Visit Tate Liverpool right now and the first thing you’re confronted with is the temporary display, Tate Liverpool is 25. Charting the years from its opening in Albert Dock on May 24 1988, it makes for a remarkable testament to a gallery that has witnessed myriad changes to both Liverpool’s cultural landscape and the city more generally.
Opened as the centrepiece for major – and in the shadow of managed decline, unquestionably needed – cultural regeneration in Liverpool, the ‘Tate of the North’ (as it was initially dubbed) was seen as a major fillip, not just for Liverpool but for the region at large. A quarter of a century on, the gallery is now such a staple of Liverpool’s art offer as to be almost taken for granted.
So just what has its impact been and how can we measure it? Lewis Biggs, Director of Tate Liverpool from 1990 to 2000, and Liverpool Biennial director from 2000-2011, describes the gallery’s opening as “a wakeup call for Liverpool”, acknowledging the city’s plight in the 1980s. “Although it would be wrong to claim too much impact for any single development, there’s no doubt that culture punches far above its weight in changing perceptions… Tate Liverpool, as a cultural organisation, did just that.”
Particularly significant, says Biggs, was that it encouraged a “sea change in the city, from inward-looking frustration, anger and misery, to a place that was confident and outward looking.” In those terms, it is easy perhaps to frame it as a government concession to the North of England, and Liverpool in particular. But that would be to overlook the fact that for a long time, it was the only gallery in the UK with a specific modern art remit.
“During the 1990s, Tate Liverpool was the only dedicated museum of modern art in England,” says Biggs. “A whole generation of school children from the North West has already grown up who were able to take modern and contemporary art for granted.”
Capital of Culture
Another significant anniversary in 2013 is that it is five years since Liverpool was the European Capital of Culture. Without Tate, it’s difficult to imagine that the city would have been quite as well equipped to bid for and take on that mantle. Ultimately, Biggs concludes, the measure of Tate’s impact has been that the city’s profile has become “more confidently international.”
Bluecoat Artistic Director Bryan Biggs (no relation) echoes the idea that Tate helped change the city’s outlook from, at the time, dangerously insular to something much more global. “The Tate has been tremendous in terms of putting the city on the international art map … its presence has also influenced other significant initiatives, notably James Moores’ decision to start a biennial here in the late 1990s.”
It’s a far cry from the era immediately before Tate’s arrival. While Liverpool certainly had an arts tradition and infrastructure in place – already boasting the Walker Art Gallery and the Bluecoat – Bryan Biggs believes that the addition of the Tate means “the city’s ‘pull’ on artists is strong and is certainly one reason why [we attract] emerging artists to work here, and for more established artists to see the city as a serious art city. The Liverpool Biennial and other galleries also do this, but the combination of these and the Tate make the city’s visual arts offer exceptional.”
Thriving artist-led scene
It is this pull that has contributed to Liverpool developing a thriving artist-led scene, meaning independent galleries such as The Royal Standard now occupy a crucial position in the burgeoning creative hinterland of the city. A studio member at The Royal Standard, Jon Barraclough (who came to Liverpool in the early 1990s by way of Bradford and New York) says he now “can’t imagine Liverpool without the Tate. Its exhibitions, its curators and directors have acted like a magnet for Liverpool.”
And has it influenced his professional practice? “Tate has provided me with opportunities to meet and talk with artists and curators from the international scene,” he says. Barraclough is co-publisher of Drawing Paper, a not-for-profit periodical concerned solely with drawing, and last year he worked directly with the gallery. “Tate collaborated with Drawing Paper… enabling us to juxtapose emerging talent alongside major international artists. The open curatorial process was really valuable.”
Of course, each of these voices has a long relationship with the city, embedded in the arts scene in and around the Tate’s arrival. When viewed from a distance, rather than through that Liverpool prism, what then?
Installed in 2011, Sally Tallant is the current Director of Liverpool Biennial, moving to the city from London where she was chief curator at Serpentine Gallery. For her, Tate opening in Liverpool was “incredibly significant … both poignant and important, it has established Liverpool as an essential destination on the arts map.” After a significant pause, she adds: “As an example of arts-led regeneration, it’s super-important.”
As Tate Liverpool celebrates its first quarter of a century, the overriding message seems to be that its impact on the cultural reinvention of the city is impossible to ignore. While the Albert Dock area also boasts the touristic delights of the Beatles Story museum, the days of the city being wholly defined by the Fab Four and football are long gone. And along with the artists, curators and arts professionals it has either drawn to the city or encouraged to stay, Tate has played a key role in that process.
Tate Liverpool is 25 continues until 27 May.
www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-liverpool
