The annual group show at Sorcha Dallas this year is themed around the idea of repeated words, images and motifs. Dubbed r e p ’ e . t ’ t i o n - the unconventional spacing and punctuation is a nod to the eccentric orthography of EE Cummings - the exhibit blends new work by young, Glasgow-based artists with more established international figures and big names from the Op and Pop art canons, arranged together in two tightly-grouped installations.

The first, in the smaller of the two gallery spaces, is overbearing and claustrophobic thanks to Claudia Wieser’s wallpaper installation.

Pasting black-and-white photocopies directly on to the gallery walls, Wieser builds up fan-like motifs, parallel lines and dense geometric blocks. These serve as a backdrop for Sue Tompkins’s typed works on paper. These texts might be poems or song lyrics - Tompkins was frontwoman of the pop group Life Without Buildings, and her practice still includes musical performance - or snatches of overheard conversation. Whatever the source, each one takes a phrase and repeats it, sometimes with slight variations, until even the most innocuous term takes on a sinister air. There’s something dark about Fiona Jardine’s untitled collage, too, which sees images of hands and limbs arranged in a repeating, circular pattern.

In the second gallery, its windows covered in gauzy white fabric, the atmosphere is lighter and cooler, bordering on the antiseptic. The works here are arranged around a seating area, which features two chairs by Franz West, their seats and backs woven into Aztec patterns of brightly- coloured industrial strapping, and, on a little plinth bearing a vase of cut flowers and volumes of EE Cummings’s poetry. The domestic feel is furthered by Eva Berende’s hinged screen, each of its four panels bearing meticulously dyed strands of wool that trace out a pattern of interlocking oblongs and diamonds.

Up on the walls surrounding this odd little salon are works by Bridget Riley and John Wesley. Undressing, a diptych by Wesley, shows a woman taking off her stockings and knickers, but any trace of the salacious is removed by the Californian Pop surrealist’s flat, spare technique, as if the female body is nothing more than a pattern to be transcribed. Wesley’s Untitled (Mickey & Minnie) further flattens the already two-dimensional, repeating the familiar three circles of Mickey Mouse and his wife in flesh pink against a minimal landscape reduced to stripes of green and blue. The pair of Riley prints here lack the dizzying, disorienting power of her best-known monochrome Op Art works.

Instead, Riley offers studies in false tessellation, aligning leaf-like abstractions in orange, blue and deep green for Sylvan, revisiting the pattern for Berlin Wall Drawing (Print), this time opting for pale pastel tones.

For a show examining repetition, there’s a good deal of variety here, but thanks to some careful curation, connections are drawn between the disparate bunch of artists gathered here, sometimes simply - Wesley and Riley share a similar palette, Berendes and West both make furniture but present it as art - sometimes subtly, with Wieser’s wallpaper providing a busy visual soundtrack for Tompkins’s silent songs.

Around the corner on King Street, 15 artists from the Sorcha Dallas roster have taken over the Glasgow Print Studio. The group show, To Bring Forth and Give, is the result of a collaboration between the gallery and the studio designed to introduce artists to the possibilities of printmaking.

While most of the 15 have opted for the traditional approach, producing editions, some have taken a more radical, experimental tack.

Clare Stephenson’s piece Ornament and Boredom is more sculpture than print. The towering effigy - it’s a good 8ft tall - is equal parts haughty drag queen, classical statue and winged angel, its component parts apparently cobbled together from fashion magazine clippings and antique illustrations.

Michael Stumpf has made a screenprint of a photograph of a screenprint. His sweatshirt, emblazoned with a jumbled, purple, red and orange logo that reads “silenzio”, each letter rendered in different type, ranging from a simple sans serif to a hand-drawn gothic face, is suspended from the gallery ceiling on a hanger.

The partner print shows the same sweatshirt, roughly scrunched and crumpled on a jet black floor. On either side of the curtained doorway that leads to the print studio, Fiona Jardine has plastered the walls with screenprinted rolls of wallpaper, dotted with eyes, lashes and brows. One panel of the pristine paper has been defaced with smudges of slurry-brown paint, and Jardine has pasted a few more eyes, this time collaged from magazines, over the top.

Craig Mulholland’s contribution is a continuation of his sprawling solo show, Grandes et Petits Machines, which filled the two spaces at Sorcha Dallas and the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Gallery earlier this year, before transferring in expanded form to Spike Island. Mulholland is at home in any medium - that solo show included everything from delicate sculptures to paintings made of metal to an animated film with an operatic score - and his four prints here are assured, crisp new renderings of his past work using pegboard, obscure patterns that suggest programs written in obsolete computer code, or dangerously decayed electrical circuits.

The artists who have opted to make more conventional prints are not overshadowed by the sculptural and installation work. In fact, the more delicate, quiet pieces stand out. Alex Pollard’s Jack Sheppard is a photo etching that distorts a portrait of the eighteenth- century thief like a fairground mirror, as if Pollard has dragged his source image this way and that during the printing process. Couple, by Raphael Danke, is a surreal juxtaposition of an outsize lipstick and a radiator, rendered in grainy monochrome. A pair of digital prints, Drawing Study, offers a diary of Kate Davis’s recent practice, with a self-reflexive text reading: “It has taken me a month and a half to complete one drawing recently. That fact is part of the image now.”

Alasdair Gray must have made his first print before some of his peers here were born, and it’s easy to see that this isn’t an artist feeling his way in a new medium, but a master at work. His Corruption - “the Roman Whore”, according to the print’s hand-written caption, “for whom hangmen and politicians play the pimp” - is a woman with a death’s head rictus grin, impossibly pregnant with an embracing Adam and Eve, who are in turn surrounded by a strange bestiary of eagles, squid and bloated fish.

To Bring Forth and Give is more of a showcase than a group show proper, but it hangs together thanks to the palpable sense that most of these artists are eagerly experimenting with, and embracing, a new direction in their practices. It is, too, a sign that printmaking, all too often seen as a poor cousin to painting, is in rude health.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 12th December , 2008.

Unreliable Witness gathers together art that explores truth and fiction, the telling of stories and the creation of myths.

Michael Fullerton opens the show with five huge posters that glitter under spotlights. They bear a press shot of a.c. acoustics, a now-defunct Glasgow group whose biography reads like the template for a cult indie outfit, complete with critical acclaim, modest sales, devoted fans in more famous bands, a handful of Peel sessions and high profile support slots that hinted at the possibility of mainstream success. Fullerton’s memorial offers a glimpse of an alternate history, where ac acoustics, despite their defiantly unambitious lower case name, were pop idols, gracing the cover of Smash Hits instead of languishing on the middle pages of the Melody Maker, headlining all the big festivals and mounting bloated international stadium tours. It’s a good joke, if you’ve heard of ac acoustics, which, as Fullerton is well aware, most people haven’t.

Fullerton’s Colour Study of the Painting ‘Elizabeth Foster’ by Sir Joshua Reynolds 1787 (Leon Trotsky) is a more complex investigation into propaganda, possible histories and the politics of aesthetics. Lady Elizabeth Foster led an interesting life, living in a menage a trois with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire for a quarter century, while, rumour has it, merrily conducting affairs with a string of Earls, Counts and, for variety, a cardinal. There’s no hint of this in Reynolds’ portrait, of course, which casts the Lady as a rosy-cheeked innocent in virginal white lace. Fullerton takes this act of revisionism and applies it to another, borrowing the colour scheme used by Reynolds to paint a version of an anti-Bolshevik poster which showed Trotsky as a slavering maniac, his features twisted into an anti-Semitic stereotype. It’s an intriguing synthesis, matching Reynolds’ subtle propaganda, which promotes an image of a powerful elite as morally upright, to the decidedly unsubtle casting of Trotsky as an unhinged monster, in a bid to secure the position of another powerful elite.

For Knowledge Will Break The Chains of Slavery (Alexei Radakov) turns again to Russian history, borrowing its title from an early Soviet poster extolling the virtues of education, but this time instead of rewriting history or merging two narratives together, Fullerton obscures it, presenting a thick strip of audio broadcast tape, unlistenable behind glass.

Gabriela Vanga takes a more whimsical approach to possible histories with George. Installed on a low table are fragments of a portrait of the titular George, and a text which tells of its making. At thirteen, Vanga didn’t have a boyfriend, so she invented one, telling her school pals new tales about him every day. Years later, after confessing to the deception, Vanga described George to a police artist without revealing that his subject was a figment of her imagination. The text then instructs the viewer to mentally reconstruct George’s face from the fragments, following Vanga’s own process in remembering the details of her teenage fiction. It’s a rather twee piece, unless you entertain the notion that Vanga has made the whole thing up, from the fibs at school to the police artist to her wish to share the experience.

There’s no sign of whimsy in Peter Friedl’s harrowing video loop, Liberty City, which shows a gang brutally beating a defenceless man. The shaky, grainy amateurish footage looks absolutely genuine, but it is in fact a short drama, based on a 1979 riot in Miami, sparked by the fatal beating of a black insurance salesman, Arthur McDuffie, at the hands of white policemen. Friedl’s fiction is, in effect, a reversal of these events - in his film, the gang is black, and their victim is a white police officer - but, thanks to its chilling realism, does more than make a simplistic point about race relations in the US, questioning the illusion of objective truth created by the shaky camerawork and grainy quality of documentary footage.

Similar questions are posed by Nedko Solakov’s installation The Truth (The Earth is Plane, The World is Flat). This collection of paintings, drawings, newspaper cuttings, wall texts, handwritten notes, snapshots and a convincingly realised documentary film presents ‘evidence’ that the world is not a globe, but a thin disk. Centred on physicist Dr. Haraldar Gustalsan and the cosmonaut Vitaly R., the overwhelming barrage of made up facts, crank theories and conspiracies are arranged like an eccentric child’s science project, building to a wonderfully silly conclusion. Solakov’s point is, though, deadly serious, his sharp sense of humour masking an angry indictment of the former government and media of his native Bulgaria. The work was made in the early 1990s, in the wake of Bulgaria’s first free elections after decades of Communist rule, and the implication is clear: if a totalitarian government tells its citizens that the earth is flat, it might as well be.

After this, Andrea Fraser’s satire of art world foibles might seem to be aiming at an easy target, but her filmed performance Official Welcome is a sophisticated critique of, well, sophisticated critiques. The piece opens with Fraser, as herself, welcoming visitors to a mid-career retrospective of her work, before adopting a series of personae, acting out introductary speeches by jaded artists, obsequious curators and blethering critics. It’s a blistering attack on the indulgences of the art system, but one that is itself indulgent, allowing the subjects of Fraser’s satire to laugh at themselves.

Susan Hiller is interested in the underlying systems of the art world and the making of art, too, but her installation feels more like a celebration of curation and presentation. From the Freud Museum (Unique Prototype) is a vitrine housing custom-made boxes which in turn house small collections of objects, inspired by Freud’s own collection of artifacts, including soil samples from Ireland, various representations of hands, a ouija board with instructions and small vials of holy water. The result is a sort of commentary on cultural history, archeology and archiving, expressed as an archive.

Hiller’s work is concise, coherent and carefully put together, but the same can’t be said of Unreliable Witness. It’s a fine collection of works, but, while each of the artists here is, at root, making work about crafting narratives, whether they contain profound truths or outrageous fibs, the show itself fails to match up to the work it contains, presenting artists and their practices individually, without telling a convincing story about them.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 28th November, 2008.

On a blustery, grey day on the banks of the River Tay, it’s tempting to see the work of Spencer Finch as akin to those therapy lamps that simulate the sunrise, resetting the body clock, and allowing those of us depressed by the late dawn to leap out of bed, full of the joys of summer.

I don’t mean to compare Finch’s large-scale sculptural installations, delicate paintings and subtle interventions to a fancy alarm clock, but the work on show at Dundee Contemporary Arts does provide a sensory kick up the backside and, often using the simplest of means, transports the viewer to different times, places and climes, from a cloudy summer afternoon in Massachusetts to the clear skies of a winter morning in New Zealand.

The Massachusetts afternoon comes first, in the form of a light, airy installation that labours under one of Finch’s trademark descriptive titles, Sunlight In An Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).

Finch spent this day in the late poet’s backyard logging the shade cast by the clouds overhead, later converting his readings into a huge cloud-shaped mess of blue, grey and purple colour filters of the sort used by photographers. These cellophane sheets are held in place with wooden clothes pegs, and suspended from the ceiling before a blindingly bright array of fluorescent striplights of varying colour temperatures, in an attempt to recreate the quality of the New England sun. As weather simulations go, Sunlight In An Empty Room isn’t much cop, a cobbled-together, jerry-built experiment that would raise eyebrows at a school science fair. But, as the plastic cloud shifts slightly in the breeze of the building’s air-conditioning, and the yellowish lights cast soft blue shadows on the walls, it’s clear that Finch is trying to capture the simple pleasure of observing a cloud making its way across the sky - and in this he succeeds.

Next door in the large gallery, Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) is a constellation of softly twinkling lights hung from the ceiling. At first, it looks like a crude attempt to plot the stars, but the regular, modular construction of the light fittings and precise arrangement of differently-sized incandescent bulbs suggest the coloured balls and black sticks of chemistry lab models, a clue to the artist’s method. Finch made his skyscape by combining paints to match the black of the night, then - using a process I won’t pretend to understand - established the molecular ratio of each pigment in his mixture, and modelled the molecular structure of each pigment, with each of the 401 bulbs in the final installation representing a single atom. The sculpture is beautiful as it is, but when Finch’s process is revealed, it becomes more so, a rigorously scientific act of poetic transubstantiation, an encoded study of a single colour.

A new work, Sky (Over Franz Josef Glacier, April 8, 2008, 10:40AM) works in a similar way, but it’s leavened with a healthy dose of humour. A perfectly square pool of water, dyed bright blue to match the sky Finch observed back in April, feeds into a huge ice-making machine, which sporadically drops a load of ice-cubes on to a slipway, where they slowly melt and drip into the water below, and the process begins again. On one level, this closed system is as full of science and poetry as Night Sky, a tiny simulation of cracking glaciers matched to a minimalist liquid painting, but it’s also wonderfully silly, a great juddering Heath- Robinson contraption that wheezes into life - making visitors lost in contemplation of the deep blue pool at its base jump out of their skin.

On the wall opposite, another new piece sees Finch inspired by his first major show in Scotland to tackle a long-standing fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment. The piece 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) converts a thought experiment in David Hume’s 1748 paper An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding into a rough, real world demonstration, in which Finch dripped 28 colours of blue paint on to paper, dipping his brush in water after each drop, making each mark a shade lighter than the one before.

The final installation housed in two small rooms at the far end of the main gallery is an even subtler investigation of perception. In one room, five fluorescent lamps are wrapped in blue filters, in the other, the walls are clad in white paint mixed with Prussian blue pigment and lit with unfiltered lamps. In both rooms, the blue is barely there, little more than a slight cooling of the light, but, no matter how hard you strain to see a difference, Finch’s two methods produce identical results.

While 8456 Shades of Blue might have been conceived to match it’s debut showing in Scotland, all the pieces here seem very much at home in the austere rooms of the DCA. Even the sheen of the highly-polished floors - a flaw in the gallery’s design that tends to distract from the works - serve Finch well, offering a diffused reflection of Night Sky that tempers its hard, scientific edges, and allowing the faintest tint of blue light to leak out of the blue rooms at the rear.

In Glasgow, The Common Guild have mounted a companion show in Douglas Gordon’s townhouse on the edge of Kelvingrove Park dedicated to works on paper by Finch, and the pieces gathered here also suit their surroundings to a T. Finch is still concerned with colour and light, but, instead of looking outward, seeking to make new sense of the world and the way in which we perceive it, he turns his attention to intimate interior spaces. A sequence of watercolours sees Finch document the colours of light that passed before his eyes during a day spent at his studio. Another set of studies, pastels this time, capture the colour of the ceiling in Sigmund Freud’s consulting room.

A set of inkblots that wend their way up the stairwell is known as 102 Colours From My Dreams. Each one was made by Finch at the moment of waking, and together they form a diary of colours he saw in his dreams. There’s no need to interpret these self-made Rorschach tests, though, as Finch helpfully provides titles that build up into an absurd, comic monologue, a jolly litany of disordered memories and strange fictions of the artist’s sleeping life, which match each colour.

These two shows demonstrate two sides of Finch, and the separation of his work does him a favour. Had Finch’s first major solo outing in the UK been a single-gallery affair, the large-scale pieces of the Dundee exhibition would likely have overwhelmed the more delicate material of the Glasgow display, and the more intimate works on paper might well have acted as distractions from the self-contained investigations of the grand installations.

By focusing on two distinct, if allied, strands of Finch’s practice, DCA and The Common Guild in total paint a better picture of the artist’s practice than they could have done alone.

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

Matthew Smith makes art out of everyday things. He buys duvets and rolls them up tight, or arranges them on specially-constructed wooden stands, takes records from his collection and tears off the front cover art, hunts down back issues of the NME, scribbling over the newsprint, and bleaches the colour out of pyjama tops before carefully folding them. Once, he put a nectarine on the floor of a gallery.

Many readers will, I imagine, be raising their eyebrows at that list of Smith’s past efforts, and, walking through the door of Mary Mary to be confronted by a spoon plonked on top of a piece of chipboard, that was my reaction too. But, after spending a bit of time with Smith’s assemblies of commonplace, terribly mundane items, some of which he’s altered, but only a little bit, they turn out to be nothing short of engrossing in their attempt to reconfigure the status of familiar objects, and rework ideas from past art movements in lowly materials.

The fact that Smith doesn’t appear to be doing very much with those materials ends up working in his favour, too. That piece of laminated chipboard, the sort of thing you see left out for the bin men after some cheap self-assembly shelving has collapsed under its own weight, is propped up on one edge, and the wooden spoon has been balanced perfectly on top, and the arrangement looks so precarious that you’re afraid to tread too heavily on the gallery floor, in case the whole thing comes crashing down. This forces a careful inspection of the piece, which reveals a lot of little mysteries. It’s clear that Smith has deliberately drizzled latex into the bowl of the spoon and along its handle, but did he make the seven marker pen lines on the reverse side of the chipboard slat, or affix the shreds of packing tape stuck to it? It’s impossible to tell, but the closer one looks at the piece, the more its two parts fade into the background, losing their meaning, or any symbolism, and becoming constituent elements of a sculptural work, relating to the space around them.

In the next room, there are more chipboard panels, and they prompt a similar process of recognition, inspection, forgetting and revelation. This time, there are seven boards balanced on top of each other, again precariously, one of which is a slightly different shade of off-white to the others. The surfaces are marked with more packing tape, and little drizzles of red resin, including a perfect little circle, which, from another artist might be taken as a cheeky reference to the red dots that mark works as sold. This time, once Smith’s choice of material has faded, the piece looks to be following in the footsteps of Donald Judd’s rigourously spaced stacks of pristinely constructed metal forms.

Some of the pieces here don’t even trouble the viewer with the status of their components - there are two works made of folded towels, some coloured, some bleached, that are immediately apparent as minimalist exercises examining colour and form.

Smith changes tack when he groups together a folded futon mattress, a wooden spoon, and a concrete cast of a wooden spoon. Smith is hardly the first artist to make casts of domestic objects, of course. But, where Rachel Whiteread presents negative space full of emotional resonance, or Bruce Nauman, casting the empty spaces beneath his chair back in the ’60s (a work later reprised by Whiteread), asks where space begins and ends, Smith doesn’t seem to be interested in big questions, or prompting associations, or even in the object he chooses to cast. To put it another way, Smith hasn’t made a little monument to spoons, he’s made a thing out of concrete, just as he’d rather we cast off any thoughts we might have about mattresses, or towels, or cheap furniture and focus instead on the formal associations between these objects.

There is a sense that Smith is trying to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to his deconstruction and decontextualisation of familiar objects. The titles he chooses suggests he’s more than aware of this. One of the towel pieces is called Second Design For A Window, implying that the work might have been made from anything, or sketched on paper, but the futon and spoons assembly is dubbed Some Afternoons, returning the viewer to the domestic sphere from which the objects were taken and, supposedly, stripped of meaning. Too tricksy? Perhaps, but there’s something satisfying, or pleasantly frustrating, in the way Smith refuses to be pinned down, which matches the way he denies any attempt to find meaning in the apparently meaningful objects he arranges and adapts, only to remind us of that meaning.

This month also marks Mary Mary’s foray into publishing, with books by Karla Black and Lorna Macintyre, the first in what gallery director Hannah Robinson hopes to become an annual series of publications by artists on her roster. This is a good move. Few fans of contemporary art can afford to buy work, even by emerging artists, and artists books offer a chance to own and collect pieces by the artists they admire without breaking the bank. Black’s large format book Mistakes Made Away From Home offers a survey of the past three years of her practice, with installation views and close-ups of her room-sized abstract sculptural pieces, which marry together sheets of cellophane, polythene and paper with hand cream, petroleum jelly and make-up. There’s a freewheeling essay, too, which opens with a tongue-in-cheek assessment of Carla Bruni’s taste in handbags, slips into a discussion of third wave feminism, and ends with Black’s manifesto for making art. Macintyre takes a very different approach. Instead of cataloguing past exhibits, her Fourteen Drawings is a set of new works, making up a book that is a work in itself. Each page contains an a photograph created without a camera. Rather than following the deliberate placing of objects on photographic paper pioneered by Man Ray and Lee Miller, Macintyre folds, tears and crumples the paper itself, making two dimensional records of three dimensional sculptures born of chance gestures. Beautifully printed and bound, both books bear up to repeated viewings, and while they’re no match for encountering Black and Macintyre’s works in the flesh, they’re certainly desirable objects in their own right.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 24th October, 2008.

As you walk down Robertson Street in the city centre, between the pawnbrokers on the corner and the office block that houses The Modern Institute, there’s a scrappy plot of land on the right. It’s been empty and fenced off for years and years, the sign promising imminent redevelopment failing to deliver while weeds grow, and passers by use it as a great big litter bin.

Now, it looks like a construction company has finally sprung into action on the disused site. Foundations have been struck, concrete has been poured, and two huge steel beams, seven metres tall cast a shadow over the building site.

That’s probably what the new activity looks like to a passer by glancing over their shoulder, at least, but the metal and concrete forms are part of a new sculpture by Monica Sosnowska. A closer look reveals that, though the materials are authentic, there’s something not quite right about this structure. For one thing, the ground around it hasn’t been cleared, and there’s no sign of the usual scaffolding. For another, you don’t need to know much about the construction industry to guess that plonking two girders into a pile of concrete probably isn’t the best or safest way to make a start on a tower block.

There’s something funny about the scale of the piece, too. For all its imposing heft, the thing looks like a model for something much larger, thanks to a sort of pathway shaped into the side of the rounded-off pyramid of concrete at the base of the piece which.

Sosnowska isn’t building, then, she’s borrowing forms from the building trade and doing away with their usual function. To what end? I’m not sure. Towers are usually optimistic things, and they often result in unintended consequences, from Babel to the Le Corbusier-inspired social housing of post-war Britain, and Sosnowska’s edifice, reaching up the heavens only to be abandoned midway through its making, certainly fits that pattern. More prosaically, the piece seems prescient - given the current economic climate, it isn’t hard to imagine unfinished buildings becoming a familiar sight.

This ambiguity is typical of Sosnowska’s work, which began with an interest in the standardised reconstruction of her native Poland after World War II, and now takes a more general investigative approach to buildings, in terms of the forms they take, the stuff they are made of, and their capacity to trigger intellectual and emotional responses. Sometimes, these investigations are little short of aggressive. Late last year, Sosnowska filled the upper floor of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery with strips of industrial rubber sheeting that hung densely from the ceiling, treating visitors brave enough to enter the work to a claustrophobic, confusing journey through the space. The last time she exhibited at The Modern Institute, back in 2004, the gallery was filled with a strange, roving tube-like structure finished in municipal brown paint and dotted with small entranceways, which forced viewers to find routes through and around it. In the Polish Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Bienale, her work 1:1 was a huge model of a building’s skeleton, forced into too small a space, and buckling under its own weight.

Inside the gallery Grill is a continuation of the themes explored in these past works, an architectural feature that runs amok. At its centre, there’s a perfectly functional, rather pretty security grill set into a window frame. But it has gone to seed, sprouting a tangle of intersecting steel wire tendrils that thrust out into space, embedding themselves into the floor, walls and ceiling. Like those rubber strips at Talbot Rice, or the large scale installation that once graced this gallery, Grill is an infestation, something that is growing out of control in the room, making the space worse than useless - to reach the sheets of paper listing the works on show, visitors have to gingerly step over and duck under the work. This is a fairly unpleasant experience, and a fraught one - the piece is a valuable work of art, after all, not something you want to trip on or bash into - but Grill is also a beautiful piece. That conflict is at the heart of this strand of Sosnowska’s practice, which she has described as ‘anti-architecture’: her work does everything that architecture shouldn’t do, making spaces that are aesthetically pleasing but that lack function or function actively against the people that inhabit them. This is more than a détournement of architectural language, it’s a critique of architectural failure, a prickly satire of the Modernist experiment, the Utopian vision which, diluted and misunderstood, resulted in grim housing schemes and crumbling prefabs, structures that worked on the drawing board but failed on site.

For all that, Sosnowska shows a fondness for the materials and structures that she appropriates, questions and satirises. The last two works here are small, controlled, less obviously site-specific, and far from aggressive. On a window ledge L Profile is a tiny three-pronged sculpture modelled after a device used in construction to control the right angles of a building. One of its edges is irregular, as if it has been teased apart, impossibly, by human hands, a suggestion reinforced by the presences of the small, shaped blobs of metal that lie beside it. A reminder, perhaps, that, for all the organic, uncontrolled nature of Grill, it has been precisely designed and built. Beside the entrance to the gallery sits Crates with Concrete, a group of three plastic crates that have been filled up with lumpy concrete. These are studies in the properties of two materials, to be looked at and appreciated, and they make no attempt to control the space around them. And there’s even a little joke embedded in the work: the crates bear the logo of the Barr brand, which inevitably calls to mind the Irn Bru slogan, ‘made in Scotland from girders’.

These quiet works may operate on a different level to the aborted building site outside in the street, or the uncomfortable reconfiguration of space offered by a work like Grill, but they further what seems to be Sosnowska’s main aim, to prompt her audience into considering architecture in new ways, questioning its purpose and examining its effects. She succeeds at this. After seeing this show, you won’t look at the buildings around you in the same way again.

Monica Sosnowska is at The Modern Institute until 8th November.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 17th October , 2008.

In 1927, when Hannah Frank began to submit her work for inclusion in the Glasgow University Magazine - first poetry, then illustrations - she adopted the pen name Al Aaraaf. The pseudonym was borrowed from the title of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, one inspired in part by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s observation of a supernova, a star that appears suddenly in the heavens, shines with a greater and greater intensity, only to disappear again. It’s a charming choice of alias, full of youthful ambition, and one that contains, too, more than a hint of the doomy romance that runs through Frank’s Art Nouveau-inspired work in pen and ink.

But in retrospect, whatever Frank’s gifts, prophecy is not among them. Far from shining brightly and briefly, she was to continue working steadily, seriously and prolifically, for decades (she finally downed tools in 2000, aged 92, on the completion of a last sculpture, Standing Figure) and in relative obscurity, her talent only fully recognised now, with an exhibition in celebration of the artist’s 100th birthday.

Born in 1908, the daughter of Charles Frank, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who found success in Glasgow selling photographic supplies from a shop on the Saltmarket, Hannah Frank’s career began with a compromise suggested by artist and family friend John Quinton Pringle - rather than devote herself wholly to her art, it was decided that Frank should attend Glasgow University, taking night classes at the School of Art. Compromise might not be the right word, though: Frank’s illustrations are informed by a passion for literature, spun out of quotations from Coleridge, Keats and The Rubaiyat, as well as biblical scenes, mostly drawn from the Book of Job.

If her literary influences are clear, a glance is enough to tell that Frank’s talent was forged at the Glasgow School of Art. There are nods to the Glasgow Style, and the influence of both Margaret Mackintosh and Jessie M King is clear. That said, Frank ploughed her own furrow, looking back further to Victorian illustration and, with her liking for strong contrast effects and adherence to a strict black and white palette, borrowing from Aubrey Beardsley. This blend of influences results in a strong, decisive graphic style in which economically described figures and faces are set against stylised grounds. In Woman With Book, a drawing from 1934, Frank dispatches her central figure with a few concise, careful strokes, only to lavish attention on the decorative floral patterns that frame her subject. Night Forms, from 1932, features Frank’s trademark female figures. Described in long, languid lines, these witchy, sultry women, with long, strong-jawed faces and dark robes, dominate this exhibition, reappearing in the spooky Moon Ballet of 1934, and again in Misericordia, a 1937 illustration, and putting in a final appearance, more stylised still, in Dance, which sees a single figure described in two swooping lines. It might be a stretch to call Frank’s work proto-feminist, but these female figures, who almost always appear as couples or in huddled groups, are studies in both independence and companionship, and there’s no mistaking that these are works by a woman artist, about women’s lives, and their bodies.

One very much gets the impression that Frank is not a woman who does things by halves and, by the early 1950s, she turned away from drawing and illustration completely, taking up sculpture full-time. Studying under Benno Schotz, the long-serving head of the Glasgow School of Art sculpture department, Frank began modelling in clay in a bid to gain a better grasp of anatomy, so as to improve her drawing, but instead found a new metier. Her fascination with the female form continued apace, but in marked contrast to the willowy figures that fill Frank’s drawings and engravings, some of her small-scale sculptures have the bottom-heavy fecundity of fertility idols, while others mix classical reclining poses with attenuated limbs and worked surfaces that call to mind Giacometti.

There are some previously unseen works here in the University Chapel, too, pastel drawings discovered by Hannah’s niece, Fiona Frank, in an old suitcase stored in the attic of her aunt’s care home, carefully wrapped up in sugar paper. All are undated, but, going by the hairdos and frocks of Frank’s sitters, they look to be from the 1940s or early 1950s. The pastels are not as immediately striking as the earlier illustrations, and are perhaps best seen as a digression, but they are valuable, showing another side to Frank’s practice. For all her devotion to a monochrome palette, the pastels reveal that she had an eye for colour, perhaps discovered in response to her mother’s exasperated request, quoted in a wall text: “Give me colour!” There are hints, too, that, though many of her preparatory sketches from life and self-portraits in pencil lack spark, Frank was more than capable of working quickly, abandoning the precise, deliberate touch that characterises her stylised graphic work to produce strong, lively pieces. Seeing them, and the last drawings in pen and ink, which offer clues that Frank was moving towards a fresher style, still indebted to Art Nouveau but dropping the decorative trappings learned from Mackintosh and King, it seems a shame that she gave up on drawing in favour of making sculpture.

Still devoted to poetry, and still in possession of the confidence and ambition that lie behind her old nom de plume, Hannah Frank has said that she hopes, quoting Longfellow, to “leave footprints on the sands of time”. With this exhibition, she has her wish. I doubt it will be the last retrospective look at the work of a Glasgow artist who, better late than never, has made her name at 100.

Hannah Frank: 100th Birthday Exhibition is at Glasgow University Chapel until October 11.

This review was first published in The Herald on 26th September , 2008.

The last time Richard Hughes showed in Glasgow, his work could be divided into two types. For the most part, he made immaculate sculptures of rather mundane, often unpleasant things. Roadsider (First of the Morning) was a perfect model of a bottle flung from a car window by a driver caught short between service stations. Cast in three stages from resin, everything from the yellow liquid pooled inside, to the blue plastic cap of the bottle, to the beads of condensation on its surface were absolutely realistic, utterly convincing. Even if you were allowed to pick up the art in galleries, you wouldn’t want to touch this.

Hughes’s second tactic was to make sculptures from the sorts of odds and ends he also makes sculptures of, as in Love Seat, a jumbled pile of mannequin legs, grubby long-johns and sports socks that, when seen from just the right angle, transformed into a hand making the peace sign.

Hughes still makes work such as this. At his first solo outing in New York earlier this year, he showed Crash My Party You Bastards, which looked like an attempt to recreate the aftermath of some very rowdy uninvited guests, but, viewed from across the room, resolved itself into a pouting teenager’s face, forming a seedy update to Dali’s Face of Mae West with its sofa lips.

But for this show, Hughes seems to have left behind the double-take transformations and casual trompe-l’oeil experiments to focus his attentions on the grimly realistic side of his practice, though there are still signs that this is an artist doing much more than meticulously crafting copies of the underwhelming items that catch his eye.

The walls of the main gallery space at The Modern Institute are dotted with little deflated balloons, all in rather sickly, faded colours, some with jolly faces printed on them.

This being Hughes, they’re not balloons, but precise resin casts, and to underline the fact that these are made, not found objects, each one is pinned, impossibly, upside down, sticking up instead of drooping down.

These sad little reminders of a sad little party hark back to Hughes’s long-running preoccupation with evoking dingy moments, but giving them a little nudge - in the past he has crafted discarded bike tyres, but looped them, impossibly, around gallery pillars - as if to suggest that there is magic to be found in overlooked episodes, or that we should re-evaluate those hazy memories of teenage years spent aimlessly mucking about.

In the next room, there’s a sculpture of a roll of soggy carpet that’s been left too close to a bonfire, so that one end is singed, and, thanks to a pulsing light inside, still glowing. If you hold your hand over the embers at the tip, it’s a little warm, and there’s even a faint chemical whiff in the air.

Like the 180-degree twist of the balloons, Hughes isn’t just engaged in perfect model- making - the sculpture of a carpet roll looks like a sculpture of an oversized hand-rolled cigarette, right down to a bend in the middle, as if it’s just been flicked away.

The rest of the works inside the gallery, though, are more prosaic, more straightforward. There’s a filthy white tarpaulin banner, the sort you see strung up over a shop’s signage announcing a closing-down sale, slumped on the floor, caught at the moment it fell from a set of four nails still firmly affixed to the wall.

Another faintly glowing cigarette end shows up, one step closer to reality than the carpet, this time on top of flattened cardboard boxes made of fibreglass and polyester resin.

Across the room, a single plimsoll sits unhappily, blackened with mould, with grass growing through its sole.

Technically, this is Hughes at his best - it is almost impossible to believe that the discarded cigarette isn’t about to start a fire in the gallery, or that the abandoned trainer isn’t soaked through with brackish water. And so, these pretty repulsive objects become incredibly attractive: the first reaction is to cringe, and think “Yuck!”; the second, which follows quickly, is to get in close, inspecting the works from every angle, spotting the mark of a paintbrush here, an unrealistic sheen there, wondering how on earth Hughes manages to make these things.

This is something Hughes has in common with Robert Gober, the American sculptor best known for his fastidious sculptures of sinks, bundles of newspaper and body parts, or, even, with the hyper-realistic figures made by Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck.

But where those artists prompt an urge to inspect, to work out the techniques of not-quite-perfect reproduction, they lack Hughes’s knack for bringing to mind a sense of time captured, the idea that the rotting trainer has been stumbled over while tramping across a patch of waste ground at the edge of a city, or that the cigarette has been dropped in the middle of some furtive conversation round the back of a suburban supermarket.

In the end, these pieces, though apparently more simple than the temporary illusions Hughes makes from piles of junk, or the subtle twists he adds to some of his recreations, offer the greater rewards.

Outside on Robertson Street, Hughes turns his gallery practice on its head with a public work, set in a lot awaiting redevelopment. It is monumental in scale, and, made of bronze, in its materials. Inevitably, though, Hughes has made a memorial to an apparently ordinary incident, casting a stubby, leafless tree which has grown through the burned-out back of an abandoned plastic chair. Out in the street, and viewed from a distance - the lot is fenced off - the thing appears to be absolutely real, if rather unlikely. And it infects its surroundings: the traffic cones that have been chucked over the fence could be by Hughes, and there’s even a plastic bottle lying by the gates, with a blue cap, just like Roadsider.

It’s a funny reversal of the old joke, in which a gallery-goer ignores the art, inspecting instead the fire extinguishers and light fittings, but, more than that, Hughes really has managed to question the status of the junk littering the city-centre patch he’s invaded with an impossibly real, but obviously fake sculpture, in just the same way that his work inside the gallery ask us to look again at the abandoned artefacts he chooses to recreate.

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

Four years ago, Kate Davis mounted a show at Sorcha Dallas called Participant. It featured drawings and screenprints of bottles, glasses and cutlery striking oddly human poses, each packed with art-historical allusions, but the piece that stood out was a big plinth, painted a slightly queasy, fleshy pink. There wasn’t much room for it in such a small gallery, so visitors had to make up their minds whether to edge around it, and squint at the other works from too close a vantage point, or clamber on top of it to get a proper look. Whichever course they took, Davis had made certain that they’d follow the implied instruction in her show title.

Now, the plinth is back, transformed, and Davis has titled her collection of new works Outsider.

The structure has been split in two - one half for each gallery space - upturned and fitted with a glass front, turning it into a scruffy version of a museum display cabinet. It’s not pink any more, but traces of its former colour can be seen through scuffs in its surface, now black. Another trace of its former purpose remains, as the upright cabinets have been placed close-up against the gallery doors, but this time the platform is a barrier, casting the visitor as the outsider of the title. Despite the stand-offishness of its new form, the ex-plinth is a highly personal work: sandwiched behind the glass are neat stacks and scruffy heaps of Davis’s belongings. There are old blankets and sleeping bags, tights and sunglasses, compilation CDs and books. Lots of books, by Kafka, Woolf, Hughes and Plath, and - lest viewers take this library as a series of clues - a guide to gluten-free cooking. advertisement

The drawings are in what Davis, a consummate draughtswoman, has made her trademark style - they are nigh-on photorealistic, dense with finicky detail, pristine and precise. Each one contains reproductions of work by another artist, Franz Gertsch, known, too, for photorealism. Gertsch liked to cast himself as without responsibility for his work, making large-scale reproductions of chance moments caught with a point-and-shoot camera. Davis has a bit of a problem with this tactic, it seems. In the first of her drawings, a Gertsch is reproduced, trapped under the wheel of a car, as a trainer- clad foot scuffs gravel over it. In the rest, Gertsch’s pieces are submerged in scenes of Davis’s own devising, the boundaries between original and copy blurred. In one, a magazine is being read, while the reader tucks in to scrambled eggs on toast, in the next a Gertsch scene is glimpsed in water pooled in a kitchen sink, a bottle of pills and some loo roll beside it on the counter. Overlaid on these mergers of Davis’s everyday life and Gertsch’s impersonal practice is a line which reads, “I want everything I make to reflect my whole life”.

That quote is borrowed from the choreographer Yvonne Rainer, so for all that it might be a statement of intent on Davis’s part, she, an outsider like her audience, has taken it from someone else. The items inside the former plinth are, for the most part, impersonal, the kind of stuff everyone has piled up in an unused cupboard, and the glass frontage hints that, however much we might like to, we cannot enter into the life of another by examining the artefacts that surround them.

Davis is in her own drawings, but never fully - we glimpse a hand here, a foot there. As she strives to reconcile herself to the newly personal tack her work is taking, she has stepped outside herself, using her own past work as an art-historical reference point, just like those quotations from Gertsch and Rainer.

Hidden away in the gallery office is a final piece, a print of a note Davis has made in the run up to the show. It provides a sort of meta-manifesto, in which a shopping list and a reminder to book a hospital appointment are presented on the same level as prompts to “finish edge of sink in pencil” and “trace out Gertsch head on knees to reflect my drawing”.

There’s another hidden work, too, in the form of the press release for the show. Rather than provide the usual gobbet of gnomic artspeak padded out with a potted biography, Davis shares a personal letter to her gallerist, in which she ponders the shift in her practice since the last show, and gives voice to her hope that she will be able successfully to communicate her ideas.

It’s a tentative piece of writing, and, for all the confidence of her drawings, this is a tentative show. Davis is showing us that she is an artist feeling her way towards a new mode of practice, uncertain as to how she should proceed. The engagement with art history that characterised her past work is here in spades - the absorption of feminist forebears’ work centred on their own lives and bodies, the calculated undermining of Gertsch’s almost macho posture of artist as machine - and the new-found self-examination is set within those self-imposed academic constraints. But, once the idea that Davis has cast artist and audience alike as outsiders, looking in on a life, and the making of work about that life, it begins to look like we’re all in this together, participants again, not outsiders at all. This give-and-take, the setting up of ideas in order to knock them down, and the exposure of the working out behind the work all add up to a self-portrait of an artist on the cusp of something new. I can’t wait to see what Davis does next.

This review was first published in The Herald on 12th September, 2008.

Galleries are not always perfect places for looking at art. They can be guilty of pandering to an elite, and are often intimidating, even to seasoned art fanciers. Might it not, then, be a good plan to bring art out into the world, installing it in spaces where people gather, rather than hiding it away in white cubes and museum halls?

This show, housed in a café on the ground floor of the old Sherrif Court, is not so much an argument against that idea as an argument in favour of the practice being forbidden by law.

Inspirations matches work by the likes of John Bellany, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and the late Steven Campbell with portraits of the artists by Shahin Memishi. This might be an interesting conceit, were it not for the fact that Memishi is - and this is a generous assessment - only a fairly capable painter, to the extent that it is a surprise his subjects agreed to sit for him. Memishi, it seems safe to say, has a higher opinion of his own work than that, setting up his Two Figures on an easel in front of Ken Currie’s brooding and bleak White Terror II, almost completely obscuring one of the best works here. I was offended by this, goodness knows what Currie would make of it. A portrait of John Bellany attempts to communicate that painter’s recent adoption of a bright palette by surrounding him with primary-hued squiggles. This ham-fisted tactic is thrown into sharp relief by the presence of Steven Campbell’s Un Homme et une femme, with its knowing, sophisticated nods to Picasso.

To make matters worse, the hanging of the show is chaotic, and absurdly cramped. Half the paintings are skew-whiff on the wall, others are plonked unceremoniously on the floor. A fine collection of drawings by Peter Howson - as always, more satisfying than his painting - is fixed so high on the wall that visitors wanting to take a good long look at them will be forced to stand on a chair. One final, farcical note: Steven Campbell’s name is misspelled, as Stephen, both on the label beside his painting and in the title of Memishi’s portrait of the artist.

Whatever the faults of traditional gallery spaces, visitors can at least expect work to be hung with the aid of a spirit level, at eye level, and with the details of the work both present and correct. Here, the only information you can trust is the list of high prices.

It’s not clear whether Memishi genuinely beleieves his work to be of the same calibre as the painters who inspire him, or if he simply has the brass neck to drum up publicity for his mediocre paintings by partnering them with the work of some of Glasgow’s best, and best-loved artists. Whichever it is, Memishi has embarrassed himself, and this show will irritate, or even anger any art lovers lured by those big names on the bill.

This review was not published in The Herald on September 3rd, 2008.

By rights, these twin showings of new work by Steven Campbell should be sad affairs. The opening night last Friday fell on the first anniversary of Campbell’s death, and the painter’s absence is almost palpable. Thanks to the artist’s wild palette, his irrepressible outpouring of ideas on to canvas, and the wild imagination that informs the last works he made, though, the atmosphere at the Glasgow School of Art and the Glasgow Print Studio is not maudlin, but triumphant, a fitting coda to a career with its fair share of ups and downs.

The pleasure in Campbell’s work comes in unpicking of the arcane tangle of allusions and references that fill every corner of his densely-worked canvases, some standing in puzzling isolation, others drifting from painting to painting, offering clues to a mystery that is ultimately impossible to solve, even, one suspects for Campbell himself.

The paintings here - most, sadly, lacking Campbell’s fantastic, funny and poetic titles - are grouped into three series. In the Baby Faced Killer works, a decidedly sinister, expressionless child-man, in red shirt and riding boots, commits impossible crimes. In one, he seems to be losing a fight with two adversaries, who are wielding the dismembered limbs of a man in a yellow suit, while furniture floats around the room, as if a Victorian seance has taken a terrible turn.

In another, set in the same sitting room, the killer stares down at the yellow-suited man, whole this time, laid out on the carpet, while, for whatever reason, Victorian biographer Lytton Strachey looks on. In a third, the fugitive is brought to justice, gripped by an equally youthful detective on the sawn-off branch of a tree. The Fantômas series is, similarly, rooted in a peculiar take on detective fiction, with the Zelig-like master of disguise given a magical twist, able to merge into and emerge from his surroundings like a chameleon. The Skin paintings, inspired in part by Italian votive paintings, centre on the macabre removal of bones, with floppy figures held aloft by eagles, or lolling on the floor, their skeletons used to build ladders or furniture.

This division into three is, in part, artificial - the baby-faced killer is haunted by chairs made of bones from the Skin series, and his dismembered victim reappears alongside Fantômas - as if Campbell has conjured up a world in which to set his stories. The real world occasionally intrudes - some of the claustrophobic rooms are decorated with paintings within paintings that borrow from Jean-Michel Basquiat, a nod to Campbell’s early years in New York - but the motif that binds most of these paintings together is the Paisley pattern. The fractured narrative running through the works is held together by these aptly psychedelic swirls, with the Fantômas character donning a Paisley suit to elude his pursuers, the boneless figures of the Skin paintings resting on paisley floors, and, in a wonderfully prosaic, suburban twist, the baby-faced killer is often seen lurking beside an overstuffed wing-back chair upholstered in paisley fabric.

This shared setting for the three series only adds to the hallucinatory confusion of the work, undermining any attempt to untangle the story hidden in these works - in fact, tracing the links between each painting, it begins to look as if Campbell is having a joke at the expense of his audience, lifting a symbolic trope from one work to subvert the narrative of another.

Narrative is not quite the right word for what Campbell is up to, though. He embraces the obvious problem of storytelling in static medium, presenting vignettes that capture a single moment, leaving the viewer grasping at possible prologues and epilogues, or, with some wily tricks, embeds the passage of time in a single image. A work in the Fantômas series sees a smartly turned-out middle-aged man in a green waistcoat lunging to catch a dropped paintbrush. Behind him, caught in the same lunge, are two near-identical men, each one younger than the last. All three are propelled forward by their arms, rendered as Heath Robinson contraptions. It’s a self-portrait of sorts, in which Campbell manages to pass on a sense of his lifelong urge to paint as something irrepressible, almost beyond his control in a single deft image, one that, with a simple repetition of a figure, manages to impress a lifetime on to the surface of the canvas.

Elsewhere, Campbell squishes linear progress into a single moment.

The Childhood Bedroom of Captain Hook with Collapsible Bed, one of few titled pieces, sees our anti-hero gazing at his own reflection in a scrying mirror as his future takes place around him - the patterned carpet beneath his feet hides a smirking crocodile, and a clock ticks away in the corner. (This is a simplification - muddying the waters, as usual, Campbell’s Hook has revealed his fate by decapitating himself, allowing that prophetic, crocodile-hiding paisley pattern to gush from the veins in his neck.) These might be the last works Campbell made, but I doubt it’s the last we’ll see of him. These two shows are taken from a collection of 30 oils, and some 200 drawings that are yet to be exhibited. There are whispers, too, of a definitive retrospective, tracing Campbell’s career from the giddy heights of his early career, when he rose to fame alongside the so-called New Glasgow Boys - a glib label that, like his contemporaries Stephen Conroy, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Adrian Wisniewski, Campbell had little time for - to the recent re-evaluation of his work after a long stint in the critical wilderness, heralded by 2005’s Campbell Soup exhibit, which exposed the artist’s influence on today’s Glasgow painters. If the late, last works are anything to go by, that retrospective will reveal Campbell, for all his compositional skill, and agile handling of paint, as, above all, a storyteller.

Stephen Campbell: New Work 2006-2007 is at Glasgow School of Art until October 11 and Glasgow Print Studio until September 28th.

This review was first published in The Herald on Tuesday 19th August , 2008.

When the short list for the Turner Prize was announced in May, Cathy Wilkes drew a lot of flack. Most commentators, and not just those at the Red Tops and middle market tabloid titles taking their annual pop at ‘modern art’, focussed on a single element of the installation at Milton Keynes Gallery that earned Wilkes her nomination, turning up their noses at the fact that her work featured a shop mannequin sitting on a toilet, as if this one, apparently tawdry, image should stand for the artist’s practice as a whole.

Part of this refusal to look beyond a sole, headline-friendly portion of Wilkes’ work can be put down to the good old London-centric approach of the press. Wilkes has represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, shown work at the prestigious roving biennial Manifesta, and regularly mounts exhibitions at major galleries in Europe, but, compared to artists of similar international standing is rarely seen in the capital. The hoopla surrounding the Turner might also be to blame. In recent years, regardless of the artists nominated, the same story plays out. The moment the nominees are made known, dead cert is picked by critics and bookies alike (Mark Leckey has been assigned that role this year), an outlier is identified as a possible contender (think Tomma Abts, or Grayson Perry) and one or more of the remaining prospects is, as Wilkes has been, branded a bit of an eccentric, or offered up as a sacrificial lamb for those who like to have a wry chuckle at the supposed pretensions of contemporary artists.

None of these reasons for the reaction to Wilkes’ Turner Prize nomination have much to do with the artist or her work, but looking at her latest installation at the Modern Institute, Prices, it is easy to see how observers might be tempted to latch on to that mannequin on the loo. This is because Wilkes work is, for want of a better word, difficult. Her installations or tableaux are made up of arranged or altered found objects matched with sculptures, paintings and, sometimes, texts that, taken together, hint at themes and concerns that are never made explicit. They shrug off any attempt by the viewer to decide, with any finality, what a given work is about, offering up and then confounding easy interpretations. Even the broad themes that can be identified in Wilkes’ work - the autobiographical sources, an ongoing examination of femininity, feminism and domestic politics - are decidedly ambiguous.

Prices is no different. Tightly assembled at the far end of the Modern Institute’s main gallery space, the piece revolves around a supermarket checkout, complete with till. On top of the reclaimed unit, there are glass and plastic bowls, each containing the dried-out residue of what might once have been soup, a couple of cups of tea, long since drunk, and a scattering of spilt sugar crystals. On the floor beside the checkout, there are more dirty bowls, and a fish tank - unconvincing in its new role as a museum vitrine - packed with more found objects and sculptural assemblies. There’s a squeezy bottle of honey in there, a battery and some grains of sand in a jam jar, and a rather grubby decorative jug of the sort found for ten pence in a charity shop. Looming over all this is a mannequin, its left hand bearing traces of the food that fills the nearby bowls, and, almost standing apart from the body of the installation but recognisably a part of it, are three more obviously sculptural works. The first of these is a flat board covered in a yellow material that calls to mind Marigold washing up gloves, its surface inscribed with a heart shape, which is marked out by tiny whelk shells, more of which have been scattered around the floor. A pair of squat towers finish the piece, each made of terracotta tiles and with a cross scraped into or painted onto their sides.

And so the difficult business of untangling Wilkes work begins. These objects are bound together, thanks to Wilkes’ unerring knack for arranging discrete elements into a sculptural whole. Sometimes these connections are self-evident but more often, there’s a slippery connection to be made, that only reveals itself after a good long look. There is, for example, a sort of ley line made up of molluscs that links the fish tank vitrine to the mannequin, and the bowls on the floor match those on the checkout, as if their placement is governed by some invented mathematical rule, like the Fibonacci sequence that governs the growth of the shells beside them. The tile stacks occupy the corners of an unfinished oblong, but one is reflected in a mirror affixed to the side of the shop unit, suggesting a second, impossible installation through the looking glass. When it comes to decoding the meaning in Prices, Wilkes again provides obvious clues, only to undermine them. There is an air of domestic drudgery, with the allusions to long supermarket queues and the mealtime frustrations of a young child, allied to the objectification of women implied by that mannequin. It might just be possible to reconcile this with the religious monuments in miniature, and even the scattered whelks, to identify some sort of feminist critique of a patriarchal society, but there is nothing so strident, or coherent, in this piece, just a set of oblique allusions.

Muddying the waters further is Wilkes’ tendency to return to the same artefacts, reworking them with each new installation. The Prices mannequin has a few strands of hair pasted to its scalp, a reminder that, in the past, Wilkes’ shop dummies have worn glossy wigs. The bottle of honey echoes her past use of jars half full of apricot jam, while the printed card that advertises this show bears an image of the yellow board, but with the heart shape marked out in flowers, not shells. And it seems safe to say that the towers of tiles, or the bowls and spoons, will show up, altered and renewed, when Wilkes mounts her Turner Prize show, continuing the long, slowly shifting development of her private language, with its vocabulary of objects and grammar of arrangement.

That language is, in the end, what makes Wilkes work so thoroughly engrossing. There is a sense that there is a key to translating or decoding these unprepossessing objects - arranged just so for purposes known only to Wilkes, and even then, perhaps, only in the moment of arrangement - but one that will be forever out of reach. The result is work that, almost uniquely, satisfies and frustrates in equal measure.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 18th July , 2008.

Kenny Hunter is probably Glasgow’s best known sculptor. Since it was unveiled in 2001, thousands have paused before his Citizen Firefighter, and thousands more pass Girl With a Rucksack in the Gorbals. Hunter is, though, as much a gallery artist as he is a maker of public works, and A Shout In The Street offers a chance to see how the two strands of his practice complement each other, as well as offering hints that the artist is striking out in new directions.

The first of these hints line the walls of Tramway 5, in the form of a series prints. In the same way that Hunter’s sculptural work is, more often than not, about sculpture, his series of prints show a keen awareness of the medium. Uncomfortable with the tendency of artists to make printed works that shadow their main practice, Hunter has embraced the two-dimensional simplicity of the screen print, restricting himself to stark white texts set on a coloured background. The results, which have the look of nightclub posters and album adverts that coat city walls, are pasted directly on to the gallery wall, and, in the spirit of subverting the monumental nature of public art works that informs his sculpture, Hunter has been busy, sneaking about fly-posting his prints in out-of-the-way spots around Glasgow.

Quite what passers-by will make of Hunter’s texts is open to question. He has borrowed lines from the likes of Rousseau, Baudelaire and Marx, eliding and adding to phrases to create rather cryptic slogans. One reads “Everlasting Agitation”, a term lifted from The Communist Manifesto. Another bears the phrase “Things fall apart all over again”, a line adapted from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, an apocalyptic work dense with religious imagery that pits the loss of innocence sired by the first world war against unfettered technological progress. Hunter added that ‘all over again’, wryly commenting on the constant doom-mongering of prophets, highlighting humanity’s constant brinksmanship - “There’s always something,” he says, “whether it’s the Cold War, or the threat of terrorism” - and, too, finding something positive in a gloomy subject by setting his text on a green ground, a hint that destruction is inevitably followed by renewal.

This is dense stuff, and the sculptures on show here, like the prints, hide a complex set of concerns beneath their simple, smooth surfaces. Hunter’s theme is those strange places found at the edges of every city that serve no real purpose. It was on the daily bike commute to his Anniesland studio, a route which takes him along the towpath of the Forth & Clyde canal, that Hunter found inspiration. “These places are free-er than parks,” he explains, “You have couples going for a stroll, people fishing, gangs meeting up at night to drink cider.” What caught his eye, though, was not the humans using the part-urban, part-rural route, but the animals.

In one sculpture a pigeon perches on an oil drum set into a car tyre. Elsewhere, a lazy, nonchalant fox sits atop an asymmetric arrangement of shelving units, a cat stands guard over a block made of a fridge and a microwave. More pigeons roost on a neat pile of televisions, and another is about to take flight, setting off from an abandoned table propped up by a telly.

There’s something comic about these arrangements. The heaps of junk clearly echo the forms of traditional plinths, and Hunter might well be the first artist to utilise what he calls “the architectonic systems of monumental sculpture” to memorialise the pigeon, but the humour of seeing scrappy city fauna given a treatment usually reserved for the great and good makes a serious point. Hunter seems to be asking his audience to consider the ownership of the in-between spaces that have inspired him: we humans might have created them, but they belong, at least in part, to the animals that have colonised them, making good use of our abandoned consumer electronics. Tellingly, the most human work here is a precise cast of a burst bin bag, spilling fag packets and coffee cups onto the gallery floor. These ideas look likely to inform Hunter’s practice for some time to come. Intrigued by the gangs of lads who made the headlines last year for hunting down the newly-urbanised roe deer, Hunter has plans to work on deer sculpture addressing, no doubt with his usual ambiguity, questions that surround the story of animals adapting to a new environment, and humans adapting to hunt them with dogs, mirroring the practices of rural humans of a different class.

In another departure from his usual practice, Hunter adds a layer to his new works by incorporating found objects - the fridge, for example, is real, but the microwave beside it is a cast - offering a sort of internal critique of his own work. “Putting an abject beside a copy, a cast works as an irritant, or a trap,” he says, “It asks questions about the value of the art, and the authorship - is it in the casting of an object, or in the finding of an object?”

Such theoretical questions apply more directly still to a set of sculptures in which Hunter turns away from his usual figurative work, looking instead to the modular Minimalism of Carl Andre or Donald Judd’s regular, repeated forms. Needless to say, Hunter subverts the work of his predecessors with a bit of a wink, undermining this cool aesthetic by stacking up casts of pizza boxes to suggest Modernist tower blocks or neatly arranging casts of cardboard boxes on slatted wooden palettes. It remains to be seen whether these more obviously experimental works will inspire future public sculptures, but Hunter clearly relishes the opportunity to cut loose in a gallery as much as he responds to the strictures of mounting work on the city streets. “If I had to rely on one or the other,” he jokes, “I’d become very bitter.”

Thankfully, he is just the opposite, and this show shows it - there’s something generous about the work on show here, towards the animal subjects and their overlooked environment, and towards the viewer too, thanks to Hunter’s apparently effortless ability to make accessible works shot through with complex, ambiguous ideas about the role of art in society, and explicitly political, but never didactic, thought-provoking where a lesser artist might stoop to propaganda.

A Shout In The Street is at Tramway from July 13 until August 24.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 11th 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.

Last month’s degree show at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone college was dominated by animals, with fur and feathers flying everywhere. Down in Glasgow, a good number of this year’s School of Art graduates seem to have been thinking with their stomachs, using food in sculptures, installations and performances.

One of the highlights of the show is Rose Hughes-Jones’s hanging sculpture, made from a dense tangle of pyramid-shaped bags, impregnated with honey, which slowly drips on to the studio floor, forming a gooey little slick. Off to the side, a perfectly smooth pool of honey is bounded by a ring of fur. Besides being a beautiful, meditative piece, it also makes use of the one sense that artists rarely seek to engage, smell - the scent is so thick you can almost taste it.

Thankfully, this is not yet the case with the work of Gary Bolam. He has sewn strips of desiccated ham together and hung them over a portable plug-hole, presented the liver of an unidentified animal on a rough-hewn plinth, and, in a curiously moving piece, placed a dead fly on a greasy slick of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. A video in which Bolam toys with another dead insect adds a dark note to the skewed humour.

Erik Smith’s work is, by comparison, almost earnest, using snacks as raw materials to craft a sort of edible minimalism: grapes are strung precisely on a wire bisecting his studio space, pizza boxes are neatly stacked in a corner and knobbly cheese-flavoured crisps are piled into towers.

Like Hughes-Jones, Penny Rafferty makes use of honey, but this time in what looks to have been a rather violent performance, which left great smears of black paint and honey, applied with strips of fabric across the studio walls. Helen Tubriddy’s has an air of violence, too, but the results are more controlled, with a tangle of umbrellas and picture frames broken down and reassembled to form a spindly infestation, accompanied by smashed, smeared eggs and balloons filled with yolk.

These last two point to another strong trend this year for immersive, unrestrained installations, which often threaten to escape the bounds of their allotted space. Laura Yuile has fashioned one of the best of these complete environments. In a crazed update to Baroque excess, she has piled up great waves of tape torn from video cassettes, fashioned dense forms from interlocking kirby grips and made lurid collages from the pages of bodybuilding magazines.

Hazel Donaldson takes a more soothing tack with her beach installation. A steep sand dune and projected waves hidden by a gauzy curtain, and visitors are invited to take off their shoes and play. Laura McConnachie’s tiny foil figures, lit by rainbow lamps, at first seem similarly welcoming, but there’s an undercurrent of threat - the shadows cast by the figures have claws. The work of Ronja Svaneborg, whose installation displays an unusual breadth of practice, has a sinister edge, too, matching lightbulbs sheathed in leatherette with a ball of sticking plasters and a chair, its seat reduced to wood shavings.

Carolyn Barrett does not quite fit the tendency toward cohesive constructions, but her sculptures work together to foster an uneasy atmosphere - low, vaguely medical seating suggests some unpleasant procedure, matched by a stool tethered to the wall and buttressed with a steel rod.

Frances Walker bridges the gap between the graduates seeking to overwhelm their audience, and those who work with more economy. Walker has hung long rolls of translucent paper from the ceiling, unfurling across the floor, smeared the walls with a sickly green paste, and wrapped strip lights in DayGlo green paper. From a distance, it seems slight, but up close, it reveals Walker’s gift for combining elements in a way that fosters connections between them.

The same might be said of Caroline Gallagher, who makes taut, restrained sculptures, lifting materials from the builders yard. One piece sees a section of steel mesh, cut, bent and adorned with a tied strip of yellow lacing, another consists of a squat stack of gently striated concrete blocks, a third is nothing more than a metal pole pushing a folded piece of foam into a corner.

John McLaren goes a little further, but again uses restraint in his investigations into everyday materials, connecting a wall-mounted wooden frame to a gently curved metal grille with bungee cords, and weaving frayed shoelaces around a black bamboo stick leant against the wall. Nicola Nisbet’s chosen material is water, liquid and solid - she has made a memento mori in the form of frozen casts of a skull and flowers, and used melting ice and paint to make sculpture-paintings, leaving behind drips of black and white on her studio walls.

Next come the artists whose work is rooted in environments, be they natural, built or social. Cassandra Baron’s work is perhaps the simplest on show, but among the most affecting, consisting of an open entranceway, leading on to a claustrophobic corridor which culminates in the dead end of a sharp corner - a concise investigation of our relationship to architecture and interiors. Ric Warren occupies similar territory, with a large-scale model of three homes merged into one, with a foam-clad flattened section offering comfy seating for visitors. This welcoming sofa of the suburbs is undercut with another model home, this time bobbing half-submerged in the sea of the gallery floor. Natalie Lambert has engaged with the fabric of the Mackintosh building itself, building kinetic columns into a stairwell, which would look like original features, if they weren’t moving.

Keith Allen is rather more boisterous, cobbling together a temporary social club, complete with mildewed camping equipment, a dart board and oche, the latter emblazoned with the crude, mystifying slogan, “Dae ye want to see ma dugs dance?”.

Last, the painters. Louise Chang’s circular collaged works stand out, with their dense layers of paint, as do Richard Oscar Godfrey’s naive paintings of bleeding limbs and masked figures. Claire Paterson’s huge canvases, portraying arcane rituals augmented by cryptic symbols, and Lucy Macdonald’s queasily psychedelic portraits of weeping women are also strong. Those four aside, precious few painters make their mark, and fewer photographers still.

This makes for a decidedly lopsided show, leaning heavily towards sculptural work and installation, but the graduates working in those fields show enough verve more than to make up for the lacklustre performance of some of their peers.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 13th July, 2008.

Jonathan Monk belongs to that group of artists - Christine Borland, Douglas Gordon, David Shrigley et al - who studied together at the Glasgow School of Art and kick-started the city’s then-ailing scene. But, unlike most of his peers, Monk exhibits in Scotland only rarely (it’s been eight years since his last outing) and remains relatively unknown here, despite a sturdy international reputation, as evinced by the major solo show spread across two Paris galleries next month. This imbalance might be down to Monk’s self-imposed exile in Berlin, or the fact that he’s represented by a London gallery, but one thing’s for sure, it’s no reflection on the quality of his work, which is charachterised by a lightness of touch and a witty, sidelong approach to some pretty weighty conceptual concerns.

That wit, or cheek, is made clear from the off at Tramway, where Monk is pretending to present two shows, one titled Something no less important than Nothing, the other dubbed Nothing no less important than Something. The pair of exhibits are, in fact, one and the same, with visitors assigned a title according to the invitation card they receive, or left to pick whichever title they find best fits the show before them.

The first work on show, Two Correlated Rotations, is another comic double act. A small projector, kitted out with a complex system that allows the spooled film to loop indefinitely, shows a film of itself being prepared to show a film loop.

But, before anyone has the chance to let out an exasperated sigh at this too clever by half conceptual jiggery-pokery, Monk presents Golden Lights Displaying Your Name. For this new work, the artist has coated the tram tracks set into the floor of Tramway 2 with gold leaf, in the hope that visitors will pick up flecks of metal on their shoes, and tramp the precious material around the city. Aside from being starkly beautiful, the work poetically invokes the building’s former purpose, and, with restraint, nods to the adage that art only truly comes into being when experienced by an audience.

Monk plays with this idea throughout this show. There are posters to be taken away, multiple mirrors in which visitors can see their fractured reflection, and directly interactive works.

These are not, thankfully, ‘interactive’ in the style of those displays that ruin many a museum, but thoughtful invitations to viewers to become actors, fellow artists even, in Monk’s work.

Another Fine Mess Repeated (out of sync) is a small projection of Laurel & Hardy engaged in a shin-kicking, trouser-dropping slapstick routine, matched with a turntable, speaker system and small collection of decidedly naff records, so that visitors to the gallery can select their own soundtrack. Change is a simple installation of an overhead projector and grey cloth screen. On top of the projector is a heap of coins, and a note tell visitors that they are ‘encouraged to change/alter the piece, adding and subtracting if required’. Gallery goers are a conservative bunch, it seems: a few coppers have been swapped for cents, of the dollar and Euro variety, and, at the time of writing, the coins have been shaped into a smiley face.

In the centre of the room, there’s an installation consisting of a video screen showing footage of famous drummers bashing away and, facing the other way, a drum kit on which visitors are encouraged to have a go, providing sound to match the silent images. While progressive rocker Carl Palmer bashes away noiselessly on the screen behind me, I manage to tap out a rather ineffectual 4/4 rhythm embellished with a few mistimed cymbal splashes, until the bored glances of the gallery attendants remind me that I lack both confidence and musical ability. It’s a depressing moment, but for other visitors with more skill and chutzpah, the installation will be transformed, perhaps into a moment of communion with the rock gods, or, more prosaically, a chance to show off.

Elsewhere, Monk explores the history of contemporary art, his own work included. Two paintings mounted high on the wall - Jackson Pollock-style abstract drip jobs - have been rescued from the Tramway’s stores, where they have lain since Monk first exhibited them here in 1997. On the opposite wall, there is a framed poster for a 1987 Martin Kippenberger show, itself bearing an image appropriated from a clothing catalogue.

This is a complex show, with Monk attempting to site his practice in an art-historical context, question the position of the artist with regard to his audience, and engage directly with the exhibition space he finds himself in, not just physically, but with regard to his history in it. In other, lesser hands, that set of concerns could easily lead to a terribly dry, overly academic show, but Monk approaches the serious business of making art with a wink and a raised eyebrow. He’s obviously having fun, and you will too.

Something No Less Important Than Nothing/Nothing No Less Important Than Something is at Tramway, Glasgow until 18th May.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday, May 2nd, 2008.

In it’s first year as a grown-up biennial, Glasgow international has lost none of the energy of its original incarnation as the underground upstart off-shoot of the staid annual Art Fair. This is mostly thanks to the glut of off-site projects, shows that have escaped the confines of the city’s galleries and set up shop in unusual venues, from the hushed halls of the Mitchell Library to private homes and near-derelict abandoned buildings.

The fun begins in the West End, at Douglas Gordon’s townhouse on Woodlands Terrace, which plays host to a series of video works by Adel Abdessemed. At first glance, Abdessemed’s documented actions can seem a little slight, but the best of them offer arresting images that linger in the memory. Also Sprach Allah sees the artist engaged in a peculiar ritual, hurled repeatedly into the air from a blanket, gamely attempting to write the titular phrase on a carpet nailed to the ceiling. In Helikoptère, Abdessemed employs an even more extreme barrier to creation, trying to draw while suspended by his ankles from a helicopter in flight.

Down the hill at the Mitchell, Calum Stirling’s use of video couldn’t be more different. His complex, engrossing installation Rostra Plaza consist of a huge canopy sheltering a screen which shows slowly shifting scenes in extreme close-up. The source of this surveillance footage is a set of five curious little dioramas mounted on rotating platforms, spied on by miniature cameras which turn their attention to particular scenes, seemingly at random. The vignettes range from arrangements of modernist architectural models to dinky maquettes of artworks, and the result is distinctly Ballardian, with Stirling creating an urban landscape in miniature in order to observe its mysteries.

Just off Sauchiehall Street, the basement of the State Bar plays host to group show A Stranger Home. Rather than using the room to mount an exhibit, the eight young artists here, working under the guidance of curator Alhena Katsof, have carefully insinuated their work into the fabric of the space. Stina Wirfelt’s brass plaque demands that visitors watch the pub telly, and consider whatever programme they might see a work of art. Baldvin Ringsted has coated various objects - a chair, a bottle of whisky, some books - in glamorous aluminium. Grier Edmonson’s quietly altered photographs line the walls, with subtle etching and painting on the glass of their frames. Best of all is Kevin Pollock’s lovingly hand-crafted, fully functional urinal, carved from MDF and burnished to a high sheen. It’s a neat, witty tribute to Duchamp’s upended Fountain, this, a complete reversal of the readymade, and - thanks to its position in the gent’s loo - one of the best evocations of the Gi’s loose ‘public/private’ theme to be found in the city.

Across town, there’s a cluster of shows between Trongate and the Saltmarket.

On Osbourne Street, Wilhelm Sasnal has taken over a dusty, claustrophobic shop basement to screen his specially commissioned short film, a decidedly bleak piece in which Polish band 19 Wiosen perform The Other Church, a hymn to the memory of murdered student Angelika Kluk. The group are joined by a naked woman who mouths the song’s lyrics, at times defiantly, but for the most part she is huddled in the corner of a dilapidated room, very much like the one in which the film is screened. That might sound exploitative, but this powerful piece of cinema is nothing of the sort, offering a moving tribute to Kluk, underpinned with barely repressed anger at her fate.

Around the corner, the proposed installation at the Bath House by Turner Prize-winner Simon Starling has run into some trouble. At the final stages, Starling’s attempt to fashion sculptural forms from the surface of silver gelatin photographic prints, using hi-tech 3-D imaging techniques, was beset by technical difficulties, but will make it’s delayed debut before the festival ends. In the meantime, the artist is showing Autoxylopyrocycloboros, a slideshow documenting his voyage across Loch Long in a wooden steamboat, its engine fuelled with wood cut from the boat’s hull as it sailed, an oddly elegiac reworking of slapstick cartoon violence that nods to the tension between the loch-side peace camp and the nuclear naval base at Faslane.

On the Saltmarket, Dani Marti and Katri Walker have risen to the challenge of effectively presenting video work, cramming a disused shop with their films, with work projected on big screens, hidden away in cupboards and stuffed into box rooms. The result is a little overwhelming, as pieces compete for attention, flickering away in peripheral vision, but allow your gaze to settle and you’re rewarded with thoughtful, innovative video portraits from both artists. Marti’s David casts an unflinching eye on a young homeless man, slipping in and out of consciousness, and hanging on to his begging cup for dear life. Walker’s Señor Celestino on the Edge of Heaven is another highlight, offering a glimpse into the world of the 80-year-old Celestino and the open air church he has carved into the rocks near his home.

Kalup Linzy’s video work at Washington Garcia’s temporary space in a retail unit on the Trongate is less satisfying. The New York artist is a low budget auteur, writing, directing and starring in scrappy little films that pastiche the high melodrama of daytime soap operas and telenovellas, poking fun at the art world in the process, and, too, examining harder issues, from race to queer identity. Linzy is a gifted comic - his turn, in thrift shop drag, as a struggling, dimwitted artist is laugh-out-loud funny - but as these films unfold, they edge perilously close to becoming that which they parody.

Add to all this activity events like The Secret Agent, Raydale Dower and Judd Brucke’s mixture of street performance and psychogeographic dérive, or the stramash of art, music and conversation at The Local, a temporary artist-designed pub at the SWG3 Studios in Finnieston, and Glasgow international begins to look less like a festival in the ordinary sense, and more like a new thread woven into the city’s cultural fabric. It’s a shame we have to wait two years until the next one.

The off-site shows of Glasgow international run until 27 April, 2008.

This review was first published in The Herald on April 18th, 2008.

It’s been three years since Jim Lambie made an appearance in Glasgow, and it’s fitting that Forever Changes, his return to home ground, is at the heart of the Glasgow international festival of visual art. It was Lambie, alongside his fellow graduates of the Glasgow School of Art, who revitalised the city’s scene, and granted Glasgow an ongoing international reputation as a hub for contemporary art in Europe. Without that crop of artists and their work, dubbed ‘the Glasgow miracle’ by prominent curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, it seems safe to say that a festival on the scale of the Gi would not exist.

Typically, Lambie has chosen to kick off the festival with a blast. His first, arguably belated, show at the Gallery of Modern Art opens with Get Back, a brick wall placed, confrontationally, a few short feet from the entrance to the exhibition space. As an introduction to the exhibit, it works well, slapping visitors in the face with a burst of Lambie’s trademark charity shop psychedelia. The bricks are formed by fabrics torn from old dresses, with garish floral patterns clashing with outsize houndstooth checks, eye-popping geometrics and plain fields of itchy polyester colour. As if that wasn’t a sufficient shock to the visual cortex, the grouting between the bricks is particularly queasy shade of DayGlo pink, and the wall has landed on two pairs of patent leather training shoes.

It’s a defiantly ugly piece of work, and one that conjures up a skew-whiff retelling of The Wizard of Oz, with Lambie dismissing the Yellow Brick Road as overly monochrome and too-obviously horizontal, and recasting the Wicked Witch of the East and her ruby slippers as a Glasgow scally, out on the town on a Friday night. While I doubt Lambie had Oz in mind as he gathered together the familiar detritus he utilises in his sculptural work, it also fits the underlying theme of the show, which hints at travel to unknown lands, and the navigation of treacherous seas.

This unlikely leitmotif is set in motion by The Strokes, a new vinyl tape floor work in the long-running Zobop series. Unlike the best known incarnations of the Lambie’s floors, which see brightly coloured lines of tape tracing the contours of the room in which they are installed, this one is made of interlocking curves in black and white. This is good old fashioned Op art, with the integrity and stability of the floor upset by a curious visual effect, a strobing ebb and flow that flickers in peripheral vision, an illusion of waves in motion.

Bobbing in the black and white sea are eight cubes of concrete. Inside each block is a collection of long players, plucked at random from the bargain bins of charity shops. But, before they can float onto the shores of some imagined South Sea island and spark a new Cargo Cult, the fossilised discs will have to make it past what is arguably the best work on show here, Seven And Seven Is or Sunshine Bathed the Golden Glow.

In the form of a cresting wave, this teetering sculptural assembly is made of wooden chairs, the sort you’d find around the average pub table, each one precisely bisected, painted in high-gloss pastels, and then bolted together willy-nilly. The structure is festooned with cheap handbags, their faux-leather surfaces obscured by shards of smashed mirror, which reflect the striped floor below, and the sickly shades of the chair parts from which they hang.

This is what you might call classic Lambie: everyday objects of little value have been transformed into something garish, glorious, and gloriously meaningless, an act of transformation made with an absolute certainty, with objects snatched from the artist’s surroundings and used as pure sculptural material.

So far, so good, but at the edges of the room, this show starts to unravel. Head Shadow is pleasing enough. The squat little construction calls to mind the off-shore interzone of the Principality of Sealand, and is made of a cheap holdall resting on a dartboard, resting in turn on a set of spray cans, which disgorged their loads of paint across the floor at the moment Lambie completed the sculpture - a none-too-subtle reminder that he is no studio-bound conceptualist, but an active sculptor who works in the spaces given over to him.

Next comes The Spell, a forgettable wall-mounted cube fashioned from gilded sections of standard door panels, then, on the other side of the space, Warm Leatherette, which sees a bowling ball hidden inside ten leather jacket sleeves, sewn together to form, following the seafaring theme, something akin to a deep sea polyp, or unexploded mine. Both are completely overshadowed by Seven and Seven Is…, and feel forced, as if Lambie is filling space, adding unnecessary adjuncts to the main business that fills the central strip of the GoMA’s main hall.

Between these two, propped against a pillar, rests A-side Forever Changes B-side The Gate. The lengthy title is a rather weak joke. The B-side, facing out into the room, shows a redacted image of three men - presumably members of Love, Arthur Lee’s psyche rock outfit, whose song titles Lambie has lifted for various pieces in this show, and for the show title itself - framed with cutout flowers. The B-side is, well, a gate, of the garden variety, painted bright red. Aside from the over-literal gag, the work falls flat thanks to the overly explicit musical reference. Lambie has been pegged as a latter-day Kandinsky by some, a sort of sculptor of music, but has always argued, convincingly, that, just as his use of easily-recognised materials is largely incidental to the finished work, so the co-opting of titles from the hip end of the pop canon signifies nothing more than the fact that he is surrounded by music, and naturally looks to familiar texts to fashion the textual elements of his works. By reconfiguring the 7” single, complete with carefully constructed A-side and an afterthought of a B-side, Lambie’s claims begin to look a little disingenuous, and, more importantly, this work is stripped of the impenetrable mystery of its betters.

Forever Changes is an awkward, off-kilter show. The loose, suggestive nautical theme provides a context that binds the best work together, supported by the shifting floor work that Lambie uses to mark his territory, and the best pieces - the ugly wall, the wave of chairs, the concrete blocks - sit well together, engaged in a bright, chaotic conversation. It is a shame that Lambie felt the need to go further, lessening the impact of the pieces at the heart of his show with the second-tier efforts that surround them.

Jim Lambie: Forever Changes is at GoMA, Glasgow until September 29th.

This review was first published in The Herald on April 11th, 2008.

On a windy Saturday morning last June, Didier Pasquette stepped off the roof of a tower block at Red Road in the North of Glasgow on to a high wire some ninety metres above the ground, and began to walk towards his target, the next block of flats on the estate.

With a long pole to aid his balance, but none of the safeguards you might expect - no net to catch him, no harness to hold him - Pasquette took tentative, oddly graceful steps into the void between the two buildings, watched by a small band of local residents.

The skywalker wasn’t taking this unconventional stroll to add to his list of record-breaking tightrope stunts - in the past he’s crossed the Thames, 30 metres above the flowing river, and walked the length of the pitch at the Stade de France in Paris - but at the behest of artist Catherine Yass.

For Yass, Pasquette’s daredevil passage between the towers of Petershill Drive marked the realisation of a work she has spent years developing, revising and bringing into being.

‘I first had the idea for this work, or some kind high wire work, in 2002,’ she explains, ‘but I never really thought it would be possible. So, for a long time, it was a dream about a dream: I was dreaming about this walk through the air, which is something people do dream about, and is a wonderful, fantastical thought.’

That flight of fancy has come to fruition in the form of High Wire, a four screen video piece recording Pasquette’s walk with accompanying photographs, which premiered last night at the CCA, a centrepiece of the Glasgow International festival of visual art.

But why film a tightrope walk, and why film it here in Glasgow?

High Wire is the latest in a strand of lens-based works by Yass that focus on the built environment. All deceptively simple, each one of these brief filmed pieces is a close examination of a single site, with roots in Yass’ ongoing investigation into the real-world outcomes of Utopian idealism, often tempered by personal concerns. For the 2002 piece Descent, which earned Yass a Turner Prize nomination, the artist slowly lowered a crane-mounted camera through a fog-bound Canary Wharf construction site. Wall traced the contours of the barrier between Israel and Palestine in unforgiving close-up, and, most recently, Yass trained her lens on the passage of a ship through the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river, an engineering marvel that displaced millions of Chinese citizens, for Lock.

‘I’m looking for concrete manifestations in the world for things that are very much intangible,’ Yass explains, ‘You’d hardly say that Canary Wharf was built from some great Utopian ideal, but it was built on an ideal of capitalism, the wall in Israel was built as a result of a movement which had once been idealist, and in China at the moment there is this great celebration of capital, and that’s become their Utopia, as far as I understand it.’

The meditative, almost elegiac quality of Yass’ film installations masks, then, a distinctly ambivalent view of the structures she films. They are also more than dry essays on the relationship between man and his surroundings. ‘I wouldn’t have done any of them if there wasn’t a strong personal element,’ Yass admits, ‘Wall, for example, had a lot to do with thinking about how your own mind can get blocked up, how you can create barriers in your own mind, and not think imaginatively around the corners of things.’

These two sources of inspiration - the public and socio-political matched with the private and personal - dovetail neatly in High Wire, with the fantasy of walking in the air allied to what Yass calls the ‘social dreams’ expressed in the high-rise architecture of the Red Road development. ‘I was thinking about dreams and fantasies and what happens when we try to put them into reality,’ she says, ‘In this case, that was with respect to Modernism and Modernist architecture - these towers were maybe built with a sense of Utopia, and later people began to see the problems with them - and the dream of walking through the air. Then there’s the relationship between that dream which might be very personal, and a social dream.’

For those who lack a head for heights, viewing High Wire might well be less a dream, more a nightmare. The four projected loops - three track Pasquette’s progress from different angles, the fourth is a view from the skywalker’s head-mounted camera - combine to form a vertiginous vista that is little short of terrifying.

Watching it on a small computer monitor in Yass’ London studio, I found myself hanging on to the arms of my chair as if my life, or Pasquette’s, depended on it - blown up to three by four metre projections, High Wire ought really to come with a health warning.

And then, well, there’s a twist. Something happens, something which Yass has asked me not to reveal, preferring that visitors to the installation find out for themselves. Suffice it to say that, while Pasquette’s walk in the sky did not - thank goodness - end in tragedy, nor was it an unqualified success. ‘My heart,’ says Yass of this unexpected turn of events, ‘was in my mouth.’

This unforeseen incident flags up something of a shift in Yass’ practice. For, while High Rise follows the precedent set by earlier pieces in terms of its central themes, it is the first time the artist has added a human actor to her work; where before her moving cameras were always precisely constrained, attached to cranes, tracks, and, in one case, a remote control aeroplane.

‘In all of these works, the camera has become the eye, and in that respect this one is no different,’ Yass says, ‘But what happened when we actually did it - what made it interesting in the end, what made it the project what it is - happened because the camera was on a person and not a machine.’

That human element resurfaces in the photographs that complete the High Wire installation. Yass has enlarged negative prints of the Red Road blocks and mounted them on light boxes, having painstakingly scratched the surface of her original negatives, marking out the lines of the high wire rope. As with the restraint shown in the filmed work, an apparently simple gesture stands in for a densely layered set of concerns.

‘If you’re printing a negative,’ Yass says, ‘It always has the potential to become something other than itself. It’s on the way somewhere, rather than being something very final. We think of photography as indexically recording something, but you can think of it as a kind of drawing - Fox Talbot called photography the ‘pencil of nature’ - so I was interested in linking drawing and photography, and was thinking about architects plans, where again we have that transformation from one thing to another.’

In the end, transformation might be the key to understanding the work of Catherine Yass: she has transformed a private dream into a public spectacle, and transformed the spectacle into a work that, ultimately, seeks to transform our understanding of the structures that surround us.

This feature was first published in The Herald in March , 2008.

Torsten Lauschmann is a tricky artist to pin down. He’s a photographer, painter, sculptor and digital artist. He’s performed with various Glasgow bands, busked around Europe with a solar-powered laptop under the name Slender Whiteman, published a web magazine, Egoburger, and authored audiovisual editing software. Lauschmann is also something of a prankster, posing as Professor Hans Peter Niesward of the Institute of Gravitational Physics he caused a stir online with World Jump Day, a bid to halt global warming with a precisely co-ordinated worldwide leap, and recently alarmed a Glasgow audience expecting a conventional performance by baking bread, while, inexplicably, dressed up as a caveman.

His latest solo outing is introduced with a lengthy quote from Dadaist Francis Picabia. ‘What I like,’ Picabia wrote in an excitable anti-classicist broadside of 1923, ‘is to invent, to imagine, to make myself a new man every moment, then to forget him, forget everything. We should be equipped with a special eraser, gradually effacing our works and the memory of them’.

It’s a quotation that might well be meant to serve as a manifesto for Lauschmann’s restless cross-media practice, his tendency to relentlessly revise and reinvent his work. But it also points to the problem with this admirably polymathic, unbounded approach to making art, and the problem with this show: it is rather patchy.

The exhibit opens with Quality (money chord), a vintage electronic organ tipped over and harshly lit from above, casting a sharp shadow onto which is projected a busy, flowing animated sequence made up of of numbers and symbols, a pseudo-scientific attempt, perhaps, to define that ‘money chord’ - musician’s slang for the perfect pop progression - leaking out of the old organ. Next comes Pandora’s Ball, another video projection that plays tricks on the viewer. The titular ball is still, and behind it a constantly shifting oblong of projected video jerks across the wall, showing dancing feet, lifted from an unidentified song and dance number. Like the impossibly precise projection of numbers into shadow in the piece beside it, Pandora’s Ball has visitors peering, puzzled, in a bid to understand its mechanics: the ball, it turns out, is not quite there, a sculptural wall drawing, fleshed out with a projected surface that, somehow, obscures the moving footage of feet.

These projected puzzles are followed by a simple sculpture, Crystal Swingball, which is exactly that: a pint-sized version of the garden game, hastily assembled on a base made of dollops of greasy oil paint from a bamboo stick, a bit of string and the titular crystal. It doesn’t look much fun to play with, though - one swing, and the sharp-edged crystal would have your eye out.

This sort of darkly humorous reversal appears again in Fear Among Scientists, for my money, the best piece here, and certainly the funniest. Numbers crudely carved out of plywood set out the sum 3 - 1 = 2. But look closely, and Lauschmann has painted in the shadows the numbers cast, leaving the total intact, but introducing an impossible system of arithmetic. According to the shadow numbers, 8 + 7 = 2.

Two nearby photographs are similarly perverse. The Curtain (13 Seconds) and The Curtain (27 Seconds) are still photographs of an earlier work, The Curtain, a two-dimensional but distinctly sculptural video work that saw stripes of muted colours slowly shifting across a large, wide screen, suggesting drapes blowing in a breeze, the movement of each stripe suggested by the movement of its neighbour, according to the the algorithms of mathematician John Horton Conway’s cellular automaton, the Game of Life. Is this, like the shadowy equation, a joke? Preserving an arbitrary moment in the progression of a piece that rests on time and movement, certainly seems an odd tactic.

Finally, with related works set beside the entrance and exit of GOMA’s corridor-like upstairs exhibition space, Lauschmann changes tack again, bookending his show with images of his partner, fellow artist Cathy Wilkes, and of their son.

Lauschmann has looked to his nearest and dearest before. Mother And Child, a loving ‘digital portrait’ of his family fast asleep, was a rich, layered piece of work, at once a contemporary reworking of religious iconography, and a private, intimate moment exposed to the world, both generous and discomforting, casting the viewer as voyeur. It was, too, a new kind of portrait, a video loop projected onto a wall drawing, its painterly qualities undermined by the occasional stirrings of the sleeping pair.

Compared to a piece like Mother And Child, the Polaroid photographs gathered here seem a little slight. The first is a simple portrait of a slightly distracted Wilkes, gazing off into the middle distance. The four images that close the show - one showing Lauschmann’s son playing with his toy lamb, another is of the boy mucking about, wrapping himself in the living room curtains, a third snap sees a pair of toy horses discarded on the floor, while the fourth image documents pencil lines on a wall, marking the growing child’s height - might well have formed a quiet, oblique portrait of the artist’s, his son, their relationship and life at home, but Lauschmann takes, arguably, a step too far, training twin spotlights on the photographs, positioned so that their light is cast in the shape of a heart. It’s a mawkish, sentimental moment. Or terribly sweet. Either way, it seems typical of Lauschmann to be exploring themes - fatherhood, family, love - that are rarely found in the contemporary art gallery. It also casts Crystal Swingball in a new light, recasting it as a thoughtful piece about paternal responsibility and anxiety, rather than a one-note joke. (Lauschmann counsels against such interpretetation, it should be said, warning in a note accompanying the exhibition that the meaning of his work ‘will disappear every time one asks, “But what is it about?”’)

It is perhaps unfair to complain when an artist like Lauschmann, who very deliberately casts his artist’s net wide, produces a show that flits from theme to theme. But this is less a show than a Lauschmann sampler - unlike his last, cohesive solo exhibit at Mary Mary, or the wonderful, immersive installation, Suburbia in 3D: Chasing butterflies, mounted at Transmission in 2004 - and it seems a shame that the works here, whether focussed on the family, geeky gags, or inventive fusions of projected video, sculpture and drawing, have been set up to fight each other for the viewer’s attention.

This review was first published in The Herald on March 28th, 2008.

The trend for artists using unconventional, mostly domestic spaces as temporary galleries has long been a part of the Glasgow art scene. From Cathy Wilkes gallery, Dalriada, set up in her council flat, to the long-running, now defunct Switchspace project run by Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated, which began life in Dallas’ living room, to the first incarnation of Mary Mary gallery, these projects were born of economic necessity, and a desire by emerging artists and curators to get their work out into the public eye, sidestepping the established exhibition system.

Now, with a collaboration between Katrina Brown, director of new arts organisation the Common Guild, and artist Douglas Gordon, the established - I hesitate to use the word ‘establishment’ - are getting in on the act. Always Begin By Degrees takes its title from a piece by Roni Horn, which itself quotes from Emily Dickinson. Horn’s work, which sets the line in aluminium, also sets the tone: language, communication and conversations are everywhere. Philip Parreno presents a pair of cartoonish speech bubbles, floating silently. Adel Abdessemed acts as an angry censor in his brief video loop, Talk Is Cheap, which sees a jackbooted foot stomping repeatedly on a microphone, replacing speech with a violent staccato rhythm. Pavel Büchler’s Bengal Rose consists of a found tube of paint containing the titular colour, and described as a replacement ‘for the last rose cut in my garden on the last sunny day of the Autumn’, a physical analogue for Juliet’s thorny meditation on the nature of naming.

Anna Gaskell’s film Eraser sees a group of schoolgirls recounting a story that begins with the mundane - a mother hurrying to get her daughter to church on time - and ends in implied tragedy, with the daughter in a car-crash coma, hearing the voices of everyone but her mother. Each girl filters the tale through her memory of events, adding details of her own, taking personal routes to the grim denouement, making it clear that Gaskell is as interested in the mechanics of memory and storytelling, and the shared language of a group, as she is in the tale being told.

As well as the works on show, Always Begin By Degrees offers visitors the chance to read books in Gordon’s library, a room designed by Andrew Miller, who has made a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of shelving backed with bright flashes of colour, and provided a reading table.

A monitor set on the table shows Marcel Marcel Broodthaers’ 1972 Speakers’ Corner Performance, which sees the Belgian conceptualist chalk up instructions on a child’s blackboard. ‘Silence’, he writes, then ‘Silence, please’, as his Hyde Park audience chat, heckle and, in the case of one older woman, sing. Finally, Broodthaers acknowledges the spectators, writing ‘You are artists’ on his board. It’s a well placed piece, filling the usual hush of a library with fuzzy noise, and raising questions about the visitor’s role in the room, an artist-designed space holding Gordon’s collection of twinned books, a work in itself.

There are also two sofas in the building, but not explicitly in the show, by Franz West, accompanied by a text by Gordon which reads ‘Every time you think of me,’, a sentence completed on the wall opposite, ‘we die.’ West, born and based in Vienna, and his sofas call to mind Freudian talking cures, Gordon adds the spark for a distinctly dark, soul-baring conversation.

These uncredited works, the description of library designer Miller as an artist in residence, and the fact that details of each work are lightly sketched on the walls in pencil show a keen curatorial engagement with the status of the space, at once a gallery and a home. Cerith Wyn Evans has picked up on this facet of the show with Untitled (Threshold), a length of rope barring entry to the upper floors of the building, adorned with Tibetan prayer bells, a pairing which invites visitors to reconsider their surroundings with a nod to museum-like formality, in turn undermined by the joke of turning aids to meditation into a primitive alarm system.

This is how group shows should be done: there’s no sign of an overweening theme, and so no attempt to set up awkward interconnections between disparate artists. Instead, visitors are free to eavesdrop on the quiet conversations between works on show. It is, too, I suspect, a manifesto of sorts for the future activities of the Common Guild, an organisation with an international outlook, but rooted firmly in Glasgow, and one that, like this opening exhibition, sets out to foster an open conversation, about art in the city, between artists, curators and audiences alike.

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

Try To Do Things We Can All Understand, London-based artist EJ Major’s first solo exhibit, takes its title from the first work on show, a wall of monitors showing stills from 29 films accompanied by matching lines of dialogue, each displayed at random.

At first, it is hard not to treat the piece as a sort of quick-fire film quiz, racking one’s brains to identify a given still or quote, but as images and texts fade into one another the fragments begin to form a loose narrative.

A glimpse of Bette Davis sitting in the back of a car, her eyes downcast, calls up the breakdown of the Hollywood star system and Davis’ fiery feud with Joan Crawford. Robert Redford, looking especially craggy beside a roaring camp fire, points to the double standard that allows male actors to play romantic leads into their 70s while their female counterparts struggle to find a part, a thought reinforced by the appearance of exceptions to the rule, Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver. When Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette pop up, silently mouthing Tarantino’s clever-clever bon mots from True Romance, Hans Zimmer’s tinkly reworking of Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica seems to fill the gallery. More generically, passionate kisses and violent tempers, steely gazes and weeping women, hove into view, flagging up cinematic clichés and stock shots, the trite tactics directors fall back on to elicit an almost conditioned response in their audience.

These commonplaces aside, each viewer will bring their own set of memories and associations, reading these fleeting, randomised images to write their own, personal story, just as Major’s reasons for choosing these particular scenes from these particular films are unknown, rooted in her own private associations.

The snippets of dialogue work in parallel to the images, and, with the odd exception - Marylin Monroe’s memorable cry of ‘You’re three dear sweet dead men!’ in John Huston’s The Misfits - are hard to place. Free of specific associations, these brief, often prosaic texts allow a more specific, though inevitably fractured, narrative to reveal itself, with a question, ‘Why are you doing this?’, answered cryptically, ‘She looks very small.’

Taken together, the gobbets of dialogue and freeze-framed images form a densely woven work, concerned with the viewer’s response, that unavoidable urge to impose an ordered narrative on this disordered presentation of Major’s filmic autobiography, a taught essay on the tension between text and image in the language of cinema, and a meditation on the power of shared symbolism.

Autobiography, text and image underpin the most recent work on show, From A Distance, too. This time, the text is William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness novel As I Lay Dying, which Major read and annotated at 17, an age at which she periodically lost the ability to speak, while the images are culled from the pages of Brownie annuals, and other sources less suitable for children. Major matches her teenage underlinings, many of which reflect her personal, traumatic, relationship with language at the time, to the sanitised vision of girlhood provided by the comic strips. The result is a rather discomforting, if sometimes hilarious, psychosexual drama. The single word ‘steer’ is accompanied by a collaged image of a Girl Guide riding a flying penis, repeated instances of the word ‘laughing’ on a page are accompanied by line drawings of a lonely girl, sitting apart from he peers, and the phrase ‘it talks’ is illustrated with an exasperated mother and glum daughter. Some of these juxtapositions are, I think, made with a wink, but the public, adult revising of private, juvenile preoccupations, the remaking of a text already remade in the earlier act of annotation, and the implied critique of the gender roles reinforced in children’s literature combine to form a work that, like Try To Do Things We All Can Understand, offers a layered examination of language, shared elements of popular culture and the divide between the public and the private.

This divide is explored more explicitly still in Marie Claire RIP. Twelve self-portraits show Major, first as a fresh-faced, peppy teen, ending up hollow-cheeked, battered, bruised and wearing filthy clothes. The series is based on an article in the titular magazine which featured mug-shots of an anonymous woman, taken over a fourteen-year period, to illustrate the effects of heroin addiction. This is powerful stuff, and, once again, Major uses relatively simple tactics to expose a broad range of concerns. The series is at once a memorial to the unknown woman and a coruscating attack, on both the assumption that her deteriorating appearance is the most important aspect of this woman’s addiction, and the magazine’s intrusive use of the images, using the mug-shots to turn a private life into public property. It is, too, a nuanced look at the nature of photography, questioning assumptions of documentary truth, and blurring the boundaries between the portrait and the self-portrait.

After this, the mail art project Love is… comes as something of a relief. In 2004, Major took screenshots of every second of Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris, printed postcards of each image and distributed all 7,000 of them, accompanied by a note asking recipients to return the card along with their thoughts on the concept of love. The volume and range of responses is remarkable. A five year old girl defined love as ‘Mum and Dad’, an elderly lady returned the card unused, a polite note explaining that, at 85, she had no use for Major’s services. Predictably, there are several exasperated requests that Major ‘get a life’ (from people who nonetheless took the trouble to post the card), musings trite enough to grace a greetings card, and a slew of popular song lyrics.

This is an assured show, then, one that, across our distinct bodies of work deftly marries together musings on the consumption and disruption of popular culture, gender and identity by making the private public.

This review was first published in The Herald in April 2008.

For her first solo show in Scotland, the Norwegian, Glasgow-educated sculptor Camilla Low has brought together existing works with a series of new pieces to craft a distinctly calm and collected display, one that matches a studied examination of formal possibilities with a strong sense of place.

The new works are fashioned from concrete cubes, crafted on site from local materials, and a match for the industrial architecture of the Dundee Contemporary Arts’ exhibition spaces. These cubes are piled and stacked, with the occasional surface painted smooth, in hues chosen from a limited palette of mostly primary colours. Resting on the arrangements of blocks are similarly precise rectilinear wooden forms: squares and oblongs defined in space and, again, treated with a high-gloss, brightly-coloured coating that denies their rough, organic origins.

Low is working in a tradition here - the modular minimalism of Sol LeWitt springs to mind, and there are echoes of Malevich’s pared-down suprematism - but she is no copyist, conveying, instead, a deep understanding of the potential of simple forms to interact with each other and the space around them. In a rather neat curatorial trick, Low’s new works stand free on the gallery floor, while earlier works, many of which lean on walls for support or are suspended from the ceiling, gather around, as if looking fondly on their progeny. And those earlier pieces are less polished, less repetitive. Diva is a collection of unpainted wooden blocks, pulled up off the floor by a cord, which Sister sees a busy cluster of orange Perspex triangles pierced by a metal rod. Best of them all is White Steel, a bent and bashed sheet of metal that has been treated to a glamorous sheen.

If the retrospective element of the show provides variety, it is the formal exploration through repetition and rearrangement of the new elements that gives the show its strength. At first sight, so many similar works might appear dull, but walk among them and the restraint that characterises Low’s recent practice offers an almost meditative experience, a set of forms pushed to their limits.

Back in Glasgow, Craig Mulholland is showing no signs of restraint, but proving once again that he is the most prolific polymath working in the city today. His new show is spread across two venues - the Glasgow School of Art and Sorcha Dallas - filling both to the gunnels, and is further fleshed out with a short digital film. Mulholland’s concerns are similarly broad, resting on the idea information in its many forms, from data storage to surveillance, encryption to virtual realities and the social and political impact of information technologies.

The Art School’s Mackintosh Gallery has been infested with an army of decidedly sinister tripods. Some bear the weight of rough-hewn pewter globes, others carry gobbets of dense, rubbery material, their rounded surfaces bearing traces of tightly-wound string, others still serve as easels, displaying framed works, “paintings” made of etched metal and polycarbonate.

More of these metal paintings - nigh on 20 of them - adorn the walls, ranging from finicky, precise geometrics, to wild splatters. There is something in the arrangement of the tripods that suggests a transmission and reception of data, as if, when unobserved, they might twitch into life, their loads to be collected, examined and interpreted, like physical manifestations of the coded robots that crawl the web, reporting their findings back to search engines.

On the other side of the room, the silver and black of the tripods and etched works give way to white, with a group of 16 framed works made of pegboard. Arranged in a towering pyramid foundation, the first of them is dense, with layers of board piled up and torn away, and the last is barely there, with traces of board at its edges, and holes drilled directly into the gallery wall. If the grouping of the tripods and metal works hints at data in transit, the pegboard pieces suggest data loss, forming a eulogy to a failing hard drive, its stored information edging away bit by bit, byte by byte.

Across town at Sorcha Dallas, there are more metal works, this time edging away from the mathematical abstractions of their peers at the School of Art to hint at the representation of library shelves or half-broken satellites in orbit. In the centre of the first exhibition space, a found metal globe has been etched with lines of latitude and longitude, and an impossible geography of intersecting curves. Next door, there is an immersive five-screen video installation, Rising Resistance, in which images from the two exhibitions flow around the room.

In the past, when Mulholland has mounted sprawling shows like this - most notable Plastic Casino in 2004 - there was a sense that he was an artist in need of an editor: someone who would lock the doors of his studio and say, “Enough!” This time, though, the bewildering array of objects offered up for examination, and the almost impenetrable layering of imagery are lent coherence by, of all things, a 12-minute digitally animated rock opera, Peer To Peer. It is a stunning, albeit brief, piece of cinema.

Mulholland and his colibrettist, Laurence Figgis, tell the story of a Camera and its Operator, both exhausted by the weight of the information they must amass, sort and route around a system - what this information is, why it is being gathered and for whom is never made clear - expressed in language that hovers beautifully between code and poetry. On screen, a hard-disk platter is suspended in space, its surface attacked by a whirling galaxy of digital detritus, tripods scuttle about, up to God knows what, and the Camera, a floating metal globe with a blinking aperture, moves to and fro through a Borgesian library of data.

There is a distinct air of hysteria about all this, and the film oozes a sort of totalitarian camp: in lesser hands, the piece might err on the sillier side of sci-fi, but Mulholland who, for all the high seriousness of his projects, is not afraid to introduce a note of winking humour - makes it work. With his twin exhibitions and superb film work, Mulholland has, then fashioned a fully-formed world, an encoded vision that reformats a real world in which the gathering and retention of information is spiralling out of control, where the prospect of biometric identity cards and DNA databases looms, our every move is followed by surveillance cameras and undesirables are moved on by speakers emitting a high-pitched digital wine.

You will not find a better evocation of the dystopian present than this.

This review was first published in The Herald on 29th February, 2008.

In the early days of the Modern Institute, the gallery was often accused of favouring a certain aesthetic or style. It wasn’t true - sure, some of the Institute’s fellows had in common a liking for tropes borrowed from Modernist design - but the real ties between represented artists were, and are, less clear, centering on a shared tendency towards a rather rigorous, distinctly serious mode of practice, with elements, be they art-historical references or specific techniques, examined and revised, methodically turned over and held up to the light.

Spencer Sweeney doesn’t fit that Modern Institute mould. For one thing, it’s nigh on impossible to get a handle on his practice, which takes in your usual art stuff, like painting and sculpture, but has also seen the artist dabble in rock ‘n’ roll, with his band Actress, release dance music under the punning alias Housing Projects and run a Manhattan nightclub called, wonderfully, Santa’s Party House, attempting to tie the whole lot together under the self-publicising, self-conscious persona of a self-proclaimed enfant terrible. (He’s not the first to do this, of course: the spirit of the late Martin Kippenberger, and his hugely influential scattershot approach to artistic reinvention, haunts Sweeney’s modus operandi.)

And then there’s the art stuff gathered in the Modern Institute’s main gallery space, a set of untitled paintings and a single sculpture that have a basis as broad as Sweeney’s polymath approach to art-making. They’re a riot, to boot. A matched pair hanging on the rear wall are thick with paint, strips of masking tape and plastic costume jewels, with snatches of barely-legible text further obscured by great swathes of colour, both Day-Glo and dismal. And, just when you think Sweeney is attacking his canvases with unfettered abandon, finicky little details swim into focus; a paint dribble resolves into a pair of reaching hands, the sticker from an organic apple is carefully affixed to a surface, great care is taken to delineate one letter in a roughly-sketched word. Elsewhere, a deftly-rendered figurative work is obliterated by fields of flat black, leaving only a glimpse of stockinged feet, and geometric colour blocks on a monochrome ground are ruined by gestural scribbles in queasy deep purple.

All these faked palimpsests suggest an ongoing, unending and anarchic bid to invoke the graffiti-drenched walls of some unsavoury pre-Guilliani New York alleyway - Sweeney wouldn’t mind terribly if a city centre scally snuck into the gallery and added his own tag to one of these canvases, I imagine - and a one-man attempt to match the invention of multiple authors working in unplanned, unthinking collaboration, covering and recovering surfaces with temporary art for its own sake.

In the midst of all this frenetic activity sits a relatively pristine sculptural work, a vast ornate white teacup bearing crudely rendered traces of lipstick on its hexagonal rim. Rising from the surface of the black solid that fills it is a perfect pyramid, also jet black. Unlike the paintings, it seems complete. Painted lipstick aside, Sweeney has, for once, resisted the urge to muddy the waters, presenting a complete, finished object that rests rather smugly, looking down, it seems, on the surrounding chaos.

What is this incongruous piece doing here? The answer lies next door in the gallery’s second space, home to a set of twenty-five drawings, all made during Sweeney’s three-day visit to Glasgow. The seemingly solid object next door is as ephemeral as these dashed-off doodles, hastily sketched out and passed on to a fabricator to be made flesh, it’s genesis glimpsed in the first drawing here. In other words, the apparently monumental sculpture is monumentally trivial, one image among many, lifted from a drawn diary of personal preoccupations, passing fancies and impotent symbols. The sketch for the teacup sculpture is set alongside a cartooned head, half Elvis, half Easter Island statue, and a glob of something that might be an intestine. This sets the tone, with the following drawings depicting a tree and a teapot observed by a pipe-smoking detective, some vaguely pornographic scenes in which transvestites prostrate themselves, a teen idol sucks her fingers and a grouping of leonine chaps bearing swords loiter in a homoerotic huddle, a smattering of Egyptian iconography (the Eye of Ra, a grumpy sphinx, some pyramids) and, for variety, a few glib abstracts.

The overall impression is of Sweeney dropping pages from the Big Book of Popular Culture into a shredder until he has a room full of scraps, then stripping off and gamboling happily through the resulting mess to find out what sticks, and where. This enthusiasm is infectious. Any effort to pin down Sweeney, to work out what he’s up to, are rebuffed by the work on show, but it doesn’t matter: he’s having fun, and the best thing to do is drop your critical guard and join in.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 24th, 2008.

Moves brings together three pieces by OpenEnded Group, a trio of artists - Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser - who use advanced multimedia techniques to explore dance, human movement and the environment.

The first work on show, Pedestrian, is unobtrusively projected onto the floor of the CCA’s foyer, a small, ever-changing arial view of an unnamed city populated by tiny characters who run, dance and generally mill about.

The action, such as it is, proceeds slowly, in fits and starts. Occassionally, a phalanx of uniformed characters will process across the frame in formation, like majorettes on parade or soldiers off to war. Slinking burglars steal sealed crates by torchlight. When the clouds break, the citizens of the Pedestrian projection unfurl their brollies as one, and, for a split second, it looks as though they might just launch into a high-kicking Busby Berkley production number, but they never do, preferring to amble along in loose formation.

These occasional bursts of drama only serve to underline its real appeal, which is to be found in the tiniest of gestures, the slightest of sight gags, the overwhelming impression that something - probably something unpleasant - is about to happen.

Some of these small moments are truly pedestrian: a girl listlessly kicks a beer can, a scuffle breaks out between joggers in the park, a couple remonstrate with each other. Others are downright odd. A man on the pavement of a city centre street is engaged in a vigorous bout of shadow boxing, ignored by passers by until his combinations open automatic doors. Nearby, a woman repeats more cryptic movements, as if warding off evil, or privately rehearsing for those big set pieces that never come. Others still simply interrupt a calm scene of walkers with a roll of their shoulders, or by breaking into a restless jog.

There is a sense of disconnection, too, between the actors and their stage. It may be a limitation of the (F)ield software which the OpenEnded Group have used to craft all the works here, or it may be a deliberate tactic, but the people that populate the Pedestrian world have that bouncing weightlessness familiar from Pixar animations or Second Life avatars. This is in stark contrast to their surroundings, which, in the dappled shade under a tree, or the ripples in reflecting glass, can be unnervingly realistic. The result matches the ambiguous title for the exhibition - the human movements which have been captured, altered and replayed, and the moves of a game, as if the Pedestrian environment is some impossibly complex urban chess board goverened by unknown rules, with the people cast as pieces guided by unseen hands, according to arcane rules.

What follows fails to match up to this early promise.

In the first gallery proper, Point A-B, a new commission, is projected onto twin screens. The work is an exploration of parkour, or free running, the urban sport that sees participants traversing cityscapes in a series of leaps, bounds and stunts, scrambling up the sides of buildings, backflipping over obstacles and jumping unscathed from dangerous heights. Openended Group have abstracted the graceful actions of free runners and set them in a sketch city, full of wire-frame models viewed from impossible angles and boiling masses of faint lines that only occassionally suggest some windowsill or piece of street furniture. The idea, presumably, is to give the viewer some sense of the nebulous and fast-flowing view of the city revealed by parkour ‘traceurs’ as they negotiate a newly fluid relationship with uninspiring surroundings. The endless gyrations of skeletal figures spinning in vaguely suggested space fails, though, becoming nothing more than an onslaught of ill-defined forms. Where Pedestrian offers an unsettling, mysterious world of moving figures without motive, Point A-B is downright confusing, a pretty blur of actions without consequences.

Forest takes on the abstraction of movement in space with more success. On five circular screens, children scamper around, playing hide and seek, or clambering up into the lower branches of trees. They only hove into view occassionally, though, obscured for the most part by the actions of algorithms that control the lighting, the camera position, the colour, even the apparent grain of the digital film, each element of the image on a screen suggested by another. It is even possible to see the piece thinking, so to speak, as a quick change on one screen is copied by its neighbour, until all five are, however briefly, in sync.

All this is pleasant enough to watch, and the self-generating, ever-changing nature of the piece makes it easy to spend a good while in its company, but, ultimately, it is, like Point A-B, merely technically impressive, simply pretty.

Openended Group are at their best, then, when they take full control of the digital environments they design - the slip and slide of Forest or the confused blur of Point A-B are no match for the meticulous choreography and cinematic verve of Pedestrian.

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

You never quite know what to expect from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show. One year, the changing committee of judges will stick hard and fast to artists who make drawings in the usual sense - marks on paper, that sort of thing - the next year, the show will be overwhelmed with work that, however far you widen the definition of the drawn, falls into other categories, from sculpture to new media and all points in-between.

This time, the selection panel, faced with the unenviable task of whittling down nigh on 3,000 anonymously submitted entries into the shortlist of eighty-seven pieces that make up this show, have managed to strike a balance between the two extremes, including artists that push hard at the boundaries of the form, and work that lies firmly within the drawing tradition. The judges - Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, art historian Catherine de Zegher and artist Avis Newman - have also quietly teased out themes in contemporary drawing practice, placing like artists with like, with the result that the exhibit takes on the feel of a conversation about the state of drawing today between the artists who practice it.

The first striking piece on show comes from two artists who have put down their pencils and picked up a computer, Sean O’Keefe and Steve Bullock. How to Draw a Cowboy, is a pseudo-scientific, vaguely retro digital display that sees points, labelled ‘gun’ or ‘spur’ track, leaving coloured trails, until the just-recognisable cowboy dissolves away. It’s a game attempt to draw the passage of time. The best of the animators took prizes. Student Prize-winner Daisy Richardson’s Sublime Climes is a delightfully amateurish stop-motion collage, that transforms images torn from magazines into a concise geological history of an imagined world. Melanie Jackson’s A Global Positioning System, which won First Prize, has a similar ecologically-aware edge. It opens with a man ordering a GPS unit from a down-market gadget mag, then tracks the product from assembly line to delivery by courier. Wittily political, and rendered in a light, naive cartoon style, Jackson’s piece is good, but visitors could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at a digital animation scooping the top honours.

Still within the fold of drawing, but adopting innovative approaches, are the artists who have turned to new processes. Second Prize-winner Brighid Lowe has filled a large sheet of paper with dense horizontal lines for Rain Drawing (1) before, as the title suggests, letting a downpour finish her piece with damp dots and spots. Tim Knowles made his Tree Drawing by affixing a pen to the branch of Scots Pine, abdicating artistic responsibility to the wind, which made a series of finicky marks.

There seems, too, to be something of a fad for infographics. Sophie Horton’s Studio Environment is an embroidered chart, with coloured threads tracking the noises the artist heard in her studio, while Susie Parfitt crafts a complex, incomprehensible graph of decisions taken according to unnamed ‘policy options’. John Holden provides a minimal counterpoint, his Grid 2 a precise set of vertical lines and nodes, a soft suggestion of ordered information.

On the sculptural front, Luke Drodz has drilled through a Pelican Books paperback, Art In England, stuffing the off-cut discs into a frame beside the desecrated text. More subtly, Mitsuko Hoshino’s Air (Lotus Pond) has leaves sketched on folded paper, simulating ripples in water.

Last but not least: the drawings. Minho Kwon stands out with My Brand New Camera Phone, in which a giant cherub enclosed in a neoclassical aircraft topped with coffee-cup chimneys prods at sprites buffeted by smoke from an oil well fire, and the Student Prize-winning Koreas_Mansoodea Shopping Centre, a strange hint of the Korean peninsula unified by commerce, brand names plastered over the architectural plans for the South side of the mall, a Dear Leader dominating the North.

Her technical drawing style is matched by Patrick Gilmartin, whose pencil work on mylar seems to be the plans for a product of unknown purpose. Ross Jones’ Refuge, meanwhile, sees an encampment of tents set in a tundra of white paper, each one different to the next, making for a truly engrossing work. Tone Holmen provides another imagined world in Coastlines, with coastal features haphazardly overlaid to form an impossible fjord-filled geography. And then there’s Paul Westcombe. His display of used coffee cups, their exteriors covered completely in tiny murals, at first look like idle doodles, but lean closer, and you’re faced with a beautifully drawn, deeply perverse world in microcosm, full of fevered psycho-sexual imaginings, some that will shock even the most jaded gallery-goer.

There is some chaff in amongst all this wheat, sure, but overall, this is a valuable survey of current drawing practice, and a show that not only presents the best of contemporary drawing, but questions the nature of the art form.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 14th, 2007.

Exhibitions about architecture have a tendency to run dry - buildings don’t, after all, fit inside other buildings, leaving only the two-dimensional disappointment of photography, and plans that are illegible to the layman.

This one, a long-overdue survey of Andy MacMillan and Izi Metztein’s groundbreaking, influential work for Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, is different, breathing life into archival materials.

The show begins at the beginning of MacMillan and Metztein’s twinned careers, with an in-depth study of St Paul’s at Glenrothes. A sudden break with Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s century-old practice, the church, built by the two architects while both were still in their twenties, is a perfect introduction, containing as it does the themes - deep, square plans, the radical use of natural light - that were to run through the pair’s practice. A brace of eight drawings - including an abstract plan for floor tiling that points to MacMillan and Metztein’s influence on contemporary artists, not least Beck’s Futures winner Toby Paterson, who has designed the exhibition space with Collective Architecture - are matched with maquettes, both being glued together by a digital animation that slowly animates plans and cross-sections until they form a representation of the completed church. Add a letter detailing the difficulties in raising funds for the project, and visitors are left with a clear, easily-grasped impression of the church’s journey from blueprint to building.

Next comes a timeline, providing context with images of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia buildings running along the wall, and a display under glass that, through architectural drawings, journal article and photographs of buildings around Europe connects the Glasgow duo to their contemporaries and forebears. It’s a simple curatorial tactic, but grants an immediate grasp of the interplay between MacMillan and Metztein’s and the wider architectural world, making it possible to see at a glance how they absorbed influences - Le Corbusier, obviously, Mackintosh, less so - tempering the hard tenets of European Modernism, and taking advantage of the post-war political will to build, but operating at one remove thanks to the steady stream of commissions from the Roman Catholic church, which allowed them to sidestep the strictures of housing projects and granted the pair a freedom to experiment.

Then, a vitrine packed with ephemera takes us inside the architects’ studio, deftly revealing another key to the development of MacMillan and Metztein: the hot-house atelier system put in place by senior partner Jack Coia, an open way of working that allowed for the atmosphere of collaboration and co-operation that resulted in a sort of ongoing architectural conversation between Izzi, Andy and their colleagues.

What follows is the exhibit’s strongest point, a guide to MacMillan and Metztein’s work, divided into themed sections.

For most of us, unversed in architecture as a technical practice, buildings seem to simply be, things to be appreciated aesthetically and emotionally as they are used - we instinctively awed by a high ceiling, say, or happily unaware that, in easily finding our way from A to B, we are taking advantage of a carefully plotted circulation system.

This second section of the exhibit comes, then, as a series of revelations. Illustrating each theme in turn, the wall texts and drawings take what might at first seem like rather dull aspects of MacMillan and Metztein’s working method, and turn them into minor miracles. The portion devoted to Plan & Promenade shows how the approach to a building impacts on its interior, effortlessly emphasising the passage from secular to sacred worlds in the case of the churches, and highlights MacMillan and Metztein’s devotion to deep plans divided into tiers. Under the banner of Integrated Structure, a phrase like ‘load bearing wall’ takes on a magical air, as the secrets of open, light-filled interiors are revealed.

There are occasional lapses into arcane architecture-speak - I’m not entirely sure what is meant, for example, by the ‘full integration of spaces with requisite room variety’ that one building is said to display - but for the most part, this is a display that not only fosters a deeper understanding of the buildings at hand, but of architecture itself.

Downstairs, we move from the thematic to the specific, with detailed surveys of 21 MacMiillan/Metzsetin buildings. Without the steady introduction and education on the upper level, this might have suited dedicated architecture buffs more than the general public, but, with the vocabulary of the themed section to hand, each set of drawings and models is open to exploration.

Add a pair of films, both featuring MacMiillan and Metzsetin engaged in passionate conversation about their practice, influences and counter-influences, and Gillespie, Kidd & Coia: Architecture 1956-1987 becomes a truly great show, one that is dense enough to reward multiple visits, and likely to turn those with a passing interest in architecture into devotees of the art. It is, too, an exhibition tinged with sadness: while most of MacMiillan and Metzsetin’s creations continue to be used, lived in and loved, much of their legacy - not least St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross - has been, unforgivably, abandoned.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 16th, 2007.

The Brittania Panopticon is a building with a long and storied history. It began life as an anonymous warehouse - no one is quite sure when - before architects Thomas Gildard and HM McFarlane transformed it into a music hall in 1857, adding the familiar facade and, inside, a proscenium arch and tightly packed stalls.

The transformations continued apace, with the advent of moving pictures in the late 1890s, and, once impresario AE Pickard took over, a programme that added freak shows, waxworks, the amateur talent contests that saw Stan Laurel make his stage debut, and even a zoo to the playbills.

Its name has changed over the years too, from the rather unimaginative Campbell’s Music Saloon to the gloriously euphonious Hubner’s Animatograph, not forgetting its current nickname, the Pots and Pans.

And, though the music hall closed its doors in 1938, as the appeal of music hall faded, the building continues to entertain, with its lower floors home to a bustling arcade, and the crumbling auditorium playing host to performances and screenings arranged by the volunteers of the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall Trust.

The latest chapter of the Panopticon story comes courtesy of artist Minty Donald, whose Glimmers In Limbo project directly addresses the building’s past, present and future, examining and interpreting its varied uses, and the decaying fabric of the music hall, too.

She has responded with a set of ‘interventions’, each as layered as the palimpsest of the Panopticon.

‘It was daunting at first,’ Donald admits, explaining the genesis of her project, ‘and really hard to know how much to do. It’s such a busy space, with such a lot going on - the displays of the building’s history, the decay upstairs, the arcade downstairs. I felt uncomfortable doing to much.’

This unwillingness to overstep the mark has resulted in a series of installations, performances and projections that share an air of understated eloquence.

Against the rear wall of the auditorium sits Shoebox Archive, 600 white shoeboxes piled up in stacks. Some contain artefacts Donald found in the building - everything from rusty safety pins to scraps of celluloid - and, when opened by visitors, light up to reveal their contents. Others are empty, and visitors are invited to leave artefacts of their own. ‘I’m trying to get people to really engage with the space,’ Donald explains, ‘and the piece is also a sort of memorial to the space, which at one point was a shoe warehouse.’

Donald has also engaged with the Panopticon’s faded exterior. From the street below, passers-by will be treated to projected animations, turning the upper windows into a giant fruit machine. ‘Instead of fruit,’ Donald says, ‘letters spin in the windows, sometimes they resolve into words, sometimes they don’t.’ Like the shoebox installation, Facade Fruit Machine is packed with allusions to past and present alike, the letterforms based on signage that has adorned the building over the years, the rolling drums a nod to the arcade that occupies the ground floor. That too has been transformed, with photographs of the dilapidated architecture inside, inaccessible to the public, displayed like estate agent’s particulars in the arcade window.

The heart of the show, though, is a performance, and the traces it leaves. Last night twelve singers performed accompanied by a pianola, its reels made according to piano arrangements by Giles Lamb of Savalas. For the remainder of the show, recordings of the event will play out, with selected lyrics projected onto the hall’s walls, an installation which Donald calls ‘a ghost of a performance’. ‘I’m not trying to recreate the old-time music hall,’ she says, ‘so all the songs were chosen as a personal response to the building. Some fit perfectly: the Orange Juice song Wan Light has the line, “There is a place which no one has seen, where it’s still possible to dream.”.’

That combination of personal response and unexpected resonance seems key to Donald’s work, which looks beyond the specific history of the Panopticon. Glimmers In Limbo is part of an ongoing research project, with a second stage due to interact with another Glasgow building with a rich heritage and uncertain future, the Tramway. ‘I’m interested in asking questions about the goals of site-specific projects,’ Donald explains, ‘and about the spaces people are deeply invested in, looking at the built environment in terms of memories and emotions, not just bricks and mortar.’ Interaction and involvement are, too, central to the project. ‘It’s really important to me that people participate,’ Donald says, ‘We can keep writing histories, and rewriting them, even falsifying them.’

The result of this deep thinking about places and spaces, and the way artists can respond to and transform them, has rejuvenated the Britannia Panopticon, and looks set to draw in a new audience, an effect that will last beyond the end of Glimmers In Limbo’s run. It seems fitting that, given time, Donald’s careful, thought-provoking work will become another story, another memory attached to the Britannia Panopticon.

This preview was first published in The Herald on October 19th, 2007.

As soon as you enter the CCA’s foyer, the promised ‘sensory overload’ of Feral Kingdom begins, thanks to a great big mural by E*Rock and Zeloot. It is - and this is putting it as kindly as possible - not very good. Face after face is piled up in day-glo orange and biro blue, from freckled and fresh-faced schoolboys to gummy aliens and most points in-between. The style is probably best described as tweenage exercise book doodle meets cack-handed graffiti, but this isn’t some exploration or appropriation of juvenile folk art, it is simply poor drawing, hoping desperately to raise its game through overwhelming repetition.

Next comes a flurry of work by Zeloot and Jelle Crama. Crama is based in Antwerp, Zeloot in The Hague, and going by the selection of silkscreen posters and record sleeves tacked to a pillar here, both are designers of choice for their respective cities’ cooler gig promoters and labels. Both lean heavily on 1960s, San Francisco-centred countercultural psychedelia of the sort defined by American illustrators and artists like Rick Griffin and Stanley “Mouse” Miller, with nods to the underground comics movement. Their adoption of the old acid drenched standards - wavy female figures, vaguely scatological imagery - is tempered by a contemporary illustration style that will doubtless mark out the first decade of the 21st Century for future audiences as immediately as the groovy hippie look works as a visual shorthand for the late ’60s, complete with angled geometric lettering that, being hastily hand-drawn, is granted a rather louche looseness. The pair have obviously done their homework, fully absorbing the style of their psychedelic forbears, but the hip new twist feels forced, unlike, interestingly, some of the wigged-out noise groups their poster works promote.

On to CCA 2, which houses work by Dr. Lakra, an artist and tattooist based in Xoaxaca, Mexico. He presents a huge mural, spanning the length of the gallery wall, and, like Zeloot and Jelle Crama, wears his influences on his sleeve. Cartoonists the Hernandez Bros. loom large, and there are shades of Daniel Clowes, too, with a dash of Japanese Manga thrown in for good measure. Unlike his co-exhibitors, Dr. Lakra’s work isn’t so much informed by other artists, instead he simply apes their style. The content, meanwhile, is a witless litany of supposedly shocking schlock imagery - orgasmic porn actresses brush up against glowering super-villains, and bewigged 18th Century judges chow down on a cooked human corpse, overlooked by an Eastern god. Of course, this might all be underpinned by a raised eyebrow, but if Dr. Lakra’s joke is to present ham-fisted renderings of glib subject matter, it isn’t particularly funny. Nor are his drawings, which see him take images of dolly birds and pin-up girls from dubious magazines, adding incongruous tattoos. It’s a step up from idly doodling glasses and moustaches on magazine covers, I suppose, but only just. Other works return to the tired shock tactics and derivative drawing of the wall piece, with more pin-ups, drooling African artefacts, and tattoo-style pieces combining in a yawn of hoped-for controversy.

After that, the mediocre work in CCA 3 comes as a relief. Baldvin Ringstead’s installation features a working Theremin surrounded by paintings, mostly religious, in which every detail has been excised except for the figure’s hands. Do you see? Ringstead is matching an instrument that produces ethereal, other-worldly sounds when you wave your hands over it to images of ghostly hands suspended in the ether. Very clever. DJ and style mag fashion photographer Mathew Stone fares better in his collaboration with performance artist The-O. On a large screen a male figure is projected reclining on the floor naked, in a vaguely Christ-like pose, and covered with glitter. After a time, the glitter slowly rushes upward, a downfall in reverse. It’s a lyrical, rather beautiful image, unencumbered by much in the way of meaning.

Lastly, there’s Lolly Batty, whose sculptural work is peppered throughout the gallery. Her inclusion here is a bit of a mystery, lacking as it does the cod-psychedelic or vaguely underground sheen of the rest. Her pieces are also, surprisingly in this context, really rather good. Each is a pristinely symmetrical form with a pristine white surface, and look like the physical manifestations of arcane mathematical formulae, which, though they are laboriously hand-crafted from polystyrene blocks, might have been made for an unknown purpose in some gleaming hi-tech factory.

That might sound like admiration for a ‘real’ artist in the midst of disdain for designers, illustrators and tattooists, but the problem with this exhibit is not the wide net it casts across artforms, the problem is the dismal quality of most of the work. In the end, it is puzzling how the show came to be. Did no one notice that the work being gathered together was so poor? Perhaps it is intended as a sort of insurance policy for the CCA: however flawed a future show might be, visitors will at least be able to say, ‘At least this isn’t as bad as Feral Kingdom’.

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

Scott Myles’ third show at the Modern Institute is a curious one. It offers a welter of contradictions, a flurry of loosely expressed connections both to art history and to Myles’ own practice, and, taken as a whole, verges on the bewildering.

The show opens with a set of four flat sculptures, affixed to the gallery walls by the edge. Each is made from aluminium, with decorative surfaces, marbled in pretty pink and sickly violet hues. The marbling is, in turn, overlaid by matte black screen-printed sections, suggestive of letter-forms. Between them, lying on the floor, is a bronze cast of a bog-standard stackable plastic chair, its surface painted with crude approximations of light and shadow. Next door in the second gallery, another bronze, this time a stern pillar is similarly overpainted, and a simple triangular shelf supports its own mirror image, and both are marbled, this time in monochrome black and white.

All display a sort of restless to-and-fro of ideas. The crafted marbling of the wall-sculptures denies their minimalist heft, and, while their placement suggests signage, that suggestion is denied by the illegibility of the printed letters. The chair is upended, immediately calling to mind Duchamp’s fountain, even though it is not a readymade, but a bronze, offering up the old chestnut of turning a quotidian object into a monumental, museum-bound sculpture. Then there’s the crude painted coating of the chair and it’s companion column, a sort of expressionist gloss obliterating the other allusions contained within the work. It’s as if Myles is running amok, latching onto art movements and pressing them together according to some arcane, impenetrable scheme of his own devising.

Some works also seem to require a familiarity with Myles’ past practice, which has ranged far and wide, from work firmly in the conceptual camp to performance to the sculptural pieces of the sort seen here. For a past project, Myles collected posters given away at exhibitions by the late Cuban artist Félix González-Torres, drew on the reverse side and displayed the results in perspex cabinets. And, for an earlier show at the Modern Institute, he presented a bus shelter, its perspex siding slathered with white paint. Now, in the second room of the Modern Institute’s main gallery, we find a perspex display case, slowly revolving on a plinth, some of its panels imprinted with smoky black whorls of paint. It’s possible that Myles is simply fond of perspex for its material qualities, but, more likely, he’s quietly building a set of associations between his work, past and present, so that, say, the tension between acquired readymades - the bus shelter, the bookcase, even the González-Torres posters - and Myles’ drawing and painting hand is emphasised over time. Does it matter if a visitor to this latest show is unfamiliar with Myles’ prior art? Maybe. Without this hint of subtle continuity, of an ongoing conversation between seemingly separate works, the untitled display case feels like an awkward addition to the show, tenuously linked to its fellows by those wisps of black, but ultimately adrift.

Similarly adrift, for any viewer, are a pair of works relating to Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Sterne’s piling up of reference and allusion, his immediately appreciable, overt influences, the slow revelation of structure through the association of ideas in Tristram Shandy, and even the slow serial publication of the novel are an obvious fit for Myles interlocking, evolving practice, but his treatment of the novel as a source is surprising. Hidden away in the gallery’s office space is an etching based on a full stop from an edition of Tristram Shandy. It is barely recognisable as such and, in fact, the pulpy surface of the paper and the spreading ink on its surface call to mind, of all things, an indistinct portrait of an 18th century gentleman. Outside in the gallery proper hangs a large colour photograph that initally appears completely blank, but on closer inspection reveals another full stop at its centre, this time actual size, and taken, the title tells us, from a bootleg edition of Sterne’s opus. Perhaps this is a new, winking approach to the readymade, elevating the status of a humble piece of punctuation. But, if that’s the case, what are we to make of Myles blowing up the ‘official’ mark to monumental scale, and putting the bootleg version in its tiny place? He might be underlining the authenticity or otherwise of works like the chair sculpture, he might be adopting Tristram Shandy as an influence in as neutral a way as possible, or he might be up to something that will become clear, or at least less opaque, in two or three years time, as future installations return to Sterne.

On paper, this might all sound rather tiresome, but in the flesh the game of reference and counter-reference Myles plays is hugely appealing: the work of untangling the ideas behind these objects is its own reward.

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

Bandaged Heads, an exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based artist Claire Stephenson, is a very peculiar proposition. It’s the sort of show that raises and dashes expectations, proffers clues to winning the prize of understanding without revealing the rules of the game, and, in the end, offers nothing but uncertainty. In other words, if you like your art to leave you wanting more, and enjoy puzzling away at a problem for its own sake, it’s a fascinatingly twisty set of ultimately unknowable works. If, though, you like to leave a gallery sated and settled, with questions posed and happily resolved, disappointment could be in store, and the winking examination of performance, artifice and lives lived at the heart of this show might prove more irritant than balm.

In the first gallery, there are four oval forms on the wall; the titular Bandaged Heads, if that’s what they are. Each has a surface of interlocking and layered wood and plywood fragments, presumably off-cuts or pieces prised from found furniture. This crude form of marquetry is, in Stephenson’s hands, remarkably eloquent. The gaps left between the thin slivers of wood conjure an urge to peel back the surface and look beneath. Faint suggestions of painted colour give the various forms, which at first glance seem blank, identical, a hint of character - a pink-tinged panel might well be hiding a bloodied mouth, a pock-marked surface suggests that some unspeakable substance is set to seep through, the fact that one oval is smaller than the rest even raises the possibility that the four are a family, sitting for a very unconventional portrait.

If, that is, you take Stephenson at her word, and blithely assume that these works are indeed bandaged heads. An oblique hint in the rather excitable text written by Susannah Thompson to accompany the show raises the possibility that the ovals might be too regular to represent human faces hidden, and that the ‘bandages’ might be obscuring a set of mirrors. In which case, could Stephenson be bandaging the heads of her viewers? A third possibility (the prosaic truth, in fact): there is nothing behind the bandages, and Stephenson is, thanks to her apparently descriptive title, simply raising possibilities, expressing a tension between the representational and the abstract, with meaning left as an exercise for the reader.

In the second, larger space next door, there are two more heads (or mirrors, or simply forms), much larger this time, and looming over two figures, which loom in turn over the viewer.

The figures are Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendent, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. These cardboard cut-outs are, though flat as pancakes, distinctly sculptural. Each has the head of a porcelain doll, with rouched costumes - one calling to mind a clown, the other a little girl’s imagined queenly glamour after an afternoon at the dressing-up box - that are made up of repeated sections culled, apparently, from medieval church sculptures.

The pair have appeared in past works by Stephenson, too. At Tender Scene, a group show at Stirling’s Changing Room gallery, they took the form of tiny, detailed collages, in glorious full colour, standing delicately beside sinister wooden machinery of unknown purpose. So, the artifice piles up in layers: crude representations of human faces are grafted to collaged bodies, and dressed in drag, only to be presented here at a further remove, photocopied, blown up beyond life-size and arranged in extravagantly camp poses.

But how do these monstrous creatures relate to the blind and bandaged heads? It seems that Stephenson is on course to create a new kind of static theatre, or alternate world, in which she provides the players, and the audience too. In each of the two galleries at Sorcha Dallas, the sculptural works on show are accompanied by drawings bearing the titles of each installation, rendered in text reminiscent of woodblock printing or early type. At first these seem a little redundant, afterthoughts to the main event, but they might be more than that; playbills offering a whispered, winking invitation to observe unseeing eyes watching a private drag queen drama play out.

If so, Stephenson has wrapped another, invisible, bandage around her work, putting viewers in the awkward position of being thrown into a performance they have not asked to take part in, lacking the artificial armour that Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendant use to ward off the world. This is clever stuff (too clever by half, perhaps) and, ultimately, the strength in Stephenson’s work is down to her knack for presenting simple, seemingly slight pieces that slowly offer up a tangled set of unresolved philosphical arguments. If nothing else, it seems safe to say that this will be the only show this year in which seven foot drag queens will embody Heidegger’s tenet of ‘throwness’ and an unhealthy dose of Kierkegaardian anxiety.

For twenty years David Rokeby has been at the vanguard of new media arts, matching technological know-how with conceptual rigour, and, as the title of this retrospective suggests, a firm focus on the relationship between humans and their computers.

When you enter the gallery that houses the first piece on show, Taken, the rear wall is a grid of blurred faces rendered in grainy black and white. Then, as you study the wall of unrecognisable people, the installation springs into action, switching to a dual screen format. On the right you see yourself, surrounded by the ghost images of previous visitors, and, as time passes, by ghost images of yourself, seconds before. This is an uncanny experience, observing oneself being observed, and it gets worse. A white box appears on the orange screen, homes in on your head, and, at the same moment, the screen to the left displays one of those grainy monochrome faces, blown up to wall-size, this time your own. There are captions, too, reading ‘under observation’, ‘nervous’, or, a little less threateningly, ‘disinterested’. The piece can be turned into a game - moving into the spaces once occupied by previous visitors is good fun - but that feeling of discomfort never quite dissipates. It can be seen as a work about memory, too, with Rokeby’s system granting the room an awareness of its inhabitants, past and present. But, ultimately, Taken is a political piece, with particular resonance in the UK, where there is one surveillance camera for every fourteen people, and trials of Talking CCTV have brought Orwellian control to our city centres with nary a word of protest. In other words, Taken is like a walk down the average British high street, the only difference being a visceral awareness of being watched, an awareness that takes time to fade after leaving the gallery.

Thankfully, Taken is followed by a much more pleasing examination of our relationship with technology. The Giver Of Names emphasises the logic-bound unsophistication of computers. Gallery-goers are asked to choose an object from a selection of objects, mostly toys, and place it on a plinth. The system then analyses the object’s characteristics and matches them to a database of words and phrases, outputting poetic phrases on a screen. I chose a pink child-size Wellington boot, and the computer, after a brief pause, said, ‘A boot withdraws from the brownish boot.’ A plastic bowling pin provoked a rather more peculiar response: ‘The next conservative on the left is tenderised by a bowling pin’. Rokeby’s aim here is, in exposing the faulty thinking of a machine, to force us to think again about our own thought processes, the lightning-quick flow of associations provoked each time we register the presence of an object or, for that matter, a work of art.

Machine For Taking Time is poetic too, even elegiac. Images of a garden, hundreds of them taken over a three year period, hove into view, the camera repeatedly panning from left to right. And, while space remains constant, Rokeby breaks time, his software morphing a bright summer’s day into a snowbound scene, unnaturally mingling the seasons, turning the regular irregular, bending linear time to the artist’s will. Like The Giver Of Names, this is a piece of technology intended to make us question our relationship with the world, upending the certainties of perception.

The last work in the CCA’s main gallery is Seen, a four screen work that draws together the main threads that run through Rokeby’s work. Four screens show four processed views of the Piazza San Marco, Venice. In one, all movement has been removed, leaving only the square itself, and a few stationary tourists. In another, the reverse is true, with nothing but movement visible. The twin central screens, meanwhile, offer almost painterly views, one tracking movement through space, the other showing slow-moving waves of motion in a constant state of ebb and flow. Once again, the computer’s monomaniacal vision is clashed with the human, and, once again, Rokeby has us question the validity of our perception, showing it to be a mental construct rather than a true representation. The passage of time, and its interpretation through memory is contained in Seen, too, making for a work that is complex, but one that, thanks to the digital brushtrokes of the central screens, is also simply beautiful.

Last of all, housed in the CCA’s resource room, is Very Nervous System, a work that Rokeby has been revising since 1986. This system of sensors, synthesisers and speakers turns human presence and movement into sound. Wiggle a finger, and the walls emit digital squeaks, jig about a bit, and they bellow out a cacophony of metallic clangs and robotic whirrs. It’s a good piece to end the show with: after the paranoia-inducing Taken, and the often rather dry, clinical experimentation of other works, the Very Nervous System shows Rokeby’s playful side, with the invisible interface proving that man and machine can play together.

It’s the quiet ones you have to watch. At Lowsalt, there are no big names, no bells and whistles, no overweening curatorial guidance, just a set of works that quietly assert themselves, and quietly assert the connections that bind them together.

That said, the first thing you see when you step through the door is a bloody great big black wing propped up in a corner, casting out a sickly red glow. The piece, by Douglas Morland, is, despite its size and the looming angle at which it sits, far from monumental. Instead, it is an absence with presence, its surface such a deep, matte black that at first glance it looks to have been cut into the wall behind it - a solid shadow that casts, impossibly, its own shadow made of light. The source of this unnerving thing is a drawing by a patient of psychoanalyst Marie Louise Von Franz, who depicted herself in a dream landscape, under the shadow of the ‘wing of Satan’. Morland matches this paranoid imagining made flesh with two drawings of branks, or scold’s bridles, the metal masks used to punish troublesome women of the 17th and 18th centuries by trapping their tongues in a spiked metal vice. One of the pair is mirrored along a central line, so that the spikes and chains of the brank become a Rorschach inkblot test with only one possible, horrible interpretation.

After that, Steven Anderson’s twinned works come as something of a relief.

On a knotted nylon mat of the sort designed to cost as little, and last as long, as possible, Anderson has placed snapped guitar strings, shattered drumsticks and broken plectrums, gleaned from a Glasgow rehearsal room. The items are arranged, too, not simply scattered, as if Anderson has taken on the role of an anthropological archaeologist of the present, digging through layers of contemporary detritus in a bid to understand and illuminate the cultural practices that surround him. On the wall above the mat, Anderson continues his studies from another angle, presenting a contact sheet full of impromptu portraits taken at an unnamed gig as they subjects walked through the doors of the venue. Somewhere between these two pieces a band is playing, but Anderson is more interested in the relics of rehearsal and the anticipation on the faces of an audience, putting collective experience on the stage, sidelining performance in favour of the bonds between creators, and between consumers.

Potential and past actions rise up again in the work of Javier Ferro. An untitled installation takes the form of a crudely cast concrete table, on top of which sits an unfinished letter in a shaky hand. It reads, ‘Dearest, I have to think about you everywhere I am. I am therefore writing to you from my boss’ office whom I’m representing at the moment’. On the floor, crumpled sheets are scattered about, suggesting that this inarticulate missive with its eccentric emphases has been slaved over and endlessly revised, only to fail. The piece is matched with two works on paper, one bearing crudely torn, cut and drawn circles - another quest for perfection doomed to failure from the start.

These are three very different artists, then, with different aims and methods. But the three are drawn together in this space by a shared sensibility, a focus on potential futures and fragmented memories - Morland’s borrowed dreams, Anderson’s shared experiences and Ferro’s dashed hopes are together greater than the sum of their parts. The works are also drawn together by this space. Lowsalt is housed in a rather dingy disused workshop, complete with a layered palimpsest of torn wallpapers, a scuffed floor and broken signage - it is a place that wears its working past on its sleeve, and, thanks to its new purpose as a gallery, points to a future of further collaboration.

The awkward but eloquent alliance of three artists, and the gallery itself, is furthered by the show’s unwieldy, hinting title - ‘Not a disentanglement from but a progressive knotting into’ - and a brief, suggestive text by Ruth Barker, which is presented on a par with the artists’ work. Barker doesn’t stoop so low as to explain the work before us, preferring to present a loose assemblage of ideas. She tells visitors that, in ancient Greek, the words for ‘truth’ and ‘not forgetting’ are synonyms, wonders whether the collective imagination might contain shared images of neutrinos as well as those of mythical beasts, and muses on passive and active modes of remembering.

Barker’s essay is a fitting coda to a show that finds its strength in ellipses and tangents, matching unconscious fears with expressions of hope and the ties that bind a society together to form an unspoken, unseen bond between the exhibiting artists.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 29th, 2007.

Walking into Tramway’s huge exhibition hall to view Alexandre Perigot’s installation, you could be forgiven for feeling a twinge of disappointment. The promised life-size reproduction of Elvis’ Memphis mansion is, at first glance, an unreadable tangle of scaffolding poles. It is only when you clamber through the structure, exiting between the columned portico of the main entrance, and turn around, that the maze of gunmetal grey poles resolves into the familiar outline of Graceland.

This back-to-front placement, and the delayed flash of recognition it provokes, is key to perigot’s installation, whose practice seems to rest on providing only slivers of information, the merest prompting hint, offering work that is completed in the moment of experience by the imagination of the viewer.

This is, of course, hardly a tactic unique to Perigot, but, with Elvis House, he taps into a very particular form of imagination; that shared, cross-cultural, media-mediated half-knowledge of celebrity lives and loves that occupies the kitschier corners of the collective unconscious.

And so, walking back through the missing door of Graceland, one finds oneself supplying the gaudy gilt edges and sumptuous shag pile, wondering which room might house the indoor waterfall, or where Elvis shot his telly, or, inevitably, where The King collapsed on the loo in a haze of prescription pills and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

But Elvis is not the only one haunting this physical sketch of Graceland. In fact, his presence seems rather more solid than the visitor’s, whose feet tread below floor level, who can pass through walls, but can’t manage the climb to the first floor, a set of restrictions and uncanny abilities that usually apply to ghosts negotiating the architecture of their own time.

This is one of many reversals. Where an exoskeleton of scaffolding usually grows and disappears around a building as it is built, perigot uses it to render an existing structure. Similarly, the scaffold’s suggestion of unfulfilled potential is a counterintuitive choice of material to build what is, essentially, a monument. On opening night, the structure played host to a performance by The Parsonage Choir, singing Elvis’ ‘If I Can Dream’, as well as music by composer and Derek Jarman collaborator Simon Fisher Turner - another reversal, making a stage out of the place Elvis escaped from the stage, but also a recognition that .

Even the choice of Graceland itself is double-edged. If the work is a mediation on celebrity, on the viewer’s ability to flesh out the bare scaffolding, it is in part hoist by its own petard - no other structure but Graceland would do. John Lennon might inspire a similar blinkered, quasi-religious devotion in his fans, but the interior of his Dakota Building apartment is unknown to all but the most zealous fans, and his country pile at Tittenhurst offers nothing but white walls and a whiff of hypocrisy. Even Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch - which can more than match Graceland for lurid, unpleasant tales, at least - is a nebulous place for most.

Perigot’s second piece, Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Lose, like Elvis House, reveals itself slowly. An arrangement of pipes snakes across the gallery floor, some rising up at awkward angles, some arranged in looping patterns flat against the ground. Every so often, prefaced by a whoosh of compressed air, balls clatter around the pipes in a series of coconut clip-clops, flamenco foot-stamps and pinball pings. And, again, the onus is on the viewer to complete the work. This time, we are told, perigot wants us to decipher the titular phrase from the sound of objects rattling through the pipes, which are arranged to approximate the artist’s handwriting. And, just as it is hard to resist fitting out and furnishing the empty Graceland opposite, the temptation to wander between and over the pipes in search of recognisable letters, or conjour up speech patterns in the rhythmic pulses they emit. That wandering is significant, too. For all that perigot invites his audience to enter a world of the imagination, his work is rooted in the real world movements of that audience, their negotiation of his structures, making for an odd tension between the cerebral appreciation of the work and the corporeal experience of it.

It is fitting, then, that these two works are gathered under the title Pipedream. It’s more than a half-decent pun on Perigot’s choice of materials: both Elvis House and Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Lose are offered up to be completed by the viewer’s imagination, with the implicit proviso that neither can ever be so completed. Here, as with any pipedream, the enjoyment is in the dreaming, and the knowlegde that dreams don’t come true, too.

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

With any degree show, there is always a worry that the hubbub of new artists making last-minute adjustments to their exhibition spaces, or the rush of gallerists and collectors rushing to snap up the work of the most promising graduates will cloud the judgement, with the adrenaline-soaked atmosphere raising works above their true status.

This year, though, there’s no doubt that the overall standard at the Glasgow School of Art is high, higher than it has been in three, perhaps four, years - a fact reflected by the unusual number of first class degrees awarded.

Some graduate’s do, however, stand out thanks to a touch of showmanship. Mark Wylie’s installation features a pressure pad that, when stepped on, prompts a wail of feedback. The blast of sound will certainly get your attention, but closer inspection reveals that this is more than attention-grabbing bluster: the speaker vibrates a dust-topped platform, forming patterns on the surface, and making for a subtle sculpture defined by the viewer’s actions. Christopher Dixon also relies on surprise. His large, pristine white cube assembled from boxes might be shrugged off as a half-decent chunk of minimalism, but when seen from above, the cube contains a complex, gentle and delicate tangle of sculptural forms made from thin wires and polystyrene packing materials.

The crafters of complete environments have an advantage, too, and the best of them can make you completely forget the clamour of their colleague’s work, even if only for a moment. In Elizabeth West’s installation, faint bands of yellow light on the wall of a constructed corridor act as a lure, leading to a cramped room with a thin slot in the wall that affords a view of a mirrored chamber filled with plastic detritus, reflection upon reflection creating the illusion of infinite space. Rachel Szmuckler, meanwhile, asks visitors to crawl, like Gulliver in Lilliput, into a claustrophobic L-shaped cubicle, plastered with eye-bending black and white check patterns and populated with female figures dancing through the space.

Quieter artists flourish, too, though. Keep an eye out for the vibrant, movement-filled, remarkably fluent drawings of Florencia Guerberof, and Triona Ryan’s self-portraits which match a keen understanding of colour with subtle nods to old masters.

The artists who truly stand out do so because a glance at their work is enough to tell that they are not merely promising prospects, but fully-fledged, having forged a cohesive, coherent practice of the sort more usually seen in emerging artists than brand-new graduates. Nafeesa Umar’s sculptural work in paper - a cascade of interlocking geometric forms - and architectural maquettes of ascending staircases provide a subtle counterpoint to the more explicit consideration of her Muslim faith seen in her video work. Pio Abad is already hotly tipped - his work graces the exhibition posters, as well as earning him a place in the finals of the Mercury Prize Art Competition - and justly so. Abad’s intricate, finicky drawings both revel in and satirise excess, drawing on Baroque influences and the grand pomp of 18th Century fashion, while a sculpture crafted from powdered wigs sits in a room lined with obscenely opulent hand-printed wallpaper. Interestingly, the large-scale paintings of Clair McGee feature similar motifs, and she, too, has papered the walls of her exhibition space. McGee, though, is chiefly concerned with architectural space, and its influence on its inhabitants - tiny figures are dwarfed by the vaulted interiors of dilapidated palaces, with hints that each painting in the series can be found through the doors of another. Cheryl Field also stands head and shoulders above her fellow graduates. Her work might briefly be described as ‘kinetic Op-Art’, but that does the complexity and rigour of her practice a disservice. One piece consists of a circle described by vertical lines that seem to shimmer off the wall, an effect doubled by the vibrating cord that stretches from floor to ceiling before it. Another combines concentric circles with a pure white light, this time creating a wholly illusory sense of movement. These are, literally, mesmerising works, made all the more satisfying by their admixing of art-historical critique and a cool, experimental edge. Lastly, Salome C. Oggenfuss’ unassuming, often humorous exhibit slowly reveals itself to be truly worthy of attention. Candid, revealing photographic portraits are set against whimsical text pieces, and Oggenfuss acknowledges the commercial realities of the art world by setting up shop - her luridly-coloured, foul-mouthed slogan t-shirts will doubtless become a familiar sight around town.

There is chaff to go with the wheat, of course - as in previous years, the crop of uninspired, insipid portraiture by photography students stands out for all the wrong reasons - but this is without doubt a good year, with genuine flashes of brilliance to be found in the warren of studio spaces and dim corridors of the Mackintosh Building.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 15th, 2007.

Airworld opens with a lengthy quote from Andy Warhol extolling the virtues of air travel, from the food service to the security checks, which ends by identifying the key theme of the exhibition. ‘Airplanes and airports have,’ Warhol says, ‘the best optimism.’

This almost giddy, gleeful aspect to the design of aircraft, airports and the ephemera of flying is apparent from the industry’s birth.

Sometimes, this optimism is utopian in scope - in 1925, Henri Defrasse, seeking a solution to the limited range of contemporary boat planes, dreamt up his Ile Flottant, a mid-Atlantic oasis of calm, part fuelling station, part resort. Taking a different tack, the mock-ups for Colani’s Megalodon ‘plane promise the democratisation of intercontinental travel in a style that is half sci-fi, half Soviet. At other times, it is the sort of fingers-crossed optimism that superstitious flyers turn to at the moment of take-off, as seen in the earliest designs for aircraft seating, woven wicker affairs that turn potentially perilous flight into an outdoorsy diversion before lunch at the country house.

Indeed, for all its sleek futurism, aviation design seems rooted in reassurance, taking forms that either distract the passenger or coddle him.

Joe Colombo’s tableware designs from the early 1970s are revealing. A porcelain set for the 1st class cabin makes no concessions to its environment, beside a vaguely modern aspect, yet his designs for second class are innovative stackable trays in which components interlock - besides the economic factors behind these twin designs, the first uses familiar materials and forms to suggest normality, the second are almost ostentatiously ‘designed’ in order to hint at rigourous efficiency. Fast-forward to the imminent future, and the concept model for the Skysleeper Solo, a seat intended for first class flyers on Japan Airlines is a double-wide parody of comfort, complete with an instrument panel to select entertainment options more complex than the pilot’s console in a DC-10 - more than luxurious excess, this is an attempt to place control in the hands of the passenger.

These two optimisms also filter down to promotional materials, and show a shift over time. Early posters focus on the aircraft, to an almost military degree: in one advertisment for BEA, a stylised ‘plane is shown banking sharply, as if lining up to strafe an enemy airfield. By the launch of Boeing’s 747, the focus has shifted to the interior, with passengers shown, as they are today, deep in relaxation, or working uninterrupted. Early ticket’s and boarding passes are indistinguishable from those issued for travel on land or see, but before long airline Braniff International is presenting passengers with colour coordinated cards with stark typography under the slogan ‘The end of the plain plane’, exchanging an image of stolid safety for one of forward-looking glamour. At the same time, branded matchbooks and a packet of cigarettes bearing the BEA logo show the give and take between the need for an illusion of invulnerability and passenger protection.

The uniforms of airline staff are more revealing still. The earliest designs for stewardesses uniforms are starched and soldierly, before morphing, in accordance with mid-century stereotypes, into glamorous, mini-skirted, almost fetishistic designerwear, only to return to a sober, practical and professional look by the 1980s. Again, this is design led by a need to distract or reassure.

On the architectural front there is a slightly different divide. A display of maquettes pitches Foster & Partners work on London Stanstead against Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK. The former is simply functional, the latter an architectural statement that gives no clue to its function, seemingly designed as a vast advertisement to be viewed from above.

This is an often fascinating tour through a specific design history, then, but it’s also hard work. Sure, there are witty touches to the exhibit - some displays feature viewing platforms modelled after aeroplane staircases - and, thankfully, no information is hidden away inside the interactive touch-screen kiosks that mar many a design show. But Airworld errs in the other direction, opting for a cool, dry, museum-like presentation that seems unlikely to engage anyone without a keen interest in design. There are omissions too. Little mention is made of the boom in cut-price air travel and its impact on design - the enforced jollity of Easyjet’s day-glo orange livery, say - and nothing on the environmental impact of that boom, a problem which must in part be solved by improved aircraft design. The wall texts fall short too, sometimes foregrounding the social role of design, sometimes drifting too far into technicalities, and too often presenting objects without much in the way of context. In other words, Airworld falls between two stools, failing the design fan with its overly ambitious attempt to cover every aspect of aviation design, and failing the novice by assuming existing knowledge.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 4th, 2007.

If your route to GOMA happens to take you along Buchanan Street, you’ll pass the Glasgow branch of a high street fashion chain. Its window display consists of some vaguely retro, outsized coloured lampshades, arranged alternately in orange and blue. Is the display a cheeky declaration of affiliation by the window dresser, a nationwide promotion foisted on the store by an unknowing head office, or entirely innocent? Whichever, the fact that a colour combination can prompt such a train of thought, and might, on a drunken Saturday night, move one passer-by to hum a tune and another to fleck the shop’s glassy frontage with spittle, is a fitting accidental introduction to Histrionics.

This is because Roddy Buchanan tackles his subject, the sectarian divide in Glasgow, with a lightness of touch and a sense of humour, always taking a personal approach that, while it makes his feelings on the absurdities of this fissure in the city’s make-up pretty clear, never offers pat solutions or condemnations.

The installation as a whole is the first sign that Buchanan isn’t afraid to approach his subject with wit. Histrionics takes the form of a huge wedge that doubles as a series of display walls and a screening room. On the one hand, it’s a nod to the elephant in the room in many a discussion on Scottish identity, on the other, its awkward placement forces visitors to walk - a loaded word in this context - as they look.

The first side of the wedge is covered in photographs of football players, of various ethnicities and nationalities, taken on the day of their signing to Celtic or Rangers. Like the anti-sectarian posters distributed to Merseyside schoolchildren in the 1980s bearing a photograph showing Everton and Liverpool players side-by-side, the point is an eloquent one, simply expressed; a reminder that the days when religious belief determined the club a player might play for are long gone.

On the right-hand wall, Buchanan goes further with a work title Glasgow’s Glasgow, and turns his examination of the sectarian divide on himself and his family. The wall is dominated by a portrait of Buchanan and his wife Jaqueline Donachie, grinning, and wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the legend ‘Mixed Marriage’. A set of graphs and charts surround the couple, showing just how mixed it is. Family trees of Buchanan and Donachie reveal the birthplaces of their antecedents, both a similar mix of Irish immigration and movement from towns surrounding Glasgow to the city. Bar charts plot the occupation of past family members, and again it is the similarities that leap out - on both sides, economic factors drew people to Glasgow. Last but not least, two percentages: 13% Protestant, 21% Catholic reveal the mixed past leading to a mixed present.

Buchanan is not looking forward to a happy-clappy rainbow future, though; he is keenly aware of, and celebrates, loyalty to tradition. Faithfulness And Loyalty is a layered homage to homemade football flags. One bears the legend ‘King Sobhuza Rangers Supporters Club’, the other ‘Mangal Pandey 1857 Celtic Supporters Club’. Buchanan is gathering moments in colonial history here - Sobhuza sought British protection from the Boer Republic, Pandey protested against the use of gun cartridges soaked in animal fat in the Indian Army - to subtly muse on loyalties to a cause, and tie Glasgow’s past traditions to its multicultural present. Another work, Thomas Muir Helpdesk, takes a similar tack - the ongoing project presents Buchanan’s research into the life of the 18th Century reformer, positioning him as a subject who can be claimed by both sides, or neither, a historical figure who transcends affiliation.

The beating heart of the installation is I Am Here, a split screen film showing Parkhead Republican Flute Band and The Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum. The presentation is scrupulously even-handed, with the two bands taking turns to play on their separate screens. The ultimate effect is of a call-and-response collaboration. As in Glasgow’s Glasgow, the emphasis is on sameness, not difference - the military music, for all the resonance of the tunes played, is at root the same. There is also, of course, a darker edge to the pairing - the call-and-response might well be seen as a stand-off, not a collaboration, and statements from the two bands on the room’s walls make it more than clear which side they are on. Importantly, though, Buchanan does not judge, choosing instead to simply present and engage.

Histrionics is, then, a fascinating exhibit, one that, thanks to Buchanan’s often deeply personal, considered and always questioning response to the issue at hand, rarely strikes a wrong note - a remarkable acheivement, given the subject matter.

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

There can be few artists in Scotland better suited than Graham Fagen to a commission marking the bicentenary anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. The artist has returned again and again to the interfaces between Scottish and Jamaican culture, whether real, imagined or brought into being by Fagen himself. In Radio Roselle, a pirate station broadcast a mix of reggae and Scots verse from somewhere in the Atlantic. With Blood Shed, Fagen continued to broadcast music and verse from the two nations, this time matching it to a map of the British Empire. His best experiment in cultural combining came with Clean Hands Cold Heart, a 2005 show at Tramway, which featured a video documenting the recording of reggae versions of Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne and The Slaves Lament, sung by Ghetto Priest, produced by British dub impresario Adrian Sherwood.

Here, though, when explicitly presented as a meditation on the slave trade, in a building built on the profits of that trade, Fagen’s tangential, light approach threatens to buckle under the weight of his theme.

The show opens with West Coast Looking West (Caribbean), a photograph of a sunset, the sort of thing you might see when forced to view a friend’s holiday snaps. Beside it hangs another photograph, the Portrait of Alvera Coke (AKA Mama Tosh). A note explains that Coke is mother to reggae legend and one-time Bob Marley collaborator Peter Tosh, before slipping away from the standard, supposedly objective museological tone, telling us that Tosh, ‘a saint’, was ‘sent to save the world from the duppies and the vampires and all evil spirits’.

In the next room, which has been given a new coat of blood-red paint, we return to themes familiar from Fagen’s past practice. The roots of the artist’s fascination with Ecosso-Jamaican culture lie in his own love of Jamaican music as a teenager growing up in Ayrshire, and his discovery that Robert Burns, before his ‘Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect’ proved a hit, sought out employment as a book-keeper on a Jamaican plantation. Three prints based on 18th Century advertisments detail three ships - Bell, Nancy and Roselle - on which Burns might have sailed had his poems failed. On the opposite wall hangs another print, ‘Plans And Records’, which shows the plan of a slave ship’s cramped conditions, its key replaced with a list of songs on slavery by reggae artists and groups with names that recall both African and European heritage - The Ethiopians, Junior Delgado, Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs - alongside, inevitably, Burns and The Slave’s Lament. Beside it, borrowing Am I not a Man and a Brother, the slogan of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England , for its title, another print shows two human skeletons, one in positive, the other in negative, touching hands.

This apparently glib plea for racial harmony points to a problem at the heart of Fagen’s practice, at least in this context, that continues in piece from which this show draws its title, Downpresserer.

A singer, trumpet player and bongo drummer are shown on a Jamaican beach, their improvised rendition of Burns’ A Slave’s Lament occasionally drowned out by surf crashing onto the shore. It’s a typical Fagen gesture, the poem is relocated to a new, apt setting, and voiced by descendants of the work’s imagined narrator, but here such a gesture raises awkward questions. The musicians are anonymous, uncredited and, quite possibly, unpaid. Does Fagen mean to highlight the ongoing impact of the slave trade through his camera’s ‘white gaze’? Or, in his rush to combine and juxtapose, has he forgotten the reason why ancestors of these men came to be on Jamaica, and forgotten the reason why his bringing together of Scots and Jamaican cultural histories is possible in the first place? Probably not, but without even a hint that Fagen is aware of these issues, it is difficult to avoid the possibility that his focus on cultural minutiae has blinded him to the bigger picture.

To borrow a term from Jamaican music production, Fagen is engaged in dubbing culture. Just as a reggae producer will take a finished song back to the studio and produce a dub version by stripping away some elements and highlighting others, so Fagen lights upon historical fact, extracting and combining elements to his own ends. But where the dub producer’s role is ultimately functional, emphasising the pulse at the heart of a song at the expense of the sung narrative, Fagen’s role is uncertain - we can see what he is doing, in his twisting and turning of historical narratives, but not why.

Ordinarily, Fagens simple gestures are not simplistic, they are subtle, rich, evocative, offering new routes into two cultures. But here, in this context, his works skate close to failure in their sidelong glances toward the issue at hand,. It is as if Fagen has chosen to continue along the road his work has long taken him, rather than take the opportunity granted by this commission to look anew at the slave trade.

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

Nick Evans has returned from his residency at Tate St. Ives to mount a typically engrossing, complex and, best of all, enjoyable show.

There are just three works on show, but all are monumental in scale. In the first space at Mary Mary, are two teetering towers in brushed aluminium that stretch from floor to ceiling. At first glance, King and Queen are a closely-matched pair. Both are built up of curved panels, precariously balanced, as if a heavy step on the gallery floor might bring them crashing down. Some panels are smooth, machine-like, others are peppered with pock marks, others still are grooved and crenelated, like tree bark or weathered stone. Spend some time with them, though and it is the differences between the two totems that leap out. The six forms that are heaped up upon each other to make King are flatter than the seven that make Queen. Queen’s more stable, balanced and solid curves are countered by its, or her, top-most panel, which sits askew, adding further fragility to an already fragile form. Similarly, a crack in the base of King heightens the sense of instability, of potential motion, that counters the stolid, lumpen aspects of the two towers.

In the next room, in marked contrast to the cool monochrome metal surfaces of King and Queen, Worm is a multicoloured coiled form that threatens to overwhelm, and perhaps escape from the gallery, rendered in polyester resin and fibreglass. Built in four sections, Worm is a rather feverish piece. Its scale is almost threatening, and besides the form suggested by its title, the work resembles an intestinal tract, the curls of a brain, even the double helix of DNA. Each coiled section is built up from further coils, their surfaces gnarled and knotted. The sections are distinguished by colour - mucous green, black, blood red and blue - each one undermined by a grubby, apparently careless discolouration which, as with the first pair of sculptures, suggests weathering, as if the work has spent time elsewhere, becoming what they are now.

This apparent weathering, and the deliberate nature of every mark on the surface of Evans’ work makes for a distinctly tactile viewing experience. Standing before the gnarled surfaces of Worm or the fragile piles of metal that make up King and Queen, it is hard to resist the urge to break the cardinal rule of gallery-going, and reach out to cop a feel. Setting up this temptation is in part, one suspects, a deliberate tactic on Evans’ part. His sculptures eloquently communicate their own construction - one can almost sense the instinctive formal decisions behind each loop and knot of Worm being made - a tendency that sets up a direct conversation between viewer and artist that verges on the performative, as if Evans might pop into the gallery at any moment to reconfigure his work. Not that they appear unfinished. For all their physical, intuitive, form-led making, if Evans knows one thing, it is when to stop.

He also has a way with a title. His last solo show in Glasgow, was called Some Newer Formalisms, and a pair of works shown there were dubbed Pieces Of The Dialectical Terror Machine, displaying Evans’ ambiguous relationship with critical theory, and, by extension, with art history, demanding that the viewer engage with his work not simply as sculpture, but as a critique of sculpture. This time, though, we are faced with the gnomic show title Rational Slab, the glibly descriptive Worm, and the anthropomorphising heraldry of King and Queen. The works that make up Rational Slab continue Evans’ investigation into a way of working that adopts and combines contrary influences - there is a whiff of Futurism about the metallic sheen of King and Queen, immediately countered by their primitive, totem-like form - in an almost aggressive attempt to engage with art-historical influences. But that aggression is tempered by the simple, suggestive titles granted to these new works, in place of the declamatory naming Evans has plumped for in the past.

This might seem to be a small shift in practice, but it brings Evans the sculptor, as opposed to Evans the thinker, to the fore. The result is a conversation, rather than a lecture, and a three-way conversation at that. Evans makes work by entering into a dialogue with his materials, each sculptural action leading to the next, and then passes that dialogue on to the viewer, thanks to that temptingly tactile aspect to King, Queen and Worm. This is not to say that Evans has abandoned the injection of dense layers of possible meaning into his work, or given up on his tendency to question the accepted tenets of critical analysis. Instead, it is as if Evans has withdrawn just enough to allow his sculptures to truly breath, becoming things to spend time with, as well as things to be thought about.

This review was first published in The Herald on March 16th, 2007.

Ideas that look great on paper

Simon Periton is best known for his doilies, large, impossibly delicate paper cut-outs that fall somewhere between painting and sculpture. His subject matter, though, is often anything but delicate, drawing on images of terrorists, punk heroes or the darker side of the natural world, and his work rests on this awkward marriage of precise, rather prissy technique and the representation of aggressive symbols.

For this, his second solo exhibition at the Modern Institute, Periton has taken off at a tangent, presenting works on paper which combine collage, stencil spray-painting, assemblage and, occasionally, cutting.

The large-scale piece Dogger is a skull-like face with multiple eyes, some spray-painted, some fringed in tinsel. Shell Queen is blurred, like a doubly-exposed photograph, with a barnacle-encrusted mussel shell standing in for a nose. An untitled work has baubles glued to it, either suggesting or obscuring a mouth. A flock of butterflies, cut from the surface of a sheet of found paper, threaten to escape from the surface of Baroness.

This building-up of found objects is matched by layering of both paint and paper. All the works here have been densely, even relentlessly, layered, with stencilled forms vying for attention, the intensity of the repeated images enhanced by the use of fluorescent orange, green and yellow spray paint.

These works, though they stand alone, see an artist exploring his own practice. The use of stencilling is not a new direction for Periton, but a return to the past: he first trained his scalpel on a sheet of paper after noticing a discarded doily he had used as a stencil on the floor of his studio. These new images acknowledge that beginning, using the honeycombs, floral motifs and DayGlo colour choices familiar from Periton’s cut-paper works to layer up a self-referential palimpsest.

There are, too, works in which the layers combine to form a discrete, delightfully complex language of reference and counter-reference. Bonfire is a silhouette of the Queen, stolen from a Cecil Beaton photograph, covered over with tiny reproductions of the anarchist movement’s Circle-A monogram. And so, without directly alluding to it, Periton turns Beaton’s respectful portrait into an analogue of Jamie Reid’s cover art for the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, itself a collage resting on a found image.

Periton also explores his influences more directly, drawing on two unconventional portraitists. The references to Man Ray and the “rayograph” technique he developed with Lee Miller are clear, with Periton’s stencilled silhouettes matching Ray’s cameraless photography of objects arranged on photographic paper.

Clearer still, The Lord Warden borrows directly from Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The sixteenth-century painter, whose portraits involved faces built from fruits and flowers, might not seem an obvious precursor for Periton to light upon, but both revel in failed attempts to reconcile opposites, Periton with his delicate doilies set up to clash with violent symbology, Arcimboldo with his corruption of still life to make portraits. Both, too, are fond of a pun.

Periton’s Catwoman, a portrait made by delineating a woman’s head and shoulders in spray paint over kitschy wrapping paper festooned with cat faces, shares a winking sensibility with works by Arcimboldo such as The Cook or The Vegetable Gardener, painted to be hung upside down or the right way up, according to preference.

This makes for a fascinating glimpse into Periton’s practice and it is easy to lose oneself examining the giddy complexity of his layers, but this series of portraits is not quite a match for the doilies.

One piece in Periton’s usual style is included, Addi, an intricate, wreath-like floral rendering of that familiar anarchist monogram in mirrored blue perspex, burnished to a reflective sheen.

It is almost a shame that Addi is on show here. It is deceptively simple, pared down - visually and conceptually speaking - and so only serves to emphasise that the busy overpainting and frantic layering of the works on paper is a less satisfying tactic than the cool-headed cutting that is Periton’s trademark.

It is almost as if Periton has turned to the works on show here in order to get something out of his system. In sampling new subjects, exposing his influences, reworking old motifs and piling image upon image in a DayGlo riot of references - might Periton be working to clarify and condense ideas that will be further explored with greater restraint in future cut-paper pieces? If so - if these new works are to be seen as something akin to studies - this exhibition is more intriguing than it might at first appear, offering a new route into understanding Periton’s wider practice, rather than a frenetic summary of it.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 26th, 2007.

In his latest documentary film piece, Pilgrimage From Scattered Points, Luke Fowler outlines the history of The Scratch Orchestra, composer Cornelius Cardew’s free-thinking grouping of musicians, non-musicians and other interested parties.

Using archive footage - much of it culled from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 television film Journey To The North Pole - alongside interviews, rostrum shots of ephemera and Super-8 vignettes, Pilgrimage From Scattered Points is at once a coherent narrative essay on the Orchestra’s history, and a fluid portrait in film of Cardew and his confreres. Divided into seven sections, the film runs from the group’s formation in 1969 to it’s rancorous split in the mid-1970s, by which time tensions between two factions, fostered by divisive debates on the function of art - a Maoist tendency who argued for making music to serve the people and a ‘bourgeoisie idealist’ camp devoted to formal experiment - had risen to boiling point. Along the way, we learn that the Scratch Orchestra - defined in their ‘Draft Manifesto’ as ‘a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performances, edification)’ - improvised from visual scores, including in one case a dog-eared copy of the Radio Times, and took a revolutionary approach to music making in more ways than one.

This clear narrative, undermined though it is by free-wheeling editing and narration by unidentified members of the Orchestra or other commentators, sets Pilgrimage… apart from Fowler’s past work. His previous films, What You See Is Where You’re At, on maverick psychologist R.D. Laing, and The Way out, a biography of Xentos Jones, lead singer of pseudo-punks the Homosexuals, were both hewn from archive footage and recordings, but both were closer to impressionistic, sometimes bewildering, near psychedelic portraits of their subjects than documentaries from which a clear picture could be gleaned. Indeed, at least one reviewer took Xentos Jones to be a fictional character, cypher, or mythic stand-in for every underground obscurity with a cult following.

And yet, this latest film can be seen as key to Fowler’s practice to date. While a little closer to documentary in the conventional sense, it covers similar ground to the earlier works, with an emphasis on the eccentric (a tag that fits Laing, Jones and the key players in The Scratch Orchestra, but does none of them justice) on utopian idealism, on collaboration, and on improvisation. These last three tenets could almost serve as Fowler’s own manifesto. Shaddaz, Fowler’s record label, fanzine and DVD imprint was set up to foster collaboration between visual artists and musicians. In his group Rude Pravo, named after the official newspaper of the Czech communist party, Fowler improvises with tape loops and unconventional instrumentation, an aspect of his musical practice he takes further when performing with fellow improvisor John Fail.

The show accompanying the debut screenings of Pilgrimage… is, too, an odd admixture of curation, appropriation and collaboration. In it, photographs of The Scratch Orchestra taken by Alec Hill were digitally reprinted by Fowler, with the two sharing credit, and a silkscreen print of Keith Rowe’s ‘Village Concert’ poster was on show, matched by the only ‘original’ Fowler, another poster collaging scores, texts and newspaper clippings relating to the Orchestra. Two specially commissioned animations, one by Alasdair Willis, another by Rude Pravo member Lucile Desamory, were displayed on monitors in the gallery, as well as being folded into Fowler’s film, emphasising the fact that film-making is, inevitably, a collaborative process.

Pilgrimage From Scattered Points can, then, be seen not just as a continuation of Fowler’s practice, its subject matter following his established interests, but a reflection of that practice. Fowler’s anti-auteurship is twinned with, or, perhaps, a more successful expression of, Cardew’s experiment in orchestrated democracy, and the non-musician members of The Scratch Orchestra match Fowler’s status as, if not a non-artist, an artist of a different stripe, combining roles - film-maker, musician, publisher, enabler and collaborator - more often found outside the gallery than in.

This review was first published in Map in May, 2006.

More often than not, prize exhibitions are hotchpotch affairs. They gather artists together by perceived quality, grouping them according to the whims of a committee; the antithesis of a well-curated show, which guides visitors along the highways and byways of artistic practice.

But this year’s Beck’s Futures show is no such thing. In a different world, one where no one feels the need to judge artists like show ponies or search endlessly for the new, it would be a fine group show. First and foremost, the nominees share a desire to question the modes of artistic practice, either simply, by slipping their work into the gaps between different media, or, more deliberately, signalling their ambivalence towards their role as makers of art. On top of this questioning discomfort with the very idea of being an artists, there are thin threads connecting the nominees, including a tendency toward the evocation of emotional states, examinations of the role of performance and collaboration in art, and a quietly confident inclination to borrow from and renew art of the past.

Lali Chetwynd gets the ball rolling by filling the CCA foyer with a whopping great cardboard head, some hairy skulls and a rickety shed. These are sculptural leftovers from a performance, a video of which loops on a pile of old televisions. The performance is funny. That giant head looks over a gaggle of women, naked and wearing wigs, who dance about a bit, and play catch with giant fruits and flowers. It is part mystery play, part groovy happening, like the punchline to a bad joke about old hippies gathering at Glastonbury tor for the solstice. This is Chetwynd’s stock in trade: making art of the naff. In the past, she has taken inspiration from Meatloaf, his doppelganger Jabba the Hut and snooker’s greatest failure, Jimmy White. The appropriation of these low culture totems, or the 60s wig-out seen here, is matched by a jackdaw approach to high art influences, so that the laughs obscure but never overwhelm a rather thorough examination of just what art is.

On the face of it, Luke Fowler might not seem to have much in common with Chatwynd’s exuberant, scattershot performances, but the two films presented here , The Way Out and What you see is Where you’re at present a shared non-standard view of the nature of art and its making. The Way Out is a loose portrait in film of Xentos Jones, the chameleon frontman of 80s underground obscurities The Homosexuals, told in anecdotes and reminiscences laid over archive footage and excerpts from Jones’ own film work. It is, though, also a self-portrait of sorts - like his subject, Fowler obfuscates himself, an anti-auteur using blank anonymity where Jones uses reinvention and endless pseudonyms to displace the notion of the creating artist. And Fowler, like Jones, is quite the polymath. Alongside his documentary film work, he runs Shaddaz, a platform for publishing collaborations between artists and musicians, and makes his own music with the group Rude Pravo, all efforts to be considered strands of his artistic practice, rather than sideshows to the main events screened here. What you see… is another portrait, this time of maverick Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing and his patients. Once again, Fowler is interested in assembly, collaboration and alternate models of creation. Bringing together documentary footage, Fowler’s editing eye is drawn to the wall scrawls and dirty protests of the inmates at Kingsley Hall, Laing’s social experiment in communal living for the disturbed, and this, alongside the collection of extant material, is another pointer to the Glasgow-based artist’s freewheeling fascination with working methods.

Daria Martin makes films too, but where Fowler collates old fragments, Martin borrows an aesthetic from stock footage of the past, painstakingly recreating the look and feel of a needlessly melodramatic cinema advertisement, crafting special effects so unsubtle that they feel like uninvited guests at a party. This is good fun, but look closer and another aesthetic is at the heart of Martin’s films. In Closeup Gallery, a smarmy croupier and his glamourpuss companion deal cards across a revolving table, generating a sort of performance sculpture brimming with formal and tonal echoes of Modernism, an aptly stylised tribute to and re-examination of that movement. And so, reversing the trend here toward fractured practice, Martin expresses her disparate concerns by gathering them up together, using film as a sort of ur-medium, a means of coalescing painting, sculpture and performance.

Next comes Ryan Gander. His Loose Association Lecture (Version 2.1) drifts happily from Erno Goldfinger to Captain Birdseye, mixing in personal anecdotes along the way, a grab-bag of ideas that almost serves as a manifesto for the studied inconsistency of Gander’s practice as a whole. Like Fowler, Gander is uncertain about art and the artist, bringing Josef Hartwig’s hitherto unrealised design for a Bauhaus chess set into the world, and presenting a snapshot of his studio wall, which includes a sketch of a trestle and sheet of chipboard, since these are ‘the two objects most vernacular to an art school studio space.’

Surrounded by these vagaries, Donald Urquhart’s installation comes as something of a shock. It is thrillingly complete, a beacon of certainty in the midst of the unanswered questions that fill up the rest of the gallery. Urquhart has made a little world here, and it is a sad place. Gnomic slogans pepper the walls and upright glass plinths, talking of ‘Letters unwritten and unsent’, ‘The dust behind limousines’ and, simply, ‘Rage’, matched with bold drawings of half-dug graves, balustrades and prickly flower-stems. Tying everything together is Darnley, Urquhart’s sickly fragrance designed for the sort of 1930s gentleman who never married. One whiff of this heady scent is enough to transport the sniffer into Urquhart’s hinted fictions, a flash of feeling that conjours up cruel and giddy laughter at a dissolute literary salon, where the women dare to wear trousers , the men bear traces of panstick, and simply everyone is making wicked whispered asides, most probably in Palare. But for all this intense evocation, this uncanny realisation of a place and time that never was and never will be, Urquhart is up to the same tricks as his fellow nominees - his first illustrations decorated flyers for his London club The Beautiful Bend, while the installation has the feel of an abandoned stage set, a reminder that Urquhart’s is a playwright, poet, performer and cabaret host, yet another artist who casts off constraints.

But what of the prizewinner? Christina Mackie fits in but certainly does not stand out. Her installation consists of a wooden lean-to housing a projector and speakers that quietly babble electronic music. The projector casts images of the artist moving drawings of little flower petals about, and has a twin beside it mounted atop a pile of wood and perspex. It is easy to see what Mackie is up to here, with nods to Modernism and Constructivism that combine with an attempt to loosely couple ideas, to hint and suggest, and, too, to break down her practice into a multidisciplnary mix. There is a problem though - Mackie’s work falls flat, it fails completely to engage the viewer, and feels flimsy compared to the other work here, work considered by the Beck’s judges, inexplicably, to be inferior. This may be too harsh - Mackie is not bad, but placed alongside her fellow nominees, some of whom cover similar ground with greater insight, her collection of things suffers.

This failure might almost be seen as a key to the show’s surprising coherence - if the winner is the worst of the lot, then the Beck’s Futures Award is, as all competitions between artists must be, a nonsense. Let’s remove the prize-giving from the equation then, and in so doing reveal that this exhibition is indeed, after all, a fine group show.

This review was first published in The Sunday Herald in June, 2005.

The first question we are taught to ask of a work of art is: what does this mean?

It’s a good place to start, and one that, given the current vogue for the quick conceptual quip, often yields immediate answers. Cathy Wilkes’s installations of sculpture, painting and arranged objects don’t prompt that stock question, and they don’t sidestep it either.

Instead Wilkes has found a way to render the first step to understanding her practice redundant, as if her work is coated in some slick substance that allows it to slip past the critical barrier, taking up residence in the thoughts of her audience unmediated.

This isn’t because Wilkes is one of those needy intellectuals, who feel duty-bound to layer allusion upon counter-allusion, afraid to make a mark that doesn’t place itself in the flow of art history, compelled to engage with their influences at the expense of finding their own voice. Nor is her work an empty Wildean exercise, all about the glorious surface. No, Wilkes makes work that is compelling, engrossing, the sort of thing that that springs unbidden into your mind weeks, months, even years after you first see it, still fully formed, still intact, with none of the edges knocked off by interpretation. In other words, while other artists communicate ideas through their work, Wilkes seems to be communicating the idea that there are ideas, and there is work, and that’s that.

If this effect, which borders on the uncanny, can be appreciated when Wilkes shows in conventional whitewalled gallery spaces, it is heightened when her work is housed in a longabandoned east end unisex hairdresser’s in Glasgow. At 116 Sword Street - the location reclaimed by curators Switchspace - the first evidence of an artist’s presence is a series of halfformed letters, constrained and divided by the panels of the wall they’re painted on. Beyond these fractured glyphs, in the back room of the former salon, is a small collection of found objects, one painting, and two sculptures. There’s a half- shattered glass, and an old cup, both sitting on the floor beneath a bathroom sink, a single strand of tangled-up black thread draped over it. Alongside, also placed on the shop floor, is a small lampshade, turned upside-down, with the head of an electric toothbrush standing inside, off-centre. Surrounding these assemblages are two stumpy little sculptures, simple metal forms with uprights and crossbars. In the corner, a lump of industrial equipment - a sander, perhaps - sits, plugged in but not running.

On the wall is a small painting with a saucer glued to its upper- right corner, and a hastily scribbled text, reading:

“She’s pregnant again.”

Cynical readers will, no doubt, be suppressing a groan at that summary, and artists who find some stuff, then put it next to some other stuff, are indeed tena-penny and often worth less. But this is where Wilkes’s great strength is revealed. Her prosaic collection of unremarkable items, matched with made objects that don’t exactly dazzle in isolation, are combined and placed in such a way that the relationships between them seems almost tangible, as if you could reach out and twang taut wires connecting each component part of the installation to its neighbour, and the surrounding space. This evocation of a tensile physical connection goes further still, seeming to engender a dumb complicity between inanimate objects and the space in which they find themselves.

Mounting work like this in a decaying Dennistoun hairdresser’s doubles the sense of interconnection, to the extent that visitors risk bringing to life the apocryphal tale of the pretentious art lover who waxes lyrical about fixtures and fittings, his back turned to the art on show. There is, for example, a broken panel in amongst those slight suggestions of an alphabet. Perhaps Wilkes broke it, perhaps she didn’t.

There is, too, a patch of wall on which posters have been pasted, then torn down, and a small, brightly lit cubicle that is completely empty - both are absences that might be interventions, or might not. It is almost as if, once you appreciate the associations between Wilkes’s work, it becomes impossible to avoid gathering up everything that surrounds it, seeing significance in everything, looking hard for a route into the work, a piece of the puzzle that will allow it to be assimilated and broken down into easily digested gobbets of meaning.

This collusion between the work and its exhibition space is nothing new for Wilkes - she famously ripped up the floor of Transmission gallery for a 2001 solo show - but here it serves to further the odd sense of unbreakable wholeness that permeates her work. It is also a nod to Switchspace, the now defunct organisation behind this show, in their final curatorial exercise.

The exhibition neatly closes a circle, since it was a lecture by Wilkes, explaining the process of converting her flat into a temporary gallery, that prompted Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated to found Switchspace in 1999, aiming to explore the possibilities of presenting art in peculiar places, from Dallas’s front room, to west end cafe basements, to, as here, abandoned commercial spaces. More than a practical solution to the problems faced by young artists trying to find a place to show their work, over the past five years, Switchspace has prompted artists to reconsider their working methods and forge new ways of making work sensitive to or inspired by its surroundings. This show, then, is a homecoming of sorts for Cathy Wilkes - a return to her adopted home town, and a return to explicit engagement with her exhibition space - as well as serving as an apt tribute for Switchspace, the organisation her work inspired.

This review was first published in The Sunday Herald on December 12, 2004.

Metal Bridge is not quite a group show, instead grouping the four exhibiting artists into two pairs. The first of Sorcha Dallas’s two spaces belongs to Steven Claydon and Craig Mulholland.

Claydon’s Locked Constellation (Giant) is a curious assembly of objects. A small, spiky and vaguely architectural geometric cage of copper tubing squats protectively over a black disc, and beside it lies a cyborg of a spiral shell, half of it, impossibly, made of metal. Leaning against the wall behind these two sculptures is a perspex vitrine, backed with hessian, displaying a cut-out rasterised image of a statue, either praying or deep in thought, that has been haphazardly stuffed into its enclosure. There is something about these pieces that suggests Claydon is playing a future historian and archaeologist, presenting artefacts from our recent past and the coming times.

Craig Mulholland’s installation is similarly subtle and suggestive.

Paths of Resistance is a spiky mixed media installation consisting of three tripods. The first bears a crudely-fashioned silver globe, the second an approximation of an oil painter’s mahl stick, the linen bound up with strands of solder, while the third displays a framed work. Together, they form a sort of solar system of artistic production. This theme is reflected in Reduction With Noise, a sound piece that matches strings and electronica with an operatic refrain, repeating the phrase “What is art itself?”.

On the walls, Mulholland presents a series of “paintings” - titled Broken Pain and numbered one to four - which are fashioned from aluminium, polycarbonate and thread. The scores and cuts in the metal surfaces call to mind shattered glass and pyramids viewed from above, some are anarchic, peppered with holes. Together, they might be read as a reduction and reappraisal of Vorticism or Cubo-Futurism, co-opting the dynamism of those movements, but bringing them to a sudden halt, rendering a fascination with the machine age, literally, in metal.

It is good to see Mulholland constrained by a small gallery space. His last exhibition at Sorcha Dallas, Plastic Casino, was sited not in the gallery but in a disused sewing factory, which Mulholland filled to the brim with a vast installation containing painting, sculpture and video work, all resting on a dizzying array of art-historical references and shot through with political concerns.

In the next room, the splitting of the exhibition is made explicit not only by a change of space, but by an opaque white curtain covering the window and blocking the entrance. Behind it lies a striking sculpture by Thomas Helbig, Gesicht. An oversized bird, or perhaps a dinosaur, peeps out from a half-cracked egg, its face set in a rictus of struggle. It might be taken for a fossil, or a particularly violent piece of taxidermy, were it not for the explicit application of white paint on its black surface - Helbig wants us to know that he created this still-born chimera. After the shock of Gesicht, Helbig offers a moment of calm in the form of two works on paper. Both untitled, these crayon daubs are incomplete, unsatisfying, with smudges of dull colour and half-finished lines. They might fare better elsewhere, but following Claydon and Mulholland, and facing Helbig’s own sculpture, they are underwhelming.

Duncan Marquiss’s looped video piece is, on the other hand, overwhelming. Still images of abandoned buildings or caves struggle with brief shots of a white-hot furnace, while blurred shadows of human figures first dance, then fight. The piece closes with a descent into pure strobing colour, so aggressive that it becomes impossible to watch. Marquiss’s other work, No Volunteers Came Forward, a drawing in pencil and chalk, sees two half-clothed female figures, one blindfolded, caught in an exhausted embrace.

In both works, Marquiss offers an imagined mythology - the film a creation myth, the drawing a scene from some invented epic - and it is this that ties his work together with Helbig’s, with both artists conjuring up a past that never happened.

Similarly, back in the first gallery, Claydon and Mulholland chronicle skewed histories, this time political and art-historical, twisting real world antecedents to their own ends.

The Metal Bridge of the show’s title, then, is not just a reference to shared materials, but to a shared sensibility rooted in the examination of the past, real or invented. A neat curatorial trick, that, and one that not only casts a new gloss on the work shown, but forms a strong whole from the work of four very different artists.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 19th, 2007.

Judging by his work, Mark Handforth must be a complicated fellow. For his first solo show in the UK, he has filled the Modern Institute’s small exhibition space with sculptures and objects that muddle minimalism with modernism, make a nonsense of the struggle between form and function, and somehow manage to straddle the line between abstraction and representation.

First comes Left, a cheap street sign scaled-up so it stands waist high, bent into a free-standing S-bend. Viewed from behind, it’s a considered formal study in gun-metal grey; from the front it’s a skewed appropriation of an everyday object. Bent Meter plays a similar trick, with the humble parking meter transformed by Handforth’s decision to make two crimps along its length. Next door, a tree stump covered in guttering candles sits like the impromptu shrines that mark the site of a car accident.

In lesser hands, this repeated blurring of boundaries might be a dry exercise, but Handforth’s real skill is in tying together individual works to reveal subtler, and more human, concerns. Here, it is Fire - an assembly of coloured strip lights - that binds the installation together (as well as being a cheeky nod to the work of Dan Flavin). The lick of neon flame running up the gallery wall reflects off the floor, and the other sculptures, its glow revealing the romance in the bluntly prosaic objects assembled and altered by the artist.

Handforth has caught himself in a loop here, imbuing the objects he has appropriated and altered with the very cultural resonance that attracted him to them in the first place.

Or, to put it another way, Handforth - who was born in Hong Kong, raised in England, educated in Frankfurt and now lives in Miami - seems to be sharing the perpetual traveller’s heightened appreciation of the objects that cross his path as clues to local customs and mores.

This is a dense, complex installation, then, but Handforth ties up his multiple themes with such a deft touch that looking at his work is like slowly unwrapping a gift, with layers of art world allusion and reference peeling away to reveal sculptures that simply find beauty in the familiar.

This review was first published in The Sunday Herald on August 1st, 2004.

Sunday nights have always been that little bit special. Any club that runs on the Sabbath attracts the dedicated hedonist, and, without the commercial constraints of the weekend proper, the DJ is freed from the shackles of genre. Optimo (Esapacio) residents Jonnie Wilkes and Twitch take full advantage of their Sunday slot, twisting together a mess of music that takes in anything from The Slits to electro classics via undiscovered proto-disco gems.

For Twitch, Optimo is a necessity, the antidote to the mainstream glut of cash-cow clubbing by numbers. ‘We started the club out of boredom, cynicism and despair with the club scene,’ he says, ‘and out of a hatred of belonging to any scene to begin with.’

This ideology is more than a pose, encompassing an anti-DJ stance that has sampler Lady Miss Roland given equal billing with the human residents, leading to an emphasis on semi-live re-edits and technical tinkering. ‘The crowd at Optimo is a crazy mix of people,’ Wilkes explains, ‘so making a track that uses say, a Dead Kennedys’ guitar part, strange drum programming, and a big disco bassline means you’ve old punks, electro freaks and disco dancers all going off.’

That ‘crazy mix’ is something of an understatement, but Optimo’s success is down to a community spirit most clubs only aspire to, with a thriving internet message board and a not-so-secret society of badge-wearing regulars splaying the club across the week. ‘That is the essence of Optimo,’ Twitch confirms, ‘and the day that falls away we will shut up shop. The fact that this community exists beyond the night is probably more important than the physical space itself. Without going into some cod-sociological thesis, community is often missing from our world and the human soul needs it.’

On the night The Face pays a visit, Optimo is typically atypical. Twitch is off spreading the message in New York, and stand-in Guy De Board brings a retro-techno edge to the proceedings. The crowd, weaned on expecting the unexpected, cram the dancefloor regardless.

Optimo (Espacio) is a club that cocks a snook at conventional clubbing and defines itself through defying definition, so can it be summed up in three words? ‘Yes,’ says Twitch, ‘Passion, passion and passion.’

This review was first published in The Face in August, 2001.