Map Magazine Articles

Journey Four: The Strathbogie Triangle

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It takes a couple of hours to drive from my base in Blairgowrie to Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, site of SSW. The letters stand for Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Unambiguous words in these times of socially engaged practice.

I’m here at the invitation of Rona Lee, who was at SSW last autumn along with eight others for a month-long development residency. She’s one of three who’ve been invited back this year to move from research into production. On one level, Rona’s present work is concerned with our relationship - physical and psychological - to water, and she shows me models of swimming pools whose eye-catching feature is their organic-seeming, cavern-like si

Studio: Louise Hopkins

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Before visiting her, I try to imagine what Louise Hopkins’s studio might look like. I think of her meticulous paintings, with their multitude of tiny, precise brushstrokes. I think of the sly way in which she takes the most ordered surfaces, like maps and graph paper, and bends them to her will. If her studio is anything like her art, it will be neat and rigorously arranged.

I’m spot on. As the artist ushers me into the front room of a flat in Glasgow’s leafy Southside, I’m confronted with bright,

Portfolio: Jessica Harrison

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Tucked away in the recesses of the SNGMA, the victorian landscape of Jessica Harrison's tiny 'Motor Mouth' collection is strikingly juxtaposed with the heavyweight sweep of its mighty neighbour, Jannis Kounellis' 'Works: 1958 - 2005'. Behind an elegant vitrine-like window, her polished bell-jars contain slender phthisic structures using meticulous casts of Harrison's own teeth together with orthodontic implements and sections of motorbike parts.

The museological allusion of the glass case presentation points to a clear reserve. The absence of any visceral quality within the work is remarkable given the ergonomic qualities of each piece's component materials. The work implies a str

Coming Soon

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Journey Five: The Thames

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I take a seat on the Tate Boat, and look north across the Thames towards St Paul’s. Earlier this morning I was really looking forward to my visit to both London’s Tates. Not so much because of the art on show at either gallery, but because of the journey between the sites in this vessel. Why? Well, because yesterday I was on much the same bit of the river in another boat tracking an ambitious site-specific piece of art, and today the Tate Boat offers a chance to relive that unique experience.

Yesterday’s party boarded east of Tower Bridge. The idea was that we would get a chance to see the message that Beth Derbyshire was having transmitted by semaphore from the

British Art Show 6

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This exhibition might almost be called British Art Show 9/11. Certainly, its twin towers are modernism and the Muslim world. But in a show that is intended to be a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in British art, can this be justified? Well, let's see.

There are 50 artists included, just as there were 50-odd in BAS 5 in 2000. There is no overlap between the artists for BAS 5 and 6, which is why certain artists who have figured prominently in the last five years aren’t here this time. Curators, Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker, have taken the laudable approach of selecting artists who haven’t yet benefited from Turner Prize levels

Lucy McKenzie, New York

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

New York’s Chelsea district, with its rough-around-the-brick-edges elegance, camp leanings and Manhattan sass, is a good place for Lucy McKenzie’s art. Witty in parts, sexy in others, the works on paper – dedicated, in the main, to exploring cartoon genres – hang comfortably on the gallery walls.

It’s funny to see two copies of the Edinburgh magazine The One O’Clock Gun, framed with pride and accompanying drawings. I have enjoyed seeing McKenzie’s line illustrations in this high-minded, highly affected and most excellent rag. One scene shows an effete young man, gesticulating with long fingers while he holds the base of a Martini glass

Roderick Buchanan, London

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Bringing together work made over the last five years, Buchanan explores the familiar to reveal the politics of the everyday: an erudite consideration of place and circumstance illuminating the structures of collective identity. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discussed how each person plays a part in the ‘social game’ through their habits, assumptions, beliefs, and behaviours. Often related to geography, they develop from a desire for a sense of belonging. In a number of works Buchanan looks at the manifestation of the social game in the playing and consumption of sport; relationships between players and spectators, the facts of winning and losing, create micro-systems of wider so

New Town Neuroses

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

For any child of the British welfare state, visiting Brasília is an uncanny experience. Bowling along the motorway from the airport, you are faced on both sides with miles of six-storey residential slabs, whose undemonstrative geometry recalls any South London estate. As you arrive at the centre, you approach a shopping mall which might be Stevenage, while the general feel of the place, its horizontality, and its tree cover, are familiar to anyone who knows Cumbernauld or Milton Keynes. But this superficial recognition is blown away by the staggering Monumental Axis, five miles of government buildings laid out on the most spectacularly rectilinear of malls. Its scale is unequalled

Made in Glasgow

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It's one of those awkward questions that invites the asking but then refuses simple answers. How has Glasgow consistently managed to produce so many successful artists over the last fifteen or so years? This is already the stuff of academic theses, and Sarah Lowndes's "Social Sculpture" (StopStop, 2004) provides an invaluable source of relevant material here. The nature of success depends, of course, upon variable criteria, but if we take annual juried events such as the Turner and Beck's prizes as our relatively objective benchmarks, we then see that over the years Glasgow-connected artists have maintained an extraordinary presence within

Zineomania

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

When Liverpool was named European Capital of Culture 2008, alongside all the usual property-boom responses, one group of artists and scene-makers responded with Mercy, a scrappy, photocopied, at times barely coherent A5 publication. Left to fend for itself in all the fly-by-night cafés and bars at the boho end of town, Mercy (Mersey, geddit?) looked as disposable and vital as the club-flyers it hung out with, and with which – somehow, some way, perish the thought and pass the spray mount – it may even share an exhibition space with.

This is the essential paradox of what we now know as Zine culture, that lovingly DIY alternative to coffee-table trivia that to

Where in the world do art and science meet?

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In 1969, Conrad Waddington, professor of animal genetics at the University of Edinburgh, published a seminal study of the relation between painting and science (Behind Appearance, EUP). He argued that science is no Cyclops, looking out at the world from a single eye, but is instead more like an Argus, with a hundred eyes. There is as much diversity to be found in science as in art, he argued, so any account of their relationship is far from straightforward.

Waddington’s story began with the influence of Einstein’s relativity theory on the cubists. He continues by examining the view held by futurists and

Four Romanian Artists: Perjovschi, Nastac, Bejenaru, Nemes

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The clock in University Square, Bucharest, has a unique, built-in countdown marking the days towards a landmark decision in the country’s fortunes. The deadline is set for January 2007, the month Romania hopes to join the EU. First, the country must at least strengthen administration systems, tighten border controls and eradicate corruption in the judiciary system.

During 50 years of communism, one party decided everything for the Romanians. There was repression of religion, suppression of media and information, a dearth of books and magazines, loss of all private land and housing, limits to travel, lack of personal choice – for example, the Dacia was the only bran

A Strategic History of Art

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In 1961, Richard Buckle brought the sculpture of Epstein to the Edinburgh Festival and in so doing transformed the Waverley Market into Edinburgh’s first gallery of modern art. It was sadly short-lived.

This exhibition sowed seeds in my imagination to consider Edinburgh College of Art as the ideal location for the Demarco Gallery’s official Edinburgh Festival exhibition of contemporary art from Canada in 1968.

Strategy: Get Arts followed in 1970, fulfilling the aims and ideals of the Demarco Gallery’s founders: Andrew Elliott, John Martin, Jimmy Walker and myself as artistic director, to help internationalise the Scottish art world by linking Scotla

Tel Aviv diary

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

18–19 DECEMBER
Teaching at Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Tel Aviv. There are 40 students so days are long. In the evening I visit a market opposite the hotel, where a man runs a stall selling bootlegs. The Nirvana CDs look interesting after seeing Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s film based on the life of Kurt Cobain. The next stall sells guns, bayonets, knives, wooden and leather night-sticks and loose ammunition. I settle for an old spirit level.

20 DECEMBER
Off to Holon Digital Arts Lab for some research into Israeli and Palestinian video art for an exhibition in autumn 2006. Galit Eilat, who runs the centre, has amassed a fine archive of material and

Diary

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This declaration is tentative, for I'm not at all sure of where it is taking me, but my aspirations urge me not to dodge this uncertain adventure. Here's my explanation and statement of intent...

'Scul?ture' was

Journey Two: Tours

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’m off to France. At least that’s the idea, but my plane is kept waiting for access to the runway for so long that a piece of art comes to mind: ‘Runway’ by Louise K Wilson. For the making of that video, she persuaded the authorities at Newcastle Airport to close the main runway to planes for an hour or so. In the aeroplane-free slot, several off-duty air traffic controllers bicycled up the runway in v-formation, guided by the voice of an on-duty colleague. Amongst other things, the resulting film is a tribute to human communication and co-operation, so often taken for granted. But if the artist is doing it again here at Luton Airport then I am not at all impressed,

Portfolio: Nigel Peake

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

‘Let me take you on a trip
Around the world and back
And you won’t want have to move
You just sit still
Now let your mind do the walking...’

There is a trace of playful self-forgetfulness and absorption in the work of Nigel Peake which conveys his sense of pleasure in drawing. Despite training as an architect, his idiosyncratic pictures are uncoupled from his chosen discipline’s constraints and inhibitions. Peake feels refreshingly free to shape his imagined kaleidoscopic cities where skewed cosmologies are spun out of fantasy and reflect an ambivalent attitude towards the ambitions of architecture.

His most recent ink drawing

Sue Tompkins, Glasgow

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The unique performance given by Sue Tompkins on the opening night of her exhibition of new works revealed many of the most compelling aspects of her practice, both as a sculptor and as a vocalist. The former Life Without Buildings singer develops a more mesmerising technique with each solo performance she delivers. Often Tompkins weaves snatches of popular song and borrowed texts (such as excerpts from Bob Dylan’s ‘One of Us Must Know’ or the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’) into a personal song/narrative. She then deliberately undermines the emotional pull of the love songs she references through odd phrasing, foot movements, lengthy pauses and the insertion

End of Time: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tokyo

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

One of the more disconcerting aspects of Tokyo is the emptiness at its centre. The spaces that the western visitor expects to be full are not. The city’s political and symbolic centre is the Imperial Palace, which is not so much a building as a great park, mostly off limits to visitors – in other words, a void. Meanwhile, the Tokyo National Museum, the world’s largest museum of Japanese art, is by western standards devoid not only of objects, but of people.

On a Saturday afternoon, the silence inside is absolute, broken only by the snores of the handful of sleeping visitors. In the west, the empty centre signifies desolation and failure. In Tokyo, by contrast,

Her Noise, London

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Doing a Yoko. For the army of macho guitar heroes whose posturings of the mid-90s attempted to reclaim a ‘classic’ canon, it was the ultimate excuse. Groupies are fine, they seemed to be saying, but otherwise girls don’t count.

However necessary it may have been for the Britpop pack to reassert masculinity following a decade of bedwetting sensitivity, such misogyny failed to grasp one thing in its emulation of ‘authenticity’. Far from the hanger-on she was made out to be, Yoko Ono was more of an artist than they would ever be. The Spice Girls’ equally misguided notion of Girl Power was an equally vacuous manifesto. Not for nothing was their f

Selective Memory: Scotland and Venice, Echo Echo, Edinburgh

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

If the viewer adopts the pose of a transcendental subject, floating above planet Earth, one can see Venice in the past, Edinburgh in the present, and the faint outline of an as-yet-undefined future in the work originally shown by Alex Pollard, Cathy Wilkes and Tatham and O’Sullivan at last year’s Venice Biennale. The latest incarnation of this travelling show – Selective Memory at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Echo Echo at the Collective – rests here for a few months, before being reconfigured sometime in the future. With each step along the way, it becomes increasingly self-reflective, complying with the vision of curators Jason E. Bowman and Rachel

Installation

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Cathy Wilkes
Our Misfortune, an installation created by Cathy Wilkes at Glasgow’s Transmission in 2001, included a distressed card table, on top of which sat a face, rendered in scraps of paper, felt and, for eyes, two jigsaw puzzle pieces cut from cloth.

This detail cannot be said to be representative of Wilkes’ work, nor can a single element in a single work be regarded as a cipher for the decryption of Wilkes’ practice. It might, though, serve as a starting point, a little clue or hint to acquaint and inform.

First, it is a face for looking at. More complex than the arrangement of lines and dots recognised even by newborns

Bear Compound

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Having been invited by Dundee Contemporary Arts to develop a public project in the city of Dundee, I became immediately enthusiastic about the possibility of becoming part of the team re-designing the European Brown Bear enclosure for Camperdown Wildlife Centre. Dundee City Council had engaged architects, engineers, educators and wildlife managers to provide the two brown bears with a vastly enhanced enclosure which would replace their current cage. These bears, while healthy and well-adapted, have never set a paw on grass.

Working along with architect Duncan Myers, and Kevin Gosling and Aileen Whitelaw from the Wildlife Centre, we have developed the ‘Dundee Bear Broch&rsqu

Minimal Decay

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica has had a remarkable career outside Brazil. In 2000 he was much in evidence in the inaugural show at Tate Modern, Century City, where he was represented by elegant, neo-minimalist work of the late 1950s. In 2002 his retrospective at the Whitechapel was based around giant, participatory installations made in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2003, his work was prominent at Beyond Geometry, LACMA’s major survey of minimalist tendencies from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Rio de Janeiro, the city where he was born, and lived all of his life, an arts centre devoted to his work opened a few years ago.

All very impressive for an artist who died in 1980

Judgement Day: Plants, Politics and Art

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In 1990 Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney published a landmark text called Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity. It warned of the dangers facing agriculture and plant cultivation because of the recent advances in genetics. At one point in the book, they recount a short anecdote concerning a trip they made to Amsterdam in 1982 where they were taken to see a gnarled old tree in the city’s botanical garden. ‘Tucked away in a battered greenhouse without any sign of distinction, gardeners showed us the living remains of an ancient coffee tree. Not just any coffee tree – the coffee tree.’ The tree had grown from a single cutting the Dutch had shipped from I

Songs in the Key of Life

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

From pop art to art rock, the interface between the musical and visual arts is fecund in Scotland to the point of groupie-like promiscuity. Stalwarts from one world hang out with movers and shakers from the other, the first to garner intellectual cred, the latter to look cool.

Who’s who in the above dichotomy these days, however, is becoming increasingly blurred. In Glasgow, The Chateau birthed a scene that embraced all of these, and when Franz Ferdinand went mainstream, you know it was partly because they knew their visual reference points as much as musical ones.

Art school has always been a sublime breeding ground for pop stars. From Roxy Music to Adam and

Venice- The Grand Tour

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As the People’s Republic of China enters the 51st Venice Biennale for the first time this year – staging an exhibition in the Arsenale complex and the Virgin Garden – Scotland makes its third independent appearance since the Scottish Sculpture Trust and the Demarco European Art Foundation presented site-specific installations by David Mach, Arthur Watson and Kate Whiteford in the Giardini in 1990. While widely promoted as causes for celebration by the world’s cult-rades, aesthetic consultants and kunst kommanders, it’s not entirely obvious why China and Scotland should want to take part in the Venice Biennale in an official capacity.

Should Scotland

Ian Hamilton Finlay

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Ian Hamilton Finlay, who this year celebrates his 80th birthday, is best known for Little Sparta, the garden in Lanarkshire which he developed with his wife Sue from 1967. It is a small piece of the world amazingly dense with resonances, echoes, beauty. There are jokey references to the Kailyard and the Siegfried Line, ‘signatures’ given to chosen parts of the surrounding landscapes, inviting the viewer to see them as works by particular artists, references to the absent worlds of the sea and classical antiquity, and reminders, amidst its tranquillity, of the violence of revolution, war, and indeed Nature. It is open from June to September (Friday and Sunday afternoons only),

Studio: Lotte Glob

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Dark brown swathes of bog, peat and mountain are strewn with grey boulders. It’s empty. The last human outcrop was a small village called Ardgay, in which a local store ekes out a living and not much else. A glimpse of the North Atlantic Ocean reminds us that this is the edge. From Cornwall up to London, on to Birmingham, through Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Inverness – here is where the British Isles ends. Southern shorelines, suburban conurbations and urban sprawls have all whittled away to this – wilderness cut by a couple of roads, occasional crofts, but mostly just immense, unyielding rock, sea and sky. A hawk hangs on the wind, poised to swoop.

Journey Three: By Loch Eriboll

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Last night at 6pm, I left the car parked overlooking the gleaming sea off Scotland's north coast. This morning at 8am, I started walking from my tent, pitched in a sheltered spot in the foothills. And now? It's noon on this fair summer's day, and I'm taking one of my regular food-water-map breaks. But I think I'll sit a little longer than usual on this particular lump of granite and review my progress.

This journey really started when I read about the visit to Lotte Glob's studio that Ruth Hedges and Luke Watson made for the last issue of MAP. Glob has made use of the huge resource that the north-west Highlands represent, referring to it as The Ultimate Rock Garden. A photograp

Portfolio: A Question of Degrees

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Glasgow

Artist and director of Glasgow's Mary, Mary gallery, Hannah Robinson returns to Glasgow School of Art. 'Degree shows are strange affairs: so much build-up and anticipation, only to find yourself at the Vic bar at the end of the night. The same routine practised to perfection over the last four years! I have never felt they are the best way in which to judge a student's achievements, putting a lot of pressure on at the last minute, when I suspect the decision has been made well in advance. But you can tell a lot from a degree show, with many of the interesting artists in Glasgow such as Henry Coombes, Lotte Gertz and Michael Stumpf, putting on intriguing

Glasgow International 2005

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Glasgow International 2005
Various venues 21 Apr - 2 May

A simultaneous and city-wide expellation of relief could blow art students off the bridge over Charing Cross, so take it easy. Glasgow City Council has realised that contemporary arts opportunities have to be made before they can be grasped, invested in before there will be cultural (and, let’s face it, financial) pay offs. There may be something desperate sounding in the title Glasgow International, a bit paranoid and maniacal - one half expects a bracketed and exclamation marked ‘(honest!)’ after it - but this could be because this event seems so desperately overdue. Or, that’s what every artis

Briony Anderson

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Banff
Briony Anderson
Installation in Ivy Buchanan’s 14 mar-28 mar

Briony Anderson’s almost-untitled ‘Video Documentation 2’ is a non-stop projected loop of the artist stepping through an improvised Scottish country dance, installed in Ivy Buchanan’s, a recently vacated dressmakers shop in Banff. It is a simple piece, and a quiet one; but it is, simply and quietly, an angry piece too. Ivy Buchanan’s sits on a side street, and, now that the shop has closed, seems largely ignored. Anderson’s choice of location points to what is perhaps her chief concern, an exploration of the place of women in Scottish culture.

The appr

Tomoko Takahashi

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

London
Tomoko Takahashi
Serpentine Gallery 22 Feb - 10 Apr

My family never liked to throw things away and boy, did they love a bargain. No wonder I ‘got’ this show by 2002 Turner Prize shortlistee Tomoko Takahashi, a Japanese artist now based in London.

The exhibition comprised around 7,600 objects collected, donated or found over a period of months, which Takahashi then painstakingly sorted and arranged throughout the Serpentine. There was a method to this madness. The galleries suggested locations – kitchen, playroom, workroom, garden – into which she could focus her eye for patterns, colours and textures while indulging an instinct

Moyna Flannigan

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

New York
Moyna Flannigan
Sara Meltzer Gallery 7 Apr — 14 May

Painting portraits is what Edinburgh-based artist Moyna Flannigan does. For many years, she has focused on this genre. But not in the traditional sense – the people that populate Flannigan’s works are imaginary – an amalgamation of memories, people watching and remembered images from books and magazines. In her last solo show, she contemporarised the portrait miniature. Once Upon Our Time, 2004, housed in the grand neo-Gothic Scottish National Portrait Gallery, featured 50 make-believe characters, exquisitely painted as small-scale portraits on vellum. These were shown alongside a select

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Edinburgh
Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 4 Jun - 4 Sep

As a young art student in the late 80s my perception of Francis Bacon was that he was nothing more than the funny, frequently bitchy, pantomime totem for a powerful section of the London art world. His Napoleonic, peacock-like strut and drunken antics on TV with Melvyn Bragg represented everything I wanted to move away from. The romantic ideas that swirled in tortured spirals around Bacon's aura, not least the notion that he had been somehow pickled in authenticity, to me bordered on the fascistic in their omnipotence and power. In 1988 I couldn't wait for the end of Bacon,

Frida Kahlo

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

London
Frida Kahlo
Tate Modern 9 Jun - 2 Oct
As a child my father took me every Sunday to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Each week he showed me Diego Rivera's murals (1932-33) in the Garden Court and talked to me about their controversial depiction of the car industry. He never mentioned Frida Kahlo, though she'd lived in Detroit with her husband Rivera while he created his murals. Her paintings again and again reference her relationship with her husband, both implicitly and explicitly, and she too made unsettling paintings that pessimistically referenced Detroit and its industry ('Henry Ford Hospital', 1932; 'Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United State

Memories of Eduardo Paolozzi

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I went to the Eduardo Paolozzi class in Munich in 1989, during my third year of a sculpture degree at Edinburgh College of Art. I had written a letter to the art school in Munich to see if someone would be interested in doing an exchange from the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst. The letter found its way to Paolozzi, who encouraged one of his students to apply. Tony Romer did, and we embarked on a three-month exchange. We are the best of friends to this day, and as far as I am aware, a continuing exchange through the Erasmus and Socrates programme has been operating between Munich and Edinburgh for the past 15 years – nice to think the letter I wrote has had such an influence on so many

A Family Life

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It's hard, thinking back, to separate the experience of meeting Mark Boyle from the experience of meeting the Boyle Family. In the notes I made afterwards, the phrase 'jovial joker' is scribbled next to Mark's name, but that does nothing to capture the forceful charisma of the man.

There was a soap opera aspect to that lunch in the gallery space at their home in Greenwich. Joan, playing mum, was a quiet, insightful presence. Sebastian, the son, operated as the family historian, coaxing stories from his parents and summarising. Georgia, the daughter, affected boredom at the business of going over old ground. She had, I suspect, heard these tales many times.

Mark, me

Art of the Public

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

What with all the 'nons', 'nees' and 'no ways' over European referenda, it is conspicuous that many EU citizens are voicing general dissatisfaction with the political class as much as they are relaying scepticism about the detail of constitutional proposals. This frustration has been demonstrated recently by the electoral rejection of the treaty, by the French and Dutch, or in the case of the Great British, by the dogged double negative which is a loud public 'no' to not having a referendum on these European matters. The unpopularity of Jan Peter Balkenend contributed in large part to the Dutch 'no'. The French people's distrust of Chirac saw his worry realised - the vote being used as a blu

Gorbals

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

'There is nothing in culture or art that is worth the life and elementary happiness of one of those thousands who rot in the Glasgow slums. There is nothing in science or religion.'
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1934

My dad photographed slums across Britain for Shelter in the late 60s. He said that the ones in Glasgow were the worst. Looking at his pictures of the Gorbals again, it is hard to believe that people were allowed to live like this. A girl puts on her eye make-up in a piece of a mirror, propped up by a window that's broken and patched up with cardboard; children play in what looks like a blitz bombsite; a father holds his son in a worn chair while the plaster peels off

A Watchful Eye

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

In 1964 Samuel Beckett made his only trip to New York City to make Film, in which Buster Keaton personifies a person perceived by the eye of an untiring perceiver. Forty years later, artist Rosalind Nashashibi, whose films are known for a delicate and contemporary strain of this theme, has made a similar trip, taking up residency in New York for the past eight months under the auspices of the Scottish Arts Council's residency programme.

Film is an exploration of Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' - that is, to be, is to be perceived. Berkeley proposes that there is no such thing as matter, only mental events, and the minds that perceive them. Not a huge leap

Record Restore Reconstruct?

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty-five years ago, between 23 August and 12 September, 1970, the celebrated German artist Blinky Palermo executed a wall painting, 'Blue/yellow/white/red', comprising a horizontal band in four colours, which briefly occupied the main stairwell of Edinburgh College of Art. This work was Palermo's major contribution to Strategy: Get Arts, an exhibition organised by Richard Demarco in collaboration with the Kunsthalle D?sseldorf as part of that year's Edinburgh International Festival. The exhibition was designed to showcase innovative work in a range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and film, from a number of prominent artists then based in D?sseldorf. These

Seeing Things

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Everything we see, we frame. Everything we experience, we frame. Or, to be more accurate, everything we are aware of seeing or experiencing, we frame. At any given time in our life, there is an infinite amount of information to take in, and in order to make sense of it, we define and organise our experience. We frame things. We choose to focus on one particular aspect of the scene, to see it in a certain way and as we do so, we ignore everything else. This is how we make sense of our world, by choosing to ignore most of what we see, in order to understand a particular part of it.

As you read this, you are only aware of the words you are reading at this particular moment. Right now

Studio: Paula Rego

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I haven't seen her octopus. So Paula Rego leads me through the vivid jumble of creatures and characters and works-in-progress that occupies her Kentish Town studio, to show me her octopus. On the way, there are other introductions to be made. 'There's my big foetus, and there's my little foetus,' Rego says, pointing out a couple of gory, misshapen little models with snaking umbilical attachments. 'They're rather horrible, aren't they?' They are. Nearby is an unfinished painting, showing a young girl at a typewriter menacing a pair of monkeys with a gun. 'When she found out that they couldn't type Shakespeare, she had to shoot them,' Rego blithely explains. One of the models for this work - a

Portfolio: Dining on Imagination

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Drawings on her studio wall operate as Choudhry’s sketchbook and are the origin of her many lines of enquiry. But her work culminates in painting in a biting style as fissured in form as it is in content. Pointedly staying clear of painterly expression, she conveys complex ideas and explores intense situations.

Choudhry desribes herself as a woman, a daughter, a sister, a lover, a friend, a colleague, a cook, a listener, a Scot, an Asian and an artist. Her paintings are enigmatic and layered – visual composites of her identity. Viewed in relation to internationalism and post–colonial thought, her paintings question both national authenticity and identity.

Mexican Lights

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I arrive in Monterrey, north Mexico, after dark. To get there I have flown into and out of Mexico City by night. Thirty million people below me and I haven't seen one of them – just an infinite pattern of sodium light. I try to translate that into some kind of human presence: for every streetlight, say, a household. It's like looking at the night sky and trying to imagine each distant star as populous and complex as planet Earth.

There is no seat belt in my taxi, and I try to work up the courage to complain. I don't or can't. I'm weak-willed through lack of sleep. Feeling weirdly untethered I look outside at the view from the highway. A shabby industrial zone gives way t

Diary: three beggars and an artist

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Thurs 24 March
Two weeks before the launch of the book Get a Fuckin’ Job Johnny decides to become a runner for a drug dealer and kicks Alex and Neil out of his tiny council flat. On the second deal Johnny and a couple,get caught by the police. The woman has put the stuff in her mouth and Johnny’s told her to swallow it before the police comes up. They handcuff the men and ask the woman to open her mouth, one of the policemen sticks a finger under her tongue and finds the drugs. They all get arrested.

Journey Six: Glasgow and Port Glasgow

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in a pub in the Calton. This Glasgow ward’s male life-expectancy of 53.9 compares unfavourably with almost anywhere else in the world other than bits of AIDS-ravaged Africa. How revealing is that? I’m surrounded by smoke, sectarian images and misplaced optimism. What better place then to read the Scottish Arts Council’s Annual Report for 2004/5?

The meat of the document is a set of accounts for the year ended 4 April 2005 (signed off in October 2005 so this is the most up-to-date data available), but

Studio: Toby Paterson

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

How long have you worked there?

I've had the studio since late 2001. I originally shared it with Hayley Tompkins, but she now has another space elsewhere in the building. Although our working processes are clearly very different, it was a pleasure to work alongside her. Previously I'd shared with Alex Pollard in a rather eccentric studio above a hairdressers, but access was inconveniently limited by their opening hours prompting the move here. This studio still meets my needs very well.

Rosalind Nashashibi’s first solo show in New York comprises the acclaimed 'Hreash House'(2004), a number of photographs, and two recent films, 'Eyeballing'(2005) and 'Adrian Noble Rehearses the RSC in Measure for Measure'(2006).

The latter consists of found footage of Adrian Noble, artistic director of the RSC 1991- 2002, rehearsing the company in Act II, scene IV; an exchange between the characters Isabella and Angelo.

The actors rehearse and the

Beyond Belief

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

The following are extracts from a conversation between Nathan Coley and Dr Timothy Chappell, a senior lecturer in Philosophy at University of Dundee. Dr Chappell’s areas of expertise include the philosophy of religion, religious experience, mysticism and reasons for faith.

Timothy Chappell: Did you see evidence of the symptoms of Jerusalem Syndrome in the people you were filming. And, a different question, did you yourself pick up any sense of Jerusalem as a holy place? Did it move you? Did it get through to you as being a holy place or was it strangely unholy?

Nathan Coley: I very deliberately didn’t try to document pe

Ian Hamilton Finlay 28 October 1925 - 27 March 2006

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

My father was a poet. He made a world of his own within the world; he shared that world with us. Sometimes, when Ailie and I would walk back from school, Mum and Dad would come down the road to meet us, and we would set off together on the path round the moor. On the way we might dip our wellies in the burn and Dad would say, ‘you can never step in the same river twice’. (This was his Greek philosophy phase). We would protest, what a lot of nonsense, it’s the same burn as always, the same peaty water flowing by. But not to Dad. In that startling and yet ordinary way of his, the

Well Red

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

When the Crayola company began to manufacture packs of crayons in 1903, they introduced kids to hitherto unknown multi-coloured artistic possibilities. Taking the ‘Cray’ from the French word for chalk, and the ‘ola’ from oleaginous, or oily, they also introduced new semantic potentials into the mix. Beginning with just eight colours, by the turn of the millennium they were producing 120 different hues, including 23 different shades of red.

The Red Krayola are a band formed in Houston, Texas almost 40 years ago and still a going concern. They may have changed their ‘C’ to a ‘K’ after Crayola

REAL LIFE Scenario

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Studio Real Life - Amsterdam 1995
Real Life Rocky Mountain - Glasgow 1996
Fortress Real Life - London 2001
Selected Real Life - Karlsruhe 2002
The Real Life Rock Opera, Volume 1 - Touring 2004

These greatest hits, a selection of the installations available on the REAL LIFE label, have played in galleries and off-site venues since Glasgow artist Ross Sinclair set out on the road in 1992. This year, he returns with his biggest solo show at home since 1996, when he installed Real Life Rocky Mountain at the Centre of Contemporary Art. Now back in the CCA with The Real Life Painting Show Sinclair has taken a surprising turn on this lifelong art roadshow. He's i

Journey Seven: Glasgow Mountains

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

I step into Tramway. The building is filled with the work of artists graduating from the two-year Master of Fine Art course this summer. First impressions are great. The 16 artists come from almost as many countries. They’re using different cultural backgrounds, temperaments and media, but have all been through the same exacting course, which makes it likely that the objects and ideas presented here will reward protracted study.

There is an eye-catching piece that I would prefer to leave until last, but because of the imminence of a meeting I must explore it straight away. A mountain has been created inside the tall space of Tramway 2. On top of that mountain perches a moder

Diary: Theatre of Dreams

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

WEDNESDAY 21 JUNE
11am Christie Park Stadium. Sun. In the changing rooms, Jakob Jensen wants to write on a wall in mud. Could I find him a bucket, water and …some mud?
12.30pm Lunch at the Gordon School. The kids swim around us like sharks. In the stadium social club, the radio bumps along with the travel news and the artworks begin to pile up. ‘Visit Garioch Blinds! Open 9 to 5 Monday to Friday.’
6pm Four pipers in full dress uniform lead a roaring tribe of Huntly folk and footballers down the main street. ‘Scotland WIN, Denmark LOSE!’ over and over again. Old ladies wave from t

Report: Can video thrive as a marginal activity?

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Douglas Gordon’s calendar, bulging with not one but three mammoth openings this year, has earmarked him as one of Scotland’s biggest contemporary art exports. Yet this international art star is conspicuous at home for being one of only a clutch of successful Scots to produce work in the film and video medium. Battling the chill northerly wind of conservative tastes, Gordon might initially seem like an exception to the rule. Scotland, in contrast to the rest of Europe, lacks much of a heritage in the medium, preferring its art finely painted and academically sculpted. But one wonders whether Gordon’s forthcoming November show – his first in Scotland since 1993 –

Report

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Which famous pop star owns Frida Kahlo’s ‘Self-Portrait with Monkey?’ Answer: Madonna. Who owned it before she did? Answer: computer giant IBM. Strapped for cash in the mid-1990s, the corporation sold off a large proportion of its legendary art collection, which it had established in the 1930s and expanded massively during the 1950s. When the collection was sold, a celebrated example of corporate art purchasing strategy disappeared, although the company received the cash injection it needed.

This anecdote springs to mind when contemplating a fascinating exhibition called Art in the Workplace, to be mounted on a 1000sqm vacant office space in the Clydesdale Bank P

What Makes You And I Different?

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This show of deconstructed self-portraits presents images of a self that is now fragmented and pluralised. The stylistics of existence and aesthetics overlap; the self-portrait acts as a mask, temporarily animated by the ghost of artistic volition.

The show includes photographs, films and sculptures by Mathew Barney, Mat Collishaw, Peter Land, Wood and Harrison, Mónica Castillo, Beagles and Ramsay, Cindy Sherman, Mark Neville, Melanie Smith and Bjørn Melhus. Barney’s work is hard to beat when it comes to self-aggrandisement dragged up as a sustained critique of the ‘centred self’. A triptych of images from his *3Drawings Restraint*2 series is on

Dada's Boys: Identity and Play in Contemporary Art

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Heterosexual men have been behaving badly for some time now. For some this is a fact of life, a genetic disposition that ensures a propensity for adolescent jokes and puerile banter. For others it’s a reflection of a deep-seated unease about the social, sexual and cultural status of the male. Curated by art historian David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys unapologetically aims to explore this crisis in masculinity, seeking to illuminate how a lineage of male artists, starting from the Dadaists, have sought to manage the riddle of the male self.

In the catalogue essay for the exhibition, Hopkins presents an engaging argument for revising the dominant perception of canonical New Yor

The 17: Bill Drummond

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On 17 May 2006, in a blacked-out room in Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery, a makeshift choir of 17 people sing their hearts out. According to the score, which was presented to them an hour or so earlier from a row of 17 hanging in the gallery, the performers are required to pretend they’re 70 years old and upwards, and make a non-verbal sound in some kind of unison, based on their own feelings of bitterness. In F sharp.

This is followed by another five-minute incantation, in which the performers become 45-to-69-year-olds, accentuating, in G sharp this time, an ‘acquired’ sense of bitterness. And so it goes, down the generations, moving through arrogance for ages

Berlin & Bucharest

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It won’t be long before you will be able to explore the psycho-geography of each city around the world through a contemporary art biennale. Two recent examples delineated the urban conditions of two very different, large European cities: Berlin and Bucharest. But while relying on an atmosphere of critical awareness, the two cities operated with very different budgets and individual curatorial approaches.

The 4th Berlin Biennal was entitled Of Mice and Men after the Steinbeck novel, but had no overall concept. Instead, a narrative flow of ideas came from the curators – Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick – threading through the numerous exhibi

Glasgow International 2006

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

This year’s Glasgow International was a modest affair – well, on the surface at least. There were gems amongst the rubble that were well worth searching for. Karla Black (at Mary Mary) and Fiona Jardine (at Transmission) managed to sparkle by presenting very reserved work, and Ross Sinclair managed to pull off a gluttonous visual feast at the CCA – many thought he couldn’t do it, others wished he wouldn’t. We will now be getting this Festival in the form of a biennale event, what we really wanted was something on this scale every second month. To pull out two exhibitions from those on offer is not too much of a difficult task, so let’s go for those that we

Ganghut in Oz

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Email to Map from Steve Murray 27/3/06:

»I Thought we could make a collage of images that landscape accross the middle of the pages then weve been building a blog/commentry/thought word piece that has snippets from all of us. sections of that i can select and we coiuld have them placed round the collage, so that there is not a narritive linnier piece but a collage of moments and thoughts like themonatge? almost like the snippets of written words act as a border for the monatge. we could maybe make a wee mock up to send in t=with the article/image. were trying to think of ways to make it more like thespirit of GAGHUT, which is something in itself we have bee

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno: Sport Television Cinema Art

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

PAINT

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

CAROL RHODES

Carol Rhodes paints landscapes in the sense that Giorgio Morandi painted bottles and Josef Albers painted squares. For such artists, landscapes, still lifes, portraits or geometrical shapes are more than genres; they are vehicles for meditation and thought. The American painter Gary Stephan, no stranger to the landscape format himself, once described Cézanne’s ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ as ‘a sufficiently interesting shape’ upon which to hang a painting. Perhaps Rhodes’ choice of landscape settles into this space for consideration – but the question is, what sort of consideration? Or perhaps she is just shu

Birds of the Devil

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Eighteen altered images and 18 writers with Goose feathers in hand and ink in well. A Strict Nature Reserve Publication, the Brainchild of one Edward Summerton, the progenitor of this project, to be published in an edition of 500 individually numbered tomes, slightly smaller than A5 in size.

The initial idea for this project was hatched during a holiday and Genealogical investigation to the Summer Isles off the North West of Scotland in the year of 2004, researching the quasi-mystical pagan roots of the Summerton family name. I should mention that the Summer Isles are the most Westerly point of Summerton’s artistic realm, ‘The Strict Nature Reserve’ where not so

Boys' Club

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Dada’s Boys is the enigmatic title of a new show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, which aims to reveal the influence of the early 20th century movement on contemporary art in Britain. Its curator is David Hopkins, who believes Dada still has something to say to 21st century sensibilities. He sat down with the artist Keith Farquhar – whose work is included in the show – and two other enthusiasts, to discuss masculinity, Man Ray, mis-spelling and mating rituals …

PERSONNEL:
DH David Hopkins, curator of Dada’s Boys, professor
Glasgow University
DL Debbie Lewer, lecturer, Glasgow University

Portfolio:Emerging

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Karen Hodge
When I left school I trained as a beauty therapist, but after working in a salon for a few years, became so disillusioned with the superficiality of it all that I decided to leave that profession and seek something more fulfilling. This body of work was made with cosmetics alone, on either calico or canvas – I began experimenting with make-up on canvas using cotton buds and make-up sponges. Appropriating sources from magazines and the internet, particularly glossy cosmetic advertising, I am currently working on several portraits based on body image and the media. My work is influenced by artists such as Richard Phillips, Chuck Close, Elizabeth

The Fiery Furnaces

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Brand names like Renault
The French lyric, that’s a little joke. At the time the record was done, a lot of people were joking in this country, after the election about France, so that song is loosely about escaping and not really having a place to go. The French cars are there, because, especially to an American, the car name is slightly exotic.

Record cover
The cover is an imitation of the 60s Penguin Mysteries. We just thought that it would be a nice cover. It was meant to be pulpy in an understated way. Those Penguin crime novels were pulp, but by today’s standards they were pretty tame. And this is a pul

Emerging: Billy Teasdale

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
A figure with a mirror as a body, a child’s dummy with a sculpted head in place of a teat, female figures seemingly hybridised with the supports that hold them up and present them – this is the stuff of Teasdale’s aesthetic world. His work brings together an investigation of formal issues in sculpture with concerns relating to the body – the sexual body in particular.

The work he presented at his degree show at Glasgow School of Art in 2004 suggested an interest in objects that combine the supposed self-sufficiency and indifference of the commodity with a perverse reading of the body as object of desire. More recent pieces pursue the latter theme, but use a

Studio: Callum Innes

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
On a sunny day in Edinburgh’s New Town, I step off a grand Georgian street to find myself in a village-like world of cottages and flowerpots. Here, in an old engravers’ workshop, lies Callum Innes’s studio.

The painter, relaxed and business-like, welcomes me into the three-floor building. He hobbles his way up the stairs, having broken a bone in his foot while playing football on the beach. For someone so internationally established, I tell him, he is surprisingly young. The 44-year-old laughs. ‘I don’t think I’m that established,’ he says. ‘What is established?’

Established is preparing for a survey show at the Frui

Bull and Bear

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Robert Bermingham and Richard Robinson profess a certain frustration with contemporary life. In contrast to the optimistic and futuristic expectations of their childhood, there is no solve-all Blue Peter food pill or Tomorrow’s World jet pack; just the same problems, anxieties and difficult relationships – war, famine and tragedy. Yet we are still being peddled the same impossible dreams by car adverts and TV property shows.

In direct contrast to the high-budget car advert fantasies, it is the garages of a particular group of British men – places for working, tinkering and hiding from wives – that provide inspiration for the first work in

Report: Art fair power and glamour is confirmed

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT

With the self-proclaimed ‘hiss and fizz’ of Frieze Art Fair deflated for another year, directors Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover have once again outdone themselves in terms of profits and punters. The young pretender of world art fairs, still a tender tot at four years old, has become the most fashionable, glamourous and boisterously British fair of them all – an unprecedentedly popular 21st century salon. And amidst a spectacle of celebrity – counting Kate Moss, Saatchi and Jude Law plus entourage – it’s evident that the wealthy patrons are the ones taking the contemporary art stage rather than the art itself. The Evening Standard has coi

Journey Eight N?RNBERG

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
I’m sitting on a bench in the back garden of Schloss Almoshof. It feels good to be in Germany for the first time ever, other than when I’ve been on the way to somewhere else.

But am I really in Germany? Yesterday evening, I landed at a modern international airport, a place that one could imagine finding close to any western city. Then, in mid-July heat I associate only with the likes of Athens, I was given a straw hat and a bicycle with which to make the journey of less than a mile to the 16th century castle in which I’ll be staying for the week. If this really is Germany, it would seem to be a toyland version that’s been dreamed up by a child.

Karla Black

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Taking full advantage of the graceful, well-lit spaces now occupied by Mary Mary gallery in Dixon Street, Glasgow, Karla Black draws out the anaemic beauty of various cosmetic substances and sculptural raw materials. Her witty impressions
of accidental form are combined with subtle accents of an underlying careful design.

Entering the gallery, the viewer is struck by the looming presence of a suspended paper sculpture, ‘Opportunities for Girls’, its ragged wings bound with criss-crossed ribbon to the ceiling. ‘Now is the time to normalise’ shows Black’s taste for inspired combinations of unorthodox media – in this instance, cardboard, paint

Gary Rough: Take Me With You

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
An apparently simple show, this one, with seven small line-drawings on paper and two short looped films. The films’ titles, however, betray the underlying ambition. In citing Breugel’s ‘The Fall of Icarus’, Rough taps the pulse of the western imaginary. An allegory of the impossibility of desire’s objects, the story of Icarus unfolds in indeterminate, interstitial space, the ‘between’ of earth and sky. And it is such betweenness that Rough thematises and explores to extraordinary effect in this body of new work.

Each of the drawings, for example, consists ofthe artist’s hand-rendered repetition of the printed lines on a sheet of rule

Martin Kippenberger

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Tate Modern presents Martin Kippenberger as ‘nomad’, ‘prodigious wit’ and ‘flamboyant performer’. This retrospective, curated by Jessica Morgan and Doris Krystof, pulls together a prolific body of work, produced between the mid-1970s and Kippenberger’s death, aged 44, in 1997. Morgan and Krystof play down the alcoholism that no doubt hastened the artist’s untimely demise and embrace Kippenberger as an idiosyncratic traveller and black-humoured jokesmith. His signal poster works hang together on the café wall outside the gallery, many of them featuring the leering, brilliantly inane artist himself.

Another image of the artist d

Allen Ruppersberg: One of Many - Origins and Variants

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
This is a retrospective of an American artist who has been prominent since graduating from art school in LA in the late 1960s. I responded to it in contrasting ways, which I’ll try and reconcile as I go along.

I’ve never come across an artist who has been so consistently stimulated by the written word, literature in particular. There are works here in homage to the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the French writer Raymond Roussel, Oscar Wilde, DH Lawrence and more.

Certainly, I got much pleasure from viewing and considering the artist’s copies and appropriations.The trouble is, as a firstgeneration conceptual artist, Ruppersberg has a tendency to bl

Colin Kirkpatrick: The Cowboy and the Spaceman

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
The centrepiece of this show is Kirkpatrick’s Peacock-produced short film, which gives the exhibition its name. Additional works, including the artist’s 2003 Zenomap project photographs, provide a preface of sorts to the primary theme of the film: the two types of ecological economy put forward by Kenneth Boulding in 1965. The first type, ‘cowboy’, is described by Boulding as ‘symbolic of the illimitable plains and associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior’. The ‘spaceman’, on the other hand, prudently recognises ‘the earth as a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction

Luke Fowler

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
MODERN INSTITUTE 18 FEB – 18 MAR

In his latest documentary film, ‘Pilgrimage From Scattered Points’, Luke Fowler outlines the history of the Scratch Orchestra, composer Cornelius Cardew’s free-thinking grouping of musicians, non-musicians and other interested parties. Using archive footage - much of it culled from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 television film Journey to the North Pole - alongside interviews, shots of ephemera and Super 8 vignettes (some featuring Fowler himself), ‘Pilgrimage From Scattered Points’ is at once a coherent narrative essay on the orchestra’s history, and a fluid portrait in film of Cardew and his

Fred Sandback

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

FRUITMARKET 18 MAR – 14 MAY

Viewing the works of Fred Sandback in the somewhat expressive architecture of the Fruitmarket, one feels the benign tension of his work more acutely. On close examination of the installation here in Edinburgh, the works overcome that particular architectural challenge. Sandback’s work has often been displayed in surroundings which provide a spatial ‘neutrality’ – one which the artist considered desirable. But in contrast to the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, where this retrospective was assembled – a building designed by Morger, Degelo & Kere in an attempt at that neutrality – the Fruitmark

Roni Horn

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

INVERLEITH HOUSE 21 JAN – 26 MAR
MUSEION, BOLZANO 4 FEB – 30 APR

New York artist Roni Horn titles this joint retrospective exhibition in Scotland/Italy, Angie and Emily Dickinson – a strange coupling – one a famed American 1970s TV cop, the other a 19th century poet. And she’s chosen a Himalayan poppy, famous for its unique blue, and a favourite in the gardens around the gallery, for the cover of the catalogue. But it’s a teenage boy in ‘From Doubt by Water’ who beckons at the door of the gallery – a young sentry, his blond facial hair making its first shocking appearance. Sticking his head

Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BARBICAN 16 FEB – 21 MAY

In this survey of late-1960s Brazil, the most striking things are the least expected. In a small room are a collection of film fragments focusing on the musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. In one, Veloso is shown in a 1967 television performance. He could scarcely look more nervous, and delivers the stiffest imaginable performance. He can barely hear the band, and sings sharp throughout. His audience are enraptured, but sit in rows, politely applauding.

A second television performance, a year later, is documented through a series of stills and an audio track. This time, Veloso sings ‘E Prohibido Prohibi

Sean Landers: It's Better to be a Sucker

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

GREENGRASSI 1 MAR - 1 APR

‘He who thinks great thoughts errs greatly,’ Heidegger once said – and he would have known. In the 1990s, while much of the New York art world was deluding itself about how great its thoughts were, Sean Landers constructed a persona who staged confessional artworks, shamelessly voicing his hopes for greatness and his inexhaustible capacity for erring. This was done by rejecting the creatively constipated form of conceptualism that dominated at the time, and opting instead for a kind of critical laxity, producing a series of hilarious, ‘pathetic’ text and figurative-based paintings and sculptures. (Nobod

Linder Sterling: The Working Class Goes to Paradise 2000-6

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

TATE BRITAIN 1 APR

A couple of years back, when Manchester’s post-punk avant-provocateur Linder Sterling appeared at Flourish, the Sunday-night happening in Glasgow, all preconceptions of her smuttified back catalogue were wiped clean. The faux-scat-jazz, sex-war subversion of her band Ludus had given way to a barrage of churning drone guitar and radio noise, wrapped up with the understated razor-blade force of her free-associative verbal ectoplasm.

Though small in scale, its intentions seemed derived in part from this major durational work, first performed in Manchester during 2000 and recreated here as part of Tate Triennial 2006. It was i

Lumin de Lumine

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

SKATERAW/TORNESS 9 FEB

In February 2006 we witnessed the terrible power of drawing in the reaction of insulted Muslims to the perceived profanity of some cartoons depicting Allah. What a mighty tool the ink pen is. Just marks on a piece of paper, a drawing can convey a message sufficiently powerful to rock the world. Now, in the 21st century, that power is potent as it ever was.

I was reminded of this power of drawing – in a more positive but still contentious way – by the invitation card to the projection of Ken Mullin’s film across the north face of Torness Nuclear Power Station. On it, a drawing by Richard Demarco was drafted

Armory Show

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

PIERS 90 & 92 9 – 13 MAR

The Armory Show started out as the Gramercy International Art fair, begun in 1994 by four New York art dealers. In 1999 its name was changed to the Armory Show, shedding its shabby beginnings, and solidifying its importance, by association with the eponymous show of 1913, through which the United States was introduced to modern art. The rest is art history. But as it is today, the Armory has nothing whatsoever to do with history.

It claims to be the world’s leading art fair devoted to contemporary art, relying for that assertion not only on New York’s glut of galleries and a

STUDIOFILMCLUB

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

VERLAG WALTHER KÖNIG, 2005, £22

In 2003, the painter Peter Doig held a series of film screenings at his studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad. These were informal social events, with a self-service bar, no advance programme and no entry fee. To announce each film, Doig produced a poster in oil-paint on paper. These posters were subsequently purchased by the Rheingold Collection, and exhibited under much more formal conditions at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in 2005. This book, produced to accompany the show, includes a full-page reproduction of each poster, interspersed with grainy photographs of the original studio screenings.

A sort of f

Lost in Space

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

BOOK WORKS CHAP BOOKS SERIES, 2006, £6.50

The dust-jacket unfolds to reveal a map of the Moon, to which handwritten yellow stickies have been attached. These highlight the landing spots of Apollo missions 11 to 17, and set up a tension between the impersonal exactitude of the map and a more subjective line of enquiry.

The book features a good introductory essay by Dodds, extracts from his correspondence with scientists, plus material from NASA sources. Dodds raises the issue of ‘exploring the cultural landscape of space travel’, describing the landing scenes as deserted stage sets littered with obsolete equipment. One corresponde

Black Box/Chambre Noire

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM, £25

A William Kentridge drawing is often far more than a static image, worked up to a state of perfection and allowed to rest in peace. Instead it’s a history of transformation, a story of things said and then unsaid. Kentridge’s charcoal ‘drawings for projection’ constitute whole scenes in his animated films, progressively erased and redrawn for the camera, leaving behind irrefutable traces of their past movements.

The South African artist, who represented his country at last year’s Venice Biennale, has been in great international demand since the late 1980s, when he began a series of anima

Ron Mueck

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
FONDATION CARTIER POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN, 2006, £19.95

The special-effects branch of the film industry has been working its way toward verisimilitude for a long time. The latest obstacle – where the acting troupes of simulacra have been waylaid – is the Uncanny Valley. In their efforts to deceive us, they’ve hit a snag: like dogs barking at the Terminator, we can smell when they’re faking humans. And when we’re given something that’s almost convincingly human but just isn’t quite right, we get to feeling uncomfortable.

The Australian-born artist Ron Mueck has occupied the Uncanny Valley – that

Art 37 Basel

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

13 – 18 JUN

Art Basel proved once again to be the most reliable one-stop glimpse of the state of the global art world: an unprecedentedly frenzied buying bonanza. The number of private jets arriving in town reportedly increased from 75 last year to 100. The gold rush atmosphere was seemingly parodied in the Art Statements section: Peres Projects displayed Terence Koh’s brilliant ‘golden shower’: 222 piss-yellow neon tubes hanging in front of 88 gold cases containing gold-plated turds along with four busts of the artist, one covered in golden bees, and a decaying baboon’s head covered in gold.

At Edinburgh’s dogg

Hanneline Visnes: The crow wants everything to be black

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

PUMP HOUSE GALLERY 24 MAY – 16 JUL

‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small.’
– Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925

From under the looming presence of Battersea Power Station, Hanneline Visnes’ latest show wrestles a space for contemplation and tracing patterns. The crow wants ev

Ruth Ewan

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

STUDIO VOLTAIRE 21 JUL – 20 AUG

Earlier this summer, Ruth Ewan arranged for eleven talking birds to be shipped to London from a parrot sanctuary in Skegness to take up temporary residence at Studio Voltaire for ‘Psittaciformes Trying to Change the World’ – ‘psittaciformes’ being the scientific term for birds, such as parrots, cockatoos and parakeets, capable of mimicking the human voice. Having settled the birds into a purposebuilt aviary, Ewan invited the exhibition staff to introduce new phrases to the birds’ vocabulary using a basic command-training technique involving repetition and reward. The twist in this Pavl

The Young Athenians

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
An exhibition of artists who have developed their work in Edinburgh over the past five years will take place at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) this October. This seems like a harmless and common enough event – of little interest even. So why is it worthy of our attention? The ‘Young Athenians’ who will grace the institution’s prestigious walls with paintings and drawings and rest their sculpture’s limbs on its polished floors, hope to raze the Academy – or what it stands for at least – from the inside. Revolution is afoot – or is this just a romantic ruse? Artists have always hoped that their objects, like disease carrying carrion, attack the

Studio: Alison Watt

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
‘Knowing you can look at a single painting for as long as you want changes the way you think’

Even the White Rabbit would be challenged by the labyrinthine route from the front entrance of London’s National Gallery to Alison Watt’s studio. Down a bewildering maze of endless corridors, through vast doors, in and out of the building, through smaller doors, all identical, the disoriented visitor finally enters a large, white, immaculate space lit by three enormous windows which open, with appropriately ancient ironmongery, over an empty quadrangle. To discover the sense of order and purpose in the studio, and the atmosphere of lucidity that accompanie

Reply: Absent Narratives

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Although there are significant differences in the ways that the image is reproduced, the distinctions between film and video as tools for making art have dissolved in today’s visual art world where the practices of many artists – Luke Fowler, Torsten Lauschmann, Dalziel + Scullion, Smith/Stewart, and Douglas Gordon, amongst the better known exponents, exist in a moving image environment embracing both analogue and new forms of digital media. Such artistic pluralism has its artistic legacy in Scotland’s recent art past. The Scottish Arts Council’s dedicated video art fund goes some way to acknowledging a reasonable scale of support for production in this field, and thi

Report: Expanded Cinema:Time/Space/Structure

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In December 2006, a four day event, organised by Mark Webber at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, examined European and American avant-garde cinema history from the 1960s to the presnt day. Recent and classic works by American structural filmmakers Michael Snow, Robert Morris and Tony Conrad were set alongside expanded cinema works first performed at the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC) by mavericks such as Malcolm LeGrice, Gill Eatherley, Sally Potter, Lis Rhodes and William Raban. Viewed through the eyes of an artist who witnessed the rise of Glasgow’s neo-conceptualvideo art in the 1990s, this report gives an outsider’s view of the cultural legacy left b

Emerging: Hanna Tuulikki

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When Hanna Tuulikki was growing up in Brighton, she spent five years living in a mobile home while her architect father built his family a brand new house. In such cramped confines, the then eleven-year-old understandably craved the great outdoors, where sea, sand and sky were in abundance. Now 24, the Glasgow-based sound artist and singer with off-kilter free folk groups Nalle and Scatter, concedes that being at one with nature at such a formative age has maybeinfluenced her current practice.

This includes a recent residency in Cromarty, recording people imitating the slow but steady inhalations and exhalations of the sea on the CD 100 Breaths, 100 Waves, and a replicati

Emerging: Jamie Shovlin

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Jamie Shovlin is omnipotent, simultaneously donning the role of artist, archivist, curator and collector. He consumes and fabricates information – the relaying of it is central to his work. From the emergence of the ‘white cube’, the divergence between art and the museum has been significant to a number of artists, most predominantly the conceptual artists of the 1960s – Shovlin reprises the role. Inescapably referencing Duchamp, and sharing similar concerns to those of Broodthaers and Kosuth, he explores the transmission of knowledge and all of its loopholes. Pitched in both conceptualist and formalist camps he subsumes the two in a side-stepping tactic that sets him

Momentum

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
MOSS
GALLERI F15/MOSS BREWERY, 2 SEP – 15 OCT

Under the banner of Samuel Beckett’s phrase ‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better’, this exhibition can’t lose. Clearing the way for both success through failure and success through success, Annette Kierulf and Mark Sladen, the curators of Momentum, the Nordic festival of contemporary art, have put together what amounts to a collection of disparate mini-exhibitions with some overlapping formal and conceptual concerns, each of which could have been presented on its own. The show begins in a converted brewery and continues at Galleri F15, housed in a mid-19th century estate across the mai

Blow-Up - Between Form and Formlessness

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
LONDON

We know that underneath the displayed image there is another one more faithful to reality, and underneath this second there is a third one, and a fourth under the previous one. All the way to the true image of that reality – absolute, mysterious – that nobody will see. Or all the way to the dissolution of any reality.
– Michelangelo Antonioni

If a work is to be of any value it must convey something of which transcends material.
– Alan Davie

Our present age is no longer concerned with the static, Cartesian division between mind and body. Rather it is the dynamic Nietzschian dialectic o

Killing Time

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
DUNDEE
DCA 9 SEP – 5 NOV

When did you last see anyone take a toilet break in a movie or onstage? That’s toilet break as in going to the toilet, by the way. Because, while the in-yer-face generation used the smallest room in the house to shag, shoot up or slash someone’s face to bits, this is merely dramatic appropriation – detournement, if you will – of that particular little boys room’s original and very private function. For the playwright, the bathroom is a convenient convenience to get dramatis personae on and off stage. A relief, light or otherwise, in which truth and artifice meet. Realistic, though, it isn’t.

The Doctor will see you now.

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
‘A little more than a year ago during my month serving as the attending physician on the pediatrics ward of the University of California, San Francisco, I ran across a dying boy who, together with his mother, reminded me, as I often am reminded, of the troubled, myopic vision so characteristic of the medicine I have learned and practice. He was a relatively young boy (I will call him Blake), no more than seven years of age and afflicted with a terminal, disfiguring version of mucolipidosis. This is a genetically based storage disease involving the pathological accumulation of complex carbohydrates in many tissues of the body, including the bones and joints, the heart, eyes, liver, sple

TOP DRAWER: David Shrigley

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
David Shrigley is all over the place. Not in a messily scattershot, action painting sort of way, you understand, because this most prolific of artists, who’s about to have his first major solo exhibition on home turf for more than a decade, is quite possibly one of the most stoically self-contained, if wryly amused people on the planet. It’s just that, as well as the exhibition, which collects drawings, sculptures, photographs and animations from the last three years at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Shrigley currently has more projects on the go than you can shake one of his trademark stick-men at.

For starters, part of his DCA exhibition is made up of a series of customis

You're Not Alone

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
He was a great raconteur

Anyone who knew Paul Carter for even the briefest of times will know that there are far too many anecdotes to recall here. A great raconteur, he liked nothing more than the chance to put the world to rights. Paul was lively company and I will miss him as a friend and as one of the most exciting artists that I had the pleasure to work with.

I met him when I moved to Edinburgh, watched his work shine in shows like those at the Collective Gallery and Generator, and was lucky enough to work alongside him at Stills Gallery in the exhibition Become Like Me.

When I moved to Wales to work at Chapter Gallery, one of t

The Scottish Enlightenment: A Visual Culture

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
There is much talk about the Scottish Enlightenment as a golden age of Scottish culture. Perhaps it was, not least in painting and in those other branches of visual thinking in which Scots have excelled: science, engineering and architecture. This period from the mid 18th to the early 19th century has been a touchstone for Scottish identity. But how does it relate to other symbols of Scottish identity such as the Wallace monument near Stirling? We usually think of that monument as simply an expression of 19th century national romanticism, with little link to the Enlightenment. Yet, within it is a portrait gallery with the grand title, The Hall of Heroes, to which Enlightenment thinkers are c

The { } Age

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Enlightenment is never evenly distributed: not even in the minds of enlightened people. There are always a few little scars of former ignorance, always a corner of an eye still cacked up with a residue of former irrationality. Edinburgh’s favourite monument, Walter Scott, wrote in Ivanhoe of Jews being ‘watchful, suspicious and timid.’ He also describes the character Isaac as suffering from typical Jewish ‘obstinacy and avarice’. While it was hardly an original slur, Scott did at least admit that Jewish people might have good reason to be suspiciousof the Christians who exploited, persecuted and insulted them somercilessly. Another bright spark of the Scottish E

Report: The Faces of Berlin

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
KW’s show on Auguststrasse is a multi-layered celebration of a literary masterpiece, its televisual interpretation and the locale of its setting. The timing coincides with the DVD release in Germany of the recently restored 1980 television production by Rainer Werner Fassbinder of Alfred Doblin’s 1929 classic novel. At 13 episodes and an extraordinary epilogue, it clocks in at a Wagnerian 15 hours plus. You can watch each episode in small, darkened rooms, not unlike cells, which ring the central space where all are projected simultaneously for observation. As we read in the novel, things begin to stir in the old panopticon. After living with the Weimar republic in your head for t