The Liverpool Biennial struck me as a patchy event. There's an awful lot of dull, indifferent or bad stuff going on that left me feeling underwhelmed. But when it is good, it is very good. If you're planning a visit I'd recommend David Altmejd's The Holes: an installation of furry, glittery, reclining giants at the Tate. It's nothing like as fully conceived or as and all-embracing as his larger-scale piece in the Venice Biennale last year, but it's still unsettling and oddly beautiful-ugly.
Also at Tate, don't miss Omer Fast's video Take a Deep Breath – I think perhaps it's my favourite piece from what I've seen over the past couple of days. It's a novelistic video work supposedly about a film crew making a piece about a suicide bomber. Inner narratives burst out from framing devices and take over the story; the artist keeps ripping the carpet out from under your feet and you don't know where in the hell you are. Aside from being clever, it's gripping and has some good jokes.
And then for sheer effect, one of the public-realm pieces is a Richard Wilson number, in which a vast ovoid portion of the facade of a disused building on Moorfields has been cut out and set to rotate in three dimensions. It's inescapably impressive. I quite like the economy of turning an unloved building into a sculpture. That's recycling for you.
The biggest surprise, however, was the Walker Art Gallery. I've barely been to Liverpool before and this was my first trip to the museum. I was completely blown away. What a collection: knock-out, overheated Victorian stuff, for starters, but also some super 18th century works – Stubbses, the important Hogarth of David Garrick, Richard Wilson (that'll be the dead landscapist not the living sculptor). That's just the start: the Old Masters include a wonderful Poussin, a great Rembrandt self-portrait that once belonged to Charles I, a Titian, a Veronese, a really nice Adam Elsheimer, and a Simone Martini.
The best stuff here hits the heights of the National Gallery and Tate Britain – so why aren't they shouting it from the rooftops? Why isn't there a really smart marketing campaign to get people excited about this top-notch collection? You'd have thought Liverpool 08 would be a fantastic moment for the Walker to blow its own trumpet. But no: the galleries were pretty empty, and lots of works were missing from the walls with a note stating that they'd be returned in August. Well, it's now late September; in any case, it's slightly puzzling as to why they haven't got the place shipshape in time for Capital of Culture year. A shame.
