites.

Google custom search engines can be added to your own site, modified to fit your site's design and you can make money from them by carrying adsense adverts with the results.

The Little Artists, who worked with the Walker Art Gallery to produce the lego Art Craziest Nation display and helped develop interpretation for the children's gallery Big Art for Little Artists, have launched their redesigned website.

The new site lets you 'find out about the artists Cake and Neave, their ideas, exhibitions and capers, and also see their Art for sale. There are also activities, an interactive gallery and an opportunity to send in your own artwork'.

Here's a photo that I took this morning of one of the lionfish in the Aquarium at World Museum Liverpool, for no other reason than I really like it. This little chap (or maybe lady - I'm not sure how you tell with fish) was swimming round quite quickly this morning, maybe inspired by all the activity upstairs in the LoveSport exhibition.

Update: (26/10/2006) you can now see a flickr slideshow with photos of this lionfish and a less active one lurking near the rock at the bottom of the aquarium

The Walker Art Gallery artwork of the month for October is the first prizewinner from John Moores 24, Martin Greenland's 'Before Vermeer's Clouds'. Dr Paul O'Keeffe gave a gallery talk last Wednesday on the painting, now available online (mp3/transcript/links).

Paul discusses Greenland's previous four entries in John Moores exhibitions and his development through these paintings. The talk also covers Vermeer's 'View of Delft', the effect of frames on pictures, cloud formations and Greenland's red corduroy suit.

If you missed the Top of the Pops broadcast of Oasis' new video, 'The Masterplan' on Saturday night you can still see this remarkable animated feature online at MSN (scroll down for the link). The video, released to promote their new greatest hits album, is a bit of a tribute to fellow Mancunian LS Lowry.

The band are depicted in Lowry-esque 'matchstick' style going about their business, including playing a gig and walking to a Man City vs Newcastle football match.

There's also a subtle 'hats off' to the Beatles with the lads swaggering across a zebra crossing Abbey Road style. They later return to their matching terrace-houses, just like in the movie 'Help!'.

I can't say that I'm the biggest Oasis fan in the world - but this video is just compelling -and the tune's not bad either.

It doesn't seem that long ago that Crewe and Nantwich's Britannia sculpture was having a lie down and some TLC in the sculpture conservation studio. 

Following Britannia's departure a heavenly figure has taken her place, in the form of the sculpture from the war memorial at Blackley, near Manchester.

Sculpture conservators Simon Cottle and Lottie Barnden are pictured hard at work cleaning the angel's wings. The bronze panels from the base of the memorial are also being conserved in the studio.

Their work will be completed in early November and the memorial will be reassembled in time for Remembrance Day.

'The Murder', Paul Cézanne

The Walker Art Gallery website contains our spoliation list - works from Walker Art Gallery's collection whose provenance is either incomplete or uncertain. They are published to assist with the worldwide search for works of art that may have been wrongfully taken during the Holocaust and World War Two.

In publishing these lists we aim to advertise as widely as possible the details of specific works of art, the whereabouts and ownership of which cannot with confidence be specified for the years 1933-45.

'The Murder', by Paul Cézanne, has recently been removed from the list, after its provenance was established thanks to research by staff at the Art Loss Register.

Nipped down to St Nick's on Chapel Street in my lunch hour today to have a look at local artist Julie Jones' latest work, part of a Dying Frog independent show for the Biennial. The exhibition is great and Julie has documented her work on the frescoes online, an interesting look at her process and the life of a busy church.

Not us unfortunately but we're getting there.

The 'One Day In History' project aims to record a blog diary for today - 17 October -  involving as many people as possible. The posts will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life.They are looking for not just the minutiae of your everyday life but also how history is affecting you, how you are interacting with the past etc. You might want to describe how you went to a museum, listened to a piece of old music, had a chat with someone about your family tree or looked at this blog (you knew there was going to be a plug in there somewhere). Mine would be too dull to contemplate so, despite quite liking the idea, I might have to spare the nation.

This is being run by the National Trust and is part of the the History Matters campaign.

Delegates deep in discussion at the Stealing History debate

Yesterday the Merseyside Maritime Museum hosted one of the key events of this year's Black History Month, a free public debate on the repatriation of African objects entitled Stealing History. The international panel of guest speakers included Dr Claude Ardioun, head of the African section at the British Museum and former director of National Museums Mali; Professor Barbara Bush, senior lecturer in history at Hallam University, Sheffield; Dr Boris Wastiau, curator of ethnography at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium; Dr Zachary Kingdon, curator of African collections at National Museums Liverpool and Dr Ray Costello, historian of the Black British community.

Afterwards delegates commented that the packed day of discussion and workshops raised issues about the complex subject of repatriation that they had never even considered before, and that it had helped them to feel involved in the museums' decision making process.

If you missed the debate you could still make it to the talks, workshops, performances and study days planned at the Maritime Museum and World Museum Liverpool until the end of the month. Have a look at the National Museums Liverpool Black History Month page for details of events at our venues, or see the official Black History Month website for events across the country.

Lots of you have been looking at the Steven Gerrard video and some of you have been linking to it as well. We've noticed that a lot of people are just linking to the blog, rather than to that particular post which will drop off the main page shortly making it harder to find. So, here is the video again, in all its formats, or you can read the original post in full here.

• Windows Media (11.3mb)
• MPEG1 (12.4mb)
• Xvid (12.3mb)

Downloadable version

•  MPEG1 (3 mins 59 secs, 19.8mb) 
  
•  You can also read the transcript here.

If you want to link to the original post you are best using this URL:
http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/gerrard

Health and safety officer Colin Parr and Chris Moseley, head of ship models conservation, are pictured overseeing the move of the Titanic model this morning.

The model is shown carefully packaged, padded and protected from the elements (and icebergs) in the large crate that is being lifted by the crane behind them.

Moving it was quite a major operation, which involved wheeling the crated model from its old home in the former Floating Palaces gallery, out of a third floor window onto the specially constructed scaffolding. The crane then lifted it safely down.

The model will go back on display in the Merseyside Maritime Museum early next year, in a new gallery on the first floor about the Titanic, Lusitania and Empress of Ireland disasters.

Pauline shows visitors some 1930s French knickers

Corsets and crinolines from the costume collection

This afternoon Pauline Rushton, curator of costume and textiles, gave visitors a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes with a talk on 'Grandma's underwear'.

During the talk, which looked at how women's underwear has changed over the years, Pauline showed examples of corsets, crinolines, drawers and knickers from the costume collection dating from 1770 up to the late 20th century.

It was quite an eye opener to see just how many complicated items of clothing a well dressed lady would have had to put on in the 18th and 19th centuries. However when we went out into the cold afterwards a few of us did envy how warm they would have been underneath all those layers.

Pauline is hoping to give another in-focus talk about the costume collection early next year, so keep an eye on the What's on pages for further details.

Artist Nicholas Middleton came into the Walker last week to give a talk on his painting 'Scene from a Contemporary Novel'. The painting is one of the entries in the John Moores 24 exhibition of contemporary painting, running at the Walker until 26 November 2006.

The photorealistic painting is a biennial highlight on feeling listless, whilst code and effect has a report on the talk itself.

In his talk Nicholas discussed inspirations such as Patrick Keiller's 'The City of the Future' exhibition at FACT and Jeff Wall, the photography and digital techniques used in creating the painting and the location near Brick Lane.

[mp3/transcript/links]

Lion head casts in the sculpture conservation studio

While sculpture conservation are best known for their work repairing large monuments, they also do a lot of smaller scale, more delicate work. On a recent visit I saw this batch of cast lion heads in the studio. The casts have been made as part of a scheme to restore some of Liverpool's historic drinking fountains, funded by United Utilities and the Liverpool Culture Company.

Children hold an original lion head spout from a fountain, with a new jaw made by conservation technologies

Conservation technologies have replicated the lion head spouts from the fountains, which was quite a challenge as only the only remaining original head had a broken jaw. A new jaw was modelled, based on old photos of the fountains, then the casts were taken from this.

The original head is shown on the right, held by children from local primary schools at the launch of the project in July. An education programme has involved Liverpool children in a range of projects about the fountains, with some even composing their own 'water music'.

The new casts should be appearing on fountains near you (if you live in the Liverpool area) soon. The Woolton Road Melly fountain is the first of four that are being considered for renovation.  The others are located at East Prescot Road, West Derby Road, and Chapel Street.

Terry Chapman of United Utilities said: "When these fountains were first introduced in the 1850s it was a tremendous breakthrough in public health - and these are beautiful civic monuments in their own right which deserve to be restored."

The project has been supported by the Libraries and Regeneration Departments of Liverpool City Council, National Museums Liverpool, The National Trust and Friends of Liverpool Monuments.

Well, OK, it is just the model of the Titanic (and if you really want to split hairs it's actually the model of the Olympic/Titanic, but that's a whole other story that you can read on the Maritime Museum collection pages).

I'll start again. Justin Garside Taylor, head of industrial and land transport conservation, is shown gently easing the Titanic model up on trolleys, ready to be moved out of the former Floating Palaces gallery and into a brand new display, due to open early in 2007.

Moving such a large and important model is quite an operation. The preparations have involved staff from several different departments, including shipkeeping, the handling team, conservation and maritime history. Once everything is ready the model will actually be moved later this week, depending on the weather.

On the lookout for icebergs are models conservator Dave Parsons (dusting the deck) with curator Alan Scarth, Justin Garside Taylor and head of ship models conservation Chris Moseley