The work of Henry Moore’s is fixed in the public imagination as a world of reclining figures and abstract forms with hollow spaces, cast in bronze on a monumental scale. When calling Moore to mind few people, it seems safe to say, think of dainty headscarves, jazzy curtains and comfy bedspreads.

The new exhibit at Dovecote Studio, the first to show Moore’s textile designs outside his home at Perry Grove, and featuring sketches and notebooks that remained undiscovered until 2006, could change all that.

Stepping across the threshold, it is, at first, very hard to believe that Henry Moore is the man behind the eye-popping designs arrayed on the studio wall. It’s not just the medium - though to see Moore working in silk and rayon rather than stone and bronze is a bit of a shock - it’s the colours. The clashing palette is unmistakably that of the optimistic, forward-looking, atomic 1950s, replete with jolly pinks, acidic lime greens and searing oranges.

Look closer, though, and there is much that is familiar. Family Group, a 1946 design, is familiar, with the extruded, softened forms of the father, mother and child a match for Moore’s monumental carvings of the time, but here, printed on a tiny scale, in seven colours, the scene is domestic, loving, bordering on the cutesy. There are little clues, too, which illuminate Moore’s better known work. The maze-like geometric patterns he sketched for headscarves have a distinctly Mesoamerican look to them, an echo, perhaps, of the Mayan reclining figures that informed Moore’s sculpture. The supposedly primitive pops up again in Heads - which Moore used for his own curtains at home - is an array of animal-like tribal masks.

Elsewhere, another side to Moore emerges, hinting at a rather wicked sense of humour. Tasked with producing designs for luxury fashion items, he picks thoroughly down to earth motifs, undercutting the glamour of silk (and the cod glamour of parachute nylon) by crafting patterns from the most mundane objects, from watering cans and caterpillars to piano keys and safety pins, all doodled with a lightness of touch. There’s even a striking design based on lines of barbed wire that, to modern eyes, looks positively punky.

Moore’s brief, parallel career as a textile designer is largely down to the efforts of Zika Ascher who, having fled Prague in 1939, turned in the post-war years toward artists for his designs, including Henri Matisse and Graham Sutherland. While these artists were happy to puncture the elitist pretensions of fine art in providing designs for mass produced items, they never quite blurred the boundaries between their main artistic practice and forays into the applied arts. In the lower galleries of the Dovecote, which play host to the Jerwood Contemporary Makers group show, it’s hard to draw a line between contemporary, conceptual art and what used to be called applied arts, or, more prosaically, crafts. The Jerwood are obviously aware of this - the foundation used to award an Applied Arts Prize, which, as of 2008, has been replaced by a shared grant for the Contemporary Makers gathered here - and the catalogue essays, while largely sticking to the appellation ‘makers’, uses the language of art criticism to discuss the work on show. This might not matter - the only useful, if tautological, way to define art today is as things presented by artists - if it weren’t for the fact that many of these makers seem to be positioning themselves in the perceived gap between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ craft. And most of them are making art, too, the only clue to a different status coming in their choice of materials, their training, and, ultimately, their inclusion in a show with the word ‘makers’ in its title.

Lin Cheung, ostensibly a jeweller, opens the show with an installation about jewellery, complete with a library of books - all in matching pristine white dust jackets - with titles like The Joy of Jewellrey, The Complete Idiots Guide to Jewellry and Zen and the Art of Jewellrey Making. In a matching all-white reading room, Cheung presents her made artefacts in chairs topped with glass seats. In other words, Cheung obscures here skill at making in a dud art installation.

Nicholas Rena’s series of vessels, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, offer much more. They are huge, deliberately unusable jugs and pots on an almost architectural scale which match pleasingly rounded forms with sharp lines, bearing a surface sheen that comes close to glowing. Tellingly, they are one-offs, not multiples, and yet Rena clearly revels in the crafting of them, generating that sheen by applying layers of acrylic paint before finishing them with wax. The result is pleasingly ambiguous, with superficially useful objects presented for examination and enjoyment, not use.

Diedre Nelson, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, approaches textile design with a twinkle in her eye. Her Emotionally Embroiderd Shirts, a trio of plain, mass-produced, machine-made garments bear beautiful, pristinely hand-stitched flowers, tucked below their collars. It’s a simple evocation of the subtle feelings we attach to our clothes as we wear them out, and an acknowledgement that those associations, built up over the years, are private - if one of Nelson’s shirts were worn, her work on them would be hidden from view, tickling the nape of the wearer’s neck. Nelson has made more flowers, more delicate still, and mounted them on the sort of foam earplugs handed out at noisy gigs. Again, a mass-produced object is suffused with the suggestion of memories, this time musical.

Memory is to the fore in Clare Twomey’s piece, too, which consists of a rough stripe across one wall of the gallery, with a history of grafitti scratched into its surface. There’s a crudely rendered bunny rabbit, a skull and crossbones, and a rough approximation of the ‘I love NY’ logo. It’s hard to resist the temptation to scratch the surface with a thumbnail, and I doubt Twomey would mind if visitors did: her best known installation featured a floor of fragile tiles, designed to be crushed under foot.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 19th December , 2008.

The Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibition of films and animations by Langlands & Bell - an artistic duo who, when they’re not making sculptural work, have been at the vanguard of new media since the late 1970s - serves well, among other things, as a history of the technology of film, from Super 8’s flickering black and white to the polygons and textures of computer simulation.

The show opens with Ooh La La Les Legumes!, a doomy, Godard-influenced piece made in 1979 when the duo were still students. The loosely structured narrative sees Langlands and Bell drifting through Dijon’s markets and cafes, as the camera plays doomily across gravestones and follows cows being herded into an abattoir. A later student work, Pseudo, borrows both the soundtrack from Hitchcock’s Psycho and the director’s techniques, to craft a silent noir in which a woman, engrossed in a thriller on TV, finds herself under attack.

These early pieces are gripping, and sophisticated in their exploration of film technique, but it is only when Langlands & Bell develop their own cinematic language, and turn their cameras on the real world, that they hit their stride.

Borough Market, filmed in 1986, is a tightly focused portrait of a place, and the people in it. Close-up shots of market traders and their punters mugging for the camera are intercut with death masks and cheap statuary, an auctioneer takes bids at breakneck speed, banging his gavel, a stiffly formal equivalent to the vendors shouting prices outside. These frenetic scenes are set against shots of city workers flowing along pavements on their way home. The shots build to form a dense study of the market and its surroundings, contrasting the forward-looking city boys with the tradition-bound stall-holders.

The most recent film here, Folkestone - Boulogne: A Blind Date, applies the same techniques to two towns, and the journey between them. In a nod to their earlier work, Langlands & Bell let their camera rove over more stalls of fruit and veg, and record a fisherman complaining about the decline of his industry. Shots of the red cabins of Folkestone’s funicular railway give way to scenes of a cross-Channel ferry chugging into Boulogne harbour, a simple juxtaposition of two transport systems kept running by the tourist trade.

Shots of elderly folk dancers in traditional costume jigging to accordion music are matched to sequences of gangs of kids clad in the international uniform of hooded tops and tracksuit bottoms. These two groups couldn’t be more different, you might think, but the teenagers are dancing too, performing “jumpstyle” moves. By cutting between the two, Langlands & Bell reduce the apparent distance between the two cultural activities, highlighting the fact that, while the folk dancers are preserving local customs in the face of globalisation, their children, despite the American streetwear on their backs, are busy creating new folk dances.

These pieces are, above all, about people, but when Langlands & Bell remove the human component from their work, they falter. The Artists Studio is a 2002 interactive computer animation that recreates the interior of the Old Library Hallway at Petworth House in Sussex, where JMW Turner kept a studio, contrasted with a virtual version of Langlands & Bell’s own studio space in London. I found it an exercise in frustration, spending five minutes desperately trying to escape an upstairs landing, and the rest of my time interacting with the virtual space by banging my virtual head against the pixelated purple flock wallpaper of a Petworth corridor. I can’t blame Langlands & Bell for my lack of coordination and unfamiliarity with the computer games that inspire the work, but even if I had been able to glide smoothly from Turner’s old haunt to the slickly designed spaces of their HQ, I doubt I would’ve learned as much as I did soaking up the atmosphere of Boulogne, Folkestone, Borough Market or Dijon.

In the upstairs gallery, The House of Osama Bin Laden, a work which earned Langlands & Bell their 2004 Turner Prize nomination, is another interactive simulation, this time set in the al Qaeda figurehead’s one- time base in Afghanistan. The stills reproduced in the catalogue show someone exploring the bombed-out building, finding a rocket launcher propped in a corner, and storage spaces full of moth-eaten rugs. On their field trip to Afghanistan, Langlands & Bell risked life and limb, only realising when reviewing their research photos of the hide-out that they had been snapping away just inches from unexploded land mines. There’s no sense of danger or immediacy to be found in the finished work, though. This could be a commentary on the media hysteria that led up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but it seems more likely to be an unfortunate side-effect of Langlands & Bell’s embracing of new technology and bloodless focus on physical space, a combination that alienates the viewer as much as their film work achieves the opposite.

There’s another problem with these simulated spaces. Langlands & Bell may have been prescient in making work in line with games such as Grand Theft Auto, which allows players to explore cityscapes, or the alternative reality of Second Life, where users potter about their second homes, but the inexorable pace of technological progress leaves these pieces, state-of-the-art five years ago, looking a little dated. This is not true of even the earliest film works, which - despite the fashion of their time, and revealing the technology behind them in the grain of Super 8 or the crispness of DV - show the world, rather than attempt to recreate it.

This is a divided show, then, evenly split between disappointing, anaemic interactive animations and warm, lyrical filmworks, but those films make it a must-see: nobody can beat Langlands & Bell at portraits of people, places and the ties that bind them together.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 5th December, 2008.

The work of many artists can, at least in retrospect, be divided up into distinct periods, with shifts or gradual moves towards new subject matter, novel techniques or fresh artistic preoccupations taken up, revised and abandoned. That progression from one mode to the next does not apply to Gerhard Richter. Pick almost any span of time in the past 40-odd years, and you might find Richter making eerily photorealistic work, Pop appropriations of found imagery, minimalist monochromes, vibrant abstract Impressionist pieces on a massive scale, delicate landscape studies or elegiac, intimate portraits.

At first, this makes for a bewildering experience - it is often hard to believe the works gathered here are the product of one hand - but for all the inconsistency on the surface, one thing is constant: Richter is in the business of painting; a long, rigorous investigation of the possibilities of his chosen medium, from the ways in which paint might be applied to a canvas, to the nature of things in the world recreated by a painter.

The earliest works look like Pop Art, but, while Richter followed Warhol or Lichtenstein in taking imagery from popular culture, he’s not interested in elevating and celebrating the Coke bottle or the cartoon, instead exploring what a painter can do with an appropriated image. Cow is drawn from a children’s book, the animal and its name precisely copied; Dead shows a partial newspaper headline above a photograph of a man crushed by a huge block of ice; Mustang Squadron and XL 513 see fighter jets reproduced from magazine illustrations.

Family at the Sea is taken from a snapshot of Richter’s then wife as a child, while Motor Boat (1st Version) sees a jolly gang of friends speeding across a bay. All these works are paintings of photographs or illustrations. Richter paints the white border of Family at the Sea and makes sure we can see the guidelines he drew when copying his Cow, but each of them bears distinct traces of Richter the painter, from the Futurist-inspired speed lines that trail the aeroplanes to the blur applied to the surface of the speedboat crew, a tactic that fast becomes a Richter trademark, present in works from the 1960s to the 2000s.

Next come the abstracts of the 1980s, huge works full of eye-popping colour, with paint spread in dense layers only to be removed, revealing the progression from blank canvas to completed work. These are not just abstract paintings, but a commentary on abstract painting. Richter has no time for the boozy heroics of Jackson Pollock; instead, he has developed a series of actions and processes to produce abstract images emphasised by his layering and removal of paint.

There are layers of satire, too, with Richter undermining the anarchic, intense stereotypes of abstract expressionism with his precise manipulation of surfaces, and pointing wryly to the blurring of his paintings from photographs each time he scrapes his squeegee across a canvas to form a hard-edged line.

Richter’s interest in handling paint is more clearly stated in his grey paintings. A series from the 1970s are all a dim, dark grey, and seen from across the room appear identical. Up close, one is delicately stippled; another has been painted with bold strokes with a big housepainter’s brush; a third is patchy, with silky areas contrasted with thick globs of paint; and a 2003 reprise bears a suggestion of a grid.

These powerful monochromes are matched to studies of colour. Red-Blue-Yellow (Reddish) and Red-Blue-Yellow (Greenish) are the result of primary colours applied in orderly swirls until they blend together. Untitled (Green) sees the experiment repeated, with shades of one colour.

Similar manoeuvres are employed in representational works, too. Buhler Heights is a progression of four paintings, beginning with a misty, bucolic landscape and ending with horizontal lines of colour that suggest the same scene. Another grouping takes identical prints of a multiple exposure photographic self-portrait, adding increasing amounts of red paint until Richter and his studio are obliterated.

For all his experimentation, Richter is a traditionalist. Farm, a small work from 1999, bears the surface blur, but is composed according to a grid. Candle, from 1982, is a breathtaking study, a display of skill that in its subject matter owes a debt to the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Small Bather matches the blur technique with a pose borrowed from Ingres, while Seascape, an impossible scene based on a composite photograph, takes on Turner at his own game. In lesser hands, these would be acts of hubris, heroic failures at best, but Richter pulls it off, thanks to some sublime draughtsmanship.

Ultimately, though, there is something terribly cool and rigid about the Richter project, a fact reflected in his Werkverzeichnis, an exhaustive register of works last updated in 2005, each one reproduced at the same scale, ordered and numbered in sequence, and the Atlas, a vast compendium of source materials collected over the years, grouped together thematically on more than 700 panels. It is impossible to avoid Richter’s pseudo-scientific approach to his own oeuvre in this exhibition, and it threatens to overwhelm the individual works. A given painting might make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck as you stand before it, but that immediate feeling is easily flattened by Richter’s careful, studious, almost relentlessly systematic approach, his ongoing formal inquiry into the nature of his craft.

The result is that, though there is no doubt Richter is a great painter, this retrospective ends up being less than the sum of its parts, with the paintings gathered here struggling under their own collective weight, each one a paragraph in a long essay on painting. Visitors will likely leave the National Gallery enlightened and educated, but unmoved.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 14th November, 2008.

At first glance, Richard Forster’s small drawings of the seashore look to be, well, a bit boring. Seen from the entrance to the gallery, the 40-odd works, all 5in x 7in, are arranged at regular intervals around the walls, and each shows the same dimly-lit grey scene, a sliver of sand, an expanse of sea, a stripe of sky.

Up close, though, they take the breath away. Forster is a remarkable draughtsman, capturing each spackle of foam on a cresting wave, the interlocking filigree pattern on the surface of the water as it is sucked away from the shore, and the sheen of wet sand as the wave finally recedes with a photorealistic intensity. In fact, it is sometimes hard to shake the impression that these aren’t drawings at all, but photographic prints, old daguerreotypes or calotypes perhaps, rescued from a forgotten Edwardian album.

This is not just down to Forster’s skill: these are not drawings of the sea and the shore, but drawings of photographs of the sea and the shore, meticulously made reproductions of throwaway, ephemeral snapshots. There is something determined, obsessive, even masochistic about this process. Forster worked at full tilt for four months to produce these drawings, and each gasp at the artist’s skill is matched with a shake of the head at this strange, zealous quest to make perfect copies of his photographic source material. advertisement

The time taken to make these works is more than a simple fact about their making, though: it is a clue that Forster’s subject is not just the shoreline, but time itself. These new works look old, the single, static viewpoint is undermined by the ever-shifting waters, the fast, instantaneous nature of contemporary photography is reconfigured by Forster’s slow transcription, and the slow process of examining his finished works, one by one. The sea is, too, inextricably linked to time, from the repeated crashing waves that mark minutes to the cyclic forces of the tides that mark the seasons.

Something like a narrative, the ordered passing of time, unfolds as these superficially similar works reveal their differences. There’s the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore, of course, but more than that Forster (who you might accuse of absenting himself as an artist in his all-consuming act of copying) makes himself known, the protagonist in a slow drama. For the most part, he sticks to the plan, relentlessly taking shot after shot of his patch of beach, with the same horizon line and measly strip of sky, but mistakes are made, and patterns form. On one short wall, three drawings offer more in the way of sky, with clouds lit from within by the moon or sun. In another triptych hidden inside the series, Forster traces the progress of a single wave, having taken three shots in quick succession (interestingly, in the publication that accompanies the show, these three alone are laid out together on a fold-out sheet).

One drawing stands out from its peers, because the horizon line is at an angle, a tiny difference that in this context seems nothing short of shocking. Perhaps Forster lost his footing, or nudged his tripod. The thirteenth and fourteenth drawings are, unlike the others, verging on the abstract, with soft white bands against a grey background, as if Forster, fingers feeling the chill after standing for so long on the same spot, shifted the focus of his camera a little to far, and pressed the shutter release a couple of times before he had a chance to correct the error.

Then, as the long series of drawings draws to a close with a run of drawings made from clear, crisp images, the last one looks to have been taken carelessly, with the camera pointing down. It would be a stretch to call these drawings a new sort of self-portrait, but Forster is doing more than presenting a dispassionate survey of the changing sea, he is present in these drawings, sharing two intimate experiences: the brief, immediate act of taking photographs out in the world, and the long hard slog in the studio, transcribing them. This might, though, be an illusion.

It’s easy to assume the drawings are arranged as the photographs were taken, but it is possible that Forster’s project is even more deliberate: it could be that he spent as long at the beach as he did wielding a pencil, selecting and ordering his photographic prints before making his drawings, like a film director in the edit suite, with a plan to manipulate his audience, purposely crafting the hint of narrative structure that appears as they pace the gallery.

This is rewarding work. Forster’s deceptively simple, apparently repetitive set of drawings offers a display of virtuoso draughtsmanship backed with a rich meditation on place, time and the nature of photography and drawing.

Outside, the latest instalment in Ingleby’s Billboard for Edinburgh public art project, Rachel Whiteread has taken over an advertising hoarding high on the wall of the gallery building. Instead of blowing up one of her collaged works on paper, Whiteread has picked a photograph of her installation Place (Village). The village in question is made up of vintage doll’s houses, some home-made, which Whiteread has been collecting for 20 years, each one empty, and lit from within.

In installation form, Place (Village), which has been shown in different configurations in Boston, London and Naples, is sad and a little spooky, like a ghost town in miniature. Here, on a grey wall, under grey Edinburgh skies, after Forster’s incessant monochromes, the red roofs, and backlit windows form a jolly, twinkly, positively Christmassy scene. After Mark Wallinger’s plain, dry offering - he presented a simple slogan text, “Mark Wallinger is innocent” - the billboard project has found its feet, showing the potential of the innovative format to transform an artist’s work.

This review was first published in The Herald on 4th November , 2008.

The first piece in the show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Close-Up, looks like an illuminated wall painting, an abstract made up of circles and dots. It is, though, not a work of art at all, but a lantern slide from the collection of Victorian horticulturalist and gardener Ellen Willmott showing the structure of Volvox globator, a type of algae.

Willmott’s slide serves as a manifesto in miniature for this exhibition. It trains its lens on the experimental microphotography of early naturalists, its adoption by educators seeking to inform art and design with natural patterns, the use of magnification as a means of disorienting and disturbing audiences by Dadaists and Surrealists, and their fascination with the human body that endures in the work of contemporary artists. It’s a warning, too, that things, when seen in close-up, are not what they seem.

The marriage of art and science, or the possibility that art and science can be the same thing, is made explicit in the images taken from Laure Albin-Guillot’s 1931 book Decorative Micrography, where cross- sections of seeds and cells are rendered in layers of charcoal and metallic pigment, and in the plates culled from Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, which see budding twigs transformed into totemic sculptures and a seed pod metamorphosed into a mosque’s minaret. Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight, in which insects, leaves and twigs flash onscreen as abstract forms, is, in this context, an echo of William Henry Olley’s scientific studies of a bee’s sting, a fly’s cornea and the scales of a butterfly’s wing.

The capacity of photography to reveal the obscure is taken up in the next room by the Surrealists, in two senses: psychological and physical. I’m not sure if Man Ray’s photograms count as close-ups - they are made without a lens, by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing it to light - but they are pseudoscientific investigations of objects, and, thanks to the Surrealist strategy of juxtaposition, reveal hidden meanings in everyday materials.

Strangeness is to the fore in Brassao’s “involuntary sculptures”, made with Salvador Dali. Small things - smeared toothpaste, rolled-up paper, a torn matchbox - are transformed by chance gestures in a sort of sculptural take on automatic writing, then transformed again by magnification into monumental works.

The power of the close-up to transform is applied repeatedly to the body. Jaques-Andri Boiffard’s untitled photograph shows a pair of eyes peering, terrified and terrifying, out from behind a dense tangle of hair, and his deliberately unpleasant portraits of ugly big toes illustrate a George Bataille essay, captioned as medical specimens. In the infamous opening scene of Buquel’s Un chien andalou, a woman’s eye appears to be slit with a straight razor, ants scurry from a hole in a man’s hand, and, in a merger of nature photography and the Surrealist’s body obsession, the camera lingers on a death’s head hawk moth. These, the most disturbing images, are shot in unflinching close-up.

Simon Starling is no Surrealist, but he shares space with them here, and bridges the gap between the artists and the scientists, the past and the present. His 2006 work Inventar-Nr 8573 (Man Ray) 4m-400nm is a slideshow which opens with a shot of Ray’s photograph Geological Fold, then relentlessly refocuses, ending on images of cloud-like forms, the magnified molecular structure of silver gelatine used in the photographic printing process.

Upstairs, things take a dramatic turn, away from the Surrealists and toward the conceptual artists of the 1970s. Where the avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s used the close-up to fetishise things, making them strange, mysterious or horrifying, their descendants opt for politically-motivated demystification.

Giusseppe Penone’s Svolgere la propria pelle (To Display One’s Own Skin) is a pseudoscientific survey of the artist’s own body; hundreds of photographs that show Penone placing a microscope slide over every square inch of his epidermis. Carolee Schneemann uses similar tactics, isolating and cataloguing male and female body parts. These works are a reversal of Boiffard’s toes, in which a body part is shown in isolation to reveal its uncanniness. Penone and Schneemann present multiple body parts to normalise them, explicitly rejecting the idea that particular parts should be viewed with shame or disgust.

Kate Craig takes an even closer look at her own body in Delicate Issue. A camera, operated by Craig’s husband, skims over her body, set to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat and breathing. Craig’s aims are clear, but, just in case anyone misses the point, she interrupts the reverie with a voiceover that poses pointed questions, asking: “What is the dividing line between public and private?” While Delicate Issue must be placed in the context of the feminist, conceptual art-making of the 1970s, the piece signals a return to the surrealism of the body in close-up - folds of Craig’s skin look like desert landscapes, wrinkles offer abstract imagery - taken up by the contemporary artists that follow, who add humour.

Mona Hatoum’s short film loop, projected on the gallery wall in a small circle, again turns the body into a landscape, a strange, shifting alien one. This time, the mesmerising subject is scrotal skin, moving in response to changes in temperature. A private part made public, and made almost unrecognisable in close-up, Hatoum’s piece has much in common with both the surreal images in the lower galleries and the politicised bodies that surround it.

Next, Wim Delvoye, who is best known for Cloaca, a biomechanical digestion machine which ingests food and excretes the obvious, turns again to the body’s waste products in Sybille II. The film shows people squeezing blackheads on their noses in extreme close-up, to the sort of wishy-washy soundtrack used in nature documentaries, reinforcing the impression that these towers of sebum oozing from pores are kin to strange sea creatures, or growing insect larvae.

I am not the squeamish type, but I left the screening room feeling decidedly queasy. It’s a reaction that would have made the Surrealists proud, and Sybille indeed brings us full circle. Dali, the artist who haunts this exhibition, though he appears here only in collaboration with Brassao and Buquel, wrote in the 1934 essay which inspired Delvoye that squeezed blackheads are “alien bodies in space”.

This sort of neat, light touch by curators Dawn Ades and Simon Baker is what makes Close-Up an enormously satisfying show, and reveals their deep, broad understanding of the subject at hand, which is matched with a willingness to let visitors draw their own conclusions.

Coralling a century and a half of scientific investigation and avant-garde art, revealing surprising connections between very different movements in art history, and deftly crafting a narrative around an apparently simple artistic tactic, Ades and Baker have mounted one of the best shows seen at Fruitmarket—or, for that matter, in Scotland—for years.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 31st October, 2008.

Video art with a capital ‘V doesn’t really exist any more. The video camera is just another tool in the artist’s kit, and the monitor or projector are as at home in the gallery as good old paintings and sculptures.

By the 1970s, the medium was maturing - pioneers Nam Jun Paik and Fred Forest first taped and screened footage shot on Sony Rovers, the first portable recording devices that allowed for instant playback and easy editing, in the middle 1960s - but still in a state of flux, with artists feeling their way around the new medium, making work video art about video, and the possibilities it offers the artist.

Mick Hartney’s Orange Free State opens with the camera roving over a tableau of oranges in bowls set on a table covered in an artfully arranged white sheet, borrowing from a Cézanne still life. Hartney tests the viewer’s patience, repeatedly panning his camera over the scene to a syrupy Debussy soundtrack, only to focus in on a monitor set up in the studio, which is showing the footage just seen, including the moment when the action shifts from the studio to the monitor, leaving us watching a video inside a video inside a video. Next, a young black woman takes a place at the table, and begins to peel and segment an orange while delivering a short spiel offering unconventional investment advice. ‘If you have no social conscience,’ she says, ‘you can invest in South Africa. If you are downright anti-social, you can invest in art.’. This time, the camera can’t keep still, and images of the young woman are intercut, layered and repeated. In the third an final section, the woman undergoes an interview in which a disembodied, patronising voice, male and presumably white, dismisses her protests that she has ‘done the work’ by speaking her words and peeling the orange, insisting that ‘the orange and the words are not the work, watching the the orange and hearing the words are the work.’ There is, too, a pretty confusing discussion of when the events shown have happened - are they in the actors’ present, the edit suite’s past, or the viewer’s future?

On paper, this discussion of the work’s means of production, race, gender and South African boycott politics, all filtered through self-conscious use of tricksy effects and repetitive editing might read as terribly dated, but Hartney’s enthusiastic analysis of video as a medium, paired with his weighty, densely layered political content, is little short of breathtaking - video might be old hat now, but Orange Free State is nothing of the sort.

Chris Meigh-Andrews’ Distracted Driver is, compared to Orange Free State, a simple, meditative piece. The familiar screeches of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the shower scene from Psycho are matched to grainy, blurred footage shot through the windscreen of a moving car. As the music fades, the car’s passenger embarks on a lengthy retelling of the film’s plot, stumbling over the details. Bored Driver might have been a better title. The motorist, who occasionally interrupts, sounds decidedly nonplussed, replying, when finally asked if he has seen ‘Hitchcock’s best movie’, with a curt ‘No’. On screen, Meigh-Andrews uses rudimentary processing effects to colour the over-saturated image, shifting from blue to purple to red, with street lamps, the driver’s hands on the wheel and the occasional pedestrian picked out in glimmering highlights. The result is a piece of anti-Hitchcock anti-cinema: instead of being caught up in the action, manipulated by the director, and distracted by a MacGuffin, the viewer shares in the subjective experience of the poor, bored driver, the shifting colours hinting at a bid to avoid falling asleep at the wheel.

Simpler still, Stephen Partridge’s installation is a single shot of a small monitor screened on the monitor itself, resulting in an endless repeat of the shot feeding back on itself, a visual equivalent of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. It’s a simple experiment, testing out what happens when you point a camera at a screen showing the camera’s output, and feels more like an instructional essay on the technical potential of video, as if Partridge is working towards a formal language of video.

Next door in doggerfisher’s small second gallery space, there’s a loop of works by David Hall and Ian Breakwell. The most remarkable thing about these pieces is that they were shown on commercial television. Hall’s advert break-length TV pieces were screened on Scottish Television in 1971, appearing unannounced, with no explanation, designed as ‘interruptions’ to the regular flow of programmes. His shots of a telly burning in a field, or a tap filling the screen with water must’ve come as quite a shock. Breakwell’s Continuous Diary, a series of 21 pieces were doubtless quite at home on the Channel 4 of old, but it now seems inconceivable that an artist would be given a slot in which to combine mundane observations of an artist’s daily life, a psychogeographical tour of London’s East End and a searing attack on the treatment of wounded soldiers returning from the Falklands war. It really is a shame that there’s no longer any room for this type of experimental programming between the endless repeats of imported comedy and increasingly cynical reality television.

The hint of nostalgia offered by Breakwell and Hall’s television pieces doesn’t, however, dominate this selection from the archives of REWIND, the University of Dundee’s video art research and preservation project. Instead, the steady, deliberate experimentation seen in much of the work on show, and the sense of excitement these artists must have felt while striking out into new terriotory is infectious. The medium might now be a familiar one, but, over the two hours it takes to watch Video from the 70s and 80s, viewers are given the chance to experience video as it once was, a new, even shocking, format for artists to explore.

Video from the 70s and 80s is at doggerfisher, Edinburgh until 25th October.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 10th October, 2008.

The cluster of galleries on Market and Cockburn Streets are, coincidentally, all showing work about exploring worlds, private, public and extraterrestrial.

At Fruitmarket, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have turned the gallery into a Wunderkammer of immersive installations, small but complete environments for visitors to explore. Some are simple, like the specially-commissioned new work The House of Books Has No Windows, a fairy-tale cottage made of tales. A cute, miniature incarnation of Borges’ Library of Babel, visitors are encouraged to enter the tiny house. Once inside the dark, claustrophobic Wendy house, the work makes use of the one sense that artists tend to ignore: smell. That dry, musty, mildewed scent of old paper and cloth is strong enough to catches in the back of the throat, prompting memories of opening a never-borrowed book from the library stacks, or rummaging for hours in second hand bookshops. After this simple, subtle piece, Opera for a Small Room is a bit of a shock. In a pitch black room, a plywood shed is packed to the gunnels with a vast record collection, various dusty turntables and vintage radios, and an array of speakers which blast a heady sound collage of field recordings, rock ‘n’ roll and opera, all overlaid with an unseen characters memories of lost love. Upstairs, things take a turn toward the spooky, with The Dark Pool, a haunted attic space, with strange clanking noises emanating from stacked boxes, disembodied voices conversing through metal horns, and quasi-medical apparatus gargling with water.

Around the corner at the Collective Gallery, artists and performers have gathered to explore outer space. The Golden Record project takes its name from the disc carried by the Voyager spacecraft, packed with sounds and images designed to represent life on Earth to any aliens who might happen upon it. The 116 images of earth included, compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan, have been reinterpreted by as many artists, inspired by the curious titles - Old Man with Beard and Glasses, Physical Unit Definitions, Underwater Scene with Diver - rather than the original images. In the second gallery, grouped around the Carpenters classic Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft and intended to replace the Golden Record’s recorded greetings in 55 languages, is a series of very short films, most by comedians, offering advice and instructions to the little green men. Topics include a history of sex toys, a guide to hair removal techniques, and musings on the evil of mobile ‘phones. The result is like spending an hour drifting around YouTube, but genuinely entertaining.

At Stills, a return to private, interior space. Instead of an exhibition, the gallery is housing a library of nigh on 8,000 books and periodicals from the collection of New York artist and author Martha Rosler, which has been touring galleries since 2005. On one level, this is a new kind of self-portrait - there can be few things more personal, or more revealing than a collection of books - but, in Edinburgh in August, it also offers an oasis of calm and quiet learning, a welcome antidote to the festivals that surround it.

The Golden Record is at The Collective Gallery until 13 September, Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller are at Fruitmarket until 28 September and the Martha Rosler Library is at Stills until 9 November.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2008.

For his first solo outing in the UK, Doves, Alexander Heim has focussed firmly on the dull, dreary world he sees around him. It’s not clear whether Heim is offering an encomium to the poured concrete and pebbledash of the suburbs and city centre, or is happily resigned to the drab fate of the modern city-dweller. At times he seems keen to show the quirks that undermine the plodding efforts of the town planners, screening surveillance footage of a scrappy pigeon going about its business in a railway station concourse, and documenting ungainly collisions of paving stones and tarmac in photographs that call to mind Boyle Family’s meticulous recreations. The Doves of the show’s title are more celebratory. These three gunmetal grey winged sculptures in papier mâché, propped up with breeze blocks, are monolithic - a Concrete Henge, if you like, bound to puzzle future archeologists. Adding to the ambiguity, Heim also shows a set of beautifully crafted bowls, their interior surfaces puddled with enamel glazes in deep blue, green and purple. These careful, deliberate objects, hanging just so on the gallery wall, at first look like a counterpoint to the half-hearted Brutalism of the Doves, but by offering up something pretty for visitors to look at, Heim seems to be asking his audience to look again at the more unprepossessing work here, not to mention the world outside the gallery, and find beauty in it too.

At Edinburgh printmakers Chad McCail is looking to the world around him as well, but with an analytical eye, exploring social mores and global politics through a cartoon filter, crafting a world peopled by ‘wealthy parasites, robots and zombies’, McCail’s parodic labels for the upper, middle and working classes.

Compulsory Education is a concise history in cartoon strip form of the school system, which McCail presents as a tool of the military-industrial complex. A series of captions, tell the story, from the defeat of the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena, to that state’s adoption of compulsory schooling in a bid to create a generation of “obedient soldiers”, ending with a table of European countries which adopted the Prussian academic model. Whether or not you buy into McCail’s revisionist analysis of education as a method of social control, one thing is certain: this is a moving work, and, therefore, convincing. The zombie children, taught to “obey orders” in factory-like institutions, and their robot peers, charged to “learn more so they can transmit commands”, are as cute as a button, and McCail draws scenes with a pared down comic efficiency, rendering Prussian victories over France and Austria as wealthy parasites prostrating themselves before other, identical wealthy parasites as robots look on and zombies do the dirty work. There’s a pleasing irony to this audience manipulation - McCail’s critique uses the methods of the very system he denounces, borrowing the tactics of cartoons, which, from Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures to the recent Danish controversy, have long been at the vanguard of the propaganda war.

In relationships grow stronger and the Puberty series, McCail adopts a different style, this time based on the line drawings of children’s textbooks and educational pamphlets. The shift in style marks a shift in tone, with McCail documenting his Utopian vision for a society in which issues of sexuality, social responsibility and gender are discussed openly, with knowledge passed freely between the generations. relationships grow stronger sees a gang of teens being waved off by their mum, dad and grandma, on their way to plant a tree, which, bizarrely, is festooned with male and female genitalia. Partly a metaphor for budding sexuality, the scene also suggests a possible ritual for marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, a theme explored further in the Puberty prints, which show kids and grown ups rationally discussing the contents of a porn mag, adults calming an angry parent who has caught two teenagers kissing (he’s so angry, he’s transforming into a bear), and a man giving a boy a knife, recognising his ability to use it safely. This is strange stuff, and, like the cartoon pieces, curiously affecting. And that’s what makes McCail’s work so strong - in matching simple styles with complex politics, he manages to engage heart and mind alike.

There’s more complexity, more twisting of reality, and more deceptively simple tactics at play in 39, the debut show by Edinburgh-based artist Hugh Brady. Brady has converted his mews studio into a cool and considered essay on the role of the artist, representations of artists in popular culture, the self-reflexive nature of the art world, the clichés of contemporary art and the business of making art. The glue that binds this ambitious exhibit together is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. The entrance to the show bears the same sign that graces the photographic studio in which much of the film is set, and the beams from the fictional studio’s door are painted over the beams of Brady’s real studio door, while a dual-screen video piece lifts interior scenes for the film, filling the upper floor of the building with the sound of star David Hemmings’ footsteps on a floor which Brady has, inevitably, recreated here. A flood of allusions to perennially hip or currently vogue-ish art and artists follows. A section of wall has been removed in a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark, the exposed bricks splashed with silver, calling to mind Richard Serra’s molten lead splashes (and his role in Mathew Barney’s Cremaster 3). There is a glibly minimalist painting of a canvas stretcher, taken from a photograph of Warhol’s studio, and artlessly installed fluorescent strip lights as a homage to Dan Flavin, or in parody of the sort of artists who pay homage to Dan Flavin. A concrete sculpture looks like the sort of art that borrows from architecture, but turns out to be a genuine maquette rescued from a skip outside an architects office. On the walls, abstract minimalist patterns ape the work of Daniel Buren, but are in fact patterns borrowed from bathroom tiles seen Federico Fellin’s 8 1/2 (also released in 1966). This parade of deliberately obvious references matched with an attempt to travel through time, eliding truth and fiction on the way, by layering London then over Edinburgh now might sound like the stuff of a pretentious philosophy undergrad’s wet dream, but Brady manages to pull it off. This is in part thanks to his restrained palette of three colours - black, white and silver - that acts as a sort of sturdy aesthetic bridge between works, but is mostly down to Brady’s nuanced understanding of the exhibition space and his relationship to it, which makes for a show that is, for all its conceptual toing and froing, a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with the difficulties of making art, here and now, in this particular place.

Alexander Heim: Doves is at doggerfisher until 13th September, Chad McCail is at Edinburgh Printmakers until 6th Septmeber and Hugh Brady: 39 is at 16B Lennox Street Lane until 25th August. This review was first published in The Herald on 22nd August , 2008.

For ten years, Ingleby Gallery was housed in a Georgian townhouse on an out of the way terrace in the New Town, a place that lent the space a rather proper air, undercut by ambitious, almost eccentric projects, like the breakneck programme of twenty-six shows that marked the gallery’s anniversary year.

Now, Ingleby, in a move more ambitious still, has shifted to a new location on Calton Road. It’s a huge, three-storey affair, with a room given over to prints and editions, a small street-level gallery, and a genuinely breath-taking exhibition space on the first floor.

This huge room comes close to overwhelming the work of Kay Rosen, an American artist who makes quiet, subtle work that explores the use of words as images, deftly altering meaning with the application of colour. Memory of Red is a large wall drawing in a sturdy sans-serif typeface, that reads ‘Remembered’, the word divided, with that final ‘red’ picked out in pink, and the clipped ‘remembe’ in red. This simple tactic has a strange effect, what you might call a linguistic illusion, sending the reading mind and seeing eye into a bit of a tizzy. In another large piece, Rosen offers her version of seascape painting, with the words ‘sky’, ‘fog’ and ‘sea’ layered over each other in grey on a grey background. Her prints offer sight gags and puns: the word ‘yellow’ in yellow is split in half to form a ‘yell’ and an ‘ow’, the first word describing the second. Greyer G invents a palindrome, with the letters fading from dark at the edges to light at the centre.

There’s humour to be found downstairs, too. Edinburgh-born Susan Collis makes work that immediately calls to mind the old gag about the critic who lavishes attention on the gallery fire extinguisher instead of the sculpture beside it. This is because Collis celebrates the most mundane objects, rendering the contents of hardware store draws in precious metals and gems. Riffing on the freshly refitted status of the space she is showing in, Collis has inlaid mother of pearl into the gallery floor to form a shimmering monument in miniature to spilt paint. Fixed is a wall-spanning installation that, from afar, looks like unfinished preparations to hang a show of paintings. Up close, the rawl plugs are made of irridescent coral, and the tiny screws have been fashioned from 18 carat white gold and inset with diamonds. A broom in the corner looks ready for the tip, but the splatters on its handle and the paint that clogs its bristles are crafted from a list of materials that reads beautifully, from citron cyrsoprase to white howite.

Outside, there’s the first installment of a year-long public art project dubbed Billboard for Edinburgh. Mark Wallinger is the first of four artists to occupy the space with a stark text reading “Mark Wallinger Is Innocent”, of what crime I’m not quite sure. One thing is certain, though: Ingleby Gallery has made a fine start in its new home.

Kay Rosen and Susan Collis are at Ingleby Gallery until 24 September.

This review was originally published in The Herald.

The trouble with Tracey Emin is “Tracey Emin”. More than any artist in recent memory, Emin is a fully-fledged celebrity, her life, and her work, firmly lodged in the public imagination as a crude cartoon drawn by tabloid headline-writers.

This is not the same fame as that of those artists who have defined a public persona and woven it into their practice, such as Dali or Warhol. Nor is Emin’s fame a match for those artists whose private lives have ended up public property, such as Picasso with his promiscuity or Pollock and his boozing. No, Tracey Emin is different, because almost all of her work is about Tracey Emin. She has invited us, with a candour that is often alarming, to consider her life as she has lived it.

Now, though, Emin is inviting us to consider the work itself. The subtitle to her first major retrospective, 20 Years, has a proud feel to it. There’s a nod to Emin’s debut - titled My Major Retrospective and reproduced here, it consisted of tiny photographic reproductions of destroyed early pieces - and a strong hint that Emin is now out to show that she’s proven herself more than a flash in the Brit Art pan. Has she? Yes and no.

Any artist, when gathering two decades’ worth of work, will be forced to include a few dead-ends along with pieces that still resonate, but there’s an awful lot of weak stuff here.

Most of this lesser work is what you might call unfiltered: the straightforward confessional pieces are not a life transformed into art so much as a life lived and presented for examination. Wall-mounted vitrines collect autobiographical ephemera alongside framed texts that explain their significance.

May Dodge, My Nan gathers family snaps and a little collage made from a doily, Uncle Colin contains a cigarette packet salvaged from the car crash that killed Emin’s uncle, along with a newspaper report of the tragedy. These are moving, sure, and the spiky poetry of Emin’s writing is at times a joy to read. But they are ultimately slight, affecting in the moment but soon forgotten.

The same can’t be said of the superficially similar video works here. In Why I Never Became A Dancer, Emin narrates the tale of a gang of lads surrounding her at a disco competition to chant the word “slag”, then appears on screen, with a triumphant grin on her face, boogying to Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). CV relates the artist’s history year by year, again with the emphasis on triumph over adversity, as the camera pans around a dingy flat, eventually alighting on Emin, naked on the floor in a foetal huddle. The Perfect Place To Grow, a ramshackle hut surrounded by plants, contains a brief film of Emin’s father presenting her with a flower - a manifestation of his ideal home. These works share a sense of transformation, a moulding of autobiographical material into something generous, inviting empathy, unlike the flatly presented revelations in those texts and vitrines.

This is also true of My Bed. This piece has come to define Emin’s work, even supplanting Carl Andre’s “pile of bricks” as emblem of the supposed con game of contemporary art. It stands up rather well. Now that the controversy surrounding this grubby mattress surrounded by manky tissues, crushed fag packets and stained knickers has faded, it begins to look like something more than a monument to Emin’s bed-bound depression, subverting the coolly presented Duchampian readymade to form an object that hasn’t been found, but lived.

The blankets, which - after that bed, and the tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was destroyed in the Momart fire - are Emin’s best known works, reveal another subtle engagement with art history. Gathered here in the staid spaces of the National Gallery of Modern Art, these appliqued works take on a monumental air, adding another layer to Emin’s use of craft materials which don’t belong in the world of fine art, her adoption of the higgledy-piggledy aesthetic of “outsider” art, and the collaborative act of sewing them together with friends, sticking two fingers up at the idea of the artist as lone hero. Telling stories in slogans and clipped phrases, the best of them are incredibly dense. Automatic Orgasm (Come Unto Me) casts Emin as a latter-day St Teresa, experiencing a sort of secular, blasphemous ecstasy. Hotel International, the first blanket, offers what feels like a complete family history of Emin and her clan, marrying specific anecdotes to simple lists of names and dates.

There’s much more to see, too. Too much. There are so many scritchy, hurried monoprints that they begin to lose their impact, a shame, since the Abortion: How It Feels series is perhaps the strongest, most affecting of Emin’s revelatory works, and the Bird Drawings provide a surprising, funny counterpoint to the relentless confessions that surround them. It is as if, in a bid to demonstrate the real depth and breadth of her practice, Emin has opted for quantity over quality. The result is a feeling that there’s a very good show trapped inside this too-complete outpouring of work.

That said, this is a valuable exhibition. It reveals Emin to be oddly prescient, prefiguring the defining trope of 21st-century pop culture, that pact made between a public with an apparently inexhaustible appetite for voyeurism, and exhibitionists happy to expose themselves. But is Emin a creature of her time, or will a future retrospective - 40 Years, say - draw such a big crowd, and so much attention?

I reckon so, as long as the wheat is sorted from the chaff: Emin’s blankets, her video works, and even her bed look set to stand the test of time.

Tracey Emin: 20 Years is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until November 9th.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 8th August , 2008.

The title of this career-long survey of political pieces by Richard Hamilton is something of a misnomer: for the most part, these aren’t Protest Pictures at all. Sure, it’s not hard to guess where on the political spectrum Hamilton’s views lie, but the works on show at Inverleith House aren’t tub-thumping, flag-waving calls to arms. They’re much more subtle than that, ranging from ambiguous reportage to finely tuned satire, via keen observation of the media’s role in presenting and filtering ideas and ideals.

The show begins in 1967 with the Redlands case, when the Rolling Stones and art dealer Robert Fraser fell victim to a dubious drug bust. Hamilton focusses on a single image culled from a newspaper photograph of Fraser and Mick Jagger, handcuffed in the back of a Black Maria and shielding their faces from the press pack. The first of the repeated re-workings add a coloured tint, the next borrows the style of court sketch artists. A poster work collects a scrap book of cuttings on the Stones’ court appearances. It remains unclear whether Hamilton is condemning this last gasp attempt by a stuffy establishment to punish the figureheads of a new lifestyle, or cooly documenting the process.

Later versions of the scene, made in the early 1970s, seem to acknowledge Hamilton’s own role in crafting an iconic image and see him acting as a seer, presaging the status of the scandal, like that later disaster for the Stones, Altamont, as a pop cultural turning point. In a pair of prints that borrow their title from a contemporary headline - A strong sweet smell of incense - Fraser and Jagger are obscured behind a layer of decaying celluloid, as if the image has been replayed over and over again. These are followed by a final commemoration, a screenprint that describes the scene in flat panels of bright colour, as if Hamilton is committing the lurid, gossipy tale to collective memory.

The Treatment Room, an installation dating to 1983, is chilling enough, and a clear condemnation of Thatcherism, but again Hamilton resists the urge to shout, preferring to whisper, however bitterly. Occupying a room of its own, the walls painted in that familiar, queasy NHS green, the piece is a stylised radiography room, complete with bed, stool and protective screen. On the gantry where an X-ray machine is usually mounted, there is a television emitting a different kind of radiation, in the form of a party political broadcast by Mrs. Thatcher.

Upstairs, still in the 1980s, comes a room dubbed The Troubles, dominated by three diptychs. The Subject shows a marching Orangeman set beside a blurred scene showing what might be headlights, or a riot in progress. Next, in a rusted frame, The Citizen is a Republican prisoner on hunger strike, the second panel blurring his dirty protest into near-abstract sworls. Last, The State, a soldier, his weapon and camoflague uniform are precisely rendered, with real fabric pockets applied to the painting’s surface, emphasisng the apparatus over the man inside it. The power of these works is in Hamilton’s ability to present the situation in Northern Ireland from conflicting viewpoints: the titles veer between representing the paintings’ subjects from their own point of view and that of outside observers, the three works are doubly mediated, through Hamilton and through his source, a television documentary.

This tension between source material and finished work is explored again in the Kent State series. First come photographs of TV footage of the campus anti-war protest of 1970 and the National Guard retaliation, which resulted in the death of four students. Next, a series of twelve proofs of a screenprint based on contemporary footage, which begin with a pale blue ground, and end with the image of a student lying prone. Then, the finished print, with a thirteenth stencil applied to reveal bright red bloodstains on the student’s body. A coda of sorts comes in the form of a pastel drawing, rendering the scene in sickly, hallucinatory bursts of colour, with loose lines suggesting a sort of moral heat haze.

The show closes with a new work, Shock and Awe, which casts Tony Blair, done up as an avenging cowboy, both hands on his six guns, ready to draw. Behind him, the sky is a post-apocalyptic red, and oil fires rage. That might sound a little trite, but even when he appears to be making a quick, cartoonish satirical jab, Hamilton hangs on to the subtlety and ambiguity that runs through his practice as a whole. The head that Hamilton has grafted on to a gunslinger’s body isn’t the boggle-eyed grimacing former PM of a Steve Bell strip, instead bearing a look that suggests Blair, beneath a half-hearted attempt at a steely glare, knows that something has gone very, very wrong - he looks, aptly enough, like a man caught in a lie, trying desperately to bluff his way out of it. It looks like Hamilton is nodding in the direction of Warhol’s silvery screenprint of Elvis, too, adding another layer of satire (or kicking a man when he’s down), by reminding us of the days when Blair caught flak for nothing more than the minor, if cringeworthy, crime of hitching his wagon to Cool Britannia, posturing with his Fender Stratocaster and posing with Britpop stars.

Beside Hamilton’s broadside against Blair hang a series of works dating back to the early 1960s, revealing that the artist has come full circle. Portrait of Hugh Gaitskill as a Famous Monster of Filmland attacks the then Labour leader for his policies in favour of nuclear deterrence - like Blairs Iraq adventure, a stance that hardly reflected the views of his party’s rank and file - by layering up a mask fashioned from B-movie bogey men over Gaitskill’s face. In combining Jack the Ripper, The Man with the Atom Brain and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hamilton casts his subject as a monster-villain, and predicts a mutant future should the Cold War powers choose to test the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

There are one or two off-key notes here, as when an infographic of the first Gulf War is shown on a television dripping in blood, or posters protesting museum fees cast institutions as political prisoners, but in both cases, one suspects that Hamilton has an eyebrow raised. Those slips aside, though, this is an outstanding body of work, proof that, in the right hands, explicitly political art can rise above agit-prop or hamfisted condemnation.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 1st August , 2008.

The blockbuster exhibition at this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival will, no doubt, be the survey of Tracey Emin’s twenty-year career at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the first retrospective of the artist’s work. It’s a canny piece of programming - only Emin’s fellow YBA Damien Hirst beats the Margate-born artist when it comes to garnering press attention - but it also shows that the EAF, still a whipper-snapper in art festival terms, has come of age, establishing a sound track record of attracting major shows by significant British artists.

Another survey show hasn’t generated the headlines guaranteed by Emin, but is certain to be a highlight of the Festival is Protest Pictures at Inverleith House. The show of work by Richard Hamilton, sometimes identified as the first practitioner of Pop Art, thanks to his famed collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, is set to focus on the politically-driven pieces in his fifty-year catalogue. Protest Pictures will include everything from Hamilton’s satirical portrait of Hugh Gaitskell, made in response to the then Labour leader’s refusal to commit to a policy of nuclear disarmament, through a series of powerful works made in response to the Troubles in Northen Ireland, right up to work completed in the last year, including Shock & Awe, which sees Tony Blair’s head grafted onto the body of a gunslinging cowboy.

The other major Edinburgh galleries seemed to have erred on the safe side. The National Gallery Complex has fallen back on that old crowd-pleasing fail-safe, a show of Impressionist painting, while the National Portrait Gallery offers the rather underwhelming travelling exhibition of Vanity Fair Portraits. At the Queen’s Gallery, there are highlights from the Royal Collection’s Renaissance holdings - it’s been running for a while, but is well worth a second look, thanks to a breath-taking selection of drawings by da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Another populist choice, but a welcome one, is the Scottish Gallery’s choice of Elizabeth Blackadder, mounting a major show of some forty oil and watercolour works.

Away from the hustle and bustle of the festivals, Portobello plays host to a public art project mounted by community arts organisation Big Things On The Beach. Garden Gallery will see local residents playing host to paintings, sculpture, installations and performances, all sited in their front gardens.

More innovative public art comes courtesy of Ingleby Gallery, which has moved from its former home in a Georgian townhouse into a vast space on Calton Road. Continuing their commitment to innovative curation - last year saw Ingleby mount a frenetic programme of twenty-six shows matching pairs of artists together - the gallery is launching Billboard for Edinburgh programme with work by Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger mounted on an advertising hoarding. Inside, the new gallery will host work by American artist Kay Rosen, whose work explores the use of text and language as images, and the first solo outing in Scotland by Susan Collis who renders mundane, everyday objects in precious materials. Another dual show, this time by the highly-regarded artistic partnership of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who will take over the Fruitmarket with their immersive, often disturbing multimedia installations.

Unconventional spaces and places seem to be something of a theme this year. As well as gardens and billboards, works of art will be taking up residence in abandoned buildings and artist’s studios. Richard Wilson will reprise 20:50 - last seen in Edinburgh at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1987 - in a derelict warehouse, alongside short films and works on paper. 20:50 is a must see. Often held up as an exemplar of installation work, the piece sees a carefully-proportioned space filled up with sump oil, creating a reflective surface that appears to flip the room upside down. Edinburgh-based artist Hugh Brady is also exploring the site-specific side of things, turning his studio, a stone-floored former stables, into something that hovers between being a work of art in its own right and an exhibition of new pieces. Younger artists seem especially keen to escape the confines of the typical white-walled gallery. Ric Warren, a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art, will be setting three of his architectural sculptures, each examining an aspect of climate change, in Charlotte Square Gardens, Ettie Spencer has been growing a crop of tobacco plants in a disused office block, and Estonian artist Mare Tralla will be painting at sites around Edinburgh under the watchful eyes of CCTV cameras. In the Old Town, in the area surrounding Advocate’s Close, various nooks and crannies will be filled with hard-to-find art. More up-and-coming artists can be found at Total Kunst, which, as in previous years, will host a changing programme of short exhibits, and at the Annuale, a series of fringe exhibitions and events organised by artist-run space The Embassy devoted to local artists that has run alongside, and counter to, the Art Festival proper for the past five years.

With work ranging from Renaissance masters to fresh-faced graduates, via key names in contemporary art, the EAF is certainly a broad church, as accessible to young art students hungry for fresh work by their peers as it is to arch traditionalists or casual gallery-goers seeking respite from the busy, juggler-strewn festival streets. It might be argued that this is a failing. It’s hard to tell the difference between the Edinburgh Art Festival and the uncoordinated flurry of shows mounted by the Edinburgh galleries in August prior to its inception. And there is no hint of a curatorial theme, no sense of focus to the proceedings. That’s not neccesarily a bad thing. The galleries would no doubt balk at anything that interfered with their freedom to programme, and, as far as the public are concerned, the more variety the better. But it will be interesting to see, with its status as a grown-up art festival secured after five short years, how the EAF will rise to its next challenge, perhaps developing into a coherent, curated and comissioning festival.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 25th July , 2008.

When Conde Nast and his editor Frank Crownshield launched the first incarnation of Vanity Fair in 1913 - the year that the American public were introduced to “modern art” by the groundbreaking Armory Show - the idea of celebrity was in a state of flux, and it shows in the early photographs on show at the National Portrait Gallery.

There are actors, actresses and dancers aplenty, and even a few characters mostly famous for being famous, but politicians are absent, while authors and artists, even the most avant garde, are set on a level with the more frivolous famous. Virginia Woolf looks decidedly Victorian in a three-quarter-length portrait, Aldous Huxley glowers intellectually into the frame, George Bernard Shaw flashes jauntily the lining of his suit jacket with an eyebrow raised, James Joyce thinks deep thoughts behind his specs and eyepatch, and the beautiful Frida Kahlo poses proudly with fellow artist and husband Diego Rivera.

These simple, straightforward, almost documentary shots are set against rather more hammy fare - Isodara Duncan in robes at the Parthenon, a moody Augustus John clutching a paintbrush - and, in establishing these two modes of celebrity portraiture, the pioneers at Vanity Fair established the standards followed to this day.

Indeed, when the magazine was resurrected in 1981, the tics and tactics of the celebrity photographer had been set in stone, and, aside from a willingness on the part of celebs and publishers alike to show some skin, there is next to no difference between the images of the 1900s and those from the 1980s and beyond. The merely famous are given a veneer of gravitas by the solemn, full-face portrait in black and white, now out of choice rather than necessity, shown to be real people, relaxing at home (not their own, more often than not, but one rented for the occasion), mugging with props suited to their profession, or arranged in “classical” poses, as if the photograph were a good old-fashioned painting.

The exception to this rule is Annie Liebowitz, and on the evidence here, her reinvention of the celebrity photograph is not entirely positive, with innovations resting on ham-fisted symbolism, arty pretensions and a tendency to show the not particularly great and good as they imagine themselves, or glibly to remind the viewer of how they found their fame. Lance Armstrong’s battle with cancer is explored by depicting the champion cyclist naked on his bike, riding through driving rain. Kate Winslet is dunked in a tank of water in a diaphanous dress, just in case anyone flicking through the magazine was unaware of her role in Titanic. At times, one almost suspects Liebowitz of puncturing her subjects’ vanity, or adding a satirical edge to her work, but it seems safe to say that this is in the eye of the beholder.

A shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger, gazing into the middle distance, his biceps straining against the T-shirt he’s chosen to wear, oddly, while skiing, is hilarious and sinister, the right-wing actor-politician as übermensch, with uncomfortable echoes of Leni Riefenstahl. The less said about the preposterous image of Mr and Mrs Tom Cruise cuddling their new baby on top of a mountain, the better. Jack Nicholson celebrates his bad-boyhood by smoking a fag and driving golf balls off a Hollywood rooftop. Both men look silly, and the photographer’s collaborative approach - read sycophancy - is at least in part to blame. Then there’s the pull-out covers, a much-copied Vanity Fair trademark, featuring a galaxy of stars, shot on separate occasions in separate time zones, assembled by a skilful, uncredited Photoshop expert, who doubtless removes blemishes and slims paunches along the way - these are wonderful in their way, because the idea of a gathering of the ultra-famous in one place is titillating - was there bitching on set, did so-and-so blank the one from that film? - but beyond that, Liebowitz does little but arrange actresses in flattering poses.

Interestingly, when Liebowitz plays it straight, the results are rather wonderful. A snap of three generations of the Redgrave acting dynasty is full of warmth. Martin Scorsese and George Lucas are caught in a moment of friendly banter, as Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola look on. Rupert Murdoch is cast as a friendly old duffer, messing about on his boat.

Thanks to Liebowitz’s showboating, and the strength of her simpler work, the plainest portraits and more candid shots stand out. Daffyd Jones’s shot of Mick Jagger, looking tired and rather bored on a banquette beside Tony Curtis and Madonna at one of Vanity Fair’s Oscars parties portrays three people as people, however feted they may be. Herb Ritts lets Clint Eastwood’s craggy old mug shine in an unforgiving close-up, and captures a telling moment, part public, part private when he shoots Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Neilson from above, snogging before cheering crowds. Helmut Newton, unable to fashion one of his studied tableaux due to time constraints, shows Mrs Thatcher, cast-iron barnet intact, but tired and sad about the eyes.

Rather more twinkly is Harry Benson’s shot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan engaged in a spot of impromptu ballroom dancing. And there’s plenty more of Benson’s generous approach to his subjects at the Kelvingrove.

In fact, perhaps due to the rather fawning captions he provides, Benson seems too generous at times - the photograph of the Reagans is in both shows, accompanied in Glasgow by a sickly soft-focus image of the Clintons, a cheery Nixon on the campaign trail, and a portrait of George W Bush, then governor of Texas, smirking and playing golf.

Benson is much better when engaged in reportage. His documentary work on the Glasgow of the early 1970s is powerful stuff, and the coverage of the assassination of Robert Kennedy is little short of breathtaking, from Ethel Kennedy in a panic, pushing the photographer away from her husband’s body to the simple image of a straw-boater floating in the senator’s blood.

On the lighter, celebrity side, Benson’s unposed snaps beat his posed set-pieces hands down. The Queen is caught looking terribly jolly on a 1957 trip to a coal mine; Bob Guccione is shown sleazily touching up a model, who casts a withering glance in the Penthouse publisher’s direction; and Judy Garland looks lost and alone as an assistant lights her cigarette. For the most part, though, Benson’s work falls flat. It remains of interest thanks to his subjects - at times it feels as if he’s shot every single star of the past half-century - but not thanks to his photography.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 4th July , 2008.

Lucy Skaer is on something of a roll at the moment. Her new Fruitmarket show, the first major solo outing in Scotland for the Cambridge-born, Glasgow-based artist, follows her selection to represent Scotland alongside five other young artists at last year’s Venice Biennale.

Add to that a nomination for the Beck’s Futures award back in 2003, and the fact that Charles Saatchi and Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger have both taken an interest in her work, and this early retrospective, gathering work from 2001 to the present, begins to look a little overdue.

The exhibition opens with a brand new installation, Room of Lines. In the middle of the room, Skaer has placed a grand old Georgian table, its top slathered in black ink. Up on the walls there are four prints, made by laying paper across the table - the surface of the first is thick with ink, a solid copy of the table’s shape, the next is slightly washed-out, and by the fourth, the heavy paper reveals the scratches and patches of the surface, now hidden beneath the black layer left by the printing process.

Dotted about the room are four sculptures, large in size but fragile in nature, made up of interlocking plaster wedges, some resting on the floor, others hugging the walls. These undulating forms are based on skeletal figures culled from representations of the danse macabre, the medieval allegory on death and its inevitability. You wouldn’t know it, though - Skaer has spun her skeletons on their axes, then split them, and there is little evidence of them in these white sarcophagi.

This is a fitting start. Skaer has long been engaged in a game of revelation and obfuscation, choosing images often loaded with political, historical and art-historical baggage and transforming them, camouflaging her sources, but edging close enough to representation that viewers can, after a good long look, identify them.

This tactic is to the fore in another new work, Three Possible Edges, which looms over the Fruitmarket’s stairwell. On three huge panels, Skaer has adopted three images - of a battleship, some police horses, and a whale skeleton - and enlarged them to life size, rendering them in densely worked, printed and drawn, pixel-like spiral motifs. The same little sworls, thousands of them, make up The Big Wave, an enlargement of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic Edo period print The Great Wave at Kanagawa, spread across a series of panels draped like unfurled scrolls from the ceiling. In both works, the borrowed images move in and out of view, sometimes clear, sometimes hidden by Skaer’s painstaking process.

Upstairs, Leonora is an installation bearing another spiral drawing of another life-size whale skeleton, a small table resurfaced with mother- of-pearl hands and a film of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, with her hands filling the frame. As with Room of Lines, these elements are loosely gathered, and apparently have little in common. But this lightness of touch works wonders, providing enough of a hint that Skaer is engaging with Carrington’s work and using her as the glue to bind her own works together.

Next come a set of small sculptures based on Rorschach inkblots, which, like the danse macabre skeletons, have been spun into three dimensions. They immediately call to mind Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s bust, Continuous Profile - Head of Mussolini. Like Bertelli’s perpetually spinning commemoration of a dictator’s face, complete with fascistic sheen, Skaer’s transformation of the dubious two-dimensional tools of pseudo-scientific psychological testing into three-dimensional sculptures has a curious effect: hiding the represented form in plain sight, removing the familiar in a bid to make the viewer look again, and closer, considering both the reconfigured shapes and their history.

Perhaps the most striking work here is Flash in the Metropolitan, a brief 16mm film projected on to the wall of a small, dark and decidedly claustrophobic side-room. Shot in 2006 in collaboration with artist- film-maker Rosalind Nashashibi while the pair were on a Scottish Arts Council residency programme in New York, the film tours the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, tracking through the Near Eastern, African and Oceanic collections, offering fleeting glimpses of statues, bowls and historical artefacts.

These ancient, lasting objects are granted only a split second in the limelight, lit up by a flashing strobe, but the metronomic regularity of those flashes reverses the transitory nature of these brief glimpses, hinting in three short minutes at the vast, almost unimaginable stretches of time that separate the old objects. There’s a hint of ritual about the film and its making, too - it’s easy to imagine Skaer and Nashashibi ceremonially pacing the dark museum in near silence, aiming their lamp at a chosen relic, making up their own druidic rites.

Of course, the two artists are not high priestesses of some contemporary art sect and, for all we know, they spent their evening in the Met collapsing into giggles. But thanks to the solemn pacing and the deep black space in which it is shown, Flash in the Metropolitan shares something with the objects it illuminates, offering a taste of the quiet awe with which these artifacts might have been regarded in their own time.

It casts a shadow over the other work on show, too. Skaer’s act of patiently repeating tiny spirals takes on a ritual quality, the hands inlaid on the Leonora table call to mind a seance, and the enclosed skeletons in the Room of Lines and the appearance of animals throughout the show hint at a hidden, and rather spooky, symbolic system. Even the process of making those big imprints of a table’s surface takes on an alchemical quality.

This odd sensation - that there is something systematic to be grasped beneath the surface of Skaer’s work beyond the act of teasing out the images she obscures, like the random blobs of a Rorschach test, and that there are ambiguous undercurrents linking seemingly separate works - is undermined by the weaker pieces on show. To be fair to Skaer, most of these weak links are earlier works, like the dayglo-hued, forced symmetry of Venn Diagram (Snow), or the overly explicit, almost glib overlays of Venn Diagram (Rorshach/Corn).

If the show is a little patchy, it does the best work little harm, and the earlier, faltering steps offer a valuable chance to see an artist in progress, refining her practice, mulling over the same concerns but always improving, arriving in 2008 with a subtle, taut and engrossing body of new work.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 23rd, 2008.

This is the first of two traveling exhibits granting the public access to the Royal Collection’s stash of Italian works. The Baroque show arrives next year, but first we are treated to a look at the Queen’s Renaissance paintings and drawings, the majority gathered by Charles I, a keen collector, and Charles II.

The room devoted to painting is rather flat. There are good works here, sure, but few that are great, and, interestingly, it is the unfinished and unconventional pieces, many by lesser-known artists, that really draw the eye, with the more plodding portraits and religious scenes fading into the background.

Giulio Romano’s Portrait of Margherita Paleologo is the first of them. Ms. Paleologo was not, it seems fair to say, much of a looker, and made up for it with her frocks. Here she is wearing a loopy confection of an overdress, its interlocking ‘knot-fantasies’ riddled with gold thread, half-hiding a crimson gown. Romano, a pupil of Raphael, is not content with his masterly handling of these folds of fabric, adding a narrative element to the dimly lit scene: two less fashionably dressed women and a nun are peering through the doorway. One can’t help but imagine that the three have come for an audience with the dress, not the lady inside it.

Dosso Dossi’s The Holy Family is something of a revelation. The work is downright odd, with a feverish, almost hallucinatory quality, as if painted from a symbol-laden vision. Mary, rendered, unusually, as a decidedly plain young woman, bears a searing white corona - her mum, dad and boyfriend have to make do with dowdy metallic discs for their halos - and adopts a stylised pose, pointing, rather superfluously, at her son. The baby is clutching a cockerel like a favourite security blanket - preternaturally drawn to the bird as a symbol of the new dawn he’s set to usher in. The sky above the group sees a rather glum grouping of cherubim conjuring themselves into the grey clouds, parting them to light up a jeweled city on the plains behind. Then, up in the dim upper left corner of the painting, we see St. Jerome. He’s ignoring the cryptic business that surrounds him, and Dossi has captured a disarmingly real display of grandfatherly pride.

This unexpected flash of the ordinary in an extraordinary painting ties Dossi’s work to other decidedly domestic religious scenes on show. Across the room, Andrea del Sarto’s The Virgin And Child sees Mary checking Jesus’ mouth for signs of his first milk teeth - fully finished, the scene might end up on the wrong side of kitsch to modern eyes, but the chubby Christ is roughly sketched, retaining a tender quality. Falling between Dossi and del Sarto is another Virgin And Child, this one attributed to Pontormo, with Joseph, pausing on his way out the door to snack on a cherry offered by a boy, probably St. John the Baptist: domesticity and symbolism combined.

Titian tackles takes on the Virgin and Child, too. Or, rather, his workshop does. The Virgin and Child with Tobias and the Angel is clearly the work of many hands, and bears none of the compositional verve of the Venetian. Titian may have had a hand in it - the familiar deep pink and lapus lazuli blue are present and correct - but it doesn’t feel like a Titian. Nor does Boy With A Pipe, this time only attributed to Titian. The one work undoubtedly by Titian is a disappointment, too. The portrait of the humanist poet Jacapo Sannazarro is a staid little thing, one of many works executed early in the painters career, and only serves as a reminder of later, greater works. There are none of those here, sadly, only echoes in the work of followers like Vecchio and Bassano.

Thank goodness, then, for the second section of the show, devoted to drawings. It opens with a remarkable, scrappy little preparatory sketch by da Vinci, one of 600-odd in Charles II’s collection. Neptune sees da Vinci, with palpable frustration, drawing and redrawing the legs of rearing horses, until they look, of all things, like Muybridge’s photographic sequences. There are many such glimpses of the creative process, and almost all are more satisfying than the finished works next door. Some, like da Vinci’s, are quick, with loose markings made to set down a fleeting idea. Del Sarto’s The Head of St. Sebastian deftly captures motion, Polidoro da Caravaggio somehow manages, with a few concise strokes, to evoke the wonder in St. Thomas’ eyes as his doubt vanish before Christ’s wounds. Others are precise. A cartoon in metalpoint by Raphael showing The Conversion of the Proconsul - that odd episode in Acts where Paul blinds a man to convince him to convince his boss of Jesus’ power - is rich with both architectural detail and a lavish attention on every face in the crowded scene.

The most striking work here, though, is A Children’s Bacchanal by Michaelangleo. A delightfully perverse piece in red chalk, the level of finish is absolutely breath-taking, every inch of the paper a masterwork in miniature. And these kids are not the little angels of our post-Victorian imagination, but horrid, base creatures, devoid of reason. At the centre of the scene a gang of loutish toddlers lug a dead horse towards a cauldron. In the upper right corner, one lad appears to be vomiting into a wine butt, ignoring his pal, who is pissing into a drinking bowl, while down and to the left, a third suckles at the withered breast of a female satyr. That all this unpleasantness is rendered so perfectly, makes for a work that is little short of sublime.

This wonderful work flags up the fact that this is a rather patchy show, rescued by the gallery of drawings. Without them, it would be distinctly underwhelming, but their presence - and the presence of Michaelangelo’s little masterpiece alone - makes it a must-see.

This review was first published in The Herald on April 25th, 2008

Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: The Renaissance is at the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh until 26 October.

Every year, doggerfisher mounts a group show. Rather than lay out the gallery’s wares, gallerist Susannah Beaumont gathers together represented artists, artists who have shown in in the space before and international artists whose work has never before been seen in Scotland. This time, there is a theme too, with the six artists chosen all sharing a concern for ‘the divide and the shared territory between sculpture and wall-based work’.

As themes go, it seems fair to say that this is a loose one, bordering on the nebulous, but, whether it’s really an excuse to get a bunch of sympathetic artists in a room together or not, it works, giving the visitor a hook on which to hang their thoughts about the work on show.

Some seem to have taken the tension between work that goes on the floor and work that goes on the wall rather literally. Sally Osborn’s twin installations, are both titled Thinking For U, and both feature black wax discs, and, yes, one is on the floor, under a puddle of water, a second is up on the wall and a third bridges the gap, propped up between the two. But there is more to Osborn’s work than that. She drapes found furniture - a low stool and a high backed chair - with lengths of fabric, striped and printed with text, effortlessly evoking, if not a narrative, then a heady atmosphere, hinting at rituals, half suburban, half glamorous.

Tension and to-and-froing is everywhere, and not just in terms of the difference between the sculptor’s floor and painter’s wall. Neil Clements’ Tipton is ostensibly a painting - in fact it is a painting, in the sense of being canvas covered with paint - but the canvas is stretched over a jagged, off-kilter geometrically formed frame, and the oil is applied in an even coating, making the work a sculptural form, more than anything else. That it is hung on the wall fits the underlying theme of the show, but Clements is exploring different territory too, placing his work in between two media.

Jonathon Owen is up to similar tricks. His untitled piece is made from a rubber car mat, and hung up on the wall, but the real tension here is between the reconfiguration of a lowly quotidian object into something almost comically precious, the dull rubber cut with extravagant care into a lacy filigree, a pattern that clashes with the existing triangular shapes incised in the surface to provide grip for a driver’s feet.

Clements’ untitled installation, a thin metal structure that cordons off an area to the rear of the gallery, deals in tension of a different sort: at intervals, the metal form is lit by a sudden burst of red neon light. The sudden, unpredictable click and flash of the bulb is distinctly unnerving, a distracting warning that something - God knows what - is up.

Clair Barclay’s work dominates the main gallery space, and, as ever, her multi-part installation is complex, oddly disquieting and powerful. Barclay’s work always carries hints of a situation or event, invariably mysterious, rarely pleasant. This discomforting air is enhanced by the use of attractive, tactile materials - she tends toward the organic, for want of a better word, often using animal hides, printed fabric, porcelain, untreated wood and delicately machined metals, objects with an unknown purpose. A brass frame leans against the wall, bearing a skimpy curtain of red and white, like an unusable deck-chair. Connected to the frame by looping brass wires, there are three wooden objects, shaped to resemble skittles, or, more menacingly, stout clubs. A second assembly sees another frame, free-standing this time, bearing a wedge-shaped platform on which rests a trio of circular brass forms, like a pocket watch or compass stripped of its workings. What Barclay is hinting at is anyone’s guess - tastefully tooled up Mods and Rockers sprang to my mind, of all things, thanks to that deck-chair and those clubs - but the relationship she sets up between the discrete parts of her installations is so precise, so taught, that meaning doesn’t seem to matter.

If it weren’t for Barclay’s strong presence, Albrecht Schäfer would absolutely steal the show. Indeed, his untitled sculpture has the look of an element stripped out from one of Barclay’s installations. Twin wooden laths stretch from floor to ceiling, curved at the midpoint, just touching each other and apparently under great tension. It is as if these two thin lengths of timber are holding up the gallery roof, and as if a well aimed kick to the base of Shäfer’s structure could bring the building tumbling down. His other pieces here are more delicate. Noguchi Split is a transformation of the Japanese-American sculptor and designer’s ubiquitous paper globe lampshade, cut along its bamboo lines and allowed to fall into thin interlocking spirals of wood and paper. As with the untitled laths, Shäfer makes a simple gesture to powerful effect, economically exploring the nature of the material or object to hand. More complex are the pieces he has installed in doggerfisher’s office space, Propeller No. 1 - Propellor No. 17, a reprise of a 1989 work. The propellors, tiny and made of paper, like origami sycamore seed helicopters, are set on matchstick-thin slivers of wood protruding from the wall, light enough to move in the air circulating around the room. Some hardly budge at all, others turn at a sluggish pace, and one, placed directly above a radiator, spins on its axis like crazy. They’re delightful, mesmerising machines, and, again, Schäfer makes a lot out of very little.

The same goes for Sara Barker, who presents a pair of curving forms, like off-cuts from a Brutalist building. They are simple, beautiful things, but at first glance, both look monolithic, heavy, menacing - if you found these sculptures sitting next to you at the bar, you’d be sure not to spill their pints - but on closer examination, their stumpy heft is partly an illusion. They are not solid lumps of building material, but made of cardboard slathered in concrete.

Other works do not fit in quite so neatly - Owen’s carefully burnt and woven book pages, Clements’ forgettable oil landscapes on steel - but what might at first appear to be a rather thin curatorial conceit turns out to prompt unexpected, even unlikely connections between a broad group of artists, and offers unforeseen means of understanding their work.

This review was first published in The Herald on March 21st, 2008.

The latest exhibit at Inverleith is not a group show, but nor is it a pair of solo outings. Instead, curator Paul Nesbitt has brought together two Glasgow artists, sculptor Nick Evans and painter Tony Swain, who share certain concerns, rooted in a deliberate, investigative approach, and a tendency to set their audience a series of challenges.

Tony Swain paints over newspaper pages, allowing existing images - photographs, design elements and the flow of text - to guide his brush and set his palette of colours.

It seems that, first and foremost, he has taken to the medium for its suggestive properties, a way to prompt his imagination and to constrain it, a chance to accept new challenges posed by a page’s layout. But there is much more going on than that. Newsprint is a fragile, temporary medium, not just in the sense of being tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, but in the way it dimples under the weight of paint, and yellows in sunlight, becoming brittle over time. Swain makes no attempt to halt this process - the works on show here curl up at the corners, and waft in the draft from an open window - as if he wants his paintings, for all the care he takes over them, to be seen as of a moment, the moment of their making. Even his titles, which are brief, gnomic, and share an economy of language with newspaper headlines, hint that these are works for today, not for all time.

Swain must be aware, too, that in choosing to leave this image intact, or letting that paragraph peep through his layers of paint, viewers will attempt to puzzle out meaning. In According to Era, a figure of indeterminate gender, trapped behind painted bars, is almost completely obliterated, with nothing remaining but a shock of hair and a pair of folded arms. In the bottom left corner, a pull quote leaps out, reading “I planned my suicide for weeks. My jump rope was made of leather so I knew it would hold my weight.”. Is this, then, a painting about attempted suicide, with the absent figure and prison bars suggested as much by the text, which Swain must have read, as they are by the formal aspects of the printed image? And if it is, how are we to account for the single legible gobbet of printed text that remains unpainted in amongst the collaged suburban apocalypse of Remembered as one? This time, it seems impossible to reconcile old news of Menzies Campbell’s tenure as leader of the Lib Dems with the overblown fantasy landscape Swain has crafted over and around the text.

The puzzle of the marks Swain makes is harder still to unravel. Too sorry, and Something vital soon both look to have been culled from broadsheet travel supplements, and in both Swain has done relatively little with his source material, extending a tropical blue sky here, hiding a figure there, but presenting more than re-working. But in The family kept changing shape, an out-of-focus printed photograph of what looks like a dancer’s legs, Swain crafts a completely incongruous miniature cityscape, dwarfed by the limbs above it. Then, returning to Remembered as one, the viewer is faced with a work made of multiple slices of newsprint, with a tidal wave looming over sets of windows, a brick-walled tunnel, an inverted image of crowds at a procession of carnival, the collaged parts linked together by brushwork in such a way that it is nigh on impossible to tell where one image begins and another ends, or whether a given element has been slightly altered or completely created by Swain’s hand.

In the downstairs galleries, Nick Evans offers a different set of problems for the viewer to ponder. Like Swain, his work is born of his chosen materials, and the result of an intuitive process.

First come Figures Standing, a trio of towering, totem-like forms. They are made of blocks of cast aluminium that betray their origins as shaped polystyrene. This is the first in a series of internalised contradictions. The brittle, breakable and disposable nature of polystyrene is contrasted with the soft, pliable but permanent nature of aluminium. But polystyrene and aluminium are not opposites, they share a lightness, and Evans, contrarily, uses that lightness to set up another contradiction: these monumental structures that loom over the viewer are, regardless of their real weight and stability, dangerously fragile, threatening to topple at the slightest touch. Then there’s that title, which suggests Evans is in representational mode, or at least providing a context, even as he presents a work that is distinctly formalist. Next door, another contradiction comes in the form of Numbers, seven small pots resting on a shelf. This time, the title is less thorny, hinting that these are editions in an ongoing series that sees Evans aiming, if not at the Platonic form of a pot, then to make a very good pot indeed, a project suggested by his material, porcelain. And yet these cast pots, be they vase-like or gourd-shaped, show signs of their making, bearing traces of the molds that made them. Like the standing figures, there is also a sense that Evans is playing games with the properties of his materials and methods - these drab little things are resolutely matte, with none of the translucent sheen associated with porcelain, and their skew-whiff nature must be meant to undermine the usual goals of the potter, who aims for symmetry and balance.

The final pair of works on show, Figures Fallen are, despite their title, quite unlike the first three. This time, Evans figures come closer to representation than before, with twin Z-shaped sculptures resting on the floor, calling to mind seated versions of the figures that guard the coastline of Easter Island. Made of plaster, their surfaces are ridged, suggesting that they were cast in molds made of corrugated cardboard (though given Evans’ slippery way of working, they might have been carefully marked by hand). And, while the title is apt in the sense that these are indeed figures, it offers another deliberate inconsistency: the twin works are mounted on the floor to give the illusion that they are hovering just above it, figures falling, not Figures Fallen.

In the end, this is a powerful pairing, bristling with subtle connections. Evans and Swain are not simply a good match, they are allies of a sort, both deeply attuned to their media, both exposing the strategies and tactics they use to make work, both among the very best artists working in Scotland today.

This review was first published in The Herald on March 7th, 2008.

The first few images in this survey of Ansel Adams’ photography are nothing short of breath-taking, but, before long, boredom sets in.

This is down to the fact that - though this exhibit is keen to remind us that, while Adams is first and foremost a landscape photographer, his practice was broad, taking in portraiture and abstract imagery - there is precious little evidence here of artistic development, with prints from the 1930s sitting happily beside those from the 1970s, because they are, in essence, the same.

That is not to say that the 150 prints gathered here are dull, far from it. The show opens with a brace of waterfalls, great violent cascades of white water set against implacable rock, then turns to a more intimate view, with spring water flowing over stones, turned cloudy and gelatinous by the long exposure time, in a way that is almost painterly (though Adams himself, who co-founded Group f/6.4 to champion ‘pure’ photography in opposition to the pictorialist style prevalent in the first decades of the last century, would have baulked a this suggestion). Then come the work for which Adams is best known, his views of mountain ranges and great lakes, rocky outcrops and desert sands, captured in perfect detail, composed with an almost obsessive care. They are glorious, sure, but after a little while, one finds oneself looking not at the landscapes Adams has captured, but at the photographs themselves. It is the impossibly crisp rendering of the distant peaks in Mono Lake, California that grabs the eye, not the beauty of mountains, and the sheer rock face shown in Monolith, the Face of Half Dome is notable not for its majesty, but for the tonal contrast between the grey stone and the black sky behind it.

In other words, if Adams was a genius, as the show’s subtitle would have us believe, his genius was technical, not artistic. And with this in mind, the exhibition’s fails is its complete lack of technical information. Ordinarily, this would not be an omission worth criticising - images are the important thing, after all, not how they were made - but with Adams, mastery of photographic technique overwhelms the subject almost every time. Take Mudhills, Arizona, for example, a late photograph that hovers on the edge of abstraction. It is lit at the centre by a shaft of light. Was this blind luck, did Adams spend hours at this spot waiting for a break in the clouds, or is that striking highlight the result of some innovative darkroom technique? We are left none the wiser.

Then there is the subject matter. Perhaps, as a confirmed city-dweller who tends to think that a wind farm improves a wild vista no end, I cannot truly understand these works. But after twenty, thirty, forty pristine images of ‘unspoilt’ nature, it is hard not to wish for some sign, however small, of human activity. And when Adams provides, it comes as a blessed relief - standing before Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, in which a squat, flat-roofed church and adjacent graveyard provide welcome right-angles, it is impossible to remain unmoved at these signs of lives lived in a landscape. Of course, taking a landscape photographer to task for photographing landscapes might be missing the point rather, but there is something in Adams unrelenting, nigh on monomaniacal regard for natural formations that grates, with this repetitious, touched-up and ultimately tedious parade of images ending up just short of being sickly soft pornography for the outdoor set.

When Adams turns away from the landscapes he loved, though, he falters, unable to leave them behind. A close-up of a picket fence is, seen through Adams’ lens, a monumental mountain range, the lines of industrial machinery become a rocky outcrop, and even an abstract like Stained Wallpaper Near Alturas, California bears a title that emphasises the place the photograph was taken, and can only be read as an attempt to evoke eddies on the surface of a pool or knots in wood. The few portraits gathered here are for the most part eminently forgettable, with one exception - John Martin In His Studio shows the subject slightly unsteady on his feet, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, a decisive moment among the too-careful compositions.

In the end, this show will doubtless be a treat for keen devotees of Adams - it is by far the most comprehensive exhibition of his work shown on these shores to date - but for those new to his work, or familiar only with his often-reproduced Western landscapes, it is sure to disappoint, offering a huge volume of works where a select few would do, revealing Adams to be, if not a one trick pony, then a photographer whose relentless pursuit of the perfect landscape photograph ultimately obscures his desire to share a love for the beauty of the natural world.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 15th, 2008.

Who is Mark Chavez-Dawson? Visitors to this, his first solo outing in Scotland, will have trouble working out where this artist begins and his cast of alter-egos end, and could be forgiven for wondering if ‘Mark Chavez-Dawson’ is yet another, admittedly thinly-veiled, alter-ego of one Mark Dawson, artist.

Chavez-Dawson is the guiding hand behind two characters - the Gallery Guard and Robin-Nature Bold - and the creator of a third, Deacon Brodie-Morgannwy, a character performed by Glasgow-based artist Jean-Pierre Lapeyre (a name which may or may not be a pseudonym for someone else).

With a confusing cast of personae in place, Chavez-Dawson weaves further fictions. According to an excerpt from the artist’s notebook, the name of Robin Nature-Bold was revealed to him in a waking dream, which featured Andy Kauffman, Andy Warhol and Peter Sellers engaged in a rather unsavoury sex ritual, watched over by Janis Joplin and Valerie Solanis. Robin Nature-Bold’s performance piece, Whatever You See Are Your Own Demons, They’re Not Coming From Me!, is based on the unlikely tale of one Deacon Brodie, a squatter in Anthony Burgess’ attic who lived on a diet of egg whites and played his Casio keyboard incessantly, disrupting already tense negotiations between the author and Stanley Kubrick over the filming of A Clockwork Orange.

With this anecdote in mind, and having procured a Casiotone 101 keyboard from a later tenant of Burgess’ lodgings, ‘Nature-Bold’ enacted a ritualistic performance intended to ‘invoke the frequency of Brodie’. This took the form of ‘Nature-Bold’, a shaman or voodoo priest dressed head-to-toe in white, bashed out improvised melodies on his keyboard, to a tune based on repeat viewings of a scene in the 1932 film adaptation of Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde. While he performed, candles were lit, and egg whites scrambled. The detritus of this pseudo-magickal event remains in the gallery, the keyboard bound up in white fun fur, Nature-Bold’s white pinstripe jacket and leather gloves, ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ painted on the knuckles, are suspended on lines of wire, stretched out to form the Christ-like pose of a triumphant musician leaving the stage.

The Museum Guard, meanwhile, carried a rather gaudy gilt frame around Edinburgh, stopping off at galleries, where he offered representatives of each the chance to sign the frame and inscribe it with the name of their favourite work of art. Silent throughout his journey, negotiations were handled by Deacon Brodie-Morgannwy and the frame now hangs on the Embassy’s wall, enclosing a video projection of the journey-performance.

Of all the pop culture icons, seminal texts, artistic practices and invented rituals that Chavez-Dawson folds together in his arcane performances and convoluted backstories, one name leaps out: Andy Kauffman. The late (or living, depending on who you ask) comedian’s outre cast of alter-egos - the foul-mouthed club comic Tony Clifton, Kauffman the misogynist champion of inter-gender wrestling, Kauffman the naif, feeding his audience milk and cookies - are not precise matches for Chavez-Dawson’s merry band, but the presentation of suspect facts and fleshed-out fictions as two sides of the same coin, true or false according to the inclinations of the audience, is Kauffman to a tee. And, like Kauffman, Chavez-Dawson is either very funny or deeply infuriating (again, depending on who you ask). Infuriating because his work shrugs off questions that it is almost always worth asking of art: What does it mean? Is it any good? It is impossible to tell whether Chavez-Dawson is serious, or even half-serious, in his bid to link the art venues of Edinburgh by taking a psychogeographic tour of them, or if, in hiding behind the Museum Guard persona, he taking the mick out of the sort of artist who makes this sort of work. The more ritualistic, and more obviously hokey, efforts of Robin Nature-Bold are similarly evasive. The audience, caught up in the serious business of Nature-Bold’s musical attempt to summon the spirit of a fiction, can easily be forgiven for taking the events unfolding before them at face value, stifling giggles perhaps, but engaged nonetheless. This might be the response Chavez-Dawson as Nature-Bold is aiming for, flagging up the willingness of the contemporary art cognoscenti to leave any skeptical tendencies at the gallery door. Or he might be engaging in an ‘honest’ investigation of the effects of adopting a persona on his practice, or using that persona to bind together disparate cultural tropes, or he might just be having enormous fun at his own, and our expense.

This uncertainty, the impossibility of settling on a single interpretation of Chavez-Dawson’s mult-layered working method, let alone the work he makes, is likely to split gallery-goers into two camps. Some will be put off by his permanently raised eyebrow, and others will be willing to join in and enjoy the joke, whichever punch-line they pick. I’m keeping a foot in both camps: Chavez-Dawson, if that is his real name, is amusing, confusing and infuriating, all at the same time. Whether this is a good thing or not remains open to question.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 1st, 2008.

The first thing you notice about Carol Rhodes’ work is not what she paints, but where she paints from. The overwhelming majority of pieces in this show, a career survey that gathers together paintings from the past 15 years of Rhodes’ practice, are painted from an impossibly vertiginous veiwpoint. There are few horizon lines to be found in these landscapes, and they are almost always presented from an awkwardly steep angle, prompting a queasy, dizzying sensation close to vertigo or air-sickness.

And then there’s Rhodes’ taste for the mundane. The world that she creates, combining elements from aerial photographs to craft realistic, but never quite real scenes, is free of glorious natural formations, glamorous urban architecture or the twee pleasures of a rural village. Instead, Rhodes turns her eyes toward the unprepossesing margins, the factories and outbuildings and minor airports that populate those unnamed spaces beyond the suburbs, the not-quite-countryside places where buildings rise up as and when they are needed, with little planning and no high-falutin’ architects bent on making a statement.

This combination of a helicopter’s eye view and dull architecture and infrastructure has one immediate effect: it is impossible to stand before one of Rhodes’ small paintings without seeking to populate them. Who works in this factory? Who lives on that barren moor? Who on earth would spend an idle afternoon at this picnic area? And, most of all, why are they being watched, silently, from above?

Rhodes is careful not to provide any answers. A human figure never appears to offer a clue to the purpose of a given structure or environment, and works carry the lightest of titles, simply identifying a key element, or two, of the composition, a trick that only serves to heighten the viewer’s curiosity before shrugging it off. It might, in fact, be wise to ignore the temptation to pad out Rhodes’ paintings with an invented backstory. There are hints, certainly, that something is not quite right in these places, and that we might not like the answers to the questions these works quietly insist that we ask.

Not everything is uncanny in Rhodes’ world. There is something pleasingly non-committal in her brushwork, particularly in those expanses of emptiness that are a constant in her work, as if none of these paintings will ever be truly finished, just as the scenes surveyed are haphazard, higgeldy-piggeldy, unplanned and incomplete. These marks are not careless - Rhodes is a distinctly deliberate painter, one who produces just a few works each year - and serve to emphasise that these are paintings, a quiet reminder that viewers should not get too caught up in the unusual viewpoint and the scenes shown, but keep a close eye on the skew-whiff compositions, flat and muted palette and carefully marked surfaces that Rhodes lays out before them. There is also something almost tender about the way Rhodes puts down paint, as if she has found herself growing deeply fond of the rather unlovely places she amalgamates, not going so far as to celebrate the scenes surveyed, but according them a level of respect, and passing that respect on to the viewer.

This show will not, I imagine, have viewers flocking to the edges of cities and featureless moors, filled with a newfound affection for drinking in landscapes that inspire not awe but uneasy boredom. It does, though, offer a challenge to preconceived notions about the places we pass by or through with blinkers on. It might be a bit of a stretch to dub Rhodes the Ballard of the brownfield site, but just as that writer thrills to the ultramodernity of motorways and the sexual possibilities of multi-story car parks, so this painter offers a curiously warm reappraisal of urban outskirts and unedifying edifices, for all that she seems keen to point out and heighten the essential oddness and discomfort to be found in such non-places.

The most satisfying aspect of what is, arguably, an overdue survey of one of Scotland’s best painters, is the realisation that Rhodes’ practice, though it is tightly focussed and returns again and again to the same themes and concerns, is broad and deep, with much more to offer than one might expect from a painter who has settled so firmly on a style and subject. There is, too, a sense that that Rhodes might just be on the cusp of something new. The latest works on show see her falling to the earth, so to speak, and preparing to hit the ground running, exchanging the high altitude overviews for a much closer look. Perhaps, in some future exhibition, covering the next fifteen years, we will find Rhodes stepping inside the structures she has thus far examined on high, revealing some of their mysteries, or, better yet, providing more unsettling ambiguities. An unlikely prospect, maybe, but a tempting one.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 28th, 2007.

You need your wits about you as you walk into Smith/Stewart’s latest sculptural installation - a faltering step might easily end in a nasty bump to the head.

Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart - the pair have worked together since 1993 under the Smith/Stewart brand - are known for their exploration of the divisions between public and private space, and this time have literally divided the rooms of Inverleith House, installing interlocking black beams at head height.

On the ground floor, the first room is split by an off-kilter cross, echoed in the second. Upstairs, the dissection of space becomes more complex with interlocking lines slicing rooms into uneven quarters.

Described like this, Enter Love And Enter Death might sound like good old minimalist sculpture, but its form is, perhaps, less significant than the effect it has on its audience.

That effect is a powerful one, of heightened awareness - the beams are set at eye level, and have the look of metal girders (though they are made of painted wood), and so present a very real threat, forcing careful, tentative movements, and a good deal of cautious peering over and under the beams to plot a course through them. The result is a feeling close to claustrophobia, even though the spaces between the beams are wide, or a nervous, grown-up reversal of the abandon with which children attack a climbing frame.

This exaggerated sense of ones surroundings also applies to everything that Smith/Stewart have not installed. Inverleith House is perhaps Scotland’s most pleasing gallery, with its airy rooms, and the green light of the Botanic Gardens creeping through the windows, but at most shows, the art overwhelms the interior - with Smith/Stewart’s joists in place, every detail of the rooms is thrown into sharp focus, and views are admired with fresh eyes when it is hard to reach them. In the last room on the upper floor of the gallery, the ghosts of past installations remain - a wall-drawing by Robert Ryman, text left over from Douglas Gordon’s Superhumanatural exhibition - and Smith/Stewart’s beams grant them a fresh context, simultaneously obscuring and framing works that, to regular visitors at least, have long since faded into the background, forcing another fresh look. At the exit, Smith/Stewart even introduce a note of humour, with a final beam placed so close to the door that leaving the work is a struggle bordering on the slapstick.

Smith/Stewart are perhaps best known for their earlier work, pitched somewhere between performance and video, which was concerned with the body at an intimate level, often with a violent edge (the duo have described their work, menacingly, as being about ‘the things that people are capable of doing to one another’). The pair have filmed themselves desperately trying to breathe with plastic bags over their heads, for example, and made distinctly disquieting video works with cameras housed inside their mouths, looking out.

In the context of this past practice Enter Love And Enter Death, can be seen as a performance of sorts, as much as it is an installation or sculpture - the difference being, of course, that the artists are not the performers in this case, but choreographers, orchestrating the movements of their audience through the gallery spaces of Inverleith House, and, where once they documented events with video, Smith/Stewart here document in advance, so to speak, with their sculptural forms. Much is left to chance, of course - the duo could hardly predict the ducking and weaving of visitors with any precision - but, as one stalks the gallery alone, the sense that others must have peeped into this corner, dipped low to gain access to that area, or pulled up short to avoid a collision with a certain beam, is a strong one, with the ultimate result that an encounter with Enter Love And Enter Death begins to feel like something approaching a collaboration, with Smith and Stewart, first and foremost, and with fellow gallery-goers past and present, too.

Without that sense of physically interpreting the work as one moves through it, the piece would be distinctly aggressive, less a meditation on the controlled routes architects set into their buildings, or an intervention on the existing spaces of Inverleith House, more a near-violent corralling of an audience. But the idea that, albeit in some limited sense, every visitor is collaborating with the collaborating duo, lends the work a subtler tension, as if the usual mode of gallery behaviour - the presentation and consumption of art - has been transformed into a distinctly discomforting dance of control and willing submission.

This is powerful stuff, then, a work that provokes an intense physical response, one that borders on the unpleasant while also offering a genuine sense of communication between viewer and artists. That all this is achieved with the simple placement of some black beams makes Enter Love And Enter Death, which is at first sight might seem rather slight and repetitive, a remarkable piece of sculpture.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 30th, 2007.

This is the first major exhibition of Joan Eardley’s work in twenty years, and curator Fiona Peason makes plain in her catalogue essay that the show is intended to bolster the current critical and commercial reevaluation of the artist’s status. Pearson also wonders where Eardley, whose life was cut short by breast cancer in 1963, should be placed amongst her contemporaries - was she a one-woman branch of the Kitchen Sink School, kin to the Cobra artists in Europe, or aligned with America’s abstract expressionists? The answer, as this exhibition makes clear, is that Eardley was all of these things and more.

The first clues to Eardley’s ability to work confidently in disparate styles come with the selection of early work that opens the exhibit. We see the young artist finding her feet. A Pot of Potatoes is very obviously in debt to Van Gogh, while works made during a tour of Italy are suffused with the frescoes of Giotto and Fra Angelico she studied. And, more significantly, the Italian paintings show the first signs of Eardley’s fascination with street life - she ignores the grand architecture of Venice in favour of painting a trio of beggars, and it is the elderly woman praying in St. Mark’s, not the cathedral itself, that catches her eye.

Back in Glasgow, Eardley has found her own style (or, rather, one of them) and her subject: the children of the city’s streets. The best of these are truly remarkable, rich with striking detail - the concentration on the face of Andrew With a Comic, the protective hand of the older boy on the young girl’s wrist in Brother and Sister, the bored, tired eyes in Glasgow Children. Eardley’s eye for composition is gripping, too, whether she is capturing life in the angled tangle of bodies in Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing, or the strict division between leering boys and sulking girls in Children, Port Glasgow.

There is something curiously apolitical about these paintings of children, though. These scamps aren’t triumphing over adversity, because Eardley has, all too often, excised it. She adopts aesthetically pleasing aspects of street squalor - making wonderful use of scrappy chalk graffiti in particular - but there is a strong sense of preemptive romantic nostalgia about these street scenes, as if the brilliant sandstone reds that feature so often are the result of rose-tinted spectacles.

Of course, it can be argued that campaigning social documentary was not Eardley’s concern, and that she mastered her true theme - the relationships between her young subjects, and their relationship to her - completely. It still seems that there is something missing in these works, however, and so, while the paintings of children are Eardley’s best known and best loved works, they are not her best.

No, the strongest work here are the landscapes and seascapes painted at Catterline, an isolated fishing village just south of Stonehaven, and the portraits of Eardley’s friend and fellow artist Angus Neil.

The former are breathtaking. Eardley does not so much observe nature as translate it, edging close to pure abstraction while always maintaining a representational edge. The Sea is an angry swell of texture surging from the surface of the painting, the surface of Foam and Blue Sky is a flurry of finnicky marks and broad strokes that coalesce into something essential, undeniably of the sea. It is as if Eardley had the ability to maintain a direct connection with what she saw before her, holding an unbroken line from eye to mind to hand to brush. At times, Eardley’s treatment of nature stands up to comparisons with Turner, for all that her dribbles and drips call to mind Pollock.

The portraits of Young could not be more different in style and atmosphere, but they share the intense immediacy of the landscape works. In The Table, Young is seated, his head bowed, his sour mood matched by the drab palette of grim greys and browns, which is repeated in A Glasgow Lodging - truly empathetic portraits, with a strength far beyond that seen in the paintings of children. It is the mesmerising Sleeping Nude, though, that steals the show. Young is shown, emaciated, cold and pale, stretched out on a bed, the flash of a yellow rug in the bottom right corner a cruel counterpoint to the oppressive sense of something more than ennui, approaching dread.

And so Eardley proves herself a mistress of diverse styles, no longer flitting from mode to mode as she did in student days, but able to work in parallel as a consummate painter of nature, a fine portraitist, and a flawed documentarian. That realisation is a sad one - had Eardley’s life not been cut short by breast cancer, it seems certain that she would have continued to explore, soaking up new movements in art, and finding her place in them.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 9th, 2007.

Internus, a body of new work by Frances Richardson takes as its starting point a panel from a predella, or altarpiece, attributed to the relatively obscure, if prolific, 15th Century painter Neri di Bicci. Titled Archangel Raphael saving an attempted suicide, the small work shows the archangel hovering in midair, cutting the noose that grips the neck of a boy, then, in a later scene, leading the boy into a chapel.

Richardson has extracted elements from di Bicci’s work, and fleshed them out into large-scale sculptures, giving viewers the unsettling impression that they are walking through the enclosed world of of the painting and its narrative. Her choice of materials is curious, too. Almost all the work here is made of medium density fibreboard, a material chosen for its lack of art historical associations, and one that provides a dull sheen of uniformity, emphasising form over surface.

The show opens, though, with a floor sculpture that stands apart. The base of the piece, propped up at a low angle, is reminiscent of those spindly plastic frames filled with component parts that make up the bulk of an Airfix model kit, but in reverse. Its surface is peppered with precision-cut outlines of munitions and armaments, with crude outlines of stealth bombers and their bombs flanking the distinctly sinister silhouette of a grenade launcher, and, inevitably, a pair of oil cans. Atop the military imagery lies a bundle of cloth bound up with string, a tiny shrouded figure awaiting burial.

I have half a mind to praise this piece, if only because avowedly political work is so thin on the ground, making the sight of a slice of good old-fashioned agitrop rather refreshing. But what is it saying? That bombing kill babies? An act which we all agree is appalling, unconscionable? This vague protest calls to mind that episode of Father Ted, in which the hapless priests of Craggy Island rail ineffectually against a blasphemous film holding placards bearing the legend “Down with this sort of thing”. Richardson might be taking the mick out of those simplistic political pronouncements that reduce complex geopolitical argument to howls of outrage, but I doubt it. The same goes for a grandiloquent introductory statement that adorns the Corn Exchange’s wall, an art-speak tongue-twister that has some very serious things to say about ‘the void’ and ‘thingness’, of the sort that land writers in Pseud’s Corner. But, again, there’s no hint of self-parody about it.

Thankfully, as soon as Richardson moves on to larger scale works, and gets stuck into di Bicci’s panel, things take a turn for the better.

The space is dominated by a larger-than-life vignette lifted from di Bicci’s tiny altarpiece. There is a set of floorboards, which look as if they’ve been torn from the source painting and suffered for it, beside which sit a tipped-over stool, and a noose, cut by the sword of the Archangel Raphael. Raphael is absent, though it is easy to imagine his presence, and that of the suicidal boy, even if you’ve never seen the work on which Internus draws. This is true, too, of a bed tucked away in the corner of the gallery. Like the straggling edges of the floorboards, it’s not even half a bed, with slats and struts ending suddenly, the clash between lumpen fibreboard solidity and sudden absence making it impossible to avoid filling in the gaps. Add a pillow crafted from cinema admission tickets, and all that lofty chat about ‘the void’ emblazoned on the wall begins to make a bit of sense: Richardson is in the business of making objects that are simultaneously present and absent, completed only when the imagination of an audience is brought to bear on them.

Incomplete objects are not her only tactic, either - the relentless monotony of MDF is broken by visibly hand-crafted clay pieces, one set atop an otherwise pristine workbench, another threatening to topple from a high beam. Both are honed to a point with a crude grip at the opposite end. They might be tools, or weapons, and their ambiguous status combines with their seemingly careless placement to suggest the ghost of a narrative, just as the half-made bed and tapering floorboards offer the ghost of an image.

It’s a shame that this body of work is on display at the Corn Exchange Gallery, which isn’t a gallery in the usual sense, but the foyer of a design company, complete with a busy reception desk ‘installed’ in amongst the art, and a constant hubbub emanating from the offices upstairs. On the one hand, it’s a fitting setting - given her use of MDF, it seems safe to assume that Richardson is uncomfortable with art being viewed as just another designed consumer product, and the ornate beams of the restored building are distinctly church-like - but pieces like these, the best of which require and demand detailed examination, not to mention long pauses for thought, deserve better.

This review was first published in The Herald on September 21st, 2007.

Most people have an easy, unthinking relationship with buildings. We gain entrance through the doors, walk the corridors, and sit ourselves down in the rooms. London-based artist Alex Hartley is different, preferring to climb up, over and around the buildings he encounters - a practice known as ‘buildering’ - naming each climb, describing it, and rating it for difficulty.

Evidence of his activity is plastered across the Fruitmarket Gallery’s frontage, in the form of Elevation 1:1, a photograph of the building on the building itself, complete with detailed instructions for eight climbing routes across the facade, and drawn white lines marking out each ascent. The descriptions reveal that, while Hartley is dead serious about his intimate explorations of exteriors, he also has a sense of humour, littering his texts with obscure jargon from the worlds of architecture and mountaineering to form a comic, and often oddly poetic builderer’s argot, first seen in his mock-serious guidebook, LA Climbs: Alternative Uses For Architecture.

Inside, after walking through Elevation 1:1 - ironically, one cannot follow Hartley’s lead up it, since his photograph has smoothed over the very lintels, mullions and window-ledges he used to gain purchase - are more documents of climbs around Scotland. These digital prints, drawings and photographs are of two types. The first sees Hartley in action, hanging on for dear life to the rounded, windowless walls of a crofter’s cottage, and effortlessly clambering onto a ledge overlooking the main hall of the shamefully derelict St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. The second type are more generous, open-ended evocations, with lines drawn on buildings which both track Hartley’s progress and suggest, like the instructional texts that dot the front of the gallery, that we too might attempt a climb.

Next come a series of photographic works encased behind satin-etched glass, which give a convincing illusion of three dimensional space. Installation (FMG) extends a room in the gallery, the glass a barrier to entering a space which is not there. Case Study recreates a modernist Californian house, the deep view of its interior seen through the windows negated by the sculpture’s thin, wedge shape.

It is hard to describe the effect that viewing these works has. One cannot help but pace restlessly around them, searching for the perfect viewing angle, frustrated that the images remain always out of focus, sometimes disappearing entirely. Some even prompt a physical response of a different, more powerful kind, a sort of giddiness or vertigo that makes looking at them at once uncomfortable and rather thrilling - feelings familiar, one imagines, to those felt by a builderer mid-climb.

Add to this photographs of more modernist homes glimpsed as a trespasser might see them, through dense foliage, and architectural reliefs of sinister doorless sci-fi structures looming from the surface of barren landscapes, and Hartley’s dissatisfaction with the standard understanding of the built environment becomes plain. And his attitude is infectious. On leaving the gallery, the buildings on Market Street have changed, becoming more than places to enter or admire, their features now a challenge to explore.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

On leaving the National Gallery Complex on The Mound, you could be forgiven for thinking that this show’s rather grand subtitle - A Celebration of Life… and Death - is a misprint. It really ought to read A Celebration of Death… and Death, and Yet More Death.

Of course, much of Warhol’s work is explicitly concerned with death - the Death and Disaster series, the skull paintings, the Marylins made in the wake of the star’s demise, the Jackie Kennedy screen-prints that show her grieving for her assassinated husband - but here, that morbid streak is infectious, colouring works that are generally taken to be celebrations of life, chock full of optimism.

Take the Brillo boxes that open the show. Elsewhere, these replications of the ordinary can only be read as happy Pop evocations of democratic American sameness - ‘All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good’, as Warhol himself had it - but here mass production becomes analogous to the Cold War threat of mass death evoked in the late monochrome painting Map Of Eastern USSR Missile Bases, the repeated threat of a Pistol screen-print or the grim potential for death upon death of an empty electric chair. And, too, Warhol’s studied absence as an artist in his development of Duchamp’s readymades (unlike Fountain, which is a urinal upended, renamed and signed, the Brillo boxes are simply recreated, handmade readymades) is no longer a jolly, winking invitation to elevate the everday, but nothing less than an artistic suicide.

This might seem a wilful, even tenuous reversal of Warhol’s stated intent and long-accepted critical interpretation. If so, this show is to blame, thanks to a didactic tendency to divide Warhol’s legacy in two, pitting life against death to an extent that forces one to question the truth of that division.

For example, the catalogue essay insists that there is an optimistic twist to the skull paintings - which have an overwhelming, immersive room to themselves - since each skull casts a shadow in the shape of a baby’s head. If this is true (and, to be honest, it seems a bit of a stretch) the shadow baby is a glum little thing. Not a symbol of rebirth, but an acknowledgement that, from the moment of birth, we’re all hurtling towards the grave. And their irrepressibly jolly colour-schemes are no sign of acceptance, but a grim joke at life’s expense, just like Self-Portrait With Skull: platinum wig aside, it’s hard to see the difference between the man and the memento mori.

Even the Paintings For Children, hung low against fish wallpaper here, as they were when first exhibited in 1983 at a Zurich gallery, are deadly. Warhol did not paint animals or people for children, but clockwork toys; lifeless things with rictus grins, condemned to death each time their mechanisms wind down.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. One room is given over to Silver Clouds, an installation of reflective, helium-filled pillows, and, on my visit, full of toddlers gleefully ignoring the notice to interact ‘gently’ with the exhibit. Then, in the lower galleries, we are treated to a selection of Warhol’s early illustration work. There are glorious drawings of shoes and handbags using the ‘blotted-line’ technique that prefigures his later use of screen-printing, and line drawings of beautiful boys smacking their lips, too. But the next room will wipe the smile off your face. It contains vitrines piled high with the contents of Warhol’s boxes, time capsules full of ephemera explicitly destined for posthumous examination. As a record of Warhol’s daily existence these collections of fan letters, playbills and press cuttings are simply fascinating, but as works of art, these boxes must be read as an attempt to stall time, to cheat death.

And, with that thought, the room full of celebrity portraits upstairs is recast. Instead of celebrating beauty and fame, revelling in superficiality, they become another attempt to guard against the future and its inevitable end. So, Debbie Harry is preserved in aspic, not held up for admiration. And, conversely, Truman Capote is shown not as the the absurdly gorgeous, plump and pouting seducer that Warhol fell for in his youth, but sad-eyed and thin-lipped: another skull painting in all but name.

This is a wonderful show, then. Not just because it offers the chance to view works never before seen in Europe, let alone Scotland, and not just because it is beautifully put together, especially when it comes to the recreated installations, but because it will more than likely change the way you think about Warhol and his work, whether you end up agreeing with its central thesis or not. Considering the ubiquity of Warhol’s images, the never-ending stream of retrospectives devoted to his work, and the volumes of popular and academic criticism devoted to his legacy, this is no mean feat.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

You’ll need your wits about you when you step into doggerfisher to take in Nathan Coley’s exhibition of new work. The Turner Prize nominee has marked the threshold with an oak beam, forcing the visitor to consider the very act of entering the gallery, and, on a more practical level, threatening to send them head over heels.

This is typical of Coley’s work. With a simple, restrained gesture, he neatly draws attention on an unconsidered relationship with the built environment, and the experience of gallery-going in particular, as if a liminal moment of anticipation has been made flesh.

It is also a human and humorous piece, qualities that Coley’s unerringly serious work sometimes lack, despite his tight focus on the physical, social and psychological relationships between people and places. The threshold is a pun of sorts - a recognition of some visitors’ fear that ‘difficult’ contemporary art might be out to trip them up - and, on a more visceral level, one can imagine a hapless caller stumbling over the thick oak beam in a flurry of silent slapstick, tumbling headlong into the next confrontational piece, Untitled (Barricade Sculpture).

Like the marked threshold, Coley’s barricade calls attention to space as much as it exists in space. It is not a lumpen authoratitive object, but an open, temporary one, almost fragile, made of slatted plywood panels on a timber frame. It is possible to see through it, but not to pass through it.

After this rather disquieting introduction come the Annihilated Confessions, a series of photographs of ornate confessionals, almost entirely obliterated by thick sprays of black or white paint. Coley might be concerned with making already private spaces so private that none may enter them, or secular denial of holy places, but, thanks to the heightened awareness of movement through space prompted by the threshold and barrier pieces, the first response to the Confessions is phsyical. It is impossible to ignore the irrational urge to lean to one side so as to peep behind the rough curtain of paint that obscures the confessionals, leading to an awkward dance with static images. By way of contrast, the shining fairground lights of Secular Icon in an Age of Moral Uncertainty offer a moment of still consideration, without ever revealing anything approaching meaning.

The ownership of spaces, be they public or private, is another key strand running through Coley’s practice and, with his usual economy, the status of the gallery is questioned by twin lightboxes. One, labelled ‘here’ is in the exhibition space, another labelled ‘there’ is placed inside the gallery office. To see them both is to acknowledge the barrier between the public and private spaces within the building, and to recognise the power relationship between passive, consuming visitors and active, providing gallerists.

Like all the works here, the two lightboxes reveal Coley to be in the business of observation and analysis, distillation and presentation. Nothing is wasted here, and each seemingly simple gesture unfolds into a web of ideas, matched by an almost oppressive set of physical manipulations. This might not be art for the heart, but it certainly engages both body and mind.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

Black Box, the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s strand devoted to experimental moving images, operates under something of a misnomer. The name suggests that the big screens and black boxes of the cinema are divorced from, even opposed to, the small screens and white cubes of the art world. Its programme, though, eloquently shows that the divide between the two forms - film and, for want of a better term, video art - is at least semi-permeable, resting not on the work, but on the artist’s intent, the context in which it is shown, the audience that consumes it and the means by which it is distributed.

Of course, this being the EIFF, some of the work on show is purely cinematic. Phantom Love, a feature-length film by Nina Menkes, takes the viewer on an immersive trip through the fractured psyche of Lulu, a woman who, bored of the repetitive attentions of her young lover, allows her mind to empty and fill up again with half-memories and subconscious effluvia. What follows is a series of vignettes, in lavish black and white, that switch from the seedy glamour of hotel casinos to harrowing encounters with a woman who may be Lulu’s sister or her troubled, hidden self. Yet this is still a work at the intersection between art and film, with nods to Buñuel’s work with Dali, and, thanks to a snake slithering down a corridor, direct allusions to the overt, obvious dream symbolism of the Surrealists.

The waters get really muddy with In The Wake of a Deadad, in which Andrew Kötting travels the world with a huge inflatable dummy of his late, grinning father, blowing up the effigy at locations of particular resonance to dead dad and live son. The work is conceived as both a 65-monitor installation and the film shown here. The former must be a confusing affair, bombarding the audience with endless instances of Kötting’s hysterically Freudian erection of his father. In linear, projected form it is, for all its complex merging of performance work and psychogeographic investigation, and its no-budget look, a distinctly conventional film. By turns funny and touching, once the viewer accepts the unedited episodic nature of In The Wake of a Deadad it forms a narrative, complete with surprise plot twist, and paints a portrait of a family beyond Kötting’s awkward tribute to his father. Sure, its not exactly the stuff of a Saturday night at the multiplex, but the simple shift in presentational modes shows that ‘difficult’ video art can become ‘easy’ cinema.

To an extent, the reverse is true of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, now showing outwith Black Box at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. This is the dual-screen gallery version of Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s cinema release, one of an edition of 17 that pairs the original film with raw footage from one of the cameras used to track the French international during a match between his club Real Madrid and Villareal. It’s an absorbing piece, which, as the two screens occasionally come together to display the same shot, calls to mind much of Gordon’s video work, with its recurring themes of doubling and doppelgängers. And, too, this version works as - to borrow from the jargon of the DVD extras menu - a ‘making of’, revealing the choices made in the edit suite, and the glossy sheen given to the washed-out rushes in post-production. It also raises questions about the distribution of artworks made of moving images: why is this work a hugely expensive, limited edition, when the film on which it is based was made available to anyone for the price of a cinema ticket? (A question that can be asked of many a ‘cinematic artist’, like Mathew Barney, whose masterly Cremaster Cycle is trapped in $100,000 DVD sets, or Glasgow-based documentary-maker/artist Luke Fowler, whose fluid filmic portraits can only be seen at gallery screenings, despite, arguably, belonging in the cinema.)

To return to Black Box, Beverly Hood’s piece Madame I not only questions modes of distribution but folds the means of viewing the work into the work itself. Telling the story of an anonymous patient in a neurological study who has lost her sense of proprioception - the awareness of the body in space - this short computer-animated film is designed to be viewed on a mobile ‘phone. And so Hood poetically evokes Madame I’s situation, a consciousness that has lost its moorings to the physical world, and forces us to look to our own disembodied existence as avatars virtually linked by the ever-present network through increasingly sophisticated mobile devices.

Is Hood’s work video art, a short film, or some as-yet-unnamed interactive experience? After taking in the work on show, or the films screened, at Black Box, such distinctions disappear, and this is the programme’s great strength: it not only gathers the best in moving images at the margins, but questions their very nature. Fascinating stuff, individually and collectively.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

This was a significant year for the visual arts at the Edinburgh festivals. Joanne Brown was appointed as director of the Edinburgh Art Festival, with an ambitious remit to put the young festival at the heart of visual art practice in Scotland, putting the EAF on an equal footing with its sister festivals. Talking of which, this was also the year that saw the Edinburgh International Festival renew its lost focus on visual art, appointing Katrina Brown as its curator.

It is too early to gauge the impact of the two new posts, but one thing is certain: visual art is now at the heart of the festivals, with shows and events that garner as much attention as anything that the Fringe, Film or Book Festivals have to offer.

The hit of the summer was, of course, Warhol: A Celebration of Life… and Death, which announced itself with confidence, thanks to the transformation of Princes Street into an exhibition space for the Campbell’s soup cans that wrapped the National Gallery Complex’s columns. And confidence was needed. The more cynical among us let out a groan at the news that a Warhol retrospective was on its way. Such shows are hardly rare, and are rarely done well, but this one turned Warhol fatigue to its advantage, dashing low expectations thanks to the wonderful, eye-popping recreations of original installations, the coup of bringing together works never before seen in Europe, and a finely-judged tone that managed to both offer new insights to those who know the artist well and serve as a clear introduction to those experiencing his work in the flesh for the first time.

Across town at the Dean Gallery, the second flagship exhibit, Picasso on Paper was a relatively dry affair. In place of whizz-bang installations, we were treated to a serious, exhaustive survey of Picasso as draughtsman and experimental printmaker that, while it was slow to reveal its delights, nonetheless delighted. The same might be said of Richard Long: Walking And Marking, another deep survey of an artist’s practice. As at the Picasso, the National Gallery of Modern Art felt a little over-stuffed, with Long’s weaker, more explicitly sculptural work at times threatening to diminish the impact of the clean gestures of his central practice, which he began at the tail end of the ’60s with the still-breathtaking A Line Made By Walking. With the debut screening of the gallery version of Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait rounding out the National Galleries contribution to the EAF, their input to the festival proved to be both broad and deep.

On the more contemporary front, Nathan Coley’s outing of new work at doggerfisher showed a lighter side to the Turner Prize nominee’s practice, with a witty threshold sculpture threatening to trip up unsuspecting visitors turning Coley’s investigations of public space into a distinctly physical experience. There was architectural interaction on offer at the Fruitmarket, too. Alex Hartley’s ‘buildering’ work saw the artist clambering over the buildings of Scotland and crafting disorientating trompe-l’œil interiors with blurred photographs and etched glass. A final highlight: the Ingleby Gallery’s quick-fire programme of artistic pairings, which saw Rachel Whiteread pitted against Robert Burns’ breakfast table, and the late photographer Francesca Woodman matched with the great sculptor Richard Serra’s early film work.

Not all was rosy at the EAF, of course. Picasso: Fired With Passion, a look at the artist’s ceramics, was an unworthy companion to the Dean show, and a flock of forgettable shows at the more staid galleries formed an uninspiring backdrop to the glittering exhibitions listed above.

The EIF’s Jardins Publics, a four-part exhibit of specially-commissioned public artworks, was, sadly, also firmly in the uninspiring camp. This was partly down to some of the work being sub-par. Michael Lin’s flowery platform in East Princes Street Gardens had the feel of well-meaning but ill-executed municipal project, and, while Apolonija Sustersic’s garden at Chessel’s Court was doubtless a boon to local residents, it had little to offer visitors. Richard Wright just about saved the day with the etched glass window he placed in St. George’s Well on the Water of Leith, which offered a meditative experience, and a genuine transformation of the surrounding landscape. Overall, though, Jardins Publics felt like a missed opportunity - its chief pleasure was the walk between the works, which could have been heightened by taking a cue from a project like The Grand Tour, the National Gallery in London’s August public project, which offered audio tours and a true emphasis on the city surrounding the art.

An even damper squib, though, was this year’s Annuale. Launched four years, this was a festival offering a grassroots alternative to the big bucks internationalism of the EAF that by its third year had become a serious alternative event, and, importantly, a means for emerging Edinburgh artists to find a wider audience. This year, though, it was nigh on invisible, with nothing more than a poorly-designed pamphlet listing show titles and locations (some inaccurate) to guide gallery-goers. This organisational failure was made all the more galling by the fact that much of the work on show under the Annuale banner was of a high standard - Matthew Inglis’ curious boxed vignettes at Hyperground, Adam Maclean’s eccentric overview of alchemical symbolism at Embassy and the freewheeling, fantastic group show at Shangri-La-La in particular - and deserved to be seen. Hiding these lights under a bushel did artists and audience alike a disservice.

The reverse was true of The Comic Book Project, which could almost be seen as a festival in itself. Centred on the Collective Gallery, with a show that offered belly laughs to match anything at the Fringe thanks to Mel Brimfield’s feverish imagining of an affair between Barbara Streisand and Joseph Beuys, and Brian Dewan’s deadpan, not-very-educational slideshows, the project’s great strength was its injection of a dose of art into all four major festivals, with film screenings, theatre and talks and a publication. This forward-thinking, uniquely inclusive event ought to be taken as a template for future bridge-building between the festivals.

In the end, then, 2007 was a strong year for art in Edinburgh, and one that held the promise of stronger years yet to come, thanks to the EAF’s coming of age, The Comic Book Project’s innovative collaborations and the hope of the EIF engaging with the visual arts with greater success in future.

This review was first published in The Herald in August 2007.

In the run-up to its tenth anniversary, Ingleby Gallery is playing host to a rather hectic year-long programme of twenty-six installations, each one pairing a contemporary artist with something they have chosen, be it another artist’s work, an object or a concept.

The third installment of this inventive curatorial conceit, and the first of four that coincide with the Edinburgh Art Festival, consists of three works by Rachel Whiteread and Robert Burns’ breakfast table.

At first glance, it’s an odd pairing - what on earth does this curiously low folding table once used by Scotland’s favourite son have to do with the work of Rachel Whiteread? - but the more time one spends with Whiteread’s work and the piece of furniture she has chosen as a counterpoint, the more connections between the object and the art appear.

First, there is the matter of absences. Whiteread’s work is, on a simple level, all about that which is not there. Her sculptures, from the Turner Prize-winning House to Embankment, the 14,000 polythene boxes that filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2004, are all solid casts of spaces where something isn’t, so to speak.

Here, to match Burns’ table, Whiteread is showing Cushion, a plaster casting of the interior of the titular object set upon a steel chair frame. It is a sagging, soggy and soft thing, though it is made of a brittle substance, and it is attractive too, almost demanding to be pinched or squeezed, a fact recognised by the rather terse note on the exhibition handout forbidding any such contact.

In this context, sitting beside Whiteread’s transubstantiation, Burns’ little table is an eloquent object, one that tells of a series of absences. The first absence is, of course, Burns himself, but his work is also absent - this is not his writing table, after all - and so, too, are its owners, some of whom are listed on an engraved metal plaque set in the table’s top. That Burns and those who owned the table after him are as absent as is possible, all of them long dead, points to the morbid aspect of Whiteread’s work. This is most obvious in her series of casts of mortuary slabs, but equally present in her casts of domestic interiors, which commemorate the lives lived in them as much as they solidify negative space, and in early works, which had a distinctly nostalgic bent, with casts of the furniture that surrounded her as a child, and the space beneath her bed.

Even the fact that the table can be folded away seems apt: unfolded, it is solid like a Whiteread cast, but when folded it occupies one space, and offers the potential to occupy another, like the space a Whiteread cast describes.

The table might, too, be a meditation on fame, selected as a sort of autobiography by proxy. Unlike her fellow YBAs, Whiteread is famously uncomfortable with the fame her work has brought her, and, given her status, it is not inconceivable that, one day, someone will pay good money for some ephemeral, irrelevant object from Whiteread’s own home or studio. If so, the choice of Burns’ breakfast table can be seen as a pithy, even acid commentary on the essentially ludicrous importance attached to unimportant objects like this one, that bear the patina of celebrity, and are revered by association at the expense of the famous artist’s work.

In short, it seems as if Whiteread is using Burns’ breakfast table as a sort of critical object, a means to provoke a conversation about her practice as a whole, not just the works shown alongside it.

And so, if there is a problem with this exhibition, it is that Burns’ breakfast table is too eloquent and too loud, its silent commentary on Whiteread’s work threatening to overwhelm the work itself. The pair of works on paper in particular are coloured by the table’s presence. Both consist of photographs of interiors with sections removed, sometimes replaced by pencil lines. In Books, a teetering pile of volumes rests on a chair, while Open Door shows a door and its frame, the space between them removed. Here, thanks to the table, they feel more like preparatory sketches or new routes to understanding Whiteread’s sculptural work than complete pieces, as if the excised portions of the photographed rooms might exist elsewhere or in the future, as casts made of plaster, resin or concrete.

In the end, this is a remarkable show, much more than the sum of its parts. Just as Whiteread uses a seemingly simple tactic - the casting of objects and spaces - to make works that are, more often than not, awe-inspiring, so this quiet little collection speaks volumes.

This review was first published in The Herald on August 3rd, 2007.

This twinned pair of exhibitions attempt to side-step the difficulty, if not impossibility, of surveying Picasso’s long and prolific career by restricting their focus to ceramics and works on paper.

Unfortunately, Picasso: Fired With Passion at the National Museum is not a success. The show centres the artist’s time at Vallauris in the South of France, when Picasso devoted himself to ceramics. It also attempts, through timelines, information panels, collected ephemera and a smattering of paintings, drawings and posters, to offer insight into Picasso’s wider practice, and his famously tumultuous private life. The result is an odd admixture of wooly generalities - Picasso was fond of the ladies, invented Cubism, was rather upset by the bombardment of Guernica - and a studied focus, that, misleadingly, takes it as a given that Picasso’s ceramic work is on a par with his wider practice. Sure, there are moments of wit, as in Mains au Poisson, a plate which shows two matte black hands crushing the life out of a shiny, slippery fish, and fine pieces, too - the vase from 1950 that opens the show is decorated with gloriously kinetic classical figures. But, given the choice between endless iterations of still lives on plates and the work that lines the walls, from simple linocut exhibition posters to a print like The Banderilles, which captures the tense elegance of a bullfight in full flow, there is no contest - the pots and plates are undeniably lesser works.

In this respect, Fired With Passion is best seen as an appetiser for Picasso On Paper, inspiring a desire to see more posters, prints and drawings.

And, thankfully, the Dean Gallery offering doesn’t disappoint, offering 120 works, from a pastel piece made when Picasso was still in his teens to an ink drawing made in 1971, two years before his death.

In contrast to the heavy-handed interventions at the National Museum, the Dean show offers loose groupings and informative, but never didactic notes, quietly hinting that Picasso, perhaps more than any other artist, resists conventional curation. His restless experimentation makes a nonsense of even simple chronological ordering. Group of Female Nudes, a classically-inspired pastel from 1921 might suggest that Picasso’s sudden volte face in 1914, when he sought to distance himself from Cubism, inspired a line of realistic work. But on the wall opposite are prints that confuse and combine styles, as if, for all that Picasso’s work is divided into periods - the Blue and the Rose, the various modes of Cubism, the neoclassical works and near-Surrealist - he saw these movements, once conceived, as modes to be layered, choices to be made.

In Faun Unveiling a Sleeping Woman, Picasso plays with the possibilities. The creature is drawn in a distinctly classical style, the object of its desire is sketched out in a few hasty lines. Given Picasso’s constant presentation of dualities - the artist and his model, the bull and the horse - it is hard to resist reading the work as a piece of concise autobiography and self-criticism, with Picasso the faun, his gaze drawn, as always, to a woman, but also to his work itself, at once out of time and out of place, but within a tradition.

A series of eleven lithographs, each titled The Bull, show a similar urge to slip free of the constraints of genre. The first print is painterly, representative, the third sees fluid washes replaced with finicky detail. Next comes a marking out of shapes, like a diagram of butcher’s cuts. The final image is a set of economical lines that emphasise the bull’s bulk, its huge body supporting the tiny horned circle of its head, and call to mind the powerful economy of the prehistoric cave paintings found near the artist’s birthplace at Málaga.

The rest of the exhibition offers shock upon shock, as Picasso flits between modes and essays new techniques. There is the bawdy cartooning of Dreams And Lies Of Franco, which both lampoons the General, depicted as a sort of priapic vegetable, and condemns him with silently screaming heads. By way of contrast, Minotauromachie offers an unreadable iconography of a mythic creature, candle-bearing girl and wounded horse. Picasso, never short on ego, stands up to the Old Masters, reworking Cranach the Younger and borrowing from Rembrandt. Naive, simple portraits - including Paloma and Claude, Vallauris, daubed in haste with a fingertip - are followed by intellectual exercises, like the hinting arrangement of shapes in the papiers collés developed with George Braque on the eve of the First War. Early, precise works like The Frugal Meal display the dismal themes of Blue Period paintings, but also hint at the repeated divisions of the most recent, in which impotent homunculi leer at voluptuous, fecund women.

This is a show to set the pulse racing, then, a comprehensive survey of work by an endlessly inventive artist whose twists and turns are little short of alarming. By the end of it, the disappointments of its sister show at the National Museum are forgotten, and faith in Picasso is restored.

This review was first published in The Herald on July 13th, 2007.

Walking and Marking begins at the beginning, with A Line Made By Walking, a piece made in 1967. The line in question is of trampled grass. This simple gesture might not have the capacity to shock that it must have had at the tail end of the 60s, but it remains hugely eloquent, and, in a sense, serves to encapsulate Long’s practice - in the imprint left by one short walk, he makes the natural world both his subject and his material, questions the nature of sculpture, pits absence against presence and, as the line stretches off towards the horizon, claims the act of walking, of movement in a landscape as his medium.

And, since 1967, Long hasn’t stopped walking, devising different means to record his movements.

The most striking works build on that first line by leaving marks, quiet monuments to a departed presence. A Circle In Ireland shows a ring of rocks arranged on jagged ground, Manang Circle situates another circle or stones, this time in Nepal, overlooking a settlement. A diptych, Stones On Stones, shows evidence of Long adding stones to the tops of cairns in Norway. Stone Line, meanwhile, brings the landscape into the gallery, with thick, irregular fingers of stone forced into unnatural linear regularity.

As well as rearranging and transporting natural elements, Long uses them to create. A series of River Avon Mud Drawings are made by dipping paper in mud from the river near his home, another deceptively simple act that offers breathtaking results - each drawing bears evidence of microscopic tidal patterns, that together suggest aerial views an impossibly dense, vast delta.

There are, too, more amorphous works, offering tangential evidence of Long’s walking, consisting of wall texts or annotated maps. And, once again, these short statements are richly layered. When Long tells us that he has been ‘marking time with muddy footprints’ he evokes movement, landscape, and his temporary, impermanent place in it. Tide Walk is described as ‘a walk of two and a half tides relative to the walker’, a factual statement that nonetheless turns conventional methods of marking out both time and space upside down.

When it comes to these activities - words like ‘action’ or ‘performance’ are, perhaps, too loaded - Long also raises a thorny question: is the work to be found with Long, as he walks, or in the photographs and text mounted in a gallery that document those works? In his essay ‘Notes on Works’, Long identifies his texts as ‘a description, or story, of a work in the landscape’ but these brief statements seem to be much more than a record. Like arch-conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, who boiled away the physical manifestations of his sculptures, presenting them instead as gnomic statements of intent, there is a sense that when Long tells us, sometimes in the present tense, about a journey he is not only recounting an event from his past, but also offering the possibility that we too might make such a journey, or even, more simply, that such journeys are possible.

It is this open-ended potentiality found in the text and photographs that marks out Long’s best work from the weaker, often more conventionally sculptural pieces on show. For an untitled work from 2004, Long has marked a section of a tree trunk with fingerprints of china clay, and there is a series of pieces in which similar marks are applied to Berber tent-pegs, or a found disc of scrap metal. The paintings made by casting diluted mud from the Firth of Forth onto the walls of the gallery show this divide, too. The great uncontrolled geysers of Throwing Muddy Water contrast with the hand-made sworls and defined shape of Firth Of Forth Mud Arc, and the latter seems lacking in comparison. Long is also sometimes guilty of offering too much information, as in Silbury Hill, which shows a spiral sculpture the same length as a walk down the hill in a straight line, but muddies the waters of this transformation of one structure into another by repeating a legend attached to Silbury.

In other words, when it comes to Long’s presence in his work, he either passes through it, as he passes through the landscape in its making, or stands stock still, asserting himself. And, the more evidence there is of the artist in the work, the less impact it has.

These lesser works don’t mar this retrospective survey of Long’s influential practice, though. In fact, their comparative weakness only strengthens the best pieces found beside them, adding up to a truly remarkable exhibition, one that has the capacity to change the way we understand the environment around us, and, too, the way we understand art itself.

This review was first published in The Herald on July 6th, 2007.

This year, at the degree show that marks the centenary year of the Edinburgh College of Art, one thing leaps out: these graduates are keen to surround their audience with work. There are pieces that bathe the viewer in light and surround them with sound, works that demand to be clambered over and crawled under. There are even sculptures that smell.

Everywhere you look, young artists are not simply presenting their work for examination, instead choosing to craft a sensory environment or conjure up an aesthetic experience. Of course, the installation is hardly a new idea, and there are as many reasons to adopt the mode of presentation as there artists - for some, it is central to their practice, for others, there is the suspicion that a striking installation might be a last-minute bid to add value - but the fact remains that a visit to this degree show involves doing and being, as much as looking.

The immersion begins, perhaps aptly, in the basement, with a brace of sculptors. Leon Hart presents two rooms, one dominated by a cross suspended from chains, the other featuring apparatus that suggests both hanging and burning at the stake - seen in isolation, these objects might smack of a camp martyr fetish, but here they have real menace. Rocca Gutteridge’s work is similarly unsettling, with a nod to David Lynch, the curious calm of her blue-lit shower curtain is undermined by the thud of a wooden bin that opens and closes itself. Lesley Martin relies on sound, too, with a junk-shop assemblage of audio equipment fizzing dangerously with static. Oliver Herbert is perhaps the best of the environment-makers, placing a stock ticker beside a vitrine full of insects dining on jewelled bones, exposing dark machinations in the board room. Out of the gloom, Ailish Murray offers light relief in the form of a low, perfumed chamber where coloured lights play across a rouched fabric ceiling. Joseph Murray takes a similarly holistic approach, but his concrete bunker far from soothing - accessed through a pitch-black corrugated iron corridor, a central chamber thrums with engine noise. Fiona Swanston plays on claustrophobia too, but her work is above all about the manipulation of bodies in space, a tangle of ladders and planks choreographing the gestures of those who walk through it. Sophie Folkesson work offers a similar level of control, thanks to a glass walkway set with razor blades, putting viewers on edge before they enter a room carpeted with human hair. Even the glass-blowers are at it - Ramon Beascoechea has suspended glass bull’s testicles on leather strapping above a sand floor, turning the eccentrically decorative into a memorial arena.

The effect of these immersive exhibits is catching, too. Fiona Pender allows her work, a curious merger of high fashion and sculpture, to stand alone, but it is hard not to make connections - not just formal and conceptual, but narrative - between a shirt that stretches the neck thanks to multiple collars, or a mask made from eyelash curlers and a gum-shield. By the same token, Colin Ashcroft’s examination of autism through ramshackle devices hint at a wider world of hampered interactions than it might elsewhere. The mood also affects the reading of work like Helen Johnson’s, which invites visitors to join her in a community weaving project, or that of Tessa Lynch, who asks that the viewer pastes newspaper images to a table in order to gauge celebrity importance - here, these feel like environments made not from objects, but social interactions.

There is, of course, much at the exhibition that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth, and some of it is bound together, albeit loosely, by another theme, made by artists with an obsessional bent. Paul Chiappe’s work is mesmerising - he draws immaculate miniatures based on Victorian photographs, the precision of his draughtsmanship a counterpoint to the shifting memories that are his subject. Celia Richards attempts to free music from the stave, cutting out each and every note from the sheets that make up Holst’s The Planets. Graeme J. Walker has found joy in repetition, making mark after mark to build planes of grey that are as curiously satisfying as they are underwhelming. Two archivists stand out, too: Katherine Hall cannot stop making notes on her daily activity and cataloguing personal ephemera, while Hazel Stroud is engaged in arranging the political world according to an unknown system, linking Parliamentary press cuttings with quotes from contemporary dictators.

Thematic links aside, the overall standard at Edinburgh is high, though, as at Glasgow and Gray’s, there is too much sub-par photography - do we really need to see more vaguely melancholy urban scenes, more flat, lifeless portraiture? - and, once again, the sculptors offer more to chew on than their peers. All those enveloping installations should give Edinburgh the edge for most visitors, however - exploring the work of this year’s graduates is, quite simply, great fun.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 22nd, 2007.

Aernout Mik’s four films ought to come with a health warning. Though their focus is on war and conflict, they do not contain scenes of great brutality or graphic violence, in fact, for the most part, they are, frankly rather dull. But Mik deals in atmosphere, presenting quietly unfolding, never resolving narratives that provoke numb paranoia, listless anxiety and, ultimately, intense disquiet.

First comes Vacuum Room. The room in question is an assembly hall, parliament or council chamber, and we see delegates going about their bureaucratic business until they are interrupted by a group of protesters who, covering their faces with their shirts, stage a sit-in. With no soundtrack, the piece is deeply ambiguous. At times the delegates ignore the invaders, handing notes to their clerks, or waiting passively. At one point, a group of politicians applaud the interlopers, either with genuine feeling, or with a raised eyebrow. With no clues as to the purpose of the action, the viewer is presented with a dilemma: who to support? The politicians might be propping up a brutal regime, or defending a fledgeling democracy. The protestors could be freedom fighters, or they could be terrorists. This dilemma is reinforced by the films’ presentation, with viewers given a choice of seating inside a hexagonal structure - hard-backed chairs to mirror the authorities, floor-cushions aligned with the dissidents. Mik is betraying his roots as a sculptor here, matching the space inside his film with the space in the gallery, turning the viewer into an unconscious actor. Whichever position you choose in the claustrophobic installation space, it is impossible to follow the action unfolding on the six screens in full, so that, in trying to grasp the situation you must twist and turn, wander from one seat to another, craning your neck in a bid to fully grasp the ///unfolding drama. Mik directed the performers in Vacuum Room via intercom from behind a two-way mirror, controlling his cameras remotely, and he directs his audience in absentia, too, provoking a sort of diluted panic to match the sense of impending threat onscreen.

In Scapegoats, Mik’s deft manipulation of gallery-goers continues, exchanging physical control for tricks of memory and association. In an empty stadium two groups, guards and prisoners this time, are, again, set in opposition. The guards are by turns rough, kicking prisoners to the floor, or kindly, offering cigarettes. The setting is immediately reminiscent of the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while the conflicted behaviours call to mind the first hours of the Stanford Prison Experiment. These allusions are indirect, though, providing a sense of false familiarity to draw the viewer into another ambiguous scenario, and act as ciphers, hinting that something very bad is happening, or about to happen, offering an intimation of the aftermath never shown on screen.

In the upstairs galleries, Mik changes tack once again. Raw Footage is just that, television film shot in the war-torn former Yugoslavia, but rejected by broadcasters as lacking in drama and tension. We are all too used to graphic scenes of individual suffering, and the clinical bomb’s eye views that pepper news broadcasts. Here we are shown a crowd waiting in a doorway, sheltering not from rain, but sniper fire. Nervous and bored, tracksuited young men guard the shell-shocked animals in a dilapidated zoo. Dogs, no longer pets, roam in packs. By homing in on the minutiae of a campaign fought on city streets, Mik forces us to reconsider our remote relationship with war.

Finally, Mik’s most recent work on film, Training Ground, returns to fiction, this time based on an anthropological study, Jean Rouch’s Mad Masters, which documented the ceremonies of an African religious sect. Like the tribesmen in Rouch’s 1954 film, the border guards and fleeing refugees of Training Ground carry wooden guns, and lapse into a trance state, prompted here by a cyclical rhythm of tense inaction and sudden violence, rather than religious observance.

This relocation and re-imagining of a religious ceremony points to what might be Mik’s central theme: the strategies, physical and mental, that men and women use to cope with the situations they find themselves in, familiar or unfamiliar. This underlying concern is eloquently expressed, too, in the space between the three fictional works and the fourth, firmly rooted in reality. Mik’s choreography and direction of his actors is always loose, never wholly didactic, so in the moments of engineered crisis we are shown gestures and expressions that are, essentially, true responses to stress. Were it not for the note on the gallery wall, it would be hard to separate Raw Footage from the other pieces.

In the end, though, the strength of Mik’s work lies in the phsyical response he provokes - while these four films offer food for thought, and demand careful analysis, they are best understood by feeling.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 8th, 2007.

Last August, Peter Liversidge made an unusual contribution to the Edinburgh Art Festival, submitting more than one hundred proposals to Ingleby Gallery. These proposals ranged from the almost impossible, with a plan to set up an amateur dental surgery, to the downright dangerous, as in the proposal to construct a death slide connecting Edinburgh Castle to the Scott monument, but those that were realised - the release of London-born spiders in the Edinburgh gallery, or requiring Ingleby staff to dress as woodland creatures for a day - were whimsical, cheerfully absurd little actions.

This show of new work returns to the proposal format, this time suggesting daily performances aimed at undermining the contemporary art fair at Basel, Switzerland. At the time of writing, these new proposals take the form of framed dates, with the suggested performance for that day painted on the wall below. As the exhibition progresses, the frames will be filled with photographs of the artist in action. Proposal 27 is, simply, ‘collecting branches’. Number 31 will see the artist setting up a ‘gin stand’ on the streets of Basel. Number 9 is a reprise of the spider stunt, and number 45 involves ‘owl boxes’, whatever they might be.

This might all sound rather daft, as if Liversidge is simply having a bit of a lark, but once the chuckles subside, it is clear that the use of humour is rather sophisticated, intended to form a direct connection between artist and viewer and, with the transmission of images from Basel to Edinburgh, a connection between two sites, too. The lightness of touch and appealing silliness of the proposed performances, whether they end up being performed or not, create a shared space of the imagination, allowing Liversidge to build and direct a conspiratorial conversation with his audience.

The same holds true for the sculpture and paintings in the main gallery space. A corral cobbled together from found pallet wood divides the space, bearing the weight of a rather jaunty stuffed Harris hawk, and the floor is littered with the bleached, cracked bones and ribcages of unknown animals, hastily assembled from more found wood, painted over with bleach-white vinyl emulsion. On the walls, our location is further revealed in a series of quiet little paintings on board, their simple, simplistic and romantic scenes contradicted by portentous titles: In Mourning of a Passing on the North Montana Plains, Let Glory Be on the North Montana Plains, The Lost Path. Liversidge is crafting a fantasy, rather than representing reality - he has never, apparently, visited the plains of Montana, but doesn’t let that stand in the way of a good story, half frontier romance, half doom-laden, Western tragedy.

In the rear gallery at Ingleby, Liversidge has mounted a set of fifty-eight small paintings, each canvas bearing a commercial logo or an image of a product. They are faux-naive, childlike or, more simply, not very good. This is no Warholian celebration of the familiar, instead Liversidge’s ham-fisted style dissolves each logo’s intended power, stripping away the graphic implication of reliability, power, comfort or whatever succinct message the brand seeks to relay to its customers. The titles are deflationary too, simply borrowing from the slogan’s and advertising pitches attached to the brand in question. Leica’s strapline, ‘A New Vision’ falls rather flat when attached to an apologetic little painting of a wonky camera, the overblown, gutsy line ‘Fire Breathing’ is let down, and not gently, by Liversidge’s lumpy, sagging rendering of the MG marque. Even the choice of brands seems designed to undermine, with a scattershot collection taking in everything from luxury timepieces to naff clothing labels via sporting events and newspaper mastheads.

These works aren’t just a critique of advertising hubris, though, they also hark back to the pre-teen pencil case decorated with brand names, band names, boy’s names and girl’s names, not only aspirationally, or to show allegiance, but to imply ownership. In ineptly tracing the lines of a logo, Liversidge takes control - the copied logo no longer belongs only to the brand, but to the creative consumer.

The logo series might seem a wholly separate endeavour from the sketch of an imagined Montana, but the two rooms share something, namely an attempt to examine our desires, whether for luxury goods or the romance of isolation in a barren landscape. They share, too, the light, winking nature of Liversidge’s proposal project, and that deft knack for launching an unforced dialogue in the space between Liversidge’s ideas and the viewer’s happy appreciation of his unassuming works.

It is perhaps unwise to look too deeply beyond the surface of Liversidge’s work - this is not work that hides behind humour, but work that rests on humour, and that is genuinely funny. In the end, Liversidge’s wide-ranging practice might best be appreciated simply, as art that is unafraid to be fun.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 1st, 2007.

No Fixed Points is a curious exhibition.

First, John Cage and Merce Cunningham are not well known as visual artists, but as the preeminent composer and choreographer of their generation.

Second, this is not quite an exhibition in the usual sense, but a shifting series of shows, flowing from one dominated by Cage, to one dominated by Cunningham.

As the show progresses, Cage’s paintings will be replaced by Cunningham’s drawings, the timing and sequence of replacement determined by chance - Cunningham rolled dice in response to questions put to him by the staff of Inverleith House, with the numbers rolled corresponding to different works.

This is an eloquent curatorial gambit, one that effectively turns the exhibition into a work in and of itself, and, too, an essay on the closely linked practices of the two artists.

The show’s title is taken from Albert Einstein’s maxim that ‘there are no fixed points in space’, a phrase which inspired Cunningham to revolutionise his practice as a choreographer, first developing a number of dance phrases, then using tossed coins and cast dice to determine their ordering, the number of repetitions and the placement of dancers on the stage. The technique was refined over time in collaboration with Cage, whose own compositional methods rested on his adaptation of the I Ching, the hugely complex ancient Chinese text that seeks to find order in chance events, offering a set of predictions arranged in a matrix of sixty-four groupings of six horizontal lines, divined by casting sticks or tossing coins.

It is, too a problematic approach to displaying work. For one thing, Cunningham is no match for Cage as a visual artist - as he would no doubt admit - so that visitors in late June might find themselves disappointed. For another, the appealing conceptual underpinnings of the exhibit threaten to overwhelm the work it contains, forcing interpretations on works that might not stand elsewhere.

And what of that work? At the time of writing Cage is firmly to the fore, with just two pieces by Cunningham present in the galleries.

Like much of his music, the two sets of paintings by Cage on show were made according to chance outcomes guided by the I Ching applied to a set of predetermined choices - the colours, the composition, the brushes used. Further removing himself as an artist from the act of creation, Cage also prepared his paper with smoke, and used river rocks as a guide for his brushes. The results, while recognisably variations on a theme, are not the cold, automated, repetitive paintings one might expect. River Rocks and Smoke No. 13 is adorned with just two shapes, a yellow square-ish form and a dull brown half circle, placed low, almost apologetically, on the paper. New River Watercolour Series I, No. 3 sees a great horizontal swathe of purple reminiscent of a stave, which looks to have been applied with a housepainters brush barely troubled with paint, overlayed with a confusion of dull red circles. A trio of paintings from New River Watercolour, Series III - perhaps the best works on show - share a vertiginous downward plummet of dry strokes interrupted by circular forms, in one dead centre, in two escaping at the papers’ edge. To borrow from the etymology of the characters than form the I Ching’s title, these are works that balance simplicity, variability and persistency. They are, too, inherently musical, both visually reminiscent of a graphic score and taut with an internal rhythm.

Cunningham’s main contribution at this point in the show’s ebb and flow is Blue Studio: Five Segments. At points, it underlines the relationship between painting composer and drawing choreographer - in one segment, Cunningham dances a duet with his own outline, in another he performs against a blue screen which slowly fills with shifting white noise, a match for the horizontal washes in Cage’s watercolours, in a third, a set of precise hand gestures call to mind a conductor coralling his orchestra.

The single Cunningham drawing present on the day of my visit, Tiger, 5/3/97, is a vibrant little thing - the titular animal has a thick leering tongue and winking eyes, its fur and whiskers a flurry of scratchy marks. And, once again, it is impossible to avoid seeking out traces of the artist’s primary practice in his drawings, seeing in those hasty marks traces of Cunningham’s choreography, of the flickering fingers glimpsed in Blue Studio.

This, then, is a show that is greater than the sum of its parts, one that, arguably, works better as a conceptual piece in its own right than as an exhibition of works. It is too, at the risk of sounding sentimental, a moving experience - Cage and Cunningham’s long creative association and long partnership continues here, even after the former’s death in 1992. In the end, No Fixed Points is an intriguing glimpse at the parallel artistic endeavours of two great artists in other media, and a tribute to the pair’s wider, interlocking practice.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 25th, 2007.

Talbot Rice Gallery used to be a stuffy space, oddly claustrophobic despite its size, with grey Edinburgh skies always looming over the works on show from skylights above. Now, thanks to a wall of restored windows, the lower galleries are flooded with light, which, fittingly, is the main ingredient of David Batchelor’s work.

Best known for his softly glowing illuminated sculptures, for this set of new pieces Batchelor has, borrowing a title from MTV’s series of acoustic gigs, unplugged his work, trading artificial light for artificial colour. First come the Parapillars, great higgeldy-piggeldy totem poles made of goods purchased at pound shops in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Arranged around Meccano-like metal structures, each of these heady sculptures has its own focus: one consists of pliers and screwdrivers in manly orange and black, another is all combs and mirrors in eye-searing neon hues, yet another piles up children’s toys and knick-knacks. The overall effect is overwhelming, like a bad dream in Blackpool, and darkly comic too, as Batchelor holds up his tacky and cheap finds for respectful examination.

There is, of course, nothing new about elevating the status of everyday objets trouvé by shifting their context away from the high street and into the gallery, and the prints and drawings that line the walls of Talbot Rice’s mezzanine show that Batchelor might well have used other objects to craft his towers: he is interested in their status, for sure, but he is far more interested in their colour. Where you might expect lists and diagrams, Batchelor’s preparatory drawings and installation guides for this and past exhibitions (some date back a decade) are pure, celebratory bursts of sprayed paint on graph paper, sometimes connected with scraps of gaffer tape, as if the artist is engaged in an ongoing set of tests, half methodical, half maniacal, matching one colour with another just for the pleasure of seeing them together.

Finally, as a sort of coda, the small rotunda gallery is given over to Anatomy Lesson (Part 1). Based on a discarded stuffed toy, this disembodied dog’s head is covered in sparkling gold sequins, and, suspended from the ceiling by its right ear, spins slowly, inexorably, its sad cartoon eyes casting a resigned, accepting glance over the gallery walls. There is something terribly gloomy about this gilded piece of tat. It calls to mind the endless optimism of a disco glitter ball, but denies it, too - no one in their right mind would want to dance in a nightclub under the gaze of a dead dog in shiny drag. And so, being much more explicit than Batchelor’s other sculptural works, this anatomy lesson forces us to think again about the happy towers of colour downstairs, lending the Parapillars a grim, gloomy and obsessional cast, which sits uncomfortably with their apparent celebration of the pound shop aesthetic. And that seems to be the key to understanding Batchelor’s work, which rests on a series of contrasting dualities, pitting the serious and pseudo-scientific against the unthinking joy to be found in experiencing colour for its own sake.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

William Eggleston earned the epithet ‘the father of colour photography’ thanks to his groundbreaking 1976 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It dragged colour photography away from the commercial and advertising worlds and into the gallery, and Eggleston did more than any photographer before him to excise any doubts about the format’s status in a fine art context.

Three decades on, such doubts seem rather absurd, but it only takes a few moments in the company of his images to understand why they had such an impact.

Step into the light-filled galleries at Inverlieth House, and these never-before-seen prints offer an immediate, sometimes shocking blast of pure colour - the hot, flat blue skies of Eggleston’s native Southern States, and the lurid palette of mid-70s fashion - and a wealth of subtler tones, especially of his subjects’ skin, from sallow off-whites to deep browns.

Step closer, and there’s another shock to be found in quality of the prints, and in Eggleston’s skill with the camera. Every pore on a face is visible, as is every strand of hair on a head, and, thanks in part to subtle tricks with depth of focus, some portraits give a distinctly three-dimensional impression - the image of young black woman in a purple dress, for example, seems about to rise up from the blurred backdrop behind her.

This takes some getting used to. At first, the temptation is to examine every detail, to wonder at the mysteries of technique. But, before long, it becomes clear that Eggleston’s work is profoundly human, above all about everyday people and the places they inhabit.

Once the barrier put in place by the quality of the photographs has been overcome, it is impossible to avoid conjuring up a romantic back-story for Eggleston’s subjects. The faded beauty gazing off into the distance has surely loved and lost, the Johnny Cash-a-like with dandruff in his quiff might well have shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, and the piggy-eyed president of the Tex Ritter fan-club must be the product of a union between first cousins.

It is more tempting still to wonder about the precise, decisive moment at which Eggleston released the shutter. Thanks to the unwieldy nature of his bulky 5 x 7 camera, a type more usually confined to the photographic studio, Eggleston did not have the luxury of firing off shot after shot to capture these perfect portraits: more often than not his images are the result of a single exposure. And so the half-smile that plays across the face of the girl with too much make-up on, or the defiant stare of the kid, proudly cradling a transistor radio must have been, at least in part, Eggleston’s doing, making these works both portraits and records of a relationship, however brief.

In the end, while this exhibit might lack the blockbusting appeal of Warhol at the National Galleries, or the exhaustive survey of Picasso at the Dean Gallery, it stands alongside those shows as the best the Edinburgh Art Festival has to offer.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

Black Marks is Alex Pollard’s first major outing in Scotland since he represented Scotland at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Then, Pollard’s work focussed firmly on his own practice and on the making of art in general, with explicit references to art-historical movements. In Wall Drawing, he crafted hands from rulers which made marks on the gallery wall, occasionally erasing their mistakes. For Figures, he borrowed from Futurist collage and painting, sculpting fighting figures from perfect copies of Staedtler pencils. His Beasts were dinosaurs with more rulers for limbs, presented on parodies of museum display tables.

At first glance, Pollard’s new work at Talbot Rice looks to be an about face, with its references to clowns and clowning, the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, David Bowie’s early ’80s adoption of that costume, and the New Romantic movement’s intergendered poses. As the exhibition reveals itself, though, it seems that Pollard, while he has looked beyond the studio for inspiration, is up to his old tricks.

Nightscape is an obvious reprise of Wall Drawing, but where his earlier piece saw art making itself, Pollard now has the gallery putting its face on, ready for a night on the town. Eyebrow pencils are elongated, undulating across the walls like eyebrows, culminating in mucky smudges. Black lipsticks are studded about the walls, as are convex make-up mirrors which lend visitors leaning in for a closer look a reflected touch of glamour. And, just as a mask of make-up is wiped away after a night on the town or on the stage, so Nightscape will be painted over at the exhibition’s close.

Those mirrors also provide a preview in miniature of Clown Medallions, a set of metre-wide commemorative bronzes that feature the faces of clowns, some happy, some sad. The monumental heft of these sculptures is undermined by their scrappy, unfinished surfaces - the clowns look to have been cast from hasty attempts to form faces from squishy globs of broken lipstick, their expressions impossible to read.

Next, a series of portraits titled Romos Getting Ready sees shattered pencils stuck to grubby boards, ephemeral studies of temporary identities made from both the tools of Pollard’s trade, and the Romo’s too.

The New Romantics are a good match for Pollard’s practice, which always mingles winking humour with rigourous examination. With hindsight they may appear as daft as the bricklayers in drag of Glam Rock, but the movement’s underground beginnings were genuinely transgressive, inspired by politicised ‘genderfuck’ drag acts and reacting against the decidedly masculine aggression of late punk by putting on a show. The nightclubs namechecked in Neil Mulholland’s introduction to the exhibition - St. Moritz, Le Kilt, Le Beetroot - are, too, a reminder that the first New Romantics were a distinctly self-aware, silly-serious bunch, eager to undermine their apparently po-faced theatricality. Bowie’s clowning on the cover of Ashes to Ashes is another perfect fit for Pollard’s looping game of reference and counter-reference: he borrowed his look from the New Romantics, who had borrowed their look from him.

In the upstairs gallery, Pollard brings on the clowns again with a set of dim, monochrome paintings, a series of fades to grey. Clown is a Pierrot’s body with a thick pencil for a head, Profile is a Medusa-like figure, its snaking hair made up of distorted, twisting pencils, its body the jumbled contents of a make-up bag.

At this point, it becomes clear that Pollard’s new set of influences rest on an interest in transformation, with the transformation of a face with make-up allied to the transformation of materials into works of art. The metamorphosing, half-finished figures in Pollard’s paintings also point to his interest in artifice - he doesn’t just use artist’s materials in his work, he crafts immaculate copies of artist’s materials - and his incessant questioning of the status of objects, an implicit challenge to the viewer still uncomfortable with Duchamp’s legacy. The clown is also an ambiguous figure, entertaining and inspiring fear in equal measure, thanks to the grinning or maudlin mask that makes it impossible to guage true emotion. In looking to the clown, Pollard sheds light on his own insistence on making ambiguous work with his eyebrow permanently raised, hinting that the wit inherent in his sculptures, paintings and drawings is intended to reinforce, not undermine his investigations into his own practice.

Black Marks is a subtle, multi-layered body of work, then. It might lack the immediacy and instant gratification of Pollard’s previous work, but this is no bad thing - by stepping out of his studio and into the nightclubs of the 1980s, the circus and the theatre, he has made a body of work that is richer, more contemplative and, ultimately, more rewarding.

This review was first published in The Herald on 11th May, 2007.

The National Galleries of Scotland know how to make the best of their collections. Instead of mounting group shows that labour under some needlessly complex and forced curatorial conceit, they take simple starting points, and run with them, revealing much on the way.

Cutting Edge: Geometry in Art 1910-1965 draws a line from the first flush of Cubism to the tail end of Constructivism, taking in Op Art and, too, works by artists that are not so easily aligned with a single movement.

Fittingly, the show opens with Picasso’s Deux Figures Neus, a 1909 drawing that teeters on the line between Cubism and the art that had gone before - the distortions of perspective and multiplied viewpoints are present, but the subject matter, a woman with a lute, a man offering a cup, are thoroughly traditional. In a contrast that is almost shocking, it is followed by Tete, a collage made in 1913 that suggests the form of a face with rigourous economy - a neat evocation of the speed at which the Cubist revolution progressed. Tete is, too, atypical of Picasso’s work, almost in the mode of later work by Kurt Schwitters - and, in one of several surprising tangents, Schwitters is here amongst the Cubists with Mz.299, a scruffy little collage assembled from strips of found paper that just fits in here thanks to its radiating lines.

Next comes a room devoted to work made in Britain between 1910 and 1940. There are some poor works here, and some honourable failures, but these are more than padding, revealing the sometimes shaky adoption of new modes in Britain. An untitled piece by Alistair Morton owes an obvious debt to Mondrian but exchanges economy for excess, its divided canvas heaped with linear and curved forms. Stanley Cursiter’s The Regatta is downright embarrassing, a tentative stab at Futurism that fails completely, from its subject matter on. By way of contrast, the St. Ives set, and Ben Nicholson in particular, are shown to have fully absorbed and co-opted the radical movements in Europe, forging ahead with a peculiarly British sensibility. Nicholson’s 1937 Painting stands out - Mondrian looms large again, but with a muted palette and a willingness to display the work’s origins in still life, this is something new.

After this, the collection of Op Art is a disappointment. Sure, Bridget Riley is at her vertigo-inducing best and a set of Wedgewood plates by Eduardo Paolozzi remind us that these movements were quick to influence design, but while these works fit the geometrical remit, they fall flat, too tricksy to be taken entirely seriously.

Thankfully, the rather dull Op art precedes the exhibitions real highlight, the selection of rarely-seen work by post-War British artists on loan from the collection of Ken Powell.

Where the Cubists sought to present the world anew, analysing and reconstructing it in response to the flat planes of paper and canvas, but never quite divorcing art from the world, these paintings, sculptures and reliefs take a very different tack.

John Ernest’s Maquette for a Tower is a tiny essay on negative space using twin interlocking wireframe towers that bear layered platforms in black, white and transparent plastic and perspex. Across the room, Construction with Aluminium Plates is similarly architectural, again draws attention to what is not there, and ends up as a sort of three-dimensional analogue of Dutch neoplasticism, with colour removed and form to the fore. Anthony Hill’s Orthagonal Composition returns us to two dimensions, with four black blocks placed seemingly at random, but balanced perfectly in terms of their area. The room is dominated, though, by a set of closely related pieces from Ernest, Hill, Victor Passmore and Gillian Wise; reliefs, or wall-mounted sculptures, in which oblongs and squares of familiar materials - copper, formica, perspex, wood - interlock and align.

On the one hand, these are outward-looking works, in their use of quotidian materials, both domestic and industrial, and in the delicate balancing of forms according to the golden ratio, which, besides its long-held place in art and architecture, governs the branching of trees, and the growth of crystals. On the other, they are self-contained, self-reflexive, approaching the point of being closed systems, or even logical tautologies - this is art about itself, about the relationships between forms. It’s also slippery stuff at times. The use of perspex and plastic is not simply a gesture toward the world, the transparency of these materials is used as a framing device, bringing cast shadows or faint reflections from the world into the work.

This is thrilling stuff that is especially resonant in Scotland, where artists continue to follow the lead of those in Powell’s collection - Toby Paterson, for example, or Craig Mulholland - and a fitting end to a show that not only contains work by the greats of the 20th Century, but offers a new route into understanding their work.

This review was first published in The Herald on April 27th, 2007.

La femme de nulle part is a show that, at its heart, is about the theatre and performance, a meditation on the space between reality and constructed narrative.

Curated by Glasgow-based artist Lucy Skaer, the exhibition brings together work by Anita Di Bianco, Sophie Macpherson and Rosalind Nashashibi. Di Bianco comes first, with Disaffection and Disaffectation, a film based on Jean Genet’s play The Maids, and starring - if that’s the right word - Skaer and fellow artist Hanneline Visnes.

In Genet’s telling of the story of the Papin sisters, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter, identities are blurred in the near-sadomasochistic ritual rehearsals of murder carried out by the two sisters. Di Bianco blurs boundaries further, having her players address each other by their real names, regardless of which role they are playing, dispensing with a third actress to play the maids’ mistress, allowing the play-acting within the play to bleed into this version of it.

For all that it is based on a piece of theatre, Di Bianco’s film is inherently anti-theatrical. Unlike Christopher Miles’ 1974 film adaptation, with its static camerawork and lavish mise en scène, Disaffection and Disaffectation is shot almost entirely in close-up, the camera relentlessly hovering over shoulders and homing in on faces.

Skaer and Visnes are artists, of course, not actors, and their performances make for difficult viewing, with Pinter-length pauses as the pair struggle to recall lines, rather than for dramatic effect. This is, it seems safe to assume, a deliberate tactic. The claustrophobic filming, the dud performances, the confusion of already confused identities all combine to make Disaffection and Disaffectation not a staging or adaptation of Genet’s work, and not simply a crude bid to evoke in the viewer a pale emotional imitation of the maids’ claustrophobic mania, but an essay on the play’s themes expressed through a skewed rendering of it; commentary as performance, performance as commentary.

Di Bianco’s second piece, Studies for J., is a sketch or rehearsal for a proposed film about Joan of Arc, itself taking the form of a film. A woman paces around a room, reciting texts on the martyr. Those texts range from speeches made at the trial of Louis XVI to the first volume of Bob Dylan’s memoirs, lighting on e e cummings and Montesquieu along the way. At the centre of the piece, though, is Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s script for his 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, which reveals Di Bianco’s rather contrary approach to her filmic sources. Where Disaffection and Disaffectation exchanges the stillness of Miles’ direction for frenetic, intrusive close-up, Studies for J. responds to Dreyer’s work by excising the passion from his passion play, and reversing his focus on full-frame facial expression by having the camera loop languidly around the reader, dwelling on the set as much as the actor.

Between Di Bianco’s pair of engrossing, provocative film works sit Sophie Macpherson’s quiet, unassuming sculptures and works on paper. The relationship between Di Bianco’s moving images and Macpherson’s static explorations is, though, immediately clear. The space is dominated by an untitled gunmetal grey construction that rises from floor to ceiling, its right-angled sides bisected by a curved shelf. Behind it sits Black Herringbone Screen, echoing its basic form in miniature, with regularly spaced chevrons marking its interior surface. These two simple, restrained pieces point to Macpherson’s investigation of theatrical themes, twin stages enclosing the absence of actors.

Other works are more explicit, and step beyond the theatre toward other modes of performance. Apparatus consists of a card table without its top, its crossed legs painted canary yellow, and a black box laid on its side, as if a street conjouror has been chased from the scene. Interlocking Coins looks like an attempt to explain the magic behind that absent conjouror’s con trick, with hundreds of one penny coins studding the surface of linked wooden discs. A drawing, Figure In Ruff, shows an androgynous figure in contemporary clothing save for the titular ruff, entering a world of make-believe through a simple act of transformation.

In amongst Macpherson’s work hang two photographs by Rosalind Nashashibi, taken from a four-part series, Untiled (Abbey), which invert images from a study of 12th Century Cistercian architecture. It is tempting to gather Nashashibi’s photographs into the theatrical fold - perhaps the upside down ecclesiastical architecture is a comment on the performance inherent in religious ritual, perhaps the grinning faces formed by the upturned arches are meant to hint at the sock and buskin masks of tragedy and comedy - but, ultimately, they seem out of place, unconnected, an afterthought.

This broken link is a surprise. Aside from the awkward appearance of Nashashibi’s photographs, Skaer’s curation is taught, even witty. Whispers of dialogue from Di Bianco’s films are allowed to bleed into Macpherson’s empty set, a subtle means of highlighting the potential narratives held in the latter’s work, and the mounting of the work is bluntly confrontational, with visitors whisked straight from the Edinburgh streets into the immersive world of Disaffection and Disaffectation.

There is a sense, too, that Skaer has approached the show as she might approach a piece of her own work, adding a quiet treatise on collaboration to the show’s more obvious themes, from her appearance in Di Bianco’s film to the seemingly forced inclusion of Nashashibi, with whom Skaer has worked closely in the past.

There is something of a problem with La femme de nulle part, though. Macpherson’s work suggests the possibility of imagined narratives, but falls short of prompting such imaginings in the viewer, and Di Bianco’s films are satisfying, but in a cool, academic sense; they are about drama, but never dramatic. This is a show that fairly fizzes with ideas, then, but while those ideas linger in the memory, the work itself does not - to twist a term from the theatre, La femme de nulle part never quite breaks the fourth wall.

This review was first published in Art Monthly on April 1st, 2007.

Juergen Teller is a slippery customer. In the early 1990s, his work for the style magazines turned fashion photography on its head. Reflecting the haute couture set's adoption of grunge by focussing not on clothes, but on the model, snapping away with a point-and-shoot camera, Teller exchanged the artifice of the high gloss pose for a no less artificial aesthetic of studied nonchalance. Then, effortlessly, the commercial photographer became a fine artist, changing the context in which his work is shown, and his subjects, but not, importantly, his methods.

The result, spread over four rooms of Inverleith House, is no less slippery. Awailable is a survey of sorts, six year's worth of work selected by Teller, it seems, to show the breadth of his practice, which takes in portraits of artists, models, designers and actresses, shots of his children and family, and, in the Nürnberg series, a pseudo-documentary look at the environs of his family home in Bavaria.

Vivienne Westwood appears twice, both images playfully subverting her public image. In Vivienne At Home, the designer appears as the wild-eyed bag lady of tabloid opprobrium, in Boadicea Vivienne, she is the done up as a punk warrior. Similarly, Gisele Bündchen is shown in two lights, first writhing in faux-ecstasy at a fashion shoot, then, in Gisele In My Bath, she undermines any sense of vulnerability with a steely gaze. Along with the wit, there's a good dollop of sentimentality, but again, one suspects Teller is winking as he opens the shutter. Cherub sees Teller's son Ed striking an angelic attitude, Tante Elfriede shows his aunt and her poodle at home, in a style that seems to wilfully misunderstand the legacy of Martin Parr.

There's no question about the status of this work as art (it's in a gallery after all), nor does the photographer's commercial past taint it in any way. Instead, it seems that Teller is self-consciously addressing these uncertainties. His fashion work is like informal portraiture, and his informal portraits seem to be schilling a product, from happy family life to effortless glamour to snowfall in the countryside. Thanks to Westwood's presence, it is hard not to remember Johnny Rotten's ambiguous question at the fag end of the Sex Pistols' career: 'Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'. Just as Rotten was asking himself the same question as his audience, so Teller's work is about his own role, as fashion world rebel or art scene interloper. That awkward status is not as troublesome as Teller might hope, but it is what makes his work if not powerful, then at least intriguing.

It's tempting to attempt a neat segue from Teller's exhibit to the work of Andrew Miller, which fills the lower floors of Inverleith House - they both delight in subverting modes of representation, engage in reconfiguring reality, and force awkward questions on their audience - but, really, they have little in common.

Sixes And Sevens is a set of new works, all completed in the last year. The first, Mirrored Pavilion is a meticulous recreation of a shack Miller spotted while working in Trinidad. It is a mysterious structure - it could be a small dwelling, a store house, even a signal box for some long-abandoned railway - and years of decay have further obscured its purpose. Miller has recreated it twice over, too. First, in Room 1, then again, as a perfect mirror image, in Room 3, an act that, in creating an imagined twin, simultaneously completes the building and raises further questions about its nature, heightened by the addition of mirrors to its frame.

Between these two halves sits another structure, titled Station, again of unknown purpose. Built from the memory of a fleeting encounter, this time in the lane behind Miller's studio, the object might be a desk, or a fixture from a hairdresser's salon, or something that could be put to more sinister ends. Miller also reminds us that he is a sculptor - the Station bears more mirrors, is lacquered in deep black, unlike the original object, and is awkwardly propped up on concrete block.

Outside the gallery, in a Secret Garden boxed in with high hedges, sits another reconstruction, Frame. It is the skeleton of a municipal playground swing, carefully aged with painted streaks of rust.

This last piece is, perhaps, the key to understanding Miller's work. It is immediately evocative, a musing on time and place, but also undeniably sculptural, a formal piece with nods to Modernism.

Miller is not turning the real into art, or revealing the beauty in overlooked objects, he is questioning the nature of reality and of art, dissolving the distinction between the two and, with his careful alterations - the mirrors on Mirrored Pavilion, the lacquer on Station - turning acts of remembering, his and ours, into a series of aesthetic choices.

The work of Trenton Doyle Hancock is underpinned by a vast and complex mythology, Homeric in scope and Biblical in tone.

The Mounds are good. The Vegans, deformed through inbreeding, are evil. Except for St. Sesom, that is. The visionary mystic, inspired by dreams in technicolour, and his followers - a gang that includes the conjoined twins Baby Curt and Shy Jerry, Bow-Headed Lou and Betto Watchhow - have long been waging a campaign to convert their fellow Vegans into loving the Mounds, instead of murdering them, and eating the pink moundmeat that oozes from them raw, instead of converting it into tofu, as is their current practice. This change in diet will, St. Sesom says, allow the Vegans to find 'spectral happiness', correcting a mutation in their makeup that makes them see in black and white. But - wait! -all is not well in Sesom's camp, his merry band are riven with factional infighting, caused in part by the saint's inflated ego, and a terrorist group, Black Brain, are causing trouble. It is also worth noting that, at some point in the distant past, the Mounds came into being when an ape-man, Homerbactus, ejaculated into a field of flowers, and the Vegans are descendants of Homerbactus too, the fruits of an incestuous relationship between Brouthescam and Cromalyna, his children.

At least, I think that's what's going on. Hancock's tales are spun out in text daubed on the gallery wall, as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture; the narrative flowing between different media, the canonical version of the story impossible to glean without being fully immersed inside the installation.

'The narrative exists as a grid,' Hancock explains, 'I had been creating characters for several years, making portraits of characters - really self-portraits of different aspects of myself - and I had no real intention of turning it into a mythology. But after graduate school, I was looking for a voice. I had made all these characters that existed on their own, and I needed a way to tie them all together, I invented the narrative to develop a dialogue between these paintings, these characters, and, actually, between modes of operation - performance, sculpture, painting, drawing.'

This last point is key. For, though the tales of St. Sesom & Co. may appear to be, well, a wee bit silly, they are the glue that binds together a sophisticated, densely layered practice. At its heart is an alchemical mingling of languages, textual and visual. Hancock's writing does not describe his images, nor do his images illustrate his texts, instead, there is a fluid interplay between the two.

'It goes in both directions,' he says, 'with everything meeting up in the middle somewhere. I never know when I'm going to have to amend the story to fit something in from a painting, or whether there's going to be some sort of organic offshoot that is out of my directorial control. Sometimes I just have to follow.'

This admixture of the linguistic and visual is matched by a jackdaw approach to influences. A typical Hancock painting, if there is such a thing, draws on comic and fantasy art, borrows from Surrealism, Cubism, Modernism--pretty much every -ism you can think of, in fact--and matches scatological humour with high theory.

'I'm definitely very conscious of "the filter",' Hancock says, 'of how I bring in low art or comics, when I'm constantly thinking about the history of painting. I try make sense of it all, to make it all coexist.'

Looking at Hancock's installation, which fills both floors of the Fruitmarket to bursting point, it does not make sense according to the usual meaning of the term. The heavily worked canvases clash obsessive, meticulous detailing against broad brush strokes and clumsily applied felt and bottle tops, depicting tangles of bony arms, or hideous great globs peppered with gaping orifices, all shot through with queasy Pepto Bismol pink, the colour of moundmeat. The allusions are dizzying, too - here Dali struggles against Robert Crumb, there a patch of Cubist abstraction snuggles up against a child-like doodle.

But, hidden in this all-engulfing flood of images and ideas are hints of order. Hands point and pinch, fists are raised, daggers clasped, suggesting an underlying code. Words and phrases are repeated in the text scrawled across the gallery walls, swimming into sharp focus. Works play off each other, with shapes recurring and shifting across the paintings and drawings, underscoring the surface narrative with a sort of formally expressed unconscious.

Slowly but surely, it is possible to enter Hancock's world, to find darker subtleties in his apparently obvious allegory of tolerance, and to unearth the deep links between text and image.

So, is Hancock worried that his first solo show in Europe might overwhelm his audience? 'Well,' he says, deadpan, 'they will have to make several trips.'

Before causing a sensation at Sensation, the 1997 Royal Academy exhibition that showcased Charles Saatchi's collection of work by YBAs, Ron Mueck was a puppet-maker, his career including a long stint at Jim Henson's workshop, home of the Muppets.

Looking at A Girl, a vast sculpture of a newborn baby, traces of his past career remain. For all the meticulous attention to detail - every vein is delineated, wisps of hair are matted to the child's head - Mueck does not simply toy with scale, his realist work is touched with the unreal. This holds true of all his giants. There are cartoon-like exaggerated overbites, elongated limbs, enlarged heads and outsized hands everywhere. It is not always clear whether this is a function of enlarging the human form, a trick of the eye that needs to be countered by a sculptor to better represent reality, or a stylistic decision on Mueck's part. Either way, Mueck does not, as it first appears, simply play with scale; he plays with proportion, giving his figures slight symptoms of dwarfism and gigantism, as well as making them small or large.

In the contemporary tradition of realistic representation of the human form, this puts Mueck closer to the mutant, multi-limbed teens of Jake & Dinos Chapman than the late Duane Hanson's fastidious vignettes. And, while the brothers Chapman seek to shock and Hanson sought to present American everymen and women for examination, Mueck can at times appear to offer little to the viewer but an opportunity to admire his skill in recreating flesh in silicone and fibreglass. This is true of A Girl, and of Mask III, an outsize study of a woman's face. But when Mueck introduces a hint of narrative, the uncomfortable feeling that there is nothing to see but his technical mastery fades.

Wild Man rears back in fear, gripping the chair that supports his vast frame. He is, it seems, terrified by the judgement of the Lilliputian viewers that surround him, just as a gallery-goer would flee from one of Mueck's little people if it sat up and smiled (a possibility that does not seem all that far-fetched when faced with some of the pieces here). Ghost, too, invites us to furnish an object with a back-story. A lanky adolescent - identified as female by a wall-label but of indeterminate gender - leans against the wall, at two metres only just a giant. Wearing a swimming costume and a trace of a sneer or smirk, this gawky creature must, it seems, have been drowned by someone, someone about to be haunted. In Bed, the largest and most arresting sculpture on show, sees a woman with knees hunched beneath her duvet, one hand resting lightly against her face, her gaze watery, and fixed in the middle distance. And it is impossible not to look into those eyes, the body part Mueck always sculpts last, and momentarily feel a connection. This is some feat on Mueck's part - this deathly still, Brobdignagian construction does not only elicit an emotional response, it allows, again only momentarily, the illusion of communication. Uncanny stuff.

More uncanny still are the miniatures. Spooning Couple, a half-dressed pair beside each other but barely touching, draws out an involuntary shudder. The male figure is so fully realised that it is difficult to inspect him - one tends to inspect, rather than simply look at Mueck's work - and his partner. Man in a Boat is slower to reveal itself. The man in question, cast adrift, looks quizzically into the distance, interested in his fate, but not overly concerned by it. Though this work is a rare piece of overt symbolism for Mueck, the little existentialist's mood is infectious, leaving little room for consideration of that which his plight represents.

And this is where Mueck's work becomes problematic. On the one hand, Mueck blinds us with his skill. Awe is the only appropriate response to these sculptures - which they are, Mueck does not take casts from real people, unlike Hanson - with their individually drilled pores, sewn hairs and glued eyelashes. On the other hand, he uses his skill to extract an emotional response. However, the latter is a fleeting feeling, and the former is a hollow one. They are powerful reactions, for sure, but they do not last: an hour after seeing one of Mueck's half-real, half-fantastic creatures, one is left only with the sense of having been duped. This might, of course, be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. These are sculptures that must be experienced, not seen reproduced in print, on the simple level of their distorted scale, and on the complex level of the response they call forth. That they fade so quickly from the mind does, though, speak of an emptiness at the heart of Mueck's practice.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2006.

Jamie Shovlin is as much an archivist as he is an artist. The show that brought his work to widespread attention was an exhibit of drawings by a teenager, Naomi V. Jelish, presented alongside mementoes and newspaper cuttings detailing the mysterious disappearance of the girl and her family. The work that earned him a nomination for the Beck’s Futures award was a eulogy to the cult post-punk German group Lust/Faust, gathering fan letters, advertisements and excerpts of unreleased songs.

The fact that both Jelish and Lust/Faust are figments of Shovlin’s imagination has earned him a reputation as a hoaxer, but his meticulously crafted invented histories are not simply elaborate gags, they are meditations on objective and subjective truth, subtly investigating the way in which the collection, presentation and categorisation of information impacts on its status.

Aggregate, as the title hints, sees Shovlin turning his archivist’s eye on himself, gathering four independent but deeply linked sets of work together.

The first of the four, Origin of Species, consists of multiple copies of Darwin’s great work. Two museum-like vitrines dominate the dimly-lit lower gallery of the Talbot Rice in a temporal echo of sorts: when Darwin abandoned his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, he turned to this room, then part of the institution’s Natural History Museum. In the first vitrine, four copies of On The Origin Of Species lie open, each annotated by past readers, one bearing a solicitor’s compliments slip as a bookmark. In the next, more editions of the book are laid out, ranging from battered 1970s paperbacks to dusty tomes from the turn of the last century. On the walls around the two cabinets, Shovlin has mounted pages from the books, each brutally edited, so that all that remains are passages readers have underlined, highlighted or annotated, the rest redacted with a black marker. This new version of On The Origin Of Species is written by readers. Some are skeptical - a note reads ‘evidence of the creator??’ - others approach the text with a narrow focus, underlining the names of particular organisms. In the simple act of hiding words, Shovlin reveals a set of questions about the nature of his chosen text, any text, and the space between facts and their interpretation.

The Birds In Her Garden is the first of two works inspired by Shovlin’s mother, who, we are told, spent much of her free time completing jigsaws while observing the natural aviary outside her window. This is another museological display, with a stuffed bird in its case, a bookshelf, and multiple ornithological drawings ringed with cuttings from bird-watching guides and handwritten notes. The drawings carry rather unscientific captions - here is Mr. Blackie The Blackbird, there is Evil Bastard The Magpie - but the cuttings are meticulously ordered, each cross-referenced with its source text on the shelf, which are in turn ordered, not by subject, author or date, but, arbitrarily, by size. Where Origin of Species is a dry look at the subjective interpretation of fact by laymen, The Birds In Her Garden cheekily elevates amateur botany to the status of Darwin’s investigations and again underlines the value of personal taxonomies.

Upstairs, after slides and video from Mrs. Shovlin’s back garden, comes a trio of works dubbed In Search Of Perfect Harmony. First, a dazzlingly complex diagram, which explains the concept of complimentary colours, matching 12 wax crayons into four coloured tetrads which each correspond to elements of the next work, three batches of rubbings taken from jigsaws. The perfect harmony in question is a uniform grey that, in theory, should result in the combinations of colour used to make each jigsaw frottage. This is an obsessional, failed attempt to bring order to the chaos of an unfinished jigsaw, and, frankly, a jaw-droppingly pointless exercise, applying the rigours of the scientific method to an absurd experiment. Then, in a small photographic portrait, we see what at first appears to be Shovlin’s moving tribute to his mother, the woman who, through her twin hobbies, inspired his love of categorisation and ordering.

But - hang on a minute - this is Jamie Shovlin, arch fibber, and teller of exquisite lies. Is this woman the artist’s mother, or no more real than his anagrammatic avatar, Naomi V. Jelish, and Lust/Faust, the band so hip they never existed? This is the question around which Aggregate revolves, and ultimately, Shovlin’s point seems to be that the answer is as irrelevant or relevant as Darwin’s readers’ reduction of the text before them to a series of subjectively chosen gobbets. Facts are judged not by their truth or falsity, but by the way in which they are presented, and the manner in which they are categorised.

After this, Landrangers forms a fitting coda. The work is collection of maps, each with a detailed catalogue card, accompanied by a map of maps, dividing the British Isles into the arbitrary squares chosen by cartographers. It is a simple representation of a set of categories, but one that elicits a personal response, to the euphony of place names and the memories they inspire. On my visit, a retired couple stood before the Landrangers on the wall, and, like Darwin’s readers and Shovlin’s mother, reordered the collection, according to past holidays and country walks.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 2nd, 2007.

‘The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire,’ Fred Sandback wrote, ‘was the outline of a rectangular solid - a 2” x 4” -lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.’

This brief, understated statement, marking the twentieth anniversary of the ‘casual act’ in 1966 that would come to define the center of Sandback’s practice shares something with that practice. It has a lightness of touch, belying a deep purpose, it has clarity, simplicity and, if Minimalist sculptures can be said to share personality traits with their sculptors, it also seems to contain a hint of playful self-deprecation.

Sandback’s best known constructions, mostly untitled lines, planes and shapes marked out in space by lengths of coloured yarn or wire, drawn tight, are undoubtedly minimalist, they are not quite Minimalist. They are spare, of course, and universal, and, in describing geometric shapes, they adhere to the superficial constants of Minimalist style.

But there’s something distinctly not-Minimalist in Sandback’s minimalism. These are not works to walk around, look at and consider, as you would, say, one of Sol LeWitt’s faceted pyramids, or an assembly of neon tubes by Dan Flavin. Instead, they are works to step over - existing as they do in what Sandback called ‘pedestrian space’ - and look through; they are not just objects with which the viewer can form a relationship, but objects that work to reconfigure the viewer’s relationship with the space around them. (In his essay in the publication to accompany this exhibition, Yve-Alain Bois compares viewing a Sandback construction to that odd sensation when a train adjacent to the one you are sitting on pulls away, momentarily sparking the sensation of movement.)

These pieces lack, too, the almost overweening certainty common to much Minimalist sculpture, displaying instead a sort of uncertain, transient, impermanent quality - as well as being not quite there, for all that these works transform space, they are transformed by it, never the same twice, dependent on an altered by their architectural surroundings, and, to co-opt jargon applied to very different media, time-based.

The last point raises a problem for this posthumous retrospective (the artist died in 2003), since, by connecting ceiling to floor, or seeming to balance a trapezoid at the junction of two walls, Sandback was an installation artist of a kind, bound to allow a new gallery to affect an old work, however precise the written instructions he filed for each sculpture were, or however much he dismissed his characterisation as an installer. As well as being the first chance to see Sandback’s work in Scotland, then, this is a chance to see his sculptures installed without Sandback’s guiding hand, though whether this will result in a loss, or add a purity of sorts is impossible to say.

The show is, too, a wide-ranging and full retrospective, moving beyond the canonical Sandback to include early sculptures in metal, works on paper and paintings. One of these, from 2003, seems key: in following a Mondrian painting - Composition With Red, Yellow, Blue 1930 - Sandback copies the lines and scale of the original. But renders it in flatly monochromatic black.

This review was first published in The Herald in March 2007.

Edinburgh Printmakers has been at the heart of the capital’s art scene for four decades, providing access to its workshop for emerging and established artists alike, and raising the profile of the print in its gallery space. To mark the anniversary, the Printmakers is set to mount an ambitious pair of exhibitions, setting out the institution’s history and surveying work from the past 40 years.

The workshop and gallery opened its doors in 1967 on Victoria Street, set up by gallerist Robert Cox and artist Phil Reeves, along with founding members Roy Wood and Kim Kempshall. For Gill Tyson, vice-chair of the Printmakers’ council, whose involvement with the project dates back to her days as an art student in the 1970s, the timing was right.

“It really grew out of that resurgence of printmaking in the 1950s,” she says, “when printmaking began to move into the fine art department at the art colleges. Then it came down to the fact that there was a lot going on in Edinburgh at the time - there was a strong artistic revival and a strong alternative artistic community, artists such as John Bellany and Sandy Moffat were coming out and keen to continue with printmaking.”

After a stint at Victoria Street, in a cramped room adjacent to Robert Cox’s gallery, the Printmakers moved to Market Street in 1975, then, as now, a hub for artistic activity in the city.

“Victoria Street was, really, entirely unsuitable as premises for a print workshop,” Tyson remembers, “so the chance to move to Market Street was a great opportunity. We were right above the Fruitmarket Gallery, and next door to the New 57 Gallery, which was an incredibly lively place.’ When the Fruitmarket was made independent of the Scottish Arts Council in 1983, Edinburgh Printmakers was forced to up sticks once more, finding, after a difficult search, its current premises in a former wash house on Union Street - Tyson, by then chair, was the first to enter the main hall. This move to a larger space led to expansion, with the Printmakers’ publishing more artists’ editions, and collaborating with non-printmaking artists as well as making its facilities available to members.

The twin gallery spaces also allowed the Printmakers to continue its commitment to bringing printmaking to a wider audience.

“As well as providing the facilities for artists to make prints,” Tyson explains, “a lot of our work has been about promoting printmaking. And I think we’ve done pretty well at that - we certainly have an international reputation.’ That reputation also applies to Scotland as a whole, with workshops across the country opening in the wake of the Edinburgh Printmakers’ early success.

“Now we have Edinburgh Printmakers, Glasgow Print Studio, Peacock in Aberdeen and the workshop in Dundee,” Tyson explains. “Printmaking is a really strong strand to the visual arts in Scotland. It’s definitely something peculiar to Scotland - of course you get print workshops in other places, but to have so many open-access print workshops here? I see that as something of a Scottish success story.”

The first exhibition celebrating Edinburgh Printmakers’ part in that success story focuses on the first 20 years of its output, aiming both to showcase work made by artists in the workshop, or in collaboration with it, and to document the organisation’s history.

“There wasn’t an awful lot in the workshop in terms of archive materials,” says Tyson, “so we had to get in touch with a lot of people who had been involved over the years. It was amazing the warmth and affection they all had for the institution, and we were faced with this deluge of cards, editions and photographs.”

Some of those materials have been put to use in a short film to be screened in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

“For the film, I interviewed Philip Reeve and Roy Wood, the founder members, and Alfons Bytautas, whose been our etching technician since 1974,” Tyson says.

“They told all their old war stories. It’s really remarkable to hear how they did so much, how they made all these international connections, even though there were so few of them.’ Then, of course, there are the prints, by artists including Peter Howson and Stephen Conroy, alongside work by the founding members. “We went for the good ones!”, Tyson jokes, explaining the process of whittling down 40 years’ worth of work into a manageable show. “We really wanted a spread of things that would show what was happening at the time in printmaking, and to have works that represented shows we’d had over the years, as well as a mix of prints by printmakers and by artists working in collaboration with the workshop.’ 40 Years at Edinburgh Printmakers should, then, be an intriguing exhibit, offering a chance to trace trends, to survey the work of a wide-ranging and disparate group of artists, and, perhaps best of all, fully to understand the role of this Edinburgh institution, the first open-access print workshop in the UK, in driving forward the practice of printmaking.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 9th, 2007.

The very first thing you see when you step inside the Gallery of Modern Art, eager to find out just what Jasper Johns has been up to in the last couple of decades, is a small, untitled lithograph. Tricking the eye, it shows the head of a duck that, on second glance might well be a rabbit. It’s a deft curatorial trick. This is, after all, Jasper Johns: painter of flags, targets and alphabets, maker of works that snatch away your breath with a dizzy combination of hard-nosed conceptual rigour and lush, painterly marks. So, what on earth is this sweet little duck-rabbit doing here?

Take a few more steps, and it becomes clear that, since the early 1980s, Johns has forged a new way of working. In the first room of the exhibition, which is neatly organised in thematic clumps, we find Ventriloquist (1983) and related works. The busy canvas is stuffed full of objects - pots by George Ohr, a commemorative vase that forms a double portrait of the Queen and Prince Philip - with Johns’ own flag paintings seemingly taped, in a trompe l’oeil flourish, onto the surface. And so it goes on. Later, Johns lifts lips and eyes from Dali, melts the melted faces of Picasso, and endlessly traces Holbein’s Portrait of a Young Nobleman Holding a Lemur. And all the while, Johns himself is in the thick of things, whether in the form of his long shadow cast on the surface of the Seasons series, or the family photographs that pepper the Catenary series.

It’s all a bit of a shock to the system, not least because - and this is not an easy thing to say - much of the work here smacks of failure. Once the game of spot the reference is done, there’s nothing left but an ugly image. Worse still, when Johns reigns in the excesses of his new method - in the awkward mystery of the Green Angel series, with a pair of ink-on-plastic reworkings of Holbein, or with the loop of string that hangs from the frame of Catenary (1998) - he calls to mind his old self, with all his old strength.

Johns’ earlier work asked questions that were born of the artist’s self-imposed distance from the act of making work. By attempting to absent himself from his paintings, he drew viewers in, forcing them to ask themselves questions about the nature of things, and the nature of their representation; questions that served to put the work back into the world from which it was drawn. (It is difficult, for example, to see the American flag fly after seeing Johns’ paintings of it without finding it a weak, unsatisfying copy of a Johns’ original copy.) Now that he has folded himself into his work, and wrapped himself in the flag of his own past practice and inspiration, Johns no longer draws in his audience while bleeding the work back into the world. Instead, much here exists in a sealed container fashioned from Johns’ life and his work. Where in the past his adoption of pre-existing images prompted a wonderful, endlessly recursive dialogue, they now seem ungenerous and didactic, puzzles that can be solved.

This review was first published in The Sunday Herald in July 2004.