INTERFACE

REVIEW

Peter Liversidge: The Thrill of it All

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
23 February – 10 April

Reviewed by: Rosie Lesso »

The mind boggles at how many carefully constructed exhibition proposals must be rejected and binned by artists and galleries every day, for subjective, practical or personal reasons. British artist Peter Liversidge has turned this perennial problem on its head, making the act of having 'too many ideas' an art form in itself.

Liversidge now has a strong reputation for his wildly divergent 'proposals', ideas for art works and performances he types on an old manual typewriter, many of which due to sheer impracticality will quite rightly never be realised. His proposals are site-specific, poking light-hearted fun at the institution he has been invited to work for and the Ingleby Gallery is no exception (one suggested gallery owners Florence and Richard Ingleby swap clothes for the day).

He came up with a grand total of 160 proposals for work to exhibit or perform at the Ingleby Gallery this year, all of which have been brought together as a publication to accompany the show. A small number of the object-based proposals were actualised by Liversidge and displayed in the gallery, including the huge neon sign, THE THRILL OF IT ALL, hung over the gallery's façade, and hundreds of brightly coloured, hand painted wooden dice scattered across the downstairs gallery floor. Upstairs was sparser, with a row of nineteen identical stones cast in glass spreading across the floor and a large black and white wall drawing apparently inspired by the inside of a passport envelope.

Liversidge demonstrates an uncanny ability to embrace diverse media including photography, sculpture and painting, but his performance-based proposals are arguably the most appealing given the audacity required to carry them off. Of those realised for this exhibition, a number took place in March, including his much hyped Proposal No 90 and Proposal No 23, 'Gin Performance', in which Liversidge gave shots of Hendricks with cucumber from a stand before giving a motivational speech to an invited audience of Scottish business leaders, and Proposal No 87, which saw the artist driving all available hire cars from Edinburgh to Glasgow in one day, where they were left.

The rest of his unrealised Ingleby Gallery proposals, which are many, were framed and displayed in the downstairs space for passing visitors to drop by and read, their creased and folded quality making them into artworks in their own right. They made for hugely entertaining reading, including ideas to run a zip wire from the gallery to Waverley Station, to paint the entrance bright orange and to even install a volcano inside the space.

There is a childish charm in Liversidge's eccentric, schizophrenic approach to making art and his ability to shirk the self-promoting signature style which so many artists seek. His descriptive approach is inspired by what he refers to as the 'unthinking' tradition of folk art. But the playful, unrealised possibilities his huge numbers of proposals draw attention to are by far the most memorable aspects of this show, revealing the importance of noting down those ridiculous, off the wall ideas before they disappear forever.

Writer detail:

Rosie writes about contemporary art for a number of UK based journals.

rhlesso@hotmail.com

Venue detail:
Ingleby Gallery »
6 Carlton Terrace, EDINBURGH EH7 5DD

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