Art beside the seaside

Biennials appear to pop up like mushrooms. It feels like every small town and city has now added a biannual art event to its cultural calendar, from Luleå to Gothenburg and from Cuenca in Ecuador to Bamako in Mali. It’s a quick fix proposition and many of these events are most extraordinary for their similarity than anything else.

One of the most surprising recent additions, however, has been in Whitstable on the Kent coast in southern England. A retirement, seaside town perhaps best known for its oysters, that will host its fourth biennial in 2010.

It is a small-scale event and unlike so many other larger events avoids the trap of being just another venue of the grand tour where the same artists and audiences move like a flock of sheep form one venue to the next. There must be something about the seaside, as this off the radar screen event has attracted artists as varied as Gerard Byrne, Simon Faithful, Frog Morris and Oreet Ashery. In fact it seems that Whitstable’s mix of small town, pebble beach, caravan-park and seafood is the perfect alternative to the canals of Venice or the bars of Madison avenue. Check out http://www.whitstablebiennale.com

Moving north on a seaside art tour one marvellous and less known art venue is the extraordinary pier at Southwold in Suffolk. The Suffolk coast has long held an attraction for artists particularly those seeking the ‘en plein air’ experience and nearby Walberswick was a holiday home for Philip Wilson Steer and Charles Rennie Mackintosh amongst others. Those hoping for the watercolours of the Norwich school or works by Cotman and Crome will be disappointed in Southwold. The pier has been taken over by sculptor, cartoonist and mad inventor Tim Hunkin. A British institution in his own right, Hunkin is famous for his TV program The Secret Life of Machines and for his numerous and often grandiose public sculptures. http://www.timhunkin.com/

But in Southwold he has created his own arcade. It is a wonderful collection of coin operated machines that invites you to do such things as testing your bravery under a ravenous dog’s dribbling mouth, creating your own instant art work and having it reviewed by a critic or taking a virtual holiday. Hunkin neatly mixes the vaudeville-risqué-humour of seaside-dirty-humour-naughtiness with a gentle and endearing personality. The pieris dominated by his massive metal water clock. On the hour and half hour the trousers of two two male figures fall down and they piss into the wind streaking across the North Sea and narrowly miss the toilet bowl in front of them. This is perhaps not the stuff of the average modern biennial but there is something disarming about his irreverence and his technical brilliance and the pier is well worth the visit. What Hunkin exemplifies is a British tradition of misbehaving by the sea. It’s the kiss me quick, Brighton rock, dirty postcard stuff that is both a little rude, but mostly very silly. It matches the oddness of the pier itself, which has to be seen as one of the strangest of cultural constructions. The pleasure piers of Britain, these seemingly pointless bits of metal and wood jutting out into the sea are still going strong. From Skegness to Clacton or from Weymouth to Brighton these Victorian follies are a testament to eccentricity and an alternative the increasingly generic quality of so much of a biennial culture by numbers.