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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year, those of us who can’t remember anything about the 1960s because, not having been born, we weren’t really there, have had to put up with baby boomers reminiscing about 1968, painted as twelve months of sit-ins, student uprisings, civil rights triumphs and general grooviness.

The ideas that lie behind Altered States of Paint are drawn from the darker side of the counterculture, and the show is more ‘69 than ‘68, skipping free love and revolutionary politics in favour of Woodstock warnings against taking the brown acid, the occultist experimentation of Kenneth Anger and Bobby Beausoleil, Brian Jones floating dead in his swimming pool, and the violent full-stop to the decade provided by Charles Manson and the Hells Angels at Altamont. The show’s title is borrowed from Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States, in which hero Dr. Jessup loses mind and body both, on fly agaric in his isolation tank, and curator Graham Domke quotes Aldous Huxley in his introductory text: ‘The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.’

Heavy stuff. And yet the show opens with Rabiya Choudry’s decidedly jolly wall painting. This huge slab of black, pink and glittering gold completely covers the entrance to the gallery, and is full of cartoon faces with bulging eyes, halfway between SpongeBob SquarePants and Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, peeping out from behind bold graphic motifs. It’s an indication that, for all those intimations of psychedelic doom and gloom, Domke has conjured up a complex creature of an exhibition, happy to undermine his stated premise, to clash artists rather than match them, and, ultimately, to confuse his audience rather than guiding them.

Inside the gallery proper, the first room holds a sort of capsule show-within-a-show, with work by all but one of the exhibiting artists. Till Gerhard’s Healter might reference the Manson Family’s unfortunate obsession with the Beatles, but it’s a light, airy piece of work, with three women dancing around a fairground helter skelter, obscured by spray-painted blasts of colour. Andreas Dobler’s Up In Smoke has an impenetrable, alien air, with rail tracks burnt to ash and two concrete structures with smoking bowls set in a fiery void. Then comes a sudden shift. Angela de la Cruz alters the state of painting by turning her canvases into sculptural forms, breaking down the stretcher of Super Clutter XXL and bolting it back together, turning a cool, collected work in high-gloss pink and brown into a frozen act of violence. Neil Clements makes sculptural paintings too, the surface of Dee a restrained minimalist essay in grey and black, countered by a canvas that borrows its shape from the Gibson Flying V guitar. What is going on here? These are artists with very different aims, some internationally established, some, like Clements and Choudry, emerging onto the Scottish scene. Jutter Koether’s small painting, which layers liquid glass and pushed-in thumbtacks over a roughly-sketched “A”, provides an answer, or a clue - all the works in the room are, or contain, the triangular shape of that letter. It’s a neat trick - rather than forcing a connection between the artists he has brought together, Domke allows a simple, formal correspondence to hint that, for all their differences, these painters share something, even if, at this point, it is no more than a superficial similarity.

In the main gallery space, the connections implied by that A-shape become clearer: these painters are all explorers. Andreas Dobler explores worlds of his own devising. Turfstones offers a post-apocalyptic scene, with half-buried Brutalist relics fording a lava stream. Meditating the wreck sees a woman, cross-legged, contemplating a crashed space ship. Stretch it is full of a strange elastic mould, infecting an artist’s studio. Til Gerhard’s explorations drift through real time and interior space, borrowing cultural artefacts from the past - the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks LP, scenes from the The Wicker Man - and dips them in private hallucinatory visions.

Jutta Koether provides a companion piece to her work in the first gallery, this time a letter K, spelling out her debt to Kenneth Anger. A series of small works, again peppered with tacks, suggest the completion of arcane rituals, and the repeated use of reflective materials offers a distorted view of the viewer, and skewed glimpses of the exhibition itself. Her large scale work, Touch and Resist 5 is a huge, hastily-rendered monochrome, seven metres across, that borrows compositionally from Titian and Reubens, but, thanks to its clumsy, hurried brushtrokes, is firmly placed within the Koether canon.

Once more, Koether provides the glue that binds the show together. The explicit engagement with art history of Touch and Resist 5 points to Clements. ‘85, another canvas cut into the shape of a guitar, this time the sort favoured by heavy metal soloists, again operates at the junction between painting and sculpture with. Clements goes further with (Full Stop), a pair of paintings that merge two traditions. Both might be seen as close-up copies of Malevich’s Black Square, but after hanging his stark canvases, Clements holds a can of spraypaint up and empties it onto the centre of each work, following the instructions of arch-conceptualist Lawrence Weiner.

Like Clements, de la Cruz makes work that explores its own making, but hers is a still more self-contained, self-referential practice. Clutter VI (with white blanket) is deconstructs and reconstructs another painting, only to obscure it almost completely beneath another canvas. Ready To Wear is a small, square work, and this time the canvas is peeled back and ruched, revealing the frame and the wall behind. Best of all, the all-black canvas of Stuck has been unceremoniously jammed into an entranceway, firmly closing the doors of perception that this exhibit promised to open.

The inclusion of Clements and de la Cruz is intriguing. Their work is the best here, but, for all that they fit in with a loose theme of painterly exploration, neither are easy bedfellows for the more explicit mining of the dark side of the 1960s dream found in the work of their peers here. They do, though, complete the exhibition. Without their cool, collected essays on the possibilities of painting, Altered States of paint might well have been too overbearing, too trippy, and, like the those rose-tinted memories of ‘68, too simple a show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elsewhere, Campbell squishes linear progress into a single moment.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first sight, the work of Lotte Gertz appears rather slight. The pieces on show at Mary Mary all share a washed-out look, with light grey backgrounds and a muted palette, torn edges, apparently apathetic marks made with pencils, crayons or oils, and various bits and bobs tentatively stuck to their surfaces.

Stand before one for a while, though, and it becomes clear that Gertz isn’t in the business of hastily dashing off vague abstracts, but a precise, thoughtful maker of images that take time to resolve. When they do, that first impression fades fast. The title of Mr Sophistication (I Am Stage) gives a hint, but look before you read and it slowly becomes clear that the rectangle missing a side is indeed a stage, and the flurry of curved lines above are the curtains that frame it. Its neighbour offers a little more, with zig-zag marks in black wending their way across the paper to offer the barest suggestion of the pitched roofs of a row of houses, and, with that realisation, the six little marks on the right become a table, with a sewn-on button completing the picture of domesticity. And when Gertz edges over the line into outright representation, she remains subtle, with clock faces reduced to a circle and two lines, and interior space boiled down to a few angled lines.

This experience of looking, and looking again, sets up the viewer well: with a few connections made, more hove into view, and Gertz slowly but surely exposes her themes, and, perhaps more importantly, her method of making work.

The first clear signal of that method is Gertz’s refusal to restrict herself to a single medium. Every work on show combines collage, drawing, painting and printing, with a few tiptoeing toward the sculptural. Woodcut prints are sliced or torn then put to use as a surface on which to draw or paint, or, in little slivers, applied in turn to a woodcut surface. Other elements are rendered with everyday objects. Matches, half-unravelled threads, off-cuts of leather and elastic bands are glued over drawings, buttons are sewn onto paper.

These materials are not, though, simply everyday detritus. Many have a common source, clothing, and most are items that we all lose easily or discard with little thought. Buttons pop off shirts and roll away, loose threads are picked at and flicked off, spent matches are dropped to the floor, red Post Office elastic bands litter closes and streets. With these familiar objects, which must be lost for her to find them, Gertz is subtly evoking bodies moving through space and time, building a physical human presence out of the faintest possible traces. And, alongside these distinctly human materials, there are recurring motifs that reinforce the idea of a barely-present body in transit: boxes and containers are everywhere, and, more obviously, houses and theatres.

To call this shadowy presence a character would be a step too far - you can’t, after all, tell much about a person from a few bits of frayed nylon, the odd button and a hint of an unpacked box - but, as these materials are used again and again, Gertz creates the distinct impression that her works are inhabited, by someone.

That someone might well be Gertz herself. Every one of the collaged works on paper in this show bears very deliberate traces of the artist who made them. Some are subtle - those woodcut backgrounds are peppered with fingerprint smudges - others are in plain sight, and delivered with a nod and a wink, as in Blue Box: Match Play, Match Spent, in which the walls and roof of a house are built of crayons drawn with crayons.

If the missing figure is Gertz, her sources and references are almost absent too. The architectural forms only-just-represented in Blue Box or Standard Houses: History, Her Story have their roots in the houses of Gertz’s native Denmark. More specific still, those clock faces are lifted from a single scene in Casablanca. The evocative title of To The Roof! With A Couple Of Things That Looks Like Wings is a distorted quotation from a Brecht poem. Few, if any, viewers would catch these allusions, and it is clear that, just as Gertz makes a given piece using a process of revision, layering up elements from what might be called preparatory works, only to paint or draw over them, so she lights on a source, turning it over in her mind, discarding some elements and retaining others, until that first thought or image becomes something else entirely.

And it seems safe to say that these processes of thinking and making are not just similar, they are intertwined, with materials suggesting new thoughts, and references reconsidered as the possibilities of a drawn line, painted smudge or applied object offer new directions. Much of this internal dialogue is, of course, private, known only to Gertz herself, but just enough leaks out to the viewer. The result is a curious mirroring, as gallery-goers seek to tease out the imagery and meaning in these works - are, for example, the two hands of Hands and Graphite Wheel applauding the unseen performance implied in Mr. Sophistication (I Am Stage)? - or consider the intention behind the use of materials, they reflect Gertz’s mode of practice. And so these private, subjective works, when they are released into the public sphere of the gallery, become private and subjective once more, in the minds of those who see them. It’s an indirect, subtle and almost teasing form of communication between artist and viewer, this, but a powerful one. By never stating her case, and working in whispers and hints, Gertz passes on her ideas with a sort of generosity. By abstaining from bald statements she rewards those willing to put in the work required to uncover the ties that bind these pieces together. Gertz cares little, I suspect, whether her audience’s specific thoughts match her own, satisfied that the gentle experience of discovery her work prompts in the viewer corresponds with the dialogue between ideas and materials at the heart of her practice.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 22nd, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackie Anderson is an unusual painter of portraits.

Instead of forging a personal relationship with her sitter, she often paints from photographs of passers-by going about their business, unaware of or unconcerned by the artist’s gaze, crafting a curiously intimate relationship between subject and audience.

These are works full of movement, too, often having the look of photographic double exposures, with figures repeated and over-layed capturing the temporal space between fleeting moments. Physical space is to the fore, too - buildings, doorways and street furniture make their presence known, but only barely, reduced to vague shadows or simple silhouettes - a hint that Anderson’s chief interest is in investigating that apparent contradiction, the complete privacy of time spent alone in busy public places, surrounded by others. Similarly, a series of portraits of the artist’s friends shows subjects caught at the moment they rise to leave a room - an unthinking act, and an insignificant one, is turned into a split second heavy with potential by Anderson’s taught, focused examination of it.

The conceptual underpinnings of Anderson’s portraiture are matched by an unconventional practice. A gifted draughtswoman - seeing one of her subjects beside their painting is enough to take your breath away - Anderson’s technical skill is clearly the result of hard labour, not simple inspiration. She is, too, something of a traditionalist and craftswoman, stretching her own canvases and priming them with rabbit-skin glue, and has developed a laborious, almost obsessive technique that relies on the removal of oil paint with turpentine as much as its application, and the repeated application of pale, translucent washes. Perhaps surprisingly, this deliberate, difficult and time-consuming technique is self-taught: Anderson began her career as an artist in 1995 after graduating with a degree in sociology from the University of Aberdeen, only later completing an MFA at Duncan of Jordanstone Art College.

The end result is a rare blend of accessibility - these are representational, figurative paintings after all - and a complex, subtle set of conceptual concerns.

As a result, Anderson is drawing increasing attention from collectors - her gallerist Amber Roome considers an outing at the London Art Fair this year a considerable success - and recently won the RSA Alastair Salverson Scholarship, an award intended to enable emerging artists to travel abroad in service of their art, and includes the opportunity for a solo show at the Royal Scottish Academy. As a result, Anderson is currently based in Trinidad & Tobago, researching her family’s links to the West Indies, focussing on the island’s multicultural aspects and the population’s use of public space. Given that Anderson’s paintings tend toward the pale, wan and transparent it is hard to guess how temporary relocation to warmer climes will impact on her practice - a wholesale conversion to stereotypical carnival scenes and sun-kissed beaches seems rather unlikely - but, given her subtle, evocative treatment of Glaswegians in Glasgow, there’s little doubt that she will return with fresh, unexpected insights into Trinidadian culture and environments.

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

Sean Scully loves paint. The canvases on show here are liberally smeared with oils, so that every movement of Scully’s hand lingers on the surface, as if he has only just completed each work. This self-referencing physicality is matched by an understanding of colour. In Green Corner, Scully fills his trademark grid with muted hues, lifted by a shock of deep orange. His watercolours and prints are softer, without the strict delineation of the paintings: in Day, soft pinks blur into blacks, and Black Corner sees light marks hardly holding back the blocks of amber and green.

If all that sounds familiar, it should - Scully is widely held up as the natural heir to American painters of a certain stripe who plied their trade in the middle of the last century. Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning both loom large (both, like Scully, European painters who emigrated to the US, and found fame there) and his work is firmly entrenched in the aesthetic of those painters, and their fellow Abstract Expressionists.

And so, wherever Scully’s work is shown, there is an elephant in the room: what on earth is Scully doing making work like this now?

He is far from being a copyist, but he is a follower, painting himself into the very corner the artists he admires sought to escape. There is no engagement with earlier abstract painting here, no sense that Scully is pushing his medium forward, or engaging on any meaningful level with his forebears. And so his work comes perilously close to being kitsch, in the sense that critic Clement Greenberg railed against when championing the work of Rothko, de Kooning et al. It is not developed in response to the ever-changing world and the art in it, but is trapped in a tradition; a way of working that is antithetical to the aims of the artists Scully draws inspiration from.

These paintings and prints are not especially unpleasant to look at, then, but there is something deeply unsatisfying about them, and a sour taste is all that is left after the first flush of contact with Scully’s way with paint and colour fades. This, perhaps, is down to an overbearing, even smug, tendency in Scully’s work. ‘Look at us,’ these paintings and prints seem to say, ‘we are very important, very important indeed.’ They might well have been, long ago. But not now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Fixed Points is a curious exhibition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas that look great on paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Craig Mulholland’s installation is similarly subtle and suggestive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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