Work

Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2008

2008-06-20T10:00:00Z

There’s always something seductive about the Edinburgh College of Art degree show, with the grand sculpture court and airy, high-ceilinged studios - contrasting with the rather more cramped conditions at Glasgow or Dundee. This year, the new graduates have more than lived up to their surroundings, many producing work of a standard not usually seen from students.

Kevin Harman’s work has already made headlines, after the police took interest in his piece Love Thy Neighbour. Harman nicked 200 doormats from the burghers of Broughton, leaving a note advising householders to ask the folk next door about their disappearance, later explaining that the mats had been appropriated in the name of art.

This might sound like student high-jinks, but the prompting of neighbourly conversations suggests a serious purpose behind an apparent prank.

Katherine Ive investigates the emotional content of property, too, offering a moving essay on grief in the form of a sturdy brick wall, bashed through to reveal leaking - or weeping - pipes. Less easy to read is Michael Brown, building the top third of a church, which has landed in the gallery accompanied by an empty greatcoat, one arm pointing ominously. There are buildings everywhere in fact, from Mark Purves’s smooth, Pepto-Bismol pink logs, stacked beside plans for a cabin; to pebble-dashed wooden palettes by Liam Richardson, a flatpack evocation of suburbia. Other sculptors take a turn for the sinister. Emily Snell drizzles thick white goo through the plug-hole of a hospital gurney, planting bronze casts of her teeth in the resulting mess, while Gwenda Thompson Marchesi presents a life-sized donkey being pulled by unseen forces into a mirror, the illustration of a grisly fairy tale.

At Edinburgh, the word tapestry has lost its traditional meaning, and now seems to be a command issued to students to do whatever the hell they like. Just so long as it’s not tapestry.

Anna Robbins makes rather sickly work with food, allowing ice to melt through the toes of a stocking on to a perfect disc of white flour, cooking up a milk jelly and placing it over a heater, and setting dough to rise on a table. There’s something strangely nostalgic about these pieces, and very sad. This is not the norm here, though, with most graduates of the tapestry department displaying irreverent wit or a taste for childlike wonder.

Joanne Sykes has laid a precise trail of red pencils, which snakes its way past her peers’ installations. It’s hard to tell whether this is a generous gesture, proudly guiding visitors to the work of others, or something altogether more aggressive. Joanne Smithers’s wearable sculptures include a motorbike helmet with a huge animal horn, and a pair of horse legs, hinting at a new sport that’s unlikely to catch on. Michael A C Jackson’s box of tricks is a delight: he has come up with a Heath Robinson contraption that, when a ballbearing is dropped into a slot, plays a dolorous little tune.

A contrariness seems to have afflicted the painters too, with many of the best avoiding painting altogether. Alice Ladenburg has invented a satirical new world, complete with its own pantheon of secular saints. Tourists in this invented land can visit a religious retreat (it’s a shed, with stained-glass windows) or splurge on tea towels, mugs and commemorative plates at the gift shop.

Nika Kupyrova’s world is less welcoming, with furniture smashed up, reconfigured and laid next to grubby tanks full of liquids of unknown origin.

The painters who actually do paint and draw are strong, too. Stephanie Straine has done a wonderfully ordered, minimalist wall drawing, full of restraint. Antonia Gallacher has collected pebbles, arranging them in museum-like vitrines, replacing some with precise, pseudo-scientific sketches. Morag Macdonald, meanwhile, restricts herself to geometric forms, or simple cross-hatching, laboriously building up finicky fields of lines.

Charlie Billingham goes in for a complex fusion of art historical tropes and imagery appropriated from advertising and packaging. He takes on the guise of Warhol’s screenprinted Elvis, mounted on a hoarding outside the ECA building, glibly reworks a packet of Love Hearts to read “Love Hurts”, and offers a new washing powder, Abstrakte Kunst Concentrate.

Steven Harrison also displays an ambivalence toward high and low culture alike in his text-based paintings, piling up apparently unrelated words, listing stock phrases, and inviting viewers to accept his winking interpretation of a rubbish, Magritte-referencing painting of a lemon, delivered in uproariously florid art-speak.

There’s some strong stuff on show here, then, and, while it’s not a competition, Edinburgh’s new crop of artists this year seem to have the edge over their peers at the other Scottish schools.

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2008

2008-06-16T10:16:32Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ferdinand Kriwet

2008-06-09T12:00:00Z

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.

Artes Mundi 2008

2008-06-02T19:19:59Z

Artes Mundi is an unusual creature. It is a biennial exhibit for Cardiff, but with an emphasis on education projects and gaining as wide an audience as possible in place of the more usual, hermetically sealed, art-world shindig. It is, too, a contemporary art prize, offering a weighty £40,000 to the winner, that takes an unusual approach to selection. Two curators - this year Portugal’s Isabel Carlos and Bisi Silva, based in Lagos, Nig-eria - go on a global search for artists with solid reputations on home turf who are beginning to emerge on the international scene, and who make work that, in one way or another, addresses the human condition.

On paper, that last criterion looks awfully vague. But it might be the secret of Artes Mundi’s success, providing enough of a framework to guide the curators while granting them the freedom to make their mark, bringing issues and themes into focus and grouping together artists working towards allied goals.

For this, the third incarnation of Artes Mundi, Carlos and Silva have done a good job of sharpening up their broad brief, collecting artists who take a poetic, often ambiguous, approach to the political.

The show opens with Lida Abdul, an Afghan-born artist who left the country of her birth after the Soviet invasion in 1978 and returned some two decades later intent on examining the place and culture she had left behind. In the film What We Saw upon Awakening, a gang of black-clad young men heave and strain at white ropes attached to a ruined building, performing an invented ritual that is at once futile and hopeful.

Brick Sellers of Kabul takes another sideways look at reconstruction, filming a long queue of little boys, lining up to exchange bricks they have salvaged for cash. Filmed in a fugue-like, languid style, with largely silent soundtracks, these pieces are at once impenetrable - the purpose of these ceremonies is never clear - and incisive, condemning the destruction of a nation while codifying the resilience of its people.

Abdul’s work seems, in this context, akin to Source, a video piece by the Dundee-based duo Dalziel + Scullion, in which a child moves through a landscape, directly experiencing his surroundings with all five senses. It is undeniably political, even polemical, asking us to reconsider the position of the human in the world - but one that never hectors, simply offering the sensuous and sensual inspection of an environment as an alternative mode of being.

Susan Norrie takes a more direct look at man and his environment, documenting and responding to the impact of a torrent of molten mud unleashed by an oil drilling outfit in East Java. A bank of monitors screen documentary footage - of the mud, protest marches and tangential reactions, including a punk gig - while a more meditative piece shows a man climbing a mountain, holding a baby goat that is never sacrificed.

N S Harsha - who took the Artes Mundi Prize last month - leavens his work with a healthy does of humour. A new series of paintings, Come Give Us a Speech, shows hundreds of figures seated on plastic chairs, listening intently, perhaps for the viewer’s reaction to the work.

All human life is here, with artists, historical figures and deities seated alongside anonymous representatives of every race and creed. It’s a thoroughly charming piece, and one that cheekily subverts a slightly sugary call for global harmony.

On the floor, Harsha has painted a site-specific work in which headless schoolchildren are bombarded with representations of famous monuments and questions culled from textbooks. It’s a surface to be played on and enjoyed that offers a barbed comment on the way we drag children around museums, whether they like it or not.

Abdoulaye Konate stands out thanks to a more agit-prop approach to his political concerns. His large-scale works in fabric - a material chosen as representative of Konate’s native Mali, as well as for practical reasons when he found himself unable to buy paint - are not always subtle. Le Dos a l’Aame sees three shrouded figures emblazoned with symbols - the Star of David, a cross, the Statue of Liberty - one of whom is carrying a bundle of firewood tied up in the Chinese flag. More effective, and affecting, are such pieces as Homage aux Chausseurs du Mande, its surface covered in a dense patchwork of cultural artefacts and talismans, and Gris-gris Blancs, in which Konate has reinvented those talismans using a restricted palette and repeated forms to render them universal.

Rosangela Renno, the first of two Portuguese artists on the shortlist, uses found materials of a very different kind, re-presenting photographs or reworking newspaper reports. In Esphelho Diario, the artist takes on the role of 133 other Rosangelas, narrating tales culled from the tabloids arbitrarily connected by a name. Elsewhere, Renno takes slide photographs of crime scenes and arranges them on lightboxes, robbing them of any sensational thrill.

While Renno offers cool meta-analysis, Vasco Araujo’s work at times verges on the lurid, matching statuettes bought at junk shops with texts on incest by the Marquis de Sade - a disturbing juxtaposition of suburban tedium with sexual violence. He also works in a quietly lyrical mode, filming a girl playing with bones in an old sanatorium, or asking vicars to discuss community and individuality with reference to Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.

Last but definitely not least comes Mircea Cantor. Born in Romania and now based in France, Cantor uses different media to create arguably the best examples of the subtly political thread that binds the Artes Mundi artists together.

Diamond Corn is a sublime crystal sculpture of a staple crop, mounted on a plain cardboard box. In the film Deerparture, a wolf and a deer pace the floor of an empty gallery in a permanent state of uneasy truce. Add to this silent footage a flag slowly burning on its pole and a triptych of photographs of desire lines, the human routes forged in defiance of planners’ straight paths, and Cantor’s work begins to offer a deliberately non-specific look at national identity, the individual’s relationship to the state and the uneasy ebb and flow of globalised politics.

Though he did not win the prize, it is hard not to see Cantor’s installation as Artes Mundi’s centrepiece this year. His unforced, carefully considered, reductive approach is as open as the exhibition’s theme and, more than any of his peers here, he makes an oblique approach work, letting the audience explore his allegories without ever stooping to lecture.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 30th, 2008.

Lucy Skaer

2008-05-26T19:27:57Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show 2008

2008-05-19T13:00:00Z

A funny thing happens at the degree shows: there is so much art, stuffed into every studio, corridor, nook and cranny of the art schools that a viewer’s brain can’t quite cope, and attempts to pick out themes, group artists together and spot trends in a bid to impose order on the chaos. Artists whose work, if seen in different galleries weeks apart, might seem to have little in common become kissing cousins, and the artists whose work stands out set the tone for their peers.

At Duncan of Jordanstone College, the first theme to hove into view is the animal. There are beasts everywhere, real or imagined, and it seems as if half of the studio spaces contain fur, feathers, hides and horns.

Ashley Nieuwenhuizen’s work is perhaps the most powerful examination of the relationship between human and animal. She has performed a series of arcane rituals, strapping dead birds to her body with twine, slowly, deliberately ingesting horse hair, which are matched to hybrid drawings and a furry knapsack studded with teats which emits contented purrs. Disturbing stuff, sure, but Nieuwenhuizen is serious, not out to shock. Ai Kato’s sculptures are decidedly discomforting too. She has crafted a new mythology inhabited by a figure adorned with duck bills and mollusc shells who surfs a wave of ghosts, and a winged and bearded baby nestled in a chamber made of animal hides. Iain Sommerville’s work is a sort of update to the Punch and Judy show, with angry cartoons reminiscent of Ralph Steadman overlooking a pair of literally pig-headed thugs. Laurie Gault’s striking sculptures are another direct look at human-animal relations, this time expressed with great restraint.

Gault’s work - antlers on poles cast in a matte plasticky yellow substance, an outsize crocodile clip with a peacock feather for a tail, stumpy thumb-like forms - flags up another trend. The best of the graduates making sculpture show a great affinity for their materials. Scott Shepherd breathes life into grubby rubber castings of two-pin plugs, showing an inflatable udder-like structure and a poisonous jellyfish submerged in brackish water. Alistair Jelks’ figurative sculpture, like a profoundly depressed modern take on Rodin’s The Thinker, stands out thanks to his assured use of cast iron with its patina of rust. Sharon McNiven engages with the history of her chosen media, exploring the possibilities of traditional woodworking techniques to make precise abstract forms. Lauren Curran disrupts the pristine sheen of her small sculptures with imprints of mushrooms, and what look like tiny pursed lips. These sculptors know their stuff, in both senses of the term.

When it comes to painting and drawing, the trend, if you can call it that, is skill. Ghe Zhang’s hyper-real canvases work with multiple traditions in Chinese art, and are executed with a quiet panache. Joanna Fraser is like a latter-day Joan Eardley, painting girls at rest and at play in a fluid style, allowing surroundings to drift away to keep the focus firmly on her young subjects. Camilla Symons is a superb draughtswoman, with some fine work in pencil on show, but it is her silverpoint renderings of rabbits and birds that really take the breath away. Two painters with a shared liking for urban spaces also stand out. David Anderson almost seems in awe of the underpasses, car parks and unassuming stairwells he paints, while Ross Brown prefers derelict vistas, undermining his deft renderings with hastily-made charcoal marks. Then there’s Nicole Porter and Fraser Gray, two very different painters who match technical facility with a concern for the process of making work. Porter’s realist canvases include self-portraits of the artist in her studio, charming small-scale paintings of pages in her sketchbook and a painting of a painting of her fellow graduates in conversation. Gray, meanwhile, sits on the fence between street art and studio work, inserting a canvas into a wall-drawing and drilling viewing port into the wall overlooking one of his large-scale pieces.

This tendency explore the process of making art is to the fore in the work of artists of a more explicitly conceptual bent, too. Poppy Brewer presents the results of a performance, also documented in grainy black and white video, in which she crafted a sort of cloth shelter, cut precise strips from a sheet of paper and made gnomic notes about the idea of infinity on blackboards. Breeshey Gray performs too, turning her allotted space into a domestic salon, chatting about art with her friends, and drinking tea. This everyday ritual is explored again via a collection of carefully catalogued tea bags, a quirky monument to a year’s worth of cuppas. Another art-making ritual, this one rather more riotous, can be found in Nadia Rossi’s madcap lab. Rossi has filled a room with bits and bobs, and cut holes in the walls so that, with the help of visitors, she can poke her arms into the space and chuck paint about, combine objects and otherwise overcome her self-imposed restrictions. Fraser MacDonald’s rough-hewn hoops match one vicious game, croquet, with another, the art world, while his gilded training shoe and pastorally painted Tetrapak carton are, thanks to their museum-like presentation, works of art about curation. This is underlined by another of the artist’s projects, a tiny gallery housed in a locker, which over the last year has shown pieces by real live artists, David Shrigley among them, and what look like figments of MacDonald’s imagination.

There are, of course, plenty of artists who buck the trends, carving out a niche all their own. Kirsten Wilson has made two matching monolithic structures into which she blasts high volume noise. The interior of the first is bare - step inside and be deafened - the second is lined with sound-proofing material, together they expose the relationship between sound and space. Graeme Plunkett works with sound too. He has housed a domestic canary in a cage rigged up with sensors and tiny loudspeakers which play recordings of birdsong triggered by the bird’s motion. Ethically suspect? Perhaps, but an intriguing look at the audible environment nonetheless. Outside the building, Euan James Taylor’s work a highlight of the show. Taylor, who collaborated with Macdonald on the locker gallery, has rigged up gloriously pointless structures out of pallets - a stile over a wall is placed right next to an entranceway, for example - and, in a little caravan, documents the activities of his invented organisation, Inefficient Solutions, “purveyors of superficial commodities” devoted to “creating and solving problems”.

Of course, not all the work on show matches the standard set by the artists listed above, but this is without doubt a strong year group. There is nothing here to make you cringe, no embarrassingly derivative works, and very few outright failures. It’s a fine start to the degree show season.

Ellipsis... at DCA

2008-05-12T20:25:08Z

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.

Jonathan Monk at Tramway

2008-05-02T13:53:38Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: The Renaissance

2008-04-25T16:15:28Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glasgow international Off-Site Projects

2008-04-18T16:19:14Z

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.

Rostra Plaza (Detail)

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.

A slide from Autoxylopyrocycloboros

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.

Jim Lambie: Forever Changes

2008-04-11T16:22:50Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catherine Yass: Highrise

2008-03-30T16:35:49Z

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 at GOMA

2008-03-28T18:21:09Z

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.

Doggerfisher: Group

2008-03-21T18:23:18Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always Begin By Degrees at the Common Guild

2008-03-14T18:24:36Z

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.