Pleasant Street Revisited: A Discursive Commentary on the Liverpool Biennials, 1999-2004
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Perhaps there is always a pretext for attending the Liverpool Biennial, different to the ostensible motive for being there. I decided to visit the 2002 Liverpool Biennial on the day that there was a launch at the former Pleasant Street Board School of a project by the Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Projects to turn the early 19th century building into a temporary exhibition space. There was a promise of some food and drink, and the possibility of meeting people. It would break up the day nicely. None of the artists’ installations at the Pleasant Street School has remained in my memory. Except, that is, for the office of the Volksboutique, an installation by the Brooklyn artist Christine Hill. The Volksboutique is a self-invented ‘label’ used by Hill since 1995 for projects which “take forms that are recognisable in everyday life, and bend them slightly to make them individual”. The Volksboutique Accounting Archive that Hill had set up in a room at the Pleasant Street School operated from the premise that “whereas the initial definition of accounting invokes financial issues, this model maintains that biographical experience and personal revelation are real currencies. They have trade value. They are worthy of being accounted for.” A proper office had been set up for this purpose, right down to the appropriate office furniture, stationery, eraser-tipped Volksboutique pencils, and an accounting clerk wearing sensible clothes. It was, comfortingly, fifty years out of date, employing real redundant office equipment and stationery graphics from old trade catalogues. It evoked the accounting office of an old-fashioned department store or shipping company.
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