I’m dragging myself around the Liverpool Biennial today before it closes. I used to care so much more than this.

Growing up in the city with the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary art, I had an education in surrealism without ever realising art had made me its student. Diller Scofidio and Renfro hid some mechanical trick under a patch of grass near my Nan’s house that made the trees slowly twirl. Do-Ho Sue jammed a traditional Korean home in the few metres between buildings on Duke Street, like a remote fallen halfway down the side of the couch. Up the road, architects Walter Hugo and Zoniel rolled up the shutters of a garage every night to reveal a portal: a light box, an alien-blue tank full of live jellyfish, pink silk performing for us in the suburbs.

And then there’s that Richard Wilson piece. When I was 13, he pushed a cookie cutter into a facade on the other side of town and made the thick disc spin so that it looked like the old office building’s stomach was churning — or the world was falling apart. And ay, maybe it needed to? Maybe trees and garages and architecture all needed a shuffle. Yes. Art peeled back the edge so I could see a different world. Artists were always undoing the seams of the real city I lived in, and that way I knew the city had seams to change. Their art was a proposal, a double dare, a playground knock to the back of the knees that came to upend me. I liked its cheek and its spectacle and the way it staked a claim out in the open like a wild animal; it wasn’t just waiting for my pilgrimage inside institutional walls.

But this year’s programme, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay, is far more internal and serious than that fox screeching in the night. Not being a serious person, I nearly missed the whole thing. Then the website was so unusable I almost wanted to. I ended up following my own Notes App trail through the city centre, mostly so I could write this review. Uptick in the amount of sick on the streets because it’s September again. I watched a window cleaner knock a telescopic pole like a bone against someone’s third floor as the rain began. Passed two men carrying sleeping bags around their necks, followed by two girls with those long early 2000s scarves that are making a comeback, and half-wished I could stay outside where life already says enough because—

I didn’t have a great time at the Biennial. No dancing trees I’ll think about for the rest of my life. Instead, a lot of art in sombre rooms that needed me to be an upright citizen and read overly long wall text and consider the slow-burn of all the low-volume meaning I’ll never have the bandwidth for (or the honest interest). Just a lot of art that might as well have been invisible before me. And like, it’s worth stating the obvious here: I am not the perfect visitor, though I reckon most people aren’t. A broader disclaimer is that the Biennial is not made in service of me, and I’m not writing this text in service of the Biennial. We each do our thing in service of ourselves, the other party thrown to the wayside. It’s fine not to care about it; it shouldn’t care about me. Critic, curator and artist are always even — it just doesn’t seem that way when critics get the last word.

Sure, there were a few pieces I liked in their own right. Isabel Nolan’s work was like an air freshener in a museum where the curation made the building shrink. A photograph in Open Eye Gallery by Widline Cadet made me physically pause, the way her flash caught a scatter of petals in pitch black so they became baby pink stars orbiting a body. When I saw Amber Akaunu’s film in the Bluecoat, it was so forthcoming I thought, thank god someone normal’s at the party. And I don’t tend to care about the ‘end result of a community project’ genre in art because I am a bit evil, but ChihChung Chang’s reinterpretation of Liverpool’s Chinese Arch using charcoal rubbings of local resident’s belongings, including a jade bracelet, some currency, and a hand fan, was neat in its own right without me having to think ‘it’s only nice because people did a thing together.’

But like, the heavy-hitter this year was supposed to be Elizabeth Price whose work I’ve enjoyed for years. Her art is usually a bright silver knife twanging and glinting, so sharp, whereas the film we got here was an essay with too many pages missing. A leaking sketch for something else, a video that ended 20 minutes too soon, dialectics delivered to an audience on shite seating through speakers that weren’t up to the job. I watched it twice and thought: is this really the film the artist wanted and needed to make because of the will of their hot true soul, or is this a shoehorning problem, a simple instance of art only able to be made because of the existence of festivals and their scarce gold dust commissions? I felt it was just too much a commission.

The rain washed all the sick off the street as the day went on, and I spoke to invigilators with more energy than I have, and some as jaded as me. I thought about how a Biennial can be about seeing and liking individual contributions, like it has been for me in the past. But to be honest, I don’t want to hunt for something I like the same way I fly through options on a streaming platform. I did the whole schlep because I wanted to feel the Biennial’s choice in bringing these particular 30 artists together. The curatorial notes on this year’s theme of ‘BEDROCK’ pointed to the city’s geological, social and historical foundations, and with that, its relationship to colonialism. Fine? But there was something in the form that answer took that meant I walked slowly all day. I didn’t know how I felt about that pace until the taxi home.

Dripping across his back seat, the driver got right into things. He was a Polish immigrant who came here legally and what did I think about all these people coming over in the boats, because some of them are rapists, and trust him, they’re getting what’s coming to them. There are rules for a reason! I said I thought rules are made-up. All of this shit is. The city we’re in. The jobs we do. There’s enough space and money here for millions more people if we just rearrange things, un-pick those seams. He scoffed. I said I’d probably be violent too if I was isolated, traumatised and seeking asylum in a country where I wasn’t allowed to work, while England flags make a rash outside my window. He made louder noises at that.

When I dried myself off and lay on the couch, I thought: the art in this year’s Liverpool Biennial has its own answer to the current “debate.” It’s taking a position I agree with — one that’s clear in the work of Fred Wilson and his empty flags, in Mounira Al Solh’s doodles, and Odur Ronald’s aluminium passports. But what gets me is, it’s having this conversation behind closed doors, inside galleries, using indoor voices heard only by a leftist gallery-going population who already agree no person is illegal. So it’s the tone. It’s the direction. It’s art like an academic looking back over their shoulder at history, not art like an animal reaching forward into something new. And it’s transient too. When this year’s festival ends, it ends. Rain over the window cleaner’s work, while this debate boils on.

I guess I wish the Biennial was out there in the world, spitting on the floor, intervening, titanic, confrontational, seam-ripping, leaving its mark where conspiratorial taxi drivers and white nationalists have no choice but to encounter it. Because I look at 150,000 people following Tommy Robinson into battle and I want art that makes an earthquake under their feet. I want spectacle I can run to, because it makes for spectacle others run away from. The budget, staff power, and all of that attention could have been organised into some opposition. Some counterweight. Some terrifying, upending imagination that shouts: you are welcome here in the port city where our bedrock has always been wet with the footprints of people coming in from the shore. But it was all just too polite.