Constellations (DLA Piper Series) @ Tate Liverpool

Some of the biggest of names in the art world from the past 89 years: Peter Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Grayson Perry (to name just a few) are among the 150 works making up the latest Tate Liverpool collection re-hang, DLA Piper series: Constellations, which seeks to create an environment that allows the viewer to make connections and observe relationships between individual artworks.

So what connections are to be made? The scope is massive, and diverse. On a whole the exhibition is an observation of life; of politics, cultural shifts, confrontations of sexuality and gender, identity crisis and celebrity iconography. The sheer volume, however, often distracts from the individual works – which does, perhaps, highlight the stronger stand-out works on display. Pierre Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms (2001), a digital animation that follows a manga character, Annlee, as she walks alone through a continuously transforming moon-like landscape, is narrated by digitally edited recordings, combining Neil Armstrong’s transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission and extracts from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864). The work merges the line between fact and fiction, science and science fiction with a visual boldness, with the glowing electronic blue of a computerised dream, contrasting massively with the rest of the exhibition, which is made up of sculptural and wall-based artwork.

Another stand-out is Gillian Wearing’s I’m desperate (1992-3); a large-scale colour photograph of a well-dressed man holding a sign that reads ‘I’m desperate’ and warrants attention due to its raw simplicity and honesty. Wearing’s work is part of the Joseph Beuys constellation, which focuses on ideas of a ‘post-war psyche,’ and social change in democratisation which, in my view, is the part of the exhibition that is most confused and uninteresting, with an over-use of ready-mades and found objects, and with works mounted on plinths through the centre of the gallery.

Around the corner, however, we enter Cindy Sherman’s constellation with Grayson Perry’s Aspects of Myself (2001) – a particularly personal earthenware vase, which contrasts strongly against its surroundings. The vase illustrates the artist’s personality through drawings of people (the largest of whom is a woman bound and gagged looking directly at the viewer), cars and other objects, including a house in the shape of an erect penis. The work critiques social boundaries in the context of the personal and the artist; addressing ideas of sexuality, gender and class, it adds to the narrative of Perry’s transvestite alter ego, Claire.

The task for visitors to Constellations is to discover individual works within the overwhelming and sometimes overcrowded whole. Touching upon issues and concepts that are increasingly relevant to our contemporary lifestyle, from celebrity to sexuality, it is the themes that we can most relate to that make the show worth the visit. Through Constellations we see a history of critique and opinion that has grown and transformed over the past century. 

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DLA Piper Series: Constellations is the new permanent collections display exhibition. Ongoing