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.

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.

This year, the Turner Prize show makes a lot of sense. This makes a change from the more usual cobbled-together feel, with four artists who have little in common bar their nomination gathered so that the public can assess them in advance of the judging panel’s decision.

The tie that binds Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes is a common interest in making art about art, and the way it is made. They all do this in very different ways, but the underlying theme of artists exploring, researching and revising the work of other artists, the art form in which they work, or, in Wilkes’s case, her own life and practice, makes this feel less like a parade of artists lining up for a cash prize, more like a group show, and a satisfying one at that.

Of the four, Macuga makes the most explicit art about art. Known for quoting from other artists, and for her interest in the way in which art is collected, curated, archived and exhibited, Macuga’s focus here is on two couples, personal and professional. She is showing a trio of sculptures that recreate designs by Lilly Reich, first seen in the German Pavilion of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. These cool, stand-offish industrial structures in smoked glass and steel must have packed more of a punch when Macuga exhibited them earlier this year in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a building designed by Reich’s partner, Mies van der Rohe, but her bid to reassess Reich still stands, thanks to the pieces’ rather pointed titles, Haus der Frau and Deutches Volk - Deutches Arbeit. Macuga’s new pieces for this show are collaged combinations of photographic prints by British modernist Paul Nash, paper cutouts by his partner Eileen Agar, and other ephemera, all culled from the Tate’s own archives.

A snap of Agar in a swimming costume is layered over a Nash photograph of some tree trunks, and a Nash snap of a cliff top is enhanced with an anatomical drawing of a hand pointing down from the heavens from Agar’s collection - posthumous collaborations enforced by Macuga that are oddly convincing, suggesting an alternate history of a particular corner of British art history.

Mark Leckey mines the past, too, but his tactics are more personal, more subjective. His Cinema-in-the-Round is a film of a lecture Leckey has been giving, and revising, for the past two years, a roving, often funny look at the artworks and films that Leckey is drawn to, and the relationship between objects and images, quoting Marx one minute and Homer Simpson the next. Made in ‘Eaven trains a camera on Jeff Koons’s highly-polished steel sculpture Rabbit, which reflects a mirror on the wall of Leckey’s studio, which in turn reflects the materials he gathered while researching the work. It’s a dizzyingly self-reflexive trick, at once commenting on the vacuous sheen of Koons’s piece, and Leckey’s attraction to it.

Self-reflexivity is the cornerstone of Runa Islam’s film works. Cinematography sees a motion-controlled camera slowly panning around the workshop of motion-control expert Harry Harrison, with a soundtrack made up of the clicks and whirrs of the camera apparatus. You’d never guess, but the camera is tracing out the letters of the word “cinematography”. For First Day of Spring, Islam returned to her native Bangladesh, and paid rickshaw drivers to rest, working as actors playing themselves. Again, the camera pans slowly, exchanging an establishing shot for close-ups on the drivers’ faces, but the sudden, unscripted interruption of a passer-by, who looks straight into the camera, reminds us that this is as much a film about documentary film-making as it is a documentary. If all that sounds too clever by half, Islam’s work is saved by being simply beautiful, and by its presentation in carefully-designed, dimly-lit screening rooms - watching them, enjoying the images presented, is enough, with the theoretical underpinnings of each film the cherry on the cake.

After these three, Cathy Wilkes comes as something of a relief. Her work is immediate, affecting and deeply personal. Rather than mining some obscure corner of art history, Wilkes looks to her own life, assembling large-scale installations from everyday elements. Set on top of two supermarket checkout units, there are bowls full of dried soup. On the floor, empty jars with batteries placed inside them. There’s a shop mannequin perched on a toilet and festooned with rusty horseshoes, a tea cup and other detritus. A second mannequin is trapped inside a birdcage and draped in sliced up tea-towels. In part a diary of domestic life, in part a feminist critique expressed in juxtapositions with a surrealist bent, Wilkes’s work works because it is, first and foremost, sculptural. Those dirty bowls are aligned with perfect precision, a pair of jam jars mirror each other, the placement of the squat heaps of roof tiles, each painted with a cross motif, fizzes with tension. And, when that cross motif reappears, this time made of spoons and wadding, it comes, inexplicably, as a genuine shock. There is, too, something deeply satisfying in the way that Wilkes borrows from her own work, slowly developing a grammar of allied objects over many years - there’s a pushchair here that offers a reminder of a 2004 installation in a disused Glasgow hairdresser’s, the tiny whelk shells that peppered a recent show at the Modern Institute have been replaced here by flower petals, the heart motif of a flat, rubbery sculpture is rendered in pink, not yellow as it has been in the past. These subtle repetitions, revisions and removals are, admittedly, only apparent to viewers familiar with Wilkes’s past work, but there’s no doubt that fresh eyes would see that Wilkes has thought deeply about the objects she gathers together, and the relationships between them, even if the reasons behind the choices she makes remain a mystery.

So, who will win? Mark Leckey has been hotly tipped since the shortlist was announced, but he’s not a dead cert like Mark Wallinger, who took the prize last year. There’s no obvious stand-out, either, and none of the artists look out of their depth. Were it up to me, I’d have a hard time choosing between Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes. Both have developed complex, layered and weighty ways of working, but neither of them, unlike Leckey and Macuga, has slipped over the line into making rather dry, academic work. The result is film and sculpture that makes you think, and think hard, but, more than that, Islam and Wilkes make the sort of stuff that sticks in the mind for reasons it is impossible to explain away in a curatorial note, operating, for all its sophistication, at a gut level, appealing to the viewers’ eyes and instincts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Islam and Wilkes are better artists than their peers here, but it does make it possible to fall in love with their work, rather than admiring its wit, rigour and sophistication.

The Turner Prize 2008 is at Tate Britain, London, until January 18.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 3rd October , 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In a break from its usual programme, which tends to include showings of new work by gallery artists and like-minded contemporaries, the Modern Institute is showing a collection of pieces by Ferdinand Kriwet, the pioneering multimedia artist and poet, best known for his ‘Bild-Ton-Collage’, or sound-picture-collages, matching a set of new pieces with a focussed retrospective, sampling the Dusseldorf-born artist’s activity in the 1960s.

The show opens with the seminal Apollovision, an attempt to fuse together the media sources Kriwet encountered on a trip to the US during the hubbub surrounding the Appollo 11 mission to the moon. Grainy television footage is cut and pasted together, paired with a soundtrack of radio broadcasts, sometimes allowed to flow, at other times cut down to single repeated words and looped announcements, to mesmeric effect.

Kriwet does not limit himself to sounds and images of the Apollo 11 mission, though, also homing in on the advertising slogans of broadcast sponsors (including, neatly enough, Brillo, a brand immortalised by Andy Warhol some five years earlier), allows the relentlessly American Superman through his filter and overlays recorded images with boldface single-word inter-titles, flashed up for just a split second: GAS, LSD, LAW, ORDER, VIET, and so on. The repeated compère’s introduction of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and the Apollo astronauts to some celebratory function sees Kriwet complete a complex picture of the moon landing as glorious scientific adventure, all-American hero worship, and advertising-laden capitalist propaganda victory.

It is this combination of the absorption and presentation of mass media with pointed commentary that allows Kriwet’s work to seem absolutely current, even if he is documenting a moment in history, and even if his techniques have been used before and since. William Burroughs extended his literary cut-up and fold-in experiments to tape, adding a veneer of hokey mysticism to the combination of existing texts and randomly inserted recordings, John Oswald’s plunderphonic manglings of hit songs might come laden with theory but remain a one-note joke, like the more recent micro-editing efforts of Cassetteboy, and Double Dee and Steinski’s feverish Lessons in the musical heritage of early hip-hop are confined to a single musical scene. Kriwet stands out from these fellow media collage artists not just for being a pioneer of the form, inspiring those that followed, but because his efforts seem to form a complete, coherent essay offering a genuine understanding of a period of past time. Those text overlay’s might hover dangerously close to agitprop, but Kriwet keeps a cool head, engaged in a genuine attempt, like David Bowie’s Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, to absorb the welter of images, sounds and texts transmitted over the airwaves.

The merger of the political, populist and commercial continues in a pair of works from 1968, both titled Textsign. Both are stamped in aluminum, their circular texts highlighted in red on a green background, with the look of shop signs or advertising hoardings, and both contain sets of ellided words, fusing celebrities with allied or unexpected concepts, new coinages that prompt dense sets of images. ‘Marlonesome’ fuses Brando with Elvis, retrospectively doubling the fame-inspired reclusive nature of both men. ‘Robertarzan’ does a similar job on RFK and the King of the Apes. The more cryptic texts - ‘Hemancipate’, ‘Jungleleisure’, ‘Mentalamode’ - seem in hindsight to presage the absurd attempts of today’s advertisers and political pollsters to slice and dice demographic groups, from Soccer Moms to Fifty Quid Blokes.

The ten prints that make up Rundscheiben - literally, Round Discs - are not so easy to read. Each one is like a little big bang, with letters, words and phrases spinning out from an empty core. A bid to disrupt the usually linear progress of writing, these are not quite concrete poems (the circular display of words does not seem to enhance their meaning) but build a rhythm through juxtaposition, as in the print which lays meaningless syllables - ‘Stot, kin, tin…’ - around lengthy, complex compound nouns.

Kriwet changes tack with the recent series Trans-Script. While still working with language and text, his focus seems to have shifted even further towards the means of transmission, in this case the book. Three museum-like cabinets are set in the centre of the Modern Institute’s main gallery space, each bearing ‘book objects’, open for perusal, but under glass. Beneath the exposed editions are more of the same, but boxed and placed with some reverence on a set of shelves, accompanied by a stern warning that visitors should not touch them. Instead, the books - perfect bound, with rather lavish interleaves protecting each Xerox-copied page of often illegible text formations - can be read on a set of video monitors hung on the opposite wall. This is no interactive installation to flick through, though, with Kriwet testing the viewer’s patience by screening each page of each book in turn, including those blank transparent leaves. It’s a strangely fetishistic installation, the complex, almost unfriendly archival presentation serving to shift focus away from the content of the books, offering them up instead as artifacts to be considered. The presence of texts mediated via digital media hints that Kriwet might be considering the future of the book as a medium, a dystopian future where books are not objects from which an individual can glean knowledge, but relics to be studied at one remove, scanned and displayed on screens.

By way of contrast, a much more generous 1967 work hangs beside the Trans-script display. This ‘poem painting’ has white text in a friendly serif display font set against a black background, the letters butting right up against the frame, as if the work has been cut from a longer dialogue. As it is, the poem consists of a single word: Du. After the cool, stand-offish installation that dominates the room, this short welcome comes as something of a relief.

This is a concise show of just eight works, then, but it is just as satisfying as any full retrospective, offering a snapshot of Kriwet’s 1960s work, while revealing the breadth of his ongoing practice, from the early, influential multimedia collage experimentation of Appollovision to the fusion of print and digital media of the Trans-script installation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For some artists a commission to craft Christmas lights might be taken as an opportunity to have a bit of fun, adding a dose of kitsch to their catalogue raisonné, or attempting an unsubtly subversive satire of the commercially-driven season.

Not so Anya Gallaccio. When the Paisley-born Turner Prize nominee was asked to provide festive lighting for The Hayward gallery, she took to the project like any other show or commission, coming up with an installation that fits in with her past practice, and rests on themes that have run through her work since she rose to fame in the late 90s alongside the Young British Artists launched at the now-infamous Freeze exhibition curated by Damien Hirst.

‘I did struggle,’ Gallaccio admits, ‘And it was quite hard to come up with something that took the same approach as I would for any project. The thing that took a long time to get over was the idea that Christmas lights are usually very graphic - a snowman, a star, a flower - and I didn’t want to make images like that. I ended up trying to think more about the process, about light itself and what you can do with it, and about colour.’

The result, a set of lights at the South Bank switched on last night by model-cum-author Sophie Dahl, consists of hundreds of coloured lightbulbs festooned on two sides of the Thames-side building.

‘I’ve made a big grid of green lights on the right hand side of the building,’ Gallaccio explains, ‘We hand-dipped about a thousand different light bulbs in different shades of green, using French enamel varnish, to make a sort of colour field. Then, on the other side of the building, there’s a smaller version made up of about 900 red bulbs.’

Aside from their Christmassy connotations, those colours are familiar from one of Gallaccio’s best known installations, Red on Green, which saw ten thousand rose heads laid out on a bed of their stalks, and left to slowly rot away. Lightbulbs do not, of course, decay, but Gallaccio has come up with novel way of incorporating her long-standing interest in transformations over time.

‘Each bulb in the piece has a computer chip,’ she says, ‘so that I can have each one to turn on and off when I want it to, and we’ve programmed the festoons of lights with Christmas carols and songs - Frosty The Snowman, White Christmas, that sort of thing - in Morse code. You can’t read the Morse code, but I needed a way of determining how the lights would come on and off without involving an image. If you think back to the roses, there were ten thousand flowers, all a similar red, but there was an optic effect down to the nature of the pigment in the blooms which changed as they aged. For this piece, I decided to hand-dip the bulbs in colours that range from yellowy-green to very dark shade, so there’s this slightly intuitive, organic element to it.’

Another key aspect of Gallaccio’s practice is her reluctance to show her hand, so to speak, preferring impermanent installations that are left to their own devices, from rotting flower heads to chocolate smeared on gallery walls or the vast block of ice she left to melt away in a disused Wapping pumping station. More recently, the artist has reclaimed the rather naff art of macramé, laboriously knotting great swathes of netting that are then hung and draped to undermined their rigid grid-like structure.

Again, Gallaccio’s festive lights have been made with her wider practice in mind, taking advantage of The Hayward’s plans for their annual lightshow. ‘The idea of the programme is that it will become an accumulative project,’ she says, ‘This year, they’re installing the lights David Batchelor made last year again, and next year there’ll be somebody else and my lights will go up again - after a while the building will end up looking like a family Christmas tree, with a great jumble of stuff built up over the years!’

‘So, I’ve left open lots of possibilities to do different things with the piece. Next year, the bulbs could be placed more closely together, which would make the colours more intense, or it could be hung in a completely different formation. I’m looking forward to seeing what different things those colours do in different places and on different scales around the South Bank in the coming years.’

Gallaccio’s contribution to London’s seasonal cityscape is not alone: over at Tate Britain, Fiona Banner has installed a 30-foot Nordic tree, and decorated it with models of the world’s fighter aircraft shorn of their national markings, ironically dubbing the tree Peace On Earth. With The Hayward’s commitment to future lighting projects, this looks like the start of a trend, one that other cities would do well to follow, tempering those gaudy municipal rigs with contributions from artists. There’s even an obvious slogan: ‘Tis the season to be arty.

This interview was first published in The Herald in December, 2007.

For the first time in 23 years, the Turner Prize Show has slipped its moorings and sailed up to Liverpool from London. By happy accident, this year’s nominees, Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger, all deal in themes that, right now, suit Liverpool to a tee. Though their approaches are very different, each of the four explore the politics of spaces and places, and the way in which history, architecture and environment work together to affect and define us. Stand outside Tate Liverpool on the Albert Dock, looking toward the city, and the view resonates with the installations inside. The Liver Building is to the left, the Anglican Cathedral off in the distance, and in between a gaggle of cranes work to regenerate the river-front, slotting nondescript towers into the skyline. It’s a rich view, brimming with Victorian civic pride, haunted by ghosts of Empire and the slave trade, topped with unfettered progress for good or ill, and serving to turn the Turner Prize show from a grubby competition into a group show anchored in time and place.

Step into the gallery, though, and highfalutin ideas prompted by the setting begin to fade. You might think that the show would rise to the occasion and make the most of Tate Liverpool, perhaps spreading across two floors, giving the four nominees plenty of room to breathe - there’s nothing a Northern city likes more than showing the Southerners how its done, after all. But no, the show is squeezed into a corner of the fourth floor, an airless, clammy and claustrophobic space. This too, though, seems rather apt - the sense of impending disappointment raised by the cramped installation matches local expectations for the reason behind the Turner Prize show’s move, Liverpool Capital of European Culture 2008, a project beset by administrative teething troubles that is limbering up to be a distinctly damp squib.

More than any of his peers, Mike Nelson stands up to the constraints of the space offered to him. This is a surprise. Nelson is best known for big, meandering installations that weave splintered narratives, blurring the lines between his work and the spaces it occupies. Here at the Tate, though, he’s conjured up Amnesiac Shrine, a tight, concise installation that opens and closes with two near-identical campfire sculptures, crafted from charred sticks and flames of plastic. In between is a maze of sorts. Four cubes stretch from floor to ceiling, each with an untidy peep-hole bashed into one corner. Inside, the cubes are hollow, piled up with dunes of sand, the interior walls mirrored to form an infinite desert landscape, overlooked, thanks to the mirrors, by the viewer’s own blinking eye. It is hard to resist flitting from one to the other in a bid to uncover previously unseen subtleties. This to-and-fro makes it easy to become disorientated, confidently striding out of the exit, only to find it’s the entrance. The piece has a back-story, too. In the mid-90s, Nelson invented a mythical gang of Gulf War veterans, the Amnesiacs, with whom he ‘collaborated’ on a series of works. While the resurrection of the Amnesiacs fleshes out the narrative of the Shrine, it doesn’t feel central to the piece - visitors create their own story, and suffer amnesia of their own, lost inside the installation.

The same cannot be said of Mark Wallinger’s Sleeper, a film, more than two hours long, which shows the artist, dressed as a bear, spending a few nights hanging about in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. It’s quite funny (men dressed as bears always are) but without the explanatory note that outlines Wallinger’s concerns, which include the ‘sleeper’ spies of the Cold War, an appropriation of Berlin’s bear emblem by a foreign visitor, and a satirical undermining of Mies van der Rohe’s stripped down Modernist building, we’re left with a faintly amusing diversion. And, once informed of Wallinger’s aims, the work hardly improves, with interlocking concepts floating over the work, not part of it. Like State Britain, his reconstruction of anti-war protester Brian Haw’s banners and signs, for which he earned his Prize nomination, Wallinger’s Sleeper is a slight work, easily shrugged off, and no amount of curatorial justification can change that.

Nathan Coley, on the other hand, makes dense, complex work that can speak for itself. His room is blocked at both ends by two threshold sculptures, oak beams that hinder the gallery-goer’s progress. When last seen at Coley’s solo show at doggerfisher, the threshold sculpture was slight and sly, a quiet suggestion to consider the space between spaces. Here, he’s beefed up the beams, so that they shout out an announcement that visitors are entering his gallery, an oddly aggressive gesture, undermined rather by the gallery attendants constant requests that visitors mind their step. There Will Be No Miracles Here, first seen on the Isle of Bute, is also transformed by this new context. The weak glow of the sculpture’s gaudy fairground lights have taken on a deflated, sad air, offering a wry commentary on the Turner Prize competition, alongside the piece’s existing associations. (The text is clipped from a 17h Century proclamation that ends ‘…by order of the King’, a curious clash between church and state). Hope and Glory is another text made flesh, this time applying the patriotic English song to a model of a lowly terraced house, signs of its making still present on the surface, in stark contrast to the heavy metal plinth on which it sits. This is a distinctly ambiguous, ambivalent piece, and Coley, with typical economy, invites the viewer to tease out possible meaning - is it a denial of jingoistic bluster, or a tribute to honest patriotic feeling? Both, and a lot more besides.

Finally, Zarina Bhimji’s photographs explore scenes of conflict in East Africa, hinting at horrors unseen. Illegal Sleep shows rifles leaning against a wall, and it takes a moment for their pleasing arrangement to fade, their true purpose becoming clear. Similarly, it is the childish drawings scratched into the wall seen in Echo that draw the eye, only for a graffito that echoes Coley’s work hoves into view: ‘The man which come from Congo should be killed by the order of the army’. Bhimji’s film Waiting closes the show, and here she turns away from conflict to closely examine a single place, a Sisal processing factory. The camera pans slowly, lovingly, over dillapidated corridors, drying machines, and dusty cobwebs, never quite revealing the building’s purpose, revelling instead in its atmosphere.

So, who will win, and who should? For some reason, Wallinger is seen as a dead cert by bookies and critics alike, but compared to the other three, his work is weak, insubstantial and eminently forgettable. Just like last year’s winner, Tomma Abts. If the public had a vote, and the prize was judged on this exhibition (they don’t and it isn’t) Mike Nelson would be a shoe-in: on my visit, the Amnesiac Shrine was met with squeals of delight and vigourous debate, with visitors lingering longest in his space. Nelson, who, like Wallinger has been nominated before, would be a deserving winner. And so would Coley and Bhimji. Though their reputations in the art world haven’t reached the giddy heights of Nelson and Wallinger, both have forged rich practices, and it is their installations that linger in the memory, offering much to mull over after leaving the gallery.

Whoever takes the prize on December 3rd, the show is well worth the trip South. For once, it has the feel of a true group exhibition, with deep connections between the four selected artists, all in a city that suits them well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A human take on nature's wonders

Two shows opened at Aberdeen Art Gallery last night, and both are concerned with the natural world and our relationship to it.

First come Dalziel + Scullion, with a long, engrossing video work, Some Distance From The Sun, that traces the evolution of plant life over the millennia, from the primitive seaweeds to complex flowers. Botanical samples float across the screen against a stark white background, shot in close up, so that any sense of scale slips away, turning the tiniest lichens into a forest of trees. The soundtrack, by Glasgow musician Mark Vernon, gurgles, burbles and hums, an attempt to recreate the sounds of growth, of life itself.

Movement is key here. The slowly panning camera suggests both inexorable evolutionary progression and the physical movement of plants, as fern fronds unfurl and seed pods pop. It's a simple piece, but one that it is easy to become lost in, absorbed by this careful presentation of natural forms, which Dalziel + Scullion have not only documented, but transformed, allowing the plants to tell the story of their own development.

In the next room is Unknown Pines, a suite of six prints, showing, in hyper-real detail, a short section of tree trunk. They are, technically, superb images - every last knot and crack stands out, a weeping ooze of sap glistens and the tiniest crenellation on a scrap of surface bark demands attention.

There is, if not quite a polemical edge to these works, then a political one. Dalziel + Scullion are explicitly attempting to alter the way their audience engages with the natural world.

Each of the pines is labelled with its common name and its Latin classification, but in lavishing attention of their subjects, Dalziel + Scullion look past the colloquial naming, the hierarchical scientific ordering, the imposition of human ownership through naming, and focus on the trees themselves. In effect, these works are portraits, and Dalziel + Scullion are - though I suspect they might take issue with the word - humanising the pines.

At this point, though, the duo are hoist by their own petard. Their aim is to do away with the casual, dismissive human view of nature and replace it with a closer, more personal appreciation, but, in this near-fetishistic presentation of natural forms, the pair have replaced scientific objectification with objectification of another type. If human attitudes to nature are colonial, then Unknown Pines is a failed attempt to foster a post-colonial approach, ultimately casting the pines as noble savages - it is impossible, of course, to patronise a tree, but these works almost manage it.

In the second gallery, David Blyth, mounting his first, long-overdue solo show, also displays a fascination with nature and its processes. His Knockturne is a complex, multi-faceted installation - one that fizzes with symbolism, subtly suggesting possible interpretations, only to counter them thanks to a slippery internal logic.

That logic rests on a seemingly illogical fusion of themes - the life of cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, and Blyth's stint working with a farmer during lambing season, a project that coincided with the birth of his first child. At the centre of the room is an ejector seat. It is being dragged along by 31 lambs, still-borns granted a new life of sorts, mounted and stuffed by Blyth. Corralling this flock is a fence bearing spinning wheels bound up with telephone cords, and, on washing lines woven from twigs, sheepskin Babygros - or spacesuits? - are hung out to dry.

Outsize balls of wool are peppered with needles, like organic Sputniks. On the wall, a silk parachute serves as the screen for a projected montage of footage from Tereshkova's flight, inter-cut with shots of a spinning wheel, a nod to the cosmonaut's unlikely career path, which began in a textile mill and ended in space.

Taken together, this is an almost overwhelming array of allusion and reference. Birth and rebirth are central, and there is a whiff of sympathetic magic, as if the installation is the apparatus for some arcane ritual to breathe life into the lambs and give Tereshkova a second chance to fly. But the temptation to read Blyth's work as religious, with space flight analogous to communion with the heavens, is tempered by a bathetic descent into the domestic and quotidian - it is a work about lives lived on the farm, in the mills and at home. There is, too, a harder, pseudo- scientific edge to the piece, in the matching of life cycles to cyclical orbits, and the fusion of high technology with low.

This confusion is Knockturne's great strength. Standing before it, one can never quite grasp the whole, nor can one resolve the connections between its disparate elements, but there remains a strong sense that resolution is possible, and that, given enough time, this is a work that will reveal itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.