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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review was originally published in The Herald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every winter, Sorcha Dallas steps out of the usual round of showcases for represented artists and presents a group show, lightly curated around a theme suggested by the work of one artist on the gallery’s roster. This time, it is Sophie Macpherson’s sculptural forms that inspire Re-Make/Re-Model, and the tie that binds the artists gathered here, albeit loosely, is performance.

Macpherson’s work tackles the idea of performance at a tangent. Her White Screen dominates the small gallery space in which it is housed, a zig-zag wooden construction, whitewashed on its front side, the rear distinctly unfinished, with a surface marked by a repeated diamond motif. Next door, Untitled Set-Up suggests a temporary outdoor theatre. Two black wooden walls are set upon a white disc, the interior of the barely-sketched room facing a grubby curtain tacked to a roughly-hewn strut on the wall. A third, untitled, sculpture is more ambiguous. Again set on a plinth, this painted concrete structure might be an uncomfortable, restrictive piece of Brutalist costume jewelry, an architectural maquette for a theatre building, or another hinted set.

This is either set design for a play that has not yet been performed (but might be) or the remnants of an imagined production. A fanciful idea on paper, perhaps, but Macpherson’s slightly slapdash methods of making lend her work a genuinely evocative air - the unfinished reverse side of White Screen suggests that there was no need to complete a face that would never be seen by an audience, while the scale of Untitled Set-Up quickly indicate that it is taking a further step back from the stage, offering a model of a set that will never be built. Taken together, the works here suggest performances somewhere between the am-dram and the avant-garde, and one can easily imagine the nonexistent body of work for which Macpherson is playing set designer.

Macpherson’s work also sets the stage for a pair of real performances, or, rather, a pair of recorded performances, both of which tackle the usual problems of performance art, questioning the status of the performance itself, its documentation and later presentation.

Babette Magnolte’s 1978 film Water Motor is a record of a dance solo by Trisha Brown, filmed twice over and projected first in real time, then again at half speed, the two sections divided by slow fades to black, like the curtains drawn at intermission. Mangolte explicitly sets up her camera as a proxy for a rapt viewer - one is barely aware of Magnolte’s cinematography, which has the camera follow Brown’s movements closely but unobtrusively, without cutting - as if, in the first, real-time episode, she aims to present a ‘true’ record of Brown’s dance. This truth is quickly undermined by that distinctly theatrical fade and the re-presentation of the piece in slo-mo: if the opening section is true, the closing one is a faded memory, recasting Brown’s jerky, half-formed, high-speed gestures and sudden springs into a languid, graceful, more traditionally balletic form.

The idea of recording artist as proxy audience member recurs in the DVD presentation of a pair of performances by Linder, Nothing for Ray Johnson, filmed on the exhibition’s opening night. The anonymous videographer has made an unsatisfactory record of Linder’s improvised combining of music and gesture, but it is meaningfully unsatisfactory. We see the artist, backed by guitarist and double bass player, her face obscured by a mask that bears a crude drawing of a rictus grin, make considered gestures and wild vocalisations to match the howl of feedback and tuneless textures produced by her accompanists. But the viewer’s view is never clear, with the original focus of the performance shifted to the obscuring arm of the bassman, or, uncomfortably, to the engrossed faces of the original audience. The silent attention of the primary audience ends up serving as a barrier, like the roving camera itself, to experience: it is clear that, on the night, this was a powerful performance, but here, the secondary audience in the gallery is left struggling to appreciate it, more voyeurs than viewers. As a record of a performance, Nothing for Ray Johnson is a failure, but in failing it anchors Re-Make/Re-Model, firming up the deliberately noncommittal presentation of disparate artists linked by a loose theme.

And, with these ideas bouncing off the gallery walls, the notion of performance begins to infect the other works on show, to the point that it is hard to tell whether looking at the works here with performance in mind is a useful route to understanding, or a gloss enforced by the context that, elsewhere, might well be irrelevant.

Martin Soto Climent’s humorous little arrangements - Detained Chain, a pair of lime-green knickers stretched between two beer bottles, and Parachute, a pair of mucky high heels suspended from a plastic bag - here become artifacts of performance, potential and past. The beer bottles threaten to break into a high-kicking burlesque, the suspended heels look knackered after their daredevil jump, while their assembly, and the hunt for junk, adds a further nod to the performed.

Alongside her performed and recorded piece, Linder is showing a brace of new collage works in the tradition of what remains her best-known work, the sleeve for Buzzcock’s 1977 Orgasm Addict single. That image, a naked woman with an iron for a head and mouths for nipples, was an explicit attack on the representation of women in contemporary media, these latest pieces are subtler, more ambiguous, and, here at least, take on the air of the remains of a performance. Charming Maid sees a soft-focus 1970s album cover with a woman’s torso burnt out to reveal that she is stuffed with flowers. The Luminous Flux obscures twin images torn from a 1960s magazine. In one panel, Nureyev’s loins are girded with a garland, and John F. Kennedy’s face is partially obscured by more flowers, but in this context, thoughts of feminism and feminity fade, replaced by a need to reconstruct Linder’s actions in making these works, the cutting and placing that make up the performance of collage.

Like Magnolte’s slow motion reprise of Brown’s dance, the interpretation forced on these works by the show around them is, if not exactly false, then questionable. And that’s where Re-Make/Re-Model reveals its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, in tying together Macpherson’s suggestive sets, Magnolte’s eloquent film and Linder’s performance and its presentation, the show is a taught one, a deep look at performance and the performed.

On the other, it is almost overbearing, the curatorial conceit leading viewers down blind alleys, nudging them towards considering collage and sculpture, first and foremost, as recorded actions.

Either way, this is a show worth seeing, whether you end up infected by its premise or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When confronted with a Turner Prize nomination, with all the attendant attention, and the prospect of going head to head in competition with their fellows, some artists shy away. Not so Nathan Coley. ‘I found it quite easy to say yes,’ he says, taking a break from installing his work at Tate Liverpool, ‘because it’s an accolade, because some really great artists have been nominated in the past - it’s good to be associated with that level of work - and, honestly, because it brings a huge audience to my work. And, in terms of the work that I’m making, I feel that it’s a good time to be shortlisted.’

On that last point, Coley is dead right. Not that his recent work has reached a new plateau, or eclipsed his past practice, instead he is at a stage in his career when past pieces and present projects seem to be gelling together, revealing resonances, some surprising.

This is apt. Coley’s sculptural objects and installations are, more often than not, deceptively simple, marked out by a tendency to develop slowly, disclosing new layers of meaning, long after the viewer first encounters them.

‘With individual pieces of work,’ Coley explains, ‘I neither seek to steal the show, nor am I interested in one-liners. My intention is for the work to have a number of ideas, a number of references.’

A good example, both of this deceptive simplicity and the increasing interconnections between his work, could be found at Coley’s recent outing at doggerfisher. Untitled (Threshold Sculpture), a slim beam of wood that blocked the entrance to the gallery, forced visitors to take care in stepping over it on their way into the space. ‘You can look at that work a being just a piece of wood on the floor,’ Coley explains, ‘maybe in the context of minimalism, but then you start thinking about the whole notion of the space you’re entering and the space you’re leaving, and then, it’s made of oak, which has a particular spiritual history and is, architecturally, used and loved by Modernists.’

Coley also sees the piece - which formally has little connection to works that have gone before - as closely linked to the work which first drew wide attention to his practice, a reconstruction of the witness box at the Lockerbie trials, made when he was ‘unofficial artist’ at the Hague: ‘It’s about the control of space, a demarcation of space, even though there’s no resemblance. Both come from my interest in how we show who we are through the architecture of our spaces.’

This talk of an innate connection between a block of oak and a witness box might make Coley sound like an arch conceptualist, with little interest in the physical manifestations of his ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth.

‘It’s a nice contradiction,’ he admits, ‘On the one hand I’m a person who makes objects, but I don’t think of that being the centre of the work. The object is somehow a mechanism to make the idea come to life.’

Indeed, he is close to incensed by references in the press to his piece We Must Cultivate Our Garden, the last line of Voltaire’s novel Candide illuminated and installed atop a building on St. Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh, being made of neon. ‘I took a lot of time and energy not making them neon!’, he says, ‘Neon has a long history in contemporary art, but I wanted to find something that had common or folk associations, so the light-bulbs are fairground light-bulbs, which means that the gravitas of the text is contradicted by the “circus is coming to town” feel of the piece, so you have one of the masters of the Enlightenment meeting the fairground and the football pitch.’

That installation, and his best-known work, Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship in Edinburgh - anonymous cardboard sculptures of every church listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages - point to a trait Coley shares with his fellow nominees, especially Mark Wallinger and Zarina Bhimji: an avowedly political bent.

‘Some people see a work like Lamp of Sacrifice as a celebration of faith,’ Coley says, ‘but for me it’s the absolute opposite. With We Must Cultivate Our Garden, that last line has been discussed at great length as being anti-church, anti-royalty and as being a call to arms for self-determination. So it’s no accident it’s on St. Andrew’s Square, named after this supposed saint of this supposed religion, Christianity.’

As for the big question - who will take the Prize? - Coley is sanguine. ‘The shortlisting is the thing that I’m excited about, not least because I have great respect for the other three who are shortlisted,’ he says, ‘The winning or the losing is a whole other thing, to do with the personal taste of the judges, to do with things that are outwith my control.’

This interview was first published in The Herald on October 12th, 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A visit to the Changing Room always feels like a special treat.

This might be down its setting - the gallery is tucked away in a shopping arcade, rather than huddled together with other spaces in an artsy ghetto, or standing aloof on a grubby side-street awaiting impending gentrification - or the layout, which has visitors clamber up a dimly-lit stairwell before entering the bright, light-filled exhibition hall. More than these accidents of geography and design, though, it is the Changing Room’s consistent and unerring knack over the last decade for mounting thought-provoking group shows that prompts such a sense of anticipation.

And, with Tender Scene, they have done it again, presenting works by Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson and Gregor Wright that fizz with unexpected connections.

Pollard - who as well as exhibiting curated the show, billed as a ‘collaborative installation’ - dominates the proceedings. Building on Black Marks, his recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, Pollard continues to mine a rich seam of thematic concerns, centring on the seedy glamour the New Romantic movement, with nods to the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, and to jesters, clowns and fools in general. While Black Marks was a rather overwhelming installation, with a batch of three foot wide bronze medallions and a huge wall drawing looming over the huge number of paintings on show, the trio of new works here have a quieter, more meditative air about them, as if, freed from the pressures of a major solo outing, Pollard has relaxed into this still-new strand of his practice.

These works, like all Pollard’s recent output, are monochrome, with a deliberately limited palette ranging from deep black to dark grey. Comet shows a tangle of snapped lipsticks, wonky eyebrow pencils and heavily distorted lines and numbers, only just recognisable as bar codes, with an overlapping set of forms that might be the trail of the titular heavenly body, or the hairspray-stiff fringe of a New Romantic. Jester is a faceless entertainer making himself up with the gooey contents of a make-up bag, while Grey Argot is Pollard in self-referential mode, presenting an amorphous blob of a cartoon speech balloon made of more sticky lippy that might almost serve as a painted manifesto for his current work.

Fiona Jardine’s contribution, They Became What They Beheld, runs alongside Pollard’s fascination with masks and make-up. A pair of photographs show a figure seated on a plinth, his two-piece suit protected by a paper boiler suit. In both images, the face is obscured by a bulbous spherical helmet, bearing a triangle in one photograph, a star in the other, a sinister update to the sock and buskin masks of classical theatre.

Clare Stephenson is concerned with theatre, artifice and disguise too. Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendant are, a note informs us, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. They star in two drawings, both clad in ruched metallic robes based on repeated forms borrowed from medieval church sculptures, both with sinister porcelain doll faces and awkwardly animated limbs, both performing beside mysterious wooden structures of unguessable purpose.

And then there’s Gregor Wright, who knocks the whole show off-balance, like a past-tipsy gatecrasher stumbling uninvited into a private party. An untitled work shows what appears to be a thermos flask rendered in disconcertingly fleshy pink. Every Extend Extra sees a set of cubic forms piled up like refugees from a game of Tetris gone rotten, while Caffeine is a cartoon portrait of a grinning little chap, steam billowing from his head. In the centre of the room sits Metamorph, an awkward, lumpy construction jury-rigged together from off-cuts of Styrofoam and wood panels, a low-rent Transformer robot caught in the act of shifting from man to machine.

Wright is a peculiar proposition at the best of times. His unfinished aesthetic and deliberately slapdash methods are hugely attractive, not to mention good fun, and the studied incompleteness of his work offers a winking challenge to the viewer, who is invited to finish off what Wright has started. Here, surrounded as he is by a trio of artists who are, if not party members, then at least fellow travellers, bound together further by subtle alterations to the gallery space - the floor is striped like an Everton mint, and patches of wall are covered in dazzle ship-like camoflague patterns - he sticks out like a sore thumb.

And yet these blowsy works fit with the quieter, more considered pieces around them, acting as grist to the mill, or sand in the Vaseline. Without Wright, Tender Scene might have been a rather ordinary group outing, a decent-but-uninspiring look at a group of artistic allies. With him, the lines connecting Jardine, Pollard and Stephenson are drawn all the more clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A human take on nature's wonders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s pregnant again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig Mulholland’s installation is similarly subtle and suggestive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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