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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review was first published in The Herald on June 6th, 2008.

All too often, the curators of group shows are guilty of shoehorning artists together, beginning with a premise, then finding work that proves it. Here, curator Lynne Cook of the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York has done the opposite, corralling three artists - Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie and Francesca Woodman - whose work practically begs to be shown together.

All three use the camera, whether to make photographs, film or video; all three train their lenses on themselves in their immediate environs. And in so doing, all three raise questions about gender and the female body in art, make inquiries into issues of identity, and use their chosen media to slip the usual moorings of time. Seeing them together, there are so many shared concerns, so many echoes, such a sense of dialogue between their respective practices that it is hard to believe that Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman were operating in isolation, largely unaware of each other's work.

Ellipsis opens with Woodman, who died young and relatively obscure, aged 22, a suicide. It seems fair to say that her posthumous reputation - at least among the young artists on whom she continues to exert an influence - is in part thanks to the poisonous Romantic notion that a great talent lost is all the greater, but in the room at the DCA devoted to her small black-and-white prints the weight of that reputation is lifted from the shoulders of her work. We see her in her studio, or in the grubby rooms of abandoned houses, relentlessly investigating the possibilities of self-portraiture. Mirrors and glass are everywhere. Woodman hides herself, uselessly, behind clear panes, huddles behind mirrors or crouches like a museum exhibit inside a vitrine. This tendency to reflect, deflect and direct the viewer's gaze is at its most powerful in a work where, unusually, Woodman appears only by proxy: three women, naked, stare into the lens, their faces obscured by a print of Woodman's own face.

Elsewhere, the focus is on the female body in its surroundings, with Woodman deliberately making herself invisible, concealed behind drapes of peeling wallpaper. There is a lot of blurring, too, not just to produce artefacts of long exposure, but to introduce the passage of time into the still photographs.

Time and movement are central to the work of Lili Dujourie. Fourteen of her video works, made between 1972 and 1981 - coincidentally or not, the same span as Woodman's working life - are ranged across a bank of monitors on the gallery floor. The first five of these, all bearing the title Homage à (one of many ellipses in this show) leave the viewer to fill in the possible subject of Dujourie's tributes. That subject is any artist - male, it is safe to assume - who has ever painted a nude: Dujourie films herself on a bed, or on the floor beside it, shifting from familiar reclining poses to awkward arrangements of limbs, a device that highlights the artificial positions in representations of women's bodies. Perhaps thanks to the sometimes violent movements or obvious discomfort of some poses, these pieces call to mind more unsavoury examples of such representation - Walter Sickert's Camden Town nudes, say, or John Deakin's exploitative photographic studies of Henrietta Moraes for Francis Bacon. In other videos, Dujourie again adopts cliched poses, here a sultry vamp, there a listless housewife. While time is inevitably present in the moving image, Dujourie, in a way that recalls the motion blur in Woodman's work, injects a sense of progression into her works, only to subvert it. Oostende, a series of images shot from the artist's studio, are shown as slides, each one with a projector of its own. The mode of display will have viewers waiting with baited breath for the usually imminent shift on to the next image, but it never comes - an ellipsis with no resolution.

More ellipses follow in the films of Chantal Akerman. Je tu il elle, an installation reworking of a feature-length film, offers a deconstructed narrative on three screens. The first shows the heroine played, inevitably, by Akerman engaged in odd rituals, eating sugar from a bag, restlessly rearranging sheets of paper on the floor and, in an echo of Dujourie, shifting between poses on a mattress. The second sees a woman who may or may not be the same character chatting in a bar with a man, waiting with him in an idling truck, and watching him shave. The third is an extended, if not explicit, sex scene in which Akerman's character, or someone who looks the same, fumbles with a girlfriend. It's an exercise in mystery, obfuscation and omission, with Akerman setting up possible interpretations and leaving them hanging: are we being shown a split narrative, the imaginings of the first woman, or something else entirely? Akerman's new edit of the 1971 film Mirror provides, finally, some resolution, reflecting and combining devices just seen in Woodman's photographs and Dujourie's Homage series: a young woman stands before a looking glass and dispassionately appraises her own body, feature by feature.

This is a powerful show that explores - if you'll excuse the term - the first flowering of feminist video art. It is worth noting that these women share more than a common set of concerns in that, while they provided primary texts for feminist critical theory, and their work can only be seen today through the lens of that discourse, none of them made their work explicitly within that context. While the body, questions of identity and the mediated gaze of the camera are to the fore, Ellipsis is also a show about time. This is not the sort of exhibition you can flit through, pausing for a little while before works that catch your eye. Instead, the shifting of time in the works on show - Dujourie's frozen slides, the long static shots in Akerman's films, Woodman's stilled movements - imposes a sort of active torpor on the viewer, slowing time to the pace of a too-hot afternoon. This effect is, at least in part, down to sensitive curation by Cook, who has done much more than simply bring Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman together, and has, moreover, arranged their work in such a way as to expose new, unexpected connections between the three artists.

Ellipsis is at DCA, Dundee until June 22nd, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What follows fails to match up to this early promise.

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

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

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

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

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

It is hard to visit a gallery nowadays without being told that an artist is dealing in memory, history and place. They’re handy buzzwords - what, after all, isn’t to do with memory, history and place? - to prop up work that, lacking the supporting struts of a curator’s note, might well fall flat. One of the great pleasures of Matthew Buckingham’s first solo outing in Scotland, then, is that he is the real deal, mining the past to illuminate the present, making work backed by deep academic research, but that stands alone, dense with ideas, and doing what art does best, burrowing into the minds of its audience, sparking off new ideas and turning old ones on their heads.

The show opens with an installed video, The Spirit and the Letter. On the wall-sized screen, a woman enters a Georgian room in period dress, and speaks, her words drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, fleshed out with quotations from other texts by the early feminist. This ghost of Wollstonecraft paces as she talks, but not across the floor, instead walking on the ceiling.

It’s a simple enough metaphor - the campaigning author wished to turn the world in which she found herself upside down (or, better, to turn it the right way up). But Buckingham doubles it with a simple gesture, installing a chandelier on the gallery floor, which forces us into sharing Wollstonecraft’s upended position, first physically, then, as the extracts from A Vindication of the Rights of Women are read, we find ourselves sharing her thoughts, which, anachronisms of language aside, are depressingly prescient, a still-current commentary on gender politics. And Buckingham has tinkered with the tenses in his source texts, too, siting Wollstonecraft firmly in her past, haunting our present, but also lending her words a fresh urgency. The spoken passages are also deftly chosen. Wollstonecraft mention of the ‘silence of spacious apartments’ and her footfalls in them, ties the quotations to their new context, and when she says, ‘Every object carries me back to past times, and impresses the manners of the age forcibly on my mind, for they may be considered as historical documents.’ it is hard not to take her words as a borrowed manifesto for Buckingham’s practice.

Next, Buckingham switches his focus to the history of his medium, in False Future. A narration in French, with English subtitles, tells the story of a lost figure in the history of the moving image, Louis Le Prince, a pioneer of cinema who succeeded in capturing motion five years before the Lumiere brothers found fame in 1895. Had Le Prince not worked in secret, his efforts known only to his family, and had he not disappeared without trace in 1890 after boarding a train - the very subject of the Lumiere’s first film - the history of cinema might have stretched back further to include, Buckingham suggests, the Elephant Man’s funeral, or the massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee. And Le Prince’s fate prefigures cinematic tropes, too - the tale of a madcap scientist working secretly on a world-changing invention, only to vanish in a puff of smoke is the stuff of B feature plots. On screen, meanwhile, Buckingham recreates one of Le Prince’s few surviving films, a static shot of a bridge in Leeds, fusing past with present.

Best of all the works here, though, is Everything I Need. On one screen, the interior of a 1970s aeroplane is examined, almost lovingly, in a series of slow takes, most as still as photographs. On the second, a text unfolds, the words of another figure in the history of feminism, Charlotte Wolff. We learn of her first love, her life as a doctor in Weimer-era Berlin in the company of Walter Benjamin, her exile in Paris with the Surrealists, and then in Britain, all memories shot through with a quiet polemic on the status of women, and lesbian women in particular. Each reminiscence is linked to a place, whether it’s the bars of Berlin or the bus stop where Wolff realised that she must flee Nazi Germany, and so the ‘plane interior becomes a sort of non-place, or place-between-places, an intellectual interzone in which memories can unfold, free from the immediate emotional impact of familiar surroundings.

Like The Spirit and the Letter and False Future, Everything I Need is a concise portrait of an historical figure, one that informs and illustrates, but one that raises more questions than it answers. What are we to think of a male artist exploring the history of feminism, or a film-maker turning his lens on film? Is Buckingham, with his precise installations, a sculptor as much as he is a film-maker, or a new kind of portraitist, his subject place and time as much as people? There are no easy answers to be found in Play the Story, and that’s what makes it such a fine show, the kind that takes up residence in every visitors memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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