National Museums Liverpool Blog - Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Happy Samhain!

If you are recovering from yesterday’s Halloween revels then you have the pagan festival of Samhain to thank. Samhain, which means ‘summer’s end’, predates the Christian All Saints’ Day or Hallowmas – hence Halloween or All Hallows' Eve.

Apparently, Samhain historically marks the first day of winter in the country calendar. At this time shepherds would bring their herds down from the hillsides and give them shelter in stables. (Someone must have forgotten to tend to these sheep which can usually be found at the Lady Lever Art Gallery).

Brrr....it's chilly in here! Dan Hays' less than cosy hamster cage painting, Harmony In Green, 1997.

No coincidence then, that following last night’s chilly temperatures I was forced to bring my hamster in from the unheated conservatory and bring him into the cosier kitchen. Of course I was very careful not to put him too near the radiator because small pets don’t like sudden changes in temperature. 

Ironically, Dan Hays' Harmony In Green painting (shown above) is described as an attempt to make a hamster cage look like a desriable place to live. Can't say I fancy it myself.

Diwali dancers at the Merseyside Maritime Museum

Visitors at the Maritime Museum yesterday were treated to a special Diwali performance by local children. Diwali, also known as the Festival of Lights, is a major celebration in Hindu culture, in which evil is banished and lamps are lit to symbolise the triumph of good.

The young dancers have been learning about this and other Indian traditions with teacher Purvi Parikh, who commented “Dance is such an important part of Indian culture and this is a great way to make it accessible to everyone". She even managed to involve the audience in a few dance moves on the day.

Some of the clocks on display at World Museum Liverpool

If you are reading this from an office in the UK then don't forget to go outside and make the most of the daylight after work today, as when you leave work next week it will be a lot darker. That's right, the clocks go back this weekend, something which usually causes mass confusion in my house as there's always a clock or two that we forget to change.

All those in the same position should spare a thought for John Griffiths, the curator of horology (or man in charge of the clocks) at National Museums Liverpool. True, most of the timepieces in our collections are not kept wound up and running, so they wont need to be changed. However, the clocks in John's care that do keep time are located in several different venues spread out across Merseyside, including World Museum Liverpool, the Lady Lever Art Gallery and Prescot Museum. With all that running around to do next week, I bet he'll be glad of an extra hour in bed on Sunday.

Mannequins under wraps in the textile conservation studio

The textile conservation studio currently resembles the dressing room of a Paris fashion show, with tall glamorous models haughtily waiting to have their hair and make-up done before donning fabulous designer clothes.

We haven't been invaded by Kate Moss and her mates though, these are actually mannequins that textile conservator Anne-Marie Hughes and curator of costume Pauline Rushton are preparing for an upcoming display at the Walker.

The new display in the Craft and Design gallery will feature designer clothing from our collections spanning the last four decades, including outfits by Andre Courreges, Jean Muir, Bill Gibb, Yves St Laurent, Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. You can't put frocks like these on just any old clothes horse, so the mannequins have been specially made for the display, each with the right hair and make-up to suit the era that their clothing is from.

If they look this good now I can't wait to see them properly dressed. The new display will open at the Walker in December.

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.