By Greg Bem
“I propose to walk to where you are.”
“A global network of thinkers navigating change through ideas” reads top of the Berggruen Institute’s website as I write this. For the last decade and a half, the Los Angeles think tank has been involved in numerous projects historical and contemporary, gaining much attention as a center of conversation and idea engagement in California. One such project of conversation occurred during August of 2021, during the height of the pandemic.
Enter UK-based Peter Liversidge, conceptual performer, and multi-disciplinary artist. It was during the height of the pandemic that Liversidge was invited to take the time and space, afforded well to a conceptualist during a global lockdown, to dive into the decades-long commitments and investigations of the institute. Mindful engagement led to the production of a book of “proposals,” in which the artist proposes ideas concerning the Institute (or its many themes).
Conceptually, the interesting thing about a proposal is that it might as well be a cloud passing along in the sky. There is no need for accountability for engaging in the proposal itself. The idea within may hold some weight and collapse the cloud (into precipitation, perhaps?) but otherwise what more to do with a proposal than say “yes” or “no”? The irony of the project is that the proposals aren’t just passing moments, but they are codified in type-writer text via a slim volume, aptly and professionally described as Proposals for the Berggruen Institute.
The book contains an introductory card describing the Institute’s invitation to the artist and the artist’s process for fulfilling the invitation, which included conducting interviews with those connected to the Institute to get at the heart of the organization and structure and the humanity within. The book resonates with this engagement, with this life, with the artist’s heeding of the call, while also humorously maintaining the stoic professionalism of think tank culture.
This isn’t the artist’s first foray into the “proposal” genre, having written similar texts for Antarctica, Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, and the Government Art Collection. The fifty pieces included in this collection feel polished and ready to be consumed as high-quality concepts, whether the answer is “yes” or “no.” Each piece was written in August 2021, and it’s hard not to reinvoke the landscape of empty spaces and heightened anxiety as each page emerges as a near-daily memento of quasi-livelihood.
Enjoyable aspects of the collection include unique takes on the ephemeral nature of the think tank. Where and what can happen in a think tank? What is supposed to exist (as symbol or structure or built something) to showcase the ongoing conversation and storied timeline of a group of people? Where is the line between the precious bravery of the intellectuals of civil society and the mysteriousness of a decentralized collective? Behind the tap-tap of the typewriter, Liversidge emerges as artist to pose these questions, mostly indirectly.
The proposals read like most conceptual writing: novel, fun, and just a bit obscure. Of course, an early proposal is creating the book, a proposal that tends to reflect a weird decision behind the proposal, decided by who and when and where and why being questions left unanswered. But the book is in the reader’s hands, so it has happened. Midway through the collection, a proposal on photographing the sky repeatedly, and archiving it, to reflect the artist’s presence. Occasionally the proposals are simple, as with the following: “I propose to keep things simple.” and “I propose to bring people together.” There is a Zen quality to some of these concepts: the ponderable nature of simplicity and togetherness disrupted by the individual reading experience, or perhaps the global pandemic, or perhaps something else completely otherwise: how to define simplicity? What does it mean to get together?
Despite some of the cliches that turn up on precious August memento real estate (such as one proposal that is a chaotic scatterplot of punctuation marks), and frustrating self-referential “meta” proposals that have to do with the proposals themselves, directly (including the collection of the proposals in book format), this collection offers a refreshing take on creativity, inventiveness, and inquiry during an otherwise relatively “tunnel-vision” era, the pandemic chapter in literature often defined as simply being “pandemic.” How curious, how humorous, that Liversidge’s works, however they might be interpreted, can continue to ring bells and wrack minds long after August 2021, as we continue to face many of the same problems and challenges, perhaps projecting forward the next long chapter for us and for the Berggruen.
You can find the book here: https://www.skny.com/ct/chu-ban-pin/peter-liversidge6
Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com.
.
.
North of Oxford 
One comment