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, bare floorboards and bright bare walls. Two ink pots – black and white – balance on two empty plastic containers, and small selections of sketches and

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

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

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 withi

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 took

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 constructivists, that science and technology were a force that wo

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

Diary: Tel Aviv

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

SUN 18– MON 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.

TUES 20
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 c

Diary: George Wylie

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'

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

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.

Sue Tompkins

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

Hiroshi Sugimoto

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

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

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

Cathy Wilkes, Claire Barclay

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),

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

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 artist over the age of thirty something will tell you - the rest know the timi

Briony Anderson

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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 appropriation of the chocolate-box cheeriness of the country dance is an obvious one, but Anderson

Tomoko Takahashi

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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 for impish juxtapositions (a child’s wellie stuffed with white plastic cutl

Moyna Flannigan

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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 selection of the National Galleries’ collection of miniatures dating from the early 16th

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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, the 'London school' and their thinly veiled anti-American parochialism to lose its power. As a consequence, for a very

Frida Kahlo

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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 States', 1932). Yet we looked at Rivera's work for years with no

Michael Stumpf

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Much of the sculptural work produced in Glasgow over the past few years is notable for the way in which it both recalls and travesties the formal languages and aesthetic tropes of modernism. In this modus operandi the fragmentary, the oblique and the contingent are favoured over anything obvious or immediate. With little hope of discerning a complete or transparent meaning, the viewer has to come to terms with material juxtapositions and affective associations, and abandon the search for over arching narratives.

Michael Stumpf’s practice certainly seems to fit within this general terrain; the exhibition Glöckchen Whiplash helps clarify the specificity of his apaproach

There Where You Are Not

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

It seems first strange and then plausible that artists should be inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher concerned with the limits of language and the clarification of communication. Perhaps it is his idea of language games, with its implications of the elusiveness of meaning and opacity of intent that is the attraction. Joseph Kosuth's citations of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the letters of Elgelmann are a good example; Derek Jarman's film, Wittgenstein, scripted by literary theorist Terry Eagleton, another. Now at the John Hansard Gallery, three artists, Alec Finlay, Jeremy Millar, and Guy Moreton complement each other with a group of works that tries to draw closer to th

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 Düsseldorf 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 Düsseld

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.

Sat 25
I don’t know what’s happened. I take the food straight to Johnny’s house. Those guys neve

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 before that there are plenty pages to wade through, full of photo opportunities and purple prose. I look up when I get to the Chairman’s foreword. T

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.

How much time do you spend there?
It always feels simultaneously as if I spend both too much and too little time there. I try and stick to some semblance of a regular working day in the

Simon Starling

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Sol LeWitt once observed that in his wall drawings there are 'two kinds of form - the lines, and the explanation of the lines. Then there is the idea, which is always unstated.' Something similar might be said of Simon Starling's works. Each one has two visible components - an object or group of objects, and a text that explains how the object was made. But there is also a third component that remains invisible. As with LeWitt, this third component has something to do with 'irrational thoughts followed absolutely and logically.' The most obvious difference, of course, is that whereas LeWitt's ideas and materials seem to be abstract, Starling's engage in the stuff of history; in the text for

Venice Biennale

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

On the eve of the big Biennale, a thunderstorm leaves the Venice air clear. Stars out, the Grand Canal is extra special in the dark - history and beauty balance on a liquid, intimate scale. The second you hit this theatre of inner-city canals and blind alleys, you are seduced, as if for the very first time. No wonder Madonna chose to sing from a gondola on that 80s number one.

Sleep in this womb-like place comes easy. Next morning, the world's most celebrated art event begins for the 51st time in its 110-year existence. This 'mother of all biennales' now spills out of the confines of its original, neo-classical campus just a few bridges from San Marco, with 30 'collateral events'

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 people w

Jordan Wolfson: In Search of the Whale

16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

HUO As I remember, our last interview was also recorded in a taxi. A lot of things have happened since then. Before, we talked about the all or nothing experience. Can you explore that further?

JW Translated into the new generations here in America?

HUO Yes. The question is where you stand in relation to this because it clearly is a new generation and it feels quite atomised.

JW It is, but there are collaborations of artists going on. In my own work I am on my own and I live a quite solitary life. I will go out to socialise sometimes in the arts but it doesn’t seem as if at this moment we are working together. I feel like we are all working apart.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

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 wee burn flowed with the waters Heraclitus wrote of.

He was the poets’ gift, of

Mayo Thompson: 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 took legal action over their original name

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.

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

Rosalind Nashashibi

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

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 director interjects, commenting on, and interpreting, the text, accordingly, the actors adding their own interpretations. This is drama at work; we, the film’s audience, are both behind the performance, and behind

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

Ross Sinclair: 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

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

Carol Rhodes, Lucy McKenzie: 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

Edward Summerton: 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

Emerging: Richard Robinson & Robert Bermingham

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 coined &l

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

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, con

Gary Rough

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 of the artist’s hand-rendered repetition of the printed lines on a sheet of rul

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

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

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
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 confreres. Divided into seven sections, it runs from the group&rsq

Fred Sandback

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 Fruitmarket provides an obvious challenge to installing and clearing the sigh

Roni Horn

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 and shoulders portrait photograph onto a metal signpost like the ones that usher you round public buildings, Horn of

Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 Prohibir’ (‘It is Forbidden to Forbid’), commenting sh

Sean Landers

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
‘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. (Nobody has produced better monkey and clown paintings.) As he fam

Linder Sterling

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 inspired by a movement manual by Ann Lee, Manchester-b

Lumin de Lumine

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 with vision and fluidity, well in advance of the event, p

Armory Show

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 artists, but also on the rest of the international travelling gallery

Art 37 Basel

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 doggerfisher, Lucy Skaer’s richly detailed drawing

Hanneline Visnes

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
‘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 everything to be black is like a mysterious secret in the corner of Batt

Ruth Ewan

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 Pavlovian exercise was that they did so using field recordings made during t

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

STUDIOFILMCLUB

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 film-buff visual artist’s Desert Island Discs, STUD

Lost in Space

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 correspondent, a lecturer in anthropology, laments that ‘space heritage still has not r

Black Box/Chambre Noire

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 animations exploring the legacy of apartheid. Black Box/Chambre No

Ron Mueck

20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 lapse just short of believable humanity – and made it his artistic stomping ground. With

Diary: Theatre of Dreams

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
SATURDAY 9
SEPTEMBER

12.30am Lannathai restaurant. Killing time with Jeep Solid (think Ivor Cutler for the dance generation). Our last resort as Jeep is barred from most places in town. The staff smile that beatific Thai smile as Jeep explores the phonetic cadences of Thai and Gaelic. We finally accept the inevitable and leave.

6.30am No sleep. Project manager Susan Christie and I take possession of Church Street, armed with traffic cones and hazard tape. Rust bright and hard against blue sky as Sam Barlow’s six-metre steel sea eagle swings from a hoist and months of delicate negotiations with engineers vanish into irrelevanc

Emerging: In the Fields

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
The quiet whir of 50 electronic ‘thaumatropes’ makes a gentle wind-in-the-trees background noise for the duration of my visit to In the Fields studio in their flat, (open to the public as part of the 2006 Edinburgh Art Festival). A formation of discs – printed with black branch sections on one side and red blossom on the other – spin in unison, creating the illusion of a plum bough in full bloom. They are powered by a solar panel suspended from the window: the supply is intermittent, affected by each passing cloud and burst of sunshine. Inspired by a Japanese haiku that describes plum-blossom as indicating the arrival of spring, the work illustrates In the Fields use

Emerging: Maria Pires

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
‘Man bringing seeds from another country is as much natural propagation as a bee carrying them, or them being blown by the wind.’
Henry Noltie, botanist, Royal Botanic Garden,
Edinburgh

Last summer, while I was traipsing around the west coast, on an artistic quest for a tropical Scotland, a Brazilian art student was busy making one on the east coast. Every day, after eating the advocados, watermelon, dates or papaya she had in her packed lunch, Maria Pires would save the stones, pips and seeds, plant them in compost and watch them grow. She ended up with 3000 plants – enough to fill a greenhouse at the David Welch Winter Gardens in Aberdeen &nd

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.

Emerging: Ettie Spencer

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Here is the shell of a single-storey, roofless house with bare stone walls, windowless windows, doorless doorway and gable ends pointing into the sky on the remote Hebridean island of North Uist. And here it is again, clad in entirely reflective aluminium sheeting by the artist Ettie Spencer.

‘It is the beauty of the changing light on these islands which caught my imagination,’ says Spencer. ‘I wanted to find a way to focus on that, while also underlining issues about belonging and displacement.’ All over North Uist these abandoned shells of houses – abandoned as inhabitants move away from island life, or into more comfortable modern dwellings –

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

Christian Jankowski

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
So much recent British art has been written about admiringly in terms of the uncanny. Many artists, it seems, wish to evoke a sense of unease and, whether time-based or static, two- or three-dimensional, they employ all manner of strategies to make the familiar seem strange, or vice versa. Outright horror, on the other hand, has evinced accusations of ‘sensationalism’, recalling the public outrage against so-called video nasties during the 1980s. The Chapman brothers’ flatof- the-hand approach is in stark contrast to the queasy poke of, say, a film by Jane and Louise Wilson.

Christian Jankowski’s recent photographic, video and sculptural works, ‘The F

Momentum

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 main fjord that divides the town of Moss, some 25 miles from Oslo.

Free food

Absent without leave - Second Young Artists Biennial

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
I hadn’t been to an international biennial before. So when invited to travel to this one, I stopped working on my book about Evelyn Waugh and flew to Bucharest where there is a crude air conditioning box attached to the wall close to almost every window. I guess it’s hot in summer.

On the day before the opening, a roundtable discussion had been arranged off-site by META Cultural Foundation, co-organisers of the biennial. About ten European curators and critics took part. The biennial’s theme of ‘art always seeming to be somewhere else’ left the panellists from ex-Communist Eastern Europe in particular with plenty to say. The discussion was in English,

Blow-Up - Between Form and Formlessness

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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 of the Apollonian and the Dionysian

The Four

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
In The Four, the Lapland group of artists continue their series of idiosyncratic responses to exceptional cultural figures (Whistler in 2003, Cervantes in 2005). This time, they reflect on the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Frances Macdonald Macnair and Herbert Macnair.

Commissioned as part of Glasgow’s Mackintosh Festival, the exhibition is germane in terms of Lapland’s own approach to working collectively and dissolving the artificial boundaries which divide fine art and design. Like The Four themselves, Lapland are a loose group of artists, designers and writers who come together intermittently to create dialogic works within speci

Torsten Lauschmann

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
An understated, stylish mix of sculpture, video, drawing and photography united in eclecticism – the many facets of Torsten Lauschmann’s approach are evident in his latest solo show, where dialogues are established between a collection of aesthetically and conceptually different works.

An ironic and absurd curiosity sets the tone. The ethos of the ubiquitous ‘Self Portrait as a Pataphysical Object’, extends beyond the absurdity of the aptly titled sculpture – a chandelier of interconnected, multi-coloured audio leads and jacks that power one small bulb, its humour highlighting Lauschmann’s adaptability and tongue-in-cheek stance.

The

Killing Time

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
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.

Such a let’s-pretend conceit is littered through

Jacqueline Donachie / Christine Borland: 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

David Shrigley: Top Drawer

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

Paul Carter: 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

Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, Jason Pierce

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
What role does the music play?
Jason Pierce: I always think when you get music in art, it’s a real fucking jump to your system, because the art world is so silent. So being asked to do something like that was a big honour. Someone asked me today, ‘Did you do the music for Silent Sound?’ I don’t think I did the music; I think of the work as one whole thing. And that’s what’s really great about what we did.
Jane P: In an earlier performance we were re-enacting the last ever Ziggy Stardust show. We’re attempting to work with a psychological connection to our audience. So I hope people

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 present 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-conceptual video art in the 1990s, this report gives an outsider’s view of the cultural legacy left

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 maybe influenced 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 replicat

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

Neal Tait: Now is the Discount of our Winter Tents

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Tait’s paintings are resistant to commentary, which is why writing on his work has often showered praise on how elusive and slippery meaning tends to be in his quirky, arrested, washed-out figurative scenes. Elusive and slippery is a good game to play in painting, allowing an artist the independence to explore and experiment free of immediate explanations, but the price is open-endedness and deferral for its own sake.

Tait’s new paintings could be accused of such wilful weirdness, yet – as the Spoonerised Shakespeare of the title hints – there’s a sense of humour to this show that suggests Tait has already got this angle covered, and may have meaningf

Kenny Hunter

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Yorkshire Sculpture Park provides a curious setting for a survey show of an artist who has consistently concerned himself with the human species as urban dwellers, occupied by its own artifice and culture at the expense of the natural world. However, at the Longside Gallery, Kenny Hunter’s largest solo show to date is framed by the panoramic views of the park, as seen through the Gallery’s glass wall. The languishing ‘Youth With a Split Apple’ (2004) so plainly echoes (and subverts) Henry Moore that it is hard to believe it wasn’t made to lie in this window. Views such as this stir the sentimental soul, prompting contemplation of those important things in life.

How to Live Together

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
In 1977, the French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes advocated what he called ‘idiorhythmy’ as the answer to the problem of living together. He developed this concept in a seminar series, whose title has been adopted by the 27th Bienal de São Paulo. Barthes defined idiorhythmy as an state in which every person would be able to find, impose and preserve his or her own rhythm of life.

The Bienal’s curatorial team, led by Brazilian Lisette Lagnado, has adopted this strategy by complementing the main exhibition with a number of events unfolding at different speeds. Thus, this edition of the Bienal, which does away with national representation for the firs

Stuart Gurden

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
This is the latest in a line of engaging multimedia productions curated by Peacock Visual Arts, this time in partnership with Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s residency programme. Gurden follows up his 2005 stint at the Workshop with a new video based on a 1000-mile road trip through Aberdeenshire, on which he collected footage of the 41 stone circles in the region visited by Julian Cope when compiling his 1998 book The Modern Antiquarian. Cope’s extraordinary tome comprises images and commentary on more than 300 stone circle sites around the UK. One critic applauded its comprehensiveness and its ‘fine balance between the academic and the personal and the poetic’.

Karl Haendel

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Karl Haendel’s precise, photographic drawings crowd the gallery spaces impressively at Sorcha Dallas. There is a tendency towards asymmetric arrangements and some of the works are stacked, leaning against the wall as though discarded or awaiting selection to be hung. This is the most inventive part of Haendel’s process, allowing surprising relationships to emerge between his apparently random images. Cartoons from The New Yorker (often depicting psychoanalytic sessions) share wall space with enlarged drawings of disembodied eyes. Allusions to the colour black occur not merely in the drawings’ murkiest tonal depths, but also in their verbal content; the work ‘Untitled

Callum Innes

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
It is difficult to destroy the myth that art history is a slow unfolding of geist, a pageant of ‘the new’ with art riding high at the head of the procession. The mini retrospective of paintings by Callum Innes at the Fruitmarket critiques the dominance of grand linear narrative in art history, presenting canvases that are in a direct dialogue with abstract expressionist and early minimalist works.

When art is characterised or refigured as an eternal return (not necessarily of the traumatic real) the inroads an artist makes continually re-write history, perform it, with the object as evidence of this. The works continue the formalist exploration of the stuff of painting

Chris Burden

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
The installation of ‘14 Magnolia Double Lamps’ (2006) at South London Gallery by Chris Burden presents but a small sample of his growing collection of monolithic castiron 1920s lampposts salvaged, stripped and restored over recent years at his studio in Los Angeles. As part of his ongoing Urban Light project the artist has attempted to reinvest the objects with the iconic status of their industrial era’s promise of wealth and civic pride. A couple of photographs by Burden, printed in the gallery’s SLG magazine illustrate the point, depicting the European style lampposts standing as proudly as the palm trees before their discordant contemporary LA backdrop of

Mark Raidpere

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
It seems at first like voyeurism. Watching a film of a private conversation between mother and son become public display, or an account of a father’s internal, isolated mental breakdown become a documentary of perverse scrutiny. In Tramway’s hot project space, it becomes almost Lynchian in its sense of foreboding. It soon, though, reveals itself to be an essay on communication and a treaty on the nature of close relationships.

For Estonian artist Mark Raidpere, who makes his UK solo debut here, these themes underscore the eponymous ‘Shifting Focus’ and the double screen film ‘Voiceover’.

‘Voiceover’ dominates the programme

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 suspicious of the Christians who exploited, persecuted and insulted them so mercilessly. Another bright spark of the Scottish

The Law of Motivation and Effort

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was mainly criticising government interference and protectionism. He famously argued that free market forces would act as ‘an invisible hand’ putting resources where they were best needed, at the best price, at a time when most governments imposed crippling tolls, duties and regulations to try and force trade in the direction they desired. Though he was writing on a very specific issue, he was also laying the foundations of modern economic thought. The Law of Supply and Demand was formulated later, but was based on his ideas.

Auction houses are the best places to see a demonstration of how this Law works

Roderick Buchanan and Thomas Muir

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In an essay published in 1999, Ross Sinclair identifies loyalty as a key attribute of Roderick Buchanan’s personality. At the heart of the essay is the relation of an incident in their shared past – a night-time brush with authority – when the bond of loyalty between the pair of artists, who were then in their mid-twenties, was tested. The essay ends with a photograph of Buchanan wearing a white t-shirt bearing the words ‘Be true to your school’.

The school that Buchanan attended before Glasgow School of Art was Thomas Muir High School. Muir was a Glasgow advocate whose promotion of liberal views in respect of parliamentary reform landed him in troubl

Tatham and O'Sullivan: House of Enlightenment

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Newhailes House, near Musselburgh, was home from 1709 to the influential Dalrymple dynasty, and it was the third baronet, Lord Hailes (1726-1792), who built up the house’s superb library. There are no books there now however – they’ve been taken a few miles down the road to the National Library in Edinburgh. The house has belonged to the National Trust since 1997, and after showing me the empty shelving in the library, the fancy fireplace, and more, the Trust’s guide has turned to leave the room. Is she not going to say a word or two about the art installed by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan?

‘I’ve been told that the contemporary art can

Free Association

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
The Critic is ‘Sweet and Mild’, according to Pavel Buchler’s facsimile cigarette packet, emblazoned on the cover of the first issue of Free Association. The critics assembled within offer a commentary on Glasgow art that is anything but: from the 1980s, when it was a rallying point for radical and subversive art practice, through the vengeful return of ‘the centre’ in the 1990s up to its market-friendly reinvention in the 2000s.

The tone is less slogan than sluagh gairm – the Gaelic phrase for battle-cry – and will no doubt elicit varying responses. Some may dismiss it as merely nostalgic, others as reiterative of ongoing battles,

Arcade: Artists and Place-making

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
It is a dawning of a new age, a new era, a New Gorbals. The final phase of building in the latest Gorbals overhaul is done and the accompanying art project is complete. In the ‘one per cent for art’ scheme, this fraction of developers’ money was invested in a wide reaching art scheme led by The Artworks Programme, and involved over 20 artists. The New Gorbals now has an orchard, a curving wall intersecting public and private space, a huge hanging lady, knitted cacti, metal birds, a girl with a rucksack, and many more interventions – permanent, evolving and temporary.

Arcade is an attempt to explore these projects by inviting writers, academics and

Bread / Take Me With You

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
The artist book has long been a means for artists outside the system to distribute their ideas to a wider audience. The much-extolled Glasgow ‘grass-roots’ art scene has a vibrant history of contributions to this format, from low-fi fanzines such as Mainstream and British Mythic, to the various publications produced by Transmission Gallery, Stop Stop and Switchspace. Now, as the art market increasingly finds a home in Glasgow – in the form of challenging new commercial galleries – the artist publication has taken on a slicker form, with higher production values. These two recent offerings from Sorcha Dallas represent contrasting approaches to this ge

Timeline

14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Throughout history, the colour black has most often been associated with negative events and emotions, bad luck and the unknown. Mourners wear black at funerals, tragic days are labelled black days, black moods are bad, black magic is evil. However, in other situations or times the colour black is considered positive. Black clothes make you look slim, black cats are unlucky, ‘the new black’ introduces seasonal trends in fashion, being ‘in the black’ means you are free from debt. Black, then, is an appropriate colour for the pages of this substantial book.

On the front cover of Timeline is an image of a hand marked with a black spot. ‘Hand wit

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

Emerging: Catherine Street

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When I spoke to Catherine Street she was busy cutting holes in a vast piece of cloth, which was to form part of a sculptural screen to divide the gallery at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. The cut cloth is one of many recurring motifs and signifiers in her work that are at once visually seductive and sophisticated, yet quietly subversive, repellent or destructive.

The exhibition at the Dick Institute includes drawing, film, installation performance and text pieces, sourced from websites and weblogs, news reports, scientific books, sci-fi literature and writings on ‘East Ayrshire’s rich history of hauntings and grisly happenings’. A network of references

Residency: Fringe Fraternity

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Duncan Marquiss’ work has been receiving growing exposure since he graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, in Dundee. In 2002, his work in the group show They Had Four Years, at artist-run space Generator Projects, was seen by curator Frances McKee, who promptly booked it for the Scottish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2003. The artist explains: ‘It just takes one thing, and then other things develop from there.’ That is the message the 28-year-old hoped to get across to Sicilian artists during his recent residency in the town of Scicli as part of the ISIDEM (Islands and Identity in Movement) project. Marquiss was astonished to learn that Italian art

Commision: Chris Evans

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When Jan Six sat for Rembrandt in 1654 as he painted his now renowned portrait, he is unlikely to have forseen that his legacy, in part, would be embodied inside a Portakabin on a central reservation in Sloterdijk, an industrial district of Amsterdam. Six was born in 1618, the son of a wealthy textile merchant and was a culturally significant figure in his later years: a patron of the arts at a time when the Netherlands’ rich culture was recognised across Western Europe, his circle of friends included poet Joost van den Vondel and painter Rembrandt van Rijn.

In 2006, when Berlin-based artist Chris Evans asked Baron Jan Six, a descendant of the 17th century Jan Six, to sugges

Argos, Wiels and a new bienniale for 2007

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Happenings on the contemporary art scene in Brussels over the past six months could be seen as a prelude to the flurry of events scheduled for the coming year. Brussels’ growing reputation as a destination for contemporary artists, curators and collectors belies the fact that the city has been home to a thriving international art community for several decades. A case in point was the recent exhibition Being, in Brussels at the contemporary art and media centre, Argos, which featured work by 13 international artists based in Brussels. The list included Beat Streuli, Orla Barry, Pierre Bismuth, Dora García, Jota Castro and Peter Downsbrough – recent arrivals such as

Douglas Gordon

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
superhumanatural could never be seen simply as a large scale retrospective of Douglas Gordon’s work. If a hint was needed, the immense tree stump with exposed roots certainly reminded visitors that this artist’s work was being shown on home ground. Indeed, much of this large body of work was being seen in Scotland for the first time. Gordon, though, didn’t dwell on the ironies of that fact but chose, instead, to construct a series of installations that quietly emphasised the Scottish dimensions of his practice. The complete exhibition stretched from the Royal Scottish Academy Building to Inverleith House, The Wash House and (in theory at least) Caledonian Hall. In

Peter Horobin

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In 1965, Fluxus artists Robert Filliou and George Brecht asked artists to ‘refrain from their tiresome spirit of competition’, with Filliou later stating in 1973 that ‘the concept of the avant-garde is obsolete… I suggest that considering each artist as part of an Eternal Network is a much more useful concept’. This Network includes the multitude of mail art activities that spurred a fundamental, albeit largely forgotten, re-evaluation of artistic production. This aesthetic basis for interconnection, collaboration and communication is integral to the work of Pete Horobin and the project DATA: Daily Action Time Archive, which had its first partial public viewing

Ettie Spencer

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It took nearly 12 hours to drive to the western isle of North Uist to visit an installation on a hillside. And as the boat pulled out of the harbour the next day, after a swift viewing and a dram, it felt like time had expanded, that the art was somehow built into the fabric of the journey itself. Full speed away from the windswept settlement, a skyscape of thoughts churn in the black waves – diaspora, loss, loneliness, beginnings and ends: along with contrasts in scale; of the artwork, a whole house worth of it standing alone; of the island itself – a bleak place populated by vast numbers of tiny lochs; and, rather grandly, of the planet’s land mass – still big

Graham Fagen

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
From the moment I read the review in Scotland on Sunday I’ve been looking forward to stepping into doggerfisher and experiencing the Graham Fagen show, Closer, for myself. Robert Burns is the subject. Actually, the subject matter is three boats. Simple images, silkscreen prints, appearing as white lines – of ship and wave – on top of a black ocean-cum-sky background. The Nancy: clear to sail from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar, Jamaica, on 10 August, 1786. The Bell: clear to sail for Kingston, Jamaica ‘by the end of September’. And The Roselle, which ‘will positively sail on the 15th of December’ from Leith, bound for both Jamaican ports. Burns

Brice Marden

16 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
One of the most interesting parts of this show is the part that isn’t there: what happened to Brice Marden’s paintings between 1984 – when he left off making the paintings built of juxtaposed monochrome panels, a body of work that had occupied him since the late 1960s, after having earlier concentrated on single gray panels – and 1986, when he started making the paintings based on linear webs of colour with which he is still involved? In fact, the exhibition makes the hiatus look even bigger, since it skips from 1981-82 ‘Elements I’ to 1987-87 ‘Diptych, Untitled #3’. A great sense of liberated energies emerged from this break or (as Brenda Rich

Lisa Yuskavage

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
A profound immersion in the great tradition of European painting – an immersion so whole-hearted that some contemporary critics would dismiss it as simply conservatism – and an equally strong affinity for the in-your-face vulgarity of Jeff Koons or Mike Kelley (which other critics might equally condemn as mere provocation) should add up to an unsustainable contradiction. The fact that Lisa Yuskavage does, for the most part, bear up under the tensions inherent in her style, and has been doing so for some 15 years now, may account for the fact that her work gives me such an otherwise inexplicable sense of jubilation. Because the work contains this tension, it is almost impossible n

John Cage

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Madrid’s La Casa Encendida is a relatively new multidisciplinary space with an exhibitions programme featuring emerging visual artists in the four floors of galleries, and favouring contemporary music in the courtyard-come-theatre. In November it mounted an exhibition of John Cage’s installation, ‘Essay’, 1987, punctuated in mid-December with a week of performances, paying homage to the infamous inventor of genius, and giving substance to the historian’s mantra; that the future is revealed through the past.

‘Essay’ takes the form of six chairs, which are positioned in new locations and new directions each day, along with an overhead grid c

Christine Borland

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
High key, slightly hard and sharp, the ambient lighting signals objectivity, truth and clarity. The exhibition is still being installed and, from various spots within the gallery and at various times throughout this process, Christine Borland speaks directly to camera, offering information of one sort or another about the selection of ten works produced since 1990 that will feature in the show. It is a familiar enough item in major exhibitions these days: the short explanatory film. Few doubt the work of art’s reliance upon factors existing beyond the silence of its strict physical presence, and any ‘supplementary’ information is guaranteed to amplify its resonance. Equally

Maurice Doherty, Mick Peter, Owen Piper, David Sherry

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
You’d have to be naïve or stubborn to attempt to analyse the art during an opening. Chatty crowds and free beer tend to hamper any close reading of that work hidden behind a cluster of close-knit conversations – and if any meaning is found in that, it will likely fade come sobriety the next morning.

However, the combination of these four Glasgow-based artists in the exhibition 1,2,3,4 begs for an exception to the rule. The diversity of works here, both individually and collectively, present deliberately incomplete thoughts, like one half of that couple anxiously awaiting the other to complete their sentences. Under this heavy openness, one becomes despera

St Mungo and Me

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
LightBox, camera, action! ‘I think I’m going to start off the evening… playing songs. And then I’m going to build [it] up,’ explains Nick McCarthy, lead guitarist of Franz Ferdinand and curator of LightBox Gallery’s new show, St Mungo and Me, of the grandiose events in store for attendees on opening night. In many ways, the opening would prove to be the exhibition itself, an evening of art and music, ‘a great combination’, in McCarthy’s words, that would stand alone as the soul of the show. It was his attempt to recreate a piece of the Glasgow Art scene in Los Angeles’s popular art district of La Cienega.

For his 2006&n

Charles Avery, Charles Avery/ Keith Wilson

23 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Why partake in our own lives when there is so much manufactured reality on view? From the virtual world, Second Life (where you can ‘live’ through an ‘avatar’), to possessing online gaming characters (eg Star Wars) and the variety of reality TV, other lives seem more interesting. Disney has taken this one step further by creating a whole new town: Celebration, Florida.

With this voyeuristic zeitgeist, narrative-based work has become more prominent in the art world. More than ever, artists seem to be inventing new personas and creating new realities. For some it even provides a better focus in which to view their work, that is, it becomes a structure

Janice McNab

24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Janice McNab seems to regard themes as a pre-modernist would have considered still-life painting – an opportunity to flex the paint, rehearse texture and understand the effects of light on forms. Over the years McNab has investigated such themes as aeroplane seats, dermatological reactions to toxic chemicals, and its effects on sufferers, and now volcanoes. By circling each area of interest through a number of paintings, McNab drums up sub-themes, analogies and allegorical significance like a bird raising worms – or a still-life painter exploring objects.

The insistent nature of working in series is instrumental in complicating a painted image beyond its immediat

Catherine Sullivan

24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Los Angeles-based video artist Catherine Sullivan’s work could easily be described in terms of radicalising theatre companies like Sheffield’s Forced Entertainment, Chicago’s Goat Island or New York’s the Wooster Group rendering Powell and Pressburger’s seminal 1946 movie A Matter of Life and Death through their mechanics of reduction, recombination, reference, distortion and fuck off art, audience and theatre tactics and procedures. Like these groups she has no restraint in disorganising the characters portrayed and what they represent, has no sense of a precious approach to the original material and has no reason not to interrupt the proceedings with

Jonathan Monk

24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Jonathan Monk’s mini- retrospective in Berlin, Yesterday today tomorrow etc, travelled from St. Gallen in Switzerland, a town named after the Celtic monk Gallus. Somehow this fact and that word – gallus – seems appropriate to Monk’s habits. According to Michael Munro’s book The Complete Patter, gallus is defined as ‘a general term of approval in Glasgow and… when applied to people it’s more about attitude and includes elements of toughness, cheek, self-assurance and boldness’. Monk’s chutzpah is perhaps best illustrated by the early work ‘My name written in my piss’, 1994 – enough to give anyone a riddy.<

Matthew Barney / Joseph Beuys

24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Why Barney and Beuys? An inspired justaposition of work by two well known artists or simply a fashionable experiment? All in the present must be transformed brings together work by these two artists in the slightly cramped Guggenheim space at the heart of Berlin Mitte. Curator Nancy Spector has realised the controversial show, showing together for the first time work by German old school artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) and New York art star Matthew Barney, known for his opulent ‘Cremaster Cycle’. Although from different generations, both refer to lost cultures and mythologies as well as using similar materials as metaphors in their narrative work.


Karla Black

24 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Predisposed to destruction, the work of Karla Black sets up perilous encounters whereby viewer subject and art object are invariably altered by the meeting. On opening the gallery door to her latest show of work, a great gust of cold Berlin wind sweeps in to scatter what suddenly seems to be the presciently titled ‘Mistakes Made Away From Home’, a huge, powder, floor installation and the centrepiece at Sandra Buergel’s new space in Hedemann Strasse.

Such obliteration is not uncommon to Black’s works – floods, drafts but mostly people tend to be responsible for the damage, including the artist herself – and the installations’ built-in tran

A Well-Cultivated Garden

13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It feels strange having to come to one city in order to visit another. But as Glasgow’s Lighthouse is showing ‘Northern City: Between Light and Dark,’ about Edinburgh, that’s indeed what I’m doing. However, asI walk out of Queen Street Station and see the statue of Walter Scott way up there on top of its column in the middle of George Square,this second northern city feels like a home-from-home. Hame’s hame, be it ever sae hamely. And if I put it that way, it’s because all the other features for the Enlightenment issue of Map have been collected together, and today I want to bear some of these in mind just as much as the work I&rsqu

Aernout Mik: Deadlock

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
I don’t know too much about Aernout Mik – just that he’s Dutch, is in his mid-40s, and has been making video installations for about a decade – and maybe I like it that way. Because for all its stylistic particularity, there’s a sense of anonymity about his work that makes it more powerful than it would otherwise be. It is as if it had been produced by the times – by history – rather than according to the artistic volition of a single individual. I’m reminded, in a way, of Alighiero Boetti’s disavowal of any true authorship of his embroidered map of the world with each country’s terrain filled in by its flag instead of a solid colou

Martin Boyce: Sculpture Scene

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Glasgow 1918 – 1980: What Happened? A recent seminar at the University of Glasgow hoped to answer this question.1 Art historians and critics attempted to sketch out a temporary but workable map to describe this terra incognita. The fact that there appears to be an absence at the core of modern Scottish art, 40 or so years when most of the art world’s attention was diverted elsewhere (mainland Europe then America), was explained through the usual sociological, political and economic methods, with formalist concerns almost completely omitted, launched head-long into the abyss. So, what did happen to Scottish Modernism and how have contemporary artists registered this lacking? The w

The Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It may seem absurd to host an international art exhibition in the dead of Russian winter - or just an ingenious strategy to give visitors an authentic experience. While skyscrapers are sprouting up around the city like trophies to the gushing oil economy, the second Moscow Biennale was held mostly on construction sites, some incredibly difficult to reach — sloshing through snow, slipping on ice, and dodging ice chunks being cleared from roofs — adding a heroic element to the quest. You take your life in your hands just crossing the wide boulevards, with pedestrian underpasses far enough apart to encourage scofflaws to dart into traffic.

One of the two main venue

Robert Orchardson & Sarah Tripp

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This intimate joint show has produced an installation dealing in narratives and their contexts, paradigms and epiphanies. It’s a show that takes on big themes but allows the needle of kitsch to hover in case the bubble should grow too weighty.

The first room is simply lit and contains four pieces alluding to cosmic themes. The narrative arc begins far out in space with an group of works that recalls the set design for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris as much as it does the theosophically influenced and universal forms of Kandinsky’s ‘On White II’. Titles such as ‘Nova’, ‘Zenith’ and &lsqu

Amsterdam

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In Amsterdam recently, three different galleries have presented Scottish artists. ‘Pure coincidence’, according to gallerist Diana Stigter, who is showing the work of Glasgow-based artist Sue Tompkins. She only found out about the exhibitions of work by Morag Keil at the Grimm gallery further down the street and Lucy Stein at the Martin van Zomeren gallery on nearby Prinsengracht, when organising the collective opening activities. Being one of the few Amsterdam galleries represented at main international art fairs such as Art Basel, Armory Show in New York and London’s Frieze, Diana Stigter gallery is not solely dependent on the Dutch art market. This may explain why

Breaking Step

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
‘I wish I were in their shoes,’ says Uros Djuric, echoing Adam Chodzko’s ‘M-Path (Belgrade Version)’, 2007. In the spirit of the Balkan ‘culture of complaint’, Djuric goes on to contemplate the shortage of support infrastructure for artists in Serbia. We talk while being bombarded by balls of all sizes from Wood and Harrison’s ‘The Only Other Point’, 2005 and ‘Notebook’, 2004. The balls appear as striking signifiers of lottery money and lucky draws for the arts in Britain.

Just-so stories about life cycles, cause and effect, improbability and accuracy, reminiscent of

Gilbert and George

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I love The World of Gilbert and George. I saw this 1981 film for the first time one afternoon in a small alternative space in Vienna, 17 years after they had made it. I had just moved to London and fallen in love with an Englishman I met at Spitalfields Market. I felt like I could feel his spirit through this film — his ‘Englishness’. The muted clouds, the buildings and streets we moved around in, the city I was beginning to know – The World of Gilbert and George reflected that to me.

Now, watching the film again, it’s still great. The editing is wonderful — the slow pacing, the moments of silence. It feels so simple, as if anyone could make suc

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
‘The great artist of tomorrow’ said Marcel Duchamp, ‘will go underground’. How many have ever taken him at his word? Today, there are a great many artists whose work reflects an unrequited longing for the underground, but there are few (unless they are very underground indeed) who dare make their lives and work there – to ‘swing in the shadows’, as Wallace Berman put it. This exhibition brings to light an underground that did exist, not too long ago, barely noticeable to the culture at large, but of considerable artistic significance. Since his death on his 50th birthday in a 1976 automobile accident, there have been occasional exhibitions devoted to

Kommando Friedrich H?lderlin

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
‘Nor is it good to be all too wise…’

The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was an ardent admirer of Ancient Greece. He wanted to regenerate Germany and turn Berlin into an Athens on the Spree anticipating Joyce’s Buck Mulligan and his desire to Hellenise Dublin. Hölderlin’s education was largely theological. As a somewhat intransigent individual with, as Michael Hamburger (his respected English translator) quoting Milton puts it, ‘a conscience that would retch’, he became a writer rather than a minister. Hölderlin’s work and ideas are the inspiration behind this large group show of contemporary German art in

Marc Bijl, Gerard Byrne, Valerie Jouve

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
‘It’s the thing that most often provokes relations.’ This is what one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century had to say about the role of celebrity in his sex life, to the French journalist and feminist Catherine Chaîne. The comment was made during a 1977 interview for the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur, which focused on the famous thinker’s relationships with women. In Gerard Byrne’s video ‘Homme à femmes (Michel Debrane)’, 2004, the conversation is replayed by actors in the setting of a typical Parisian apartment. There’s a familiarity to the way the topic of women is handled that hints at the identity of the mai

Hayley Tompkins and Sue Tompkins

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
For the past two years sisters Hayley and Sue Tompkins have been working as part of Spike Island’s design team for its £2.25m capital refurbishment project. That they should be invited to participate in the inaugural exhibition is apt considering their close involvement with the development of the new gallery spaces and the nature of their individual practices wherein work is often hung in response to the architectural idiosyncrasies of a space.

Continuing the trajectory of her recent work, Tompkins is exhibiting typewritten texts on sheets of newsprint which are hung from the gallery walls in various configurations. The papers flap in the breeze and curl at the edges.

George Condo

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
On their long running spoof quiz show Shooting Stars, Reeves and Mortimer used a simple trick for soiling celebrity perfection. After applying a swift, linear swipe of a scalpel to the photograph of a ubiquitous celebrity, they would rejoin the split image, overlapping the separate halves so that beauty’s all-important symmetrical balance was grotesquely spiked. Such Surrealist, William Burroughs-inspired ‘cut up’ surgery was devilishly effective – anodyne pop princesses were revealed as repugnant, snarling, barking fascists, their carefully sculpted noses running aground on their silicon-filled plump lips. Of course, the whole thing was put over with flip, cartoon li

Mick Peter

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It’s a very dark, very wet night as I schlepp, sans brolly, over to Hackney to see Mick Peter’s first solo show in London. The gallery website promised that Yussupov Park would embody Peter’s interest in ‘emblems of stupidity’ and the human impulse to ‘congregate amongst dirt, bad smells and every kind of abomination’. As I pick my way down a dripping alley of dark warehouses I cynically wonder if the setting could be more perfect.

Inside the small, industrial room are several markedly different sculptures including ‘Two Clerks’, 2006 – two pairs of giant cement-coated playing cards bound with rubber-cast belts alluding t

Ross Sinclair versus Sir Edwin Landseer

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Writing in the publication, Real Life and How to Live it, edited by Nicola White, which complemented Ross Sinclair’s renowned show Real Life Rocky Mountain at the CCA in 1996, Donnie O’Rourke neatly described the cultural confidence which motivated a good deal of Scottish art in the 80s and 90s: ‘For many people Scotland was becoming a viable idea. A place sufficiently well imagined to be real.’ Sinclair continues to be inspired by this sentiment. He has long scrutinised the viability of various Scottishnesses, uncomplacently challenging and augmenting our versions of reality with bouts of extrovert creative imagining.

The latest is a joint project with art

Nick Evans

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
The three sculptures on show at Mary Mary demonstrate that the Glasgow-based artist Nick Evans has a solid aesthetic understanding and intellectual comprehension of how to make unapologetic sculpture that drops a ‘rational slab’ (the title of the show) on the head of naïve theories about installation, site-specific and environmental art practices. ‘It’s like having a Bentley in the garage and not driving it otherwise,’ as Evans has said about the dead-head fashion for supposedly neo-formalist work that is merely an arch posture with no backbone.

There is something sweetly reactionary about this work; clear art historical references are pulled to

Gustav Metzger: Revolutionary Constructions

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
HUO: We were about to talk about Lund and you were telling me about your new project.

GM: Yes. I think we might go back to the exhibition which was in the autumn of 2005 at the Cubitt Gallery. The work was entitled ‘Eichmann and the Angel’. On literally the last day of the exhibition, Adam Szymczyk, the director of Basel Kunsthalle, came by and more or less immediately decided to take it over.

HUO: Can you tell me about the show? It had to do with a moveable structure, didn’t it?

GM: Yes. Based on a kind of reconstruction of the structure in which Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem in 1961. It wasn&rsqu

Lucy Skaer: Drawing Close

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve recently had work in a number of group exhibitions, the most recent being with Anita di Bianco at Elisabeth Kaufmann Galerie in Zurich. What did you present there?
It was a whole installation called Leonora, and the titles for the individual works were taken from Tarot cards. Recently I’ve taken to using titles that have a series of sub-systems, where there is a sense of logic between the titles, but the system is a logic between the words rather than the art works.

Didn’t you include a large image of a whale as part of that installation?

It was a big drawing called ‘Death’. I wanted to

Kate Davis: Could we? I am asking

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Facing facts: it is almost routine these days to claim that the history of art has been dominated by male artists, that the documenting of this history has largely been the preserve of male writers, and that the public display of this same work has been mainly in the hands of male gallery directors and curators. There may latterly have been a rise in the number of xhibited female artists, of female historians, critics and editors, and of female directors, gallerists and curators, but they operate nonetheless within institutional contexts that have been seriously inflected by their male-dominated histories.

As far as I can tell, none of these preceding statements appears contentiou

Interview: Peter Saville

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Manchester International Festival is styled by you. Branding a city sounds very international jet-set-ish
I’m creative consultant to the perception and evolution of the city. The issue was the brand of Manchester in terms of its potential being optimised, and whether it’s working towards the ambitions of the city. I go about things in the way that I do, which is to dream of a possible future. MIF was on the agenda when I started, but we didn’t have a clear strategy of what it should be. One piece of cultural credibility that Manchester has, from the Halle to Happy Mondays, is music. The original objective was to make it original and modern, an

Report: What is 'Public' in Public Art?

11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Presented in one of the many green spaces alongside the Promenade, a pedestrian avenue that encircles Münster’s city centre, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s outdoor installation, ‘Münster Novel’, assembles miniature reproductions of about 40 works created by different artists since the first edition of the decadal exhibition in 1977. A small-scale replica of Richard Serra’s work ‘Trunk – Johann Conrad Schlaun Recomposed’, 1987, consisting of two 1.5 metre high rusted steel plates planted in the ground, stands next to a 1:4 maquette of Dan Graham’s pavilion ‘Oktogon für Münster’, 1987, a collection of concrete

Emerging: Laura Aldridge

11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Laura Aldridge’s recent work reveals an evolving sensibility that employs text, theatricality, and various decorative arts to question the nature of the works she exhibits. There is a sensitivity to display techniques in her work that goes back to her MFA degree show where she presented a series of photographic portraits of individuals modelling ‘radical facial jewellery’, reminiscent of anthropological imagery, alongside a large pop art totem, ‘personal triumph’. Reproductions of early museum interiors were important to that body of work and remain so in more recent pieces. The otherness that a museum or a gallery bestows on an object, amplifying its characteri

Residency: Words and Sculpture

11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Claudia Zeiske, director of Deveron Arts, seems relieved to see me. She wonders if I would say a few words about the publication being launched as part of the George MacDonald of Huntly Festival that is kicking off at the Brander Library, Huntly, Aberdeenshire. As I say something about the book, Kenny Hunter will be getting the sculpture he’s been commissioned to make out of its packing case. Is it a good idea to have a writer or artist talk self-consciously about his work? It seems to be an assumption that’s made these days that expertise in one area of activity should be matched with at least competence in ostensibly related areas.

So I say something to the people w

Commission: Donald Urquhart

11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When I was selling beer a couple of years back I concocted an imaginary ad for an imaginary product – an unrealised dream of a thing called CRYALLNITE mascara. For this image I needed to draw a lustrously lashed eye, and one that didn’t look as though it had been crying all night. I drew the exuberant eye of Nina Simone. You may not know the eyes of Nina Simone, for her famed voice, tantrums, song writing, piano playing and politics are what she is known for. She was never really considered a beauty. Often she was simply never considered. ‘Everybody took a chunk of me’, she said. Ripped-off, bootlegged, cheated, abused – Simone’s notorious fury and b

Interview: Simon Fisher Turner

11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
How did you get to Gracelands?

I’ve worked with [artist] Alexandre Perigot for a few years. He comes up with these crazy ideas I half understand, then I go and do something with them. We once did a project called Fanclubbing in a deserted arts centre in Marseille, and by the end we had a whole album. This is the same. It is noise. No noise. Some noise. It’s kind of like plunderphonics, using stuff from all over the world, so it tends to work at the drop of a map.

Film soundtracks, art projects and dance scores – accident or design

My life has generally been an accident. I’ve never had a grand plan and

You Do Voodoo

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Don’t let the title of this show by 13 artists working in a variety of media confuse you. Although advertised as work which ‘involves aspects of magic, ritual and supernature’ there is very little, if any, direct reference to the kind of religious customs which originated in Africa and became widespread in the African American population following the introduction of slavery. The label is really a convenient tag under which to group a number of artists whose practices are widely disparate and whose messages and thought processes are often at variance.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no interlinking themes and that the work in question clashes d

John Latham: Incidental Person

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Throughout his life, John Latham, 1921–2006, England’s most controversial conceptual artist, periodically visited Scotland. Briefly, during the summer of 1964, he and Alexander Trocchi stayed with Edinburgh bookshop owner and co-founder of the Traverse theatre, Jim Haynes. He spoke at Edinburgh College of Art’s Participation Art, 1972, accompanied by fellow artist Barbara Steveni, his wife and enthusiastic collaborator. But it was the 1975 – 6 Artist Placement Group (APG) which enabled him to work on a still enduring project, taking up the role of ‘Incidental Person’ alongside civil servants at the Scottish Office’s Development Agency.

Monika Sosnowska

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Earlier this year, on the wrecked forecourt of the now defunct Pre-Fabricated House Factory in Warsaw, a new building sprung up. It was a classic modular construction, typical of the utopian 60s or 70s: tall and erect, if a little shorter than the average tower block. Within weeks, just when it looked like its steel frame might be clad in the concrete that cloaks many Polish cities like a dusty grey mantle, it had disappeared again.

In a city that has long cannibalised its old material self to survive; whose historic centre is a post-war fake; where grim housing projects are perhaps its true architectural heritage; and where communist era buildings are now routinely stripped back

Victor Man: Plural Solitude

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It may sound paradoxical, but I am convinced that without the Internet we would have none of the collective hyperproduction of nostalgia that has been evident for some time. By saying this, I do not mean to spout a cliché about the psychology of the Internet, ie the lack of synchronism between the immediacy of information and interior time, the instantaneous contraction of communication and the physiology of human processing. I believe that this is now a given that we can use as a new starting point, a new configuration of the individual reactivity to which art is offering a new opportunity to break the rules. The point is, however, not to proffer arguments for the umpteenth and lates

40 Years Videoart.de

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Most of us are perfectly aware that the revolution has not been televised, and were it to occur it would be videotaped – then uploaded onto Youtube – then critiqued by the net multitude in (LOL). It was only a few decades ago that many radicals felt that popping a video cassette into a player was itself a revolutionary act.

The black oblong block has been all but replaced by the wafer-thin DVD, and we don’t pop, but slide them into whatever digital receptacle we’re using. As the ‘digital heritage’ subtitle to 40 Years Videoart.de – PART 1 indicates, video is a term rapidly outpacing all previous definitions. Accordingly, this compend

Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie ( 1967-1978)

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Jean Baudrillard died on 6 March this year. The obituary columns worldwide joked that his death did not take place. This was a knowing nod to Baudrillard’s most infamous proclamation in 1991 that the first Gulf War, of all things, did not take place. The joke was told unkindly by some to imply that Baudrillard was a curious but ridiculous postmodernist who was unacceptably cavalier with the material realities of life. Baudrillard has ceased to exist, so the material world is not a simulation.

The trick in reading Baudrillard, however, is to take him not literally but seriously. His work is riddled with insight delivered to your delight or despair by exaggeration, provocation

Kara Walker: My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In American TV show Weeds, a preacher chastises his friend for using the word ‘ain’t’. ‘Don’t say that. “Ain’t” is a slave word,’ to which the woman dryly responds: ‘Well, I ain’ts no slave, so’s I can says what I wants.’ With similar wit, but undoubtedly more edge, American artist Kara Walker has cut through the history of slavery to produce an imaginative revisionism that refuses to shirk at bad language. Instead, she does unheard of things with both words and form, and this meticulously arranged guide to her apocalyptic world is full of such horrors. Her extensive series, ‘Negress Notes’, 1995, for i

documenta 12 magazine No. 1: Modernity?

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Is Modernity Our Antiquity? is the subtitle of one of the three leitmotifs that precede documenta 12, the five yearly event opening in June this year. Director Roger M Buergel primes the exhibition audience in this, the first of three magazines to be released in the run-up to the much-heralded show, although, at over 200 pages, this magazine looks and feels like a book. It consists of a collection of essays from over 70 worldwide publications, digital and in print, brought together to give a multicultural perspective on modernity, Life and Education establishing a rhetorical debate, pitched to stimulate discussion before and during the exhibition.

It is difficult to avoid

Paul Rooney

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Paul Rooney is an obsessive auto-didact of a certain age, weaned on back-street pop culture he’s upended, rummaged through, then rolled around in on the doorstep of his defiantly red-brick northern English local. Or that’s how it appears from this magnificently surreal 12” single, released on delicious raspberry-ripple, joke-shop blood n’ lipstick coloured vinyl through Berlin’s SueMi Records. Anyone who witnessed Pass The Time Of Day, which this Liverpool born, Edinburgh College Of Art trained chancer curated at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery in 2004 will get the idea. Then, Rooney and a crew including Arab Strap and Mark Leckey explored music as a

Throbbing Gristle

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When the original ‘Wreckers Of Civilisation’ declared that ‘The Mission Is Terminated’ in 1981, a legend was already in motion. It’s one that Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson had been living up to since Throbbing Gristle’s notorious 1976 debut at COUM Transmissions’ ICA exhibition led Tory roustabout Nicholas Fairburn to take the moral high-ground. TG’s provocative mix of cheap n’ nasty analogue-electro-sludge and performance art terrorism continued to turn nihilism into an art-form which Punk could only cock a rusty safety-pin at.

This silver jubilee reunion

Bauhaus: Reviewed 1919 - 1933

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It may go against the interdisciplinary yet essentially purest aesthetic of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus to splice theory, art history and music to create an entertaining taster of Modernism, but this is what Bauhaus: Reviewed 1919 – 1933 attempts to do. This collection of short speeches by Albers, Mies and Gropius on the history of the Bauhaus, describe the still attractive utopian ideals and the genius of the charismatic idealists who ran the school. These snippets of conversations and lectures, sometimes spoken of the cuff with cars passing in the background of the recording, sometimes read from rustling sheets of paper, are interspersed with works by Hauer, Wolpe, Antheil and Scho

Wyndham Lewis

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
From the art-rock of Ludus, Josef K and Hermine, this label of love provides a secondhand daylight for sonic treasures, maintaining the DIY spirit of their original record labels (New Hormones, Postcard, Salome). Alongside 70s and 80s curios, LTM puts out intriguing audio-books on Futurism, De Stijl and Surrealism, and the latest is by the irascible master blaster of the first half of the 20th century; Vorticist painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis. He was considered xenophobic for extolling a particular kind of Englishness that runs through to Factory, another label LTM licenses acts from. The readings of ‘A Crisis of Thought’ (1947) and ‘The Essential Purposes of Art&rs

Life Without Buildings

30 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Life Without Buildings were always coy about their artworld activities.Yet, whether by accident or design, the three singles and solitary album of stop-start post-punk left behind by vocalist Sue Tompkins, guitarist Robert Johnston, bassist Chris Evans and drummer Will Bradley in their short lifespan before splitting in 2002, now sounds like a perfect artistic statement.

A Rough Trade Shops post-punk compilation arrived on the back of the Franz Ferdinand/Bloc Party/Rapture jangular art-rock explosion called LWB, two years too early. As it stands, this 12 song live retrospective recorded in Australia remains as uncorrupted by trend-spotters as their studio debut, Any Other City.

Report: Arms, Art & Automobiles

19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT
When I phoned the press office at ExCel to ask whether ‘freelance’ journalists were allowed entry to the arms fair – or ‘Defence Systems & Equipment International 07’, as it’s officially called – I was told by a reassuringly callow gentleman simply to turn up with ID and a few articles I’d written.

This was too good to be true, but being an optimist I went along anyway. The Beckton branch of the Docklands Light Railway was heavily policed; I alighted at Prince Regent, weaving between officers and stewards towards the accreditation tent with an apprehension probably induced by Mark Thomas’s claim in the Guardian that he&rsq

Residency: Jane Topping

19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Steven Cairns: You’ve been in Amsterdam since February. Looking back, how did you prepare yourself for the move?

Jane Topping: This residency is such a unique opportunity, it can be tailored by the artist according to their individual requirements. So before I applied, I sat down and identified what it was that I would like to gain from moving to Amsterdam. I thought of the things I’d like to examine and concentrate on within my own practice; things I would like to change about how I work and things I was currently happy with and would like to develop. In the end, even before I arrived, I had a clear idea of what I wanted from this residency and what

52nd Venice Biennale

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In the carefully landscaped wilderness of the Giardini, three national pavilions contain work by artists using mirrors to a specific purpose, creating some of the most startling and dynamic spatial and sensory moments of the Biennale. David Altmejd’s ‘The Index’ and Isa Genzken’s ‘Oil’ occupy the Canadian and German pavilions respectively. Further down the hill, Eric Duyckaert’s ‘Palace of Mirrors’ and Discoveries fills the Belgian building. All are instances of doubling, reflection and reversal activating an otherwise sober event. Altmejd’s installation in the spiral-shaped, organic house of glass and wood is populated by a cabal o

A Venice Comment...

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
I could fill pages discussing the spectacle and spectacles of the Biennale. Such sights! A slightly deranged, rabid hunger for novelty gripped some members of the international art class as they fought heat exhaustion and alcohol poisoning (all tomorrow’s parties today!) to lurch hopefully with digital camera and notebooks poised, from one country’s representative to the next. Then there was the branding success of the Australians (again) in fitting out every trade fair attendee with their yellow, over-the-shoulder fashion accessory (Naomi had one, she was wearing it on her yacht).

And then there was the art. Oh yes – the art. First thing to say is – there

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
If travel broadens the mind, tourism must be regarded as a bright-eyed postcard façade you must peel, gnaw and scratch away at. The moment foreign soil is set foot on, heightened sensory antennae must circumnavigate officially designated palaces of culture and discover its rotten but throbbing heart.

For an artist-in-residence abroad, the experience is by its very nature a more mind-expanding experience. The 20-odd practitioners captured in transit in this large-scale international exchange make plain the state of permanent transience they’re in. Works on show aren’t so much dispatches from home, nor are they souvenir snapshots of faraway places. Rather, each w

Gillian Wearing

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
An investigation into the typical family in northern Italy’s Trentino region, Gillian Wearing’s exhibition and performance Family Monument developed a course that veered from sociological research to the intersection of reality TV, game-show entertainment, collaborative performance and even group therapy.

First a sociology professor provided demographic statistics profiling the average Trentino household from 1961 to the present, displayed in the form of large freestanding coloured pillars. Videos of people on the street discussing what defines a typical family, and how it is changing, were projected in a gallery downstairs. The culmination of the project will be a br

Learn to Read

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Although conceptual art’s adoption of linguistic strategies was motivated by an antipathy to formalism, not everyone was kicking sand in Clement Greenberg’s face. Historians have overemphasised the aesthetic dissidence of the conceptual project, ignoring its participation in the wider cultural and philosophical epiphany known as poststructuralism.

Learn to Read brings together 29 artists who inherit this synthesis of image, object and word, though two of them – Robert Barry and John Baldessari – can rightly lay claim to having inaugurated it. The exhibition’s title is taken from Baldessari’s poster of a woman reading a James Joyce biography. St

Rosalind Nashashibi: Bachelor Machines

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Blake said if you look at something long enough you become what you behold. Warhol quipped that if you look at something too long it loses its original meaning. Perhaps both statements have some veracity when viewing the films of Rosalind Nashashibi, where the act of looking is so incredibly vital. Here, the film camera operates as image-machine, modifying both the original image it records and the perception of the viewer.

Nashashibi is strikingly at the forefront of her filmmaking contemporaries because of this very attentiveness towards the machinery of her chosen medium. In her latest works ‘Bachelor Machines Part 1’ and ‘Bachelor Machines Part 2’, she

Alex Frost

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Adults, Alex Frost’s multifaceted show of drawings and sculptures in Berlin is, despite the title, no X-rated affair. The world of adulthood dealt with here is a recognisably bourgeois milieu and relates to notions of gentrified acquired taste. We are presented with sculptures of moulded biomorphic shapes, pillow-like forms made from ceramic tiles, grout, polystyrene and glue. Their surfaces are decorated with the logos of, to the British eye, instantly recognisable shopping products: After Eight Mints, Twinings tea and Ryvita slim-breads. These Adult works, all 2007, thus elegantly cross reference Warhol’s Brillo boxes, Oldenburg’s soft constructions and Gaudí&rsquo

You Have Not Been Honest

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
For many artists it seems like honesty might not be the best policy. It is often the elegance of extreme fabrication, the indulgence of the imagination, and a reconfiguring of history’s givens that makes work intriguing. This is not to say, however, that the films and videos in this exhibition of British artists lack sincerity. But each work shown here appears mindful – if not doubtful – of the value of truth. And, wandering through one of Italy’s finest new art spaces which seems to take on a poignant site-specific quality – a large part of the show is exhibited in the beautiful Donna Regina church – it is this doubt or critical enquiry that inflects each

Three for Society

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ This quote, and Thoreau’s subsequent discussion about visitors to his home in his book, Walden, serve as the premise for this group exhibition curated by Mari Spirito. Unfortunately the exhibition lacks the vanguard intellectual vigour and courage that one associates with the American maverick.

Thoreau’s ideas are perhaps more relevant today than at any previous point in history. Governments in the occident take progressively more liberties with the powers with which they have been entrusted, and the societies to which they belong behave ben

Armen Eloyan

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Two Feet in One Shoe has the ring of a modern proverb, one that suggests chaos-inducing impotence or awkward stupidity. It is also the stuff of theatrical clowning and staged silliness, and a thoroughly fitting title for the first UK solo exhibition of Armenian artist Armen Eloyan, who presents absurd, richly textured paintings that feature familiar characters from the canons of art history, folklore, Marlboro and Disney; some of the universal icons of our mythology. After a pompous, burlesque Master of Ceremonies, resplendent in top hat and doublet opens the show, ‘Disaster’, 2006, awaits; a dark, multi-canvas landscape depicts a sky consumed by doom clouds, a white bunny slain

Martin Creed

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Compared to early conceptualism’s vehement political rhetoric against the material art object, I might have once said that Martin Creed’s approach to making things was that of the sensitive, self-aware, emotionally literate new man, achingly cautious not to bring too many new things into an already cluttered world. Like the art version of wearing a condom.

Up until now that is. There’s a big cock – but no condom – in Martin Creed’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill, an enormous video projection, ‘Work No. 730’, is a close porno shot in monochrome of a (possibly) black man’s dick entering (maybe) a white woman from beh

Jen DeNike

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
A constant tic of expectation lingers in the waiting room that is adolescence. Boredom before or after the event is drawn out by lack of anything better to do, a constant sentence rambling without the restraint of the full stop, over and over and over and under like the filmed infinite loop of a boy sinking and rising from the water of a backyard swimming pool, his intake of breath consequential to the American flag he holds aloft at each emergence – its desire for oxygen somehow exceeds his own need for air. An electric orange sunset and shadowed palm trees identify this artificial oasis as the Californian landscape of a disillusioned teenaged culture, its seeming pleasures trig

Dalziel and Scullion

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of An Tobar, ‘Source’ is an in-depth exploration of nature as experienced through the eyes and ears of a young boy. Filmed entirely on Mull, it captures the stark grandeur of the landscape in winter, when it is at its most sparse and unforgiving. The boy leads us into a world that seems bleak and menacing, in which he appears small and insignificant. We are in turns shrunk to the size of an insect, zooming in on the microscopic creatures that busily inhabit an unseen world beneath our feet, and then elevated to the height of giants, as we look down upon the patterns that emerge within the landscape. Through the boy’s senses we

Tender Scene

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
This group show featuring the work of four already firmly associated artists contains much that is dark, executed with the lightest of touches. Alex Pollard curates and on the back of his recent solo show at Talbot Rice and international obligations, it might have been reasonable to expect a somewhat half-hearted display. However, there is evidence of effort on show here.

The Changing Room is a space with certain formal complexities – two rooms separated by stairs, uneven floors and irregular angles – which offer both challenges and possibilities that the artists here have approached in a way which produces a unity of aesthetic purpose. Positioning strips of black and

Skylar Haskard

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Los Angeles-based, Glasgow School of Art-trained, Skylar Haskard has installed here a jerry-built, foil-lined, perforated pegboard den. Continuing his references to the temporary architecture of gang huts, bivouacs and shanty towns, Haskard has, we are told, responded to the gallery space in the development of this new work. Maybe so, for Transmission’s home-to-be is across the road: his ad hoc tactics are apposite. But that given rationale seems too rational, too blandly
like contemporary art practice proper, to account for a construction which is so bizarrely provisional.

Above the roofless den the strip lights have been ripped and lowered from the gallery ceiling. T

Tony Swain: Concrete Planes

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
In 1919 Max Ernst spent a rainy day by the Rhine in Cologne, leafing through the pages of the 1914 Biblioteca Pedagogica. As his eyes skated across its mathematical objects, botanical and zoological images, anatomical and paleontological diagrams, Ernst became aware of an optical excitation: the increasingly hallucinatory sensation of multiple, super-imposed images. He recalled, ‘I formed into dramas my most secret desires, out of what had previously been banal pages of advertising’.

Ernst’s spectacular envisioning of early 20th century collage is by no means exclusive to the familiar definition of a cut-and-paste procedure, but an effective tool in recognising t

Enrico David: Choreography of Man

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Isla Leaver-Yap: Let’s talk about the use of surrogates or models in your work.

Enrico David: I think these models represent a series of sub-personalities. My work has, for a long time, been manifesting only one individual figure in space.

Like ‘Madreperlage’, the huge Louise Bourgeois-esque rag doll you presented at the British Art Show 6?

Yes, these works are kind of effigies, since there is a sense in which I’m activating or empowering these objects with a certain aspect or character. I thought of the doll as a part of me that could take a compliment. It’s negotiating or trying to delineate

between two deaths

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
The full range of such a major show, with over 30 artists and a mini festival to boot, could never be represented in a catalogue despite its 328 lustrous pages. This is a shame as I am sympathetic to the project’s ambition which tries earnestly to address our society’s ‘melancholic introspection’. As all we have is the book all we can hope to assess is the project’s principal theme.

The hand of curators and editors Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin is heavily felt in this weighty tome designed to deal with weighty problems. The title ‘between two deaths’ quotes Lacan’s metaphor for Antigone which the curators seem to have picked up

Let Me Show You Some Things

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
It may be better to give than to receive, but French philosopher Marcel Mauss takes this thought further in his seminal 1954 study ‘Essai sur le don’ (‘The Gift’). In it, he states, ‘such power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back’. And so, we give in order to be rewarded, and the hierarchy of gift giving and gift giver thus begins.

This thought is one of the themes underlying Sarah Tripp’s limited edition ‘unbound book’ Let Me Show You Some Things. Tripp, a fine artist who has moved her work into graphic design and film making, has written a familiar-sounding short story centred around a slightl

Taking The Matter Into Common Hands: Contemporary Art and Collaborative Pracrices

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Contemporary practices that fall outside the gallery mainstream have been in the spotlight recently. After an undeserved period in the critical wilderness, collaborative, publicly-engaged and site-specific practice have begun to hold their own as structures worthy of regular examination. Certainly a milestone in this re-awakening – though not without its flaws – was Nicolas Bourriaud’s seminal book Relational Aesthetics (RA). The success of Taking The Matter Into Common Hands however, as the latest of these way-markers, is that enough time seems to have passed for RA to be treated as a landscape we have already traversed rather than a monument to stand before in awe.

After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
The liberating title, resonant of the 1960s, suggests it’s all over – that women have successfully transformed contemporary art. Have they? With the coming of our new, post-revolutionary age, one in which freedom is a complex issue, bound up with a growing global market and technology, the potency of the radical individual has been heavily reduced. This book goes some way towards illustrating how a number of women artists prized open the door of our still ‘patriarchal society’ a little wider, but does not explain why their presence at biennials, major exhibitions and art fairs remains marginal.

Opening up in celebratory tone with the biographies of 1

Shadowed Spaces

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Music, by its very nature, can take you anywhere. On record, the private consumption of something designed for public dissemination is already transcendent enough. In the live arena, the communal experience makes such experiences even more pronounced. Hence the mass appeal of stadium-rock fascist rallies and the mud-bath pilgrimages of the open-air festival.

Shadowed Spaces confounded expectations of both these secular desires to share… something. Or other. The Arika organisation’s follow-up to last year’s Resonant Spaces, a Scotland-wide tour which utilised the unique timbres of venues such as Hamilton Mausoleum and Smoo Cave for musicians John Butcher and Akio

Mute Audio Documents

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
There are two sides to every story. For Mute Records’ boss Daniel Miller, wisdom comes with hindsight in this essential 10CD sonic history of the first five years of the record label he founded in the aftermath of punk. His plan? To seize the means of production, subvert the guitar-toting system and get back to the future with cheap analog synthesisers.

Miller’s first release, in his guise of The Normal, ‘T.V.O.D./Warm Leatherette’, starkly soundtracked the man/machine, sex/metal matrix. His next incarnation, the Silicon Teens, was even more fictitious. Marketed as a boy/girl quartet, Miller again demonstrated how synthesisers could marry technology and sim

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - The Seance At Hobs Lane

12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT
Katabasis is a fertile creative territory from Orpheus to Dante, from Zazie to Deathline. From Hobs Lane to Troywood nuclear bunker, Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s explorations into the underground are a remarkable extension of this venerable tradition of artists who share the burden of mystery. And Hobs Lane – the street in the Quatermass and the Pit BBC TV series and subsequent Hammer movie – is our destination. ‘The Séance at Hobs Lane’ first happened in 2001, but it could have occurred in 1958 when the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and CND campaigned for pushing and not pushing buttons. Hobs Lane has been reactivated again thanks to the excavation team at the glo

Emerging: Ruth Ewan

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?

Ewan MacColl’s ‘Ballad of Accounting’ is a rallying cry against submission. While critically referencing those who ‘skim the cream’, it is equally a challenge to the masses who ‘accept the shoddy’. Written for BBC’s landmark series Radio Ballads in 1964, it attacks low expectations, but also inherently a society that abuses its people into passivity

Emerging: Babak Ghazi

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Random is one of those words that has been drafted into the lexicon of the back of the bus, entering a spectrum of judgement that is notoriously superficial. Arbitrariness, on the other hand, has not, but can cut much deeper in the right, or wrong, hands. Whereas random means entirely without pattern, arbitrariness might be arrived at through a well-defined system founded on meaningless parameters. When directed towards art, the term can strike a nerve in the artist who struggles with the boundless universe of possibilities. The freedom to select and develop an agenda, an aesthetic, a set of references – the basis of a practice – is literally overwhelming for some, requiring that

Report: Contemporary Art Writing and it's environs

16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘A language might also be compared to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side of the sheet and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to take a pair of scissors and cut one side of paper without at the same time cutting the other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate sound from thought, or thought from sound; this could only be done by an abstraction.’

Cours de Linguistique Général, Ferdinand de Saussure

‘The single distinction of the manuscript is that not one word of it is legible.’

The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien

An

Residency: Nick Evans

23 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of his March to May residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre in Holland (EKWC), I met with Glasgow-based artist Nick Evans to discuss the impact of residencies on his practice over the last few years: a 2003 Springboard residency at Cove Park, a 2006/7 six-month residency at Tate St Ives and his recent one at Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire. Throughout our conversation the function of residencies to Evans’ practice becomes clear, providing a useful trigger for an exploration of his work and aesthetic concerns.

His residencies can be separated into those that invite productivity through quiet rumination, such as Cove Park an

Alas Nature / Roni Horn / My Oz

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
It is impossible to upstage the spectacular beauty of the Icelandic landscape. Yet perhaps in no inhabited place does the earth narrate geological history more eloquently, as it continually coughs up magma and expands underfoot. The island’s inhabitants have an exceptionally intimate relationship with the vagaries of the volatile climate and savage terrain: precipitous fjords and dramatic gorges, steam-spewing fissures and roiling geysers, gloppy lava fields and icy lagoons, which is impossible to articulate in mere words. But two recent art exhibitions and a new museum offer poetic meditations on the country’s profoundly magical nature.

The exhibition Alas Nature, at

A North Light ~ Cynosure

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Lawrence Weiner’s text work ‘Above Beyond Below’, 1986, located in one of the Pier Arts Centre’s new galleries, acts as a metaphor for this inaugural exhibition’s modus operandi, which is to link past works from the collection with current works, whilst signalling future collaborations. By such means both the exhibition and furthermore, the new building, successfully highlight that the space we inhabit is made up of that which is always out of our reach, whether past or future.

This understanding of self and place over time is integral to the Pier. Although the building remains the constant, the cynosure of the title, it is impossible to view&nb

Stan Douglas

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Four musicians are improvising free jazz. At Documenta 9, in 1992, this sober yet poetic video projection was shown on the front and back of a suspended screen. It highlighted the cultural/political context which regarded the creation of free jazz as a vehicle of black consciousness. This form of installation was new and appeared alien at the time; the related ‘media-theatre of cruelty’ by Bruce Nauman, was more familiar. Then, it was not possible to work out whether the jazz session was the presentation of a documentary, whether it was a new performance, or just archive material. Only intensive examination finally revealed it as a construct.

The Canadian artist Stan D

Matthew Barney

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
There seems to be a persistent gap between art and the world at large. I don’t mean the generative gap between reality and representation that visual artists have employed to various ends over the centuries, but the vast gulf that divides the abilities and ambitions of those practising in other disciplines from the artist who adopts or echoes their methods. Matthew Barney’s current show, Drawing Restraint, is a particular case in point. The show’s title lays out the artist’s ambition: to make a mark despite curtailing his movement with physical inhibitors or distractions, such as harnesses, a pitching ship, gravity or a trampoline.

Louise Bourgeois

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In 1993 I curated Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, a historical survey of four generations of woman artists in America. This included comprehensive film programmes, panel discussions, and for the most up-to-date performances the Clit Club was set up in the gallery for a night. Trash, the sexiest drag king in town, was on stage dancing topless in black leather chaps, ass cut out, huge black dildo cock, stylised sideburns and goatee. Behind her was half-naked Hannah Wilke covered with chewing gum pussies. In front of Trash hung two of Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Janus’ sculptures, 1968, her take on th

David Lamelas

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In a 1972 interview with David Lamelas, the curator and author Lynda Morris remembers, ‘When we were making Film Script … you talked about a scene from a movie such as John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971, about scenes which do not give any information but create the feeling of a film.’ In response, Lamelas states, ‘In all movies you have scenes which just connect and do not contain any information’. Morris appears in both works shown here—as an actress in Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning), 1972, and as one of the artist’s London Friends, photographed in a shoot arranged with a fashion photographer in 19

Michael Fullerton

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘I hadn’t heard of any of them, so I tried to remember them so I could Google them when I got home… It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn’t know inside me.’ This sentiment, expressed by Oskar Schell, the precocious nine-year-old inventor, Francophile and protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005, is similar to the initial impulse provoked by Michael Fullerton’s most recent installation, Pleasure in Nonsense. The space is populated by six skilfully painted portraits of a motley cast of famous and unfamiliar characters, two discreet sculptures that share the installation’s title, a triangul

Effigies

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Shortly after the plague had swept through 14th century western Europe, the Church began to exhibit a new style of sculpture – an unprecedented number of nudes, portraits, and of course the representation of the withered corpse as a new form of tomb monument, adorning altars, apses and naves. Death and his effects were often portrayed, and sculptural studies into the anatomy of the body progressed at a skill and speed extraordinary for this period. The corporal discoveries in artistry of the late gothic period in particular provided the foundations for figurative sculpture as we know it.

On arriving at Effigies, such a mythic past seems less confined to a purely ar

Jock McFadyen

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Jock McFadyen’s distinctive work is often described as raw or gritty. This is not solely due to his favoured social realist subject-matter, but also because his painting always pushes against the grain of conventional taste. Never predictable, he sets own agenda, a fact which invariably puts his work at odds with critical fads. For instance, at the Chelsea Art School in the early 1970s, where he studied as a mature student, he was still at the centre of the British pop art movement, its teaching staff including archetypical practitioners of that glam mock time such as Allen Jones.

The independent McFadyen however, developed his own approach to socio-political themes that had

William Eggleston

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In 1974 photographer William Eggleston produced an extraordinary series of nightclub portraits documenting the club scene in and around Memphis, Tennessee.

Simultaneously, he was working in the same locations with an early video camera, documenting on tape many of the same people who appear in the accompanying still pictures. Both photographs and videotape were intended to be shown together. They were destined, however, to lie unexhibited until the stills were finally brought together in book form in 2006.

The pictures, collectively exhibited under the title 5 X 7 (the film format they were shot on) and a full length edit of the video work entitled ‘Stranded in C

Mike Kelley

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Wow! None of your abject ‘trouble in paradise’ transgressive madness on show here then. No dubiously stained cuddly toys as previously favoured by the California- based artist. Kandors is a whirling dervish of a show by the one time punk and self confessed pants shitter. Described in Artforum by Robert Storr back in 2004 as a provoker and counterpuncher, Kelley throws some upper cuts to blindside us. His ‘embrace of failure’ as Storr puts it has been blown away and he now follows through (ouch) by revisiting the Finish Fetish of West Coast utopias, the ‘emphatic uncool’ of his effluent works firmly on the back burner. Welcome to the pleasure dome…

Re: [Video Positive] Archiving Video Positively

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In the seminar ‘Had To Be There?’ David Curtis said that the ‘fundamental role of an archive is the re-presentation of the work’ so it is no surprise that the quest for authenticity should be implicit in the title as well as weave throughout a number of the presentations which were invited to consider the archiving of time-based media within the context of new information systems and the growing trend of collaborative, site-specific and process based new media.

The symposium coincided with the exhibition Re: [Video Positive] Archiving Video Positively which re-enacted a number of installation works originally commissioned for the Video Positive festiv

Carol Bove

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The Middle Pillar: The Balance Between Mind and Magic, 1938, is the theosophical doctrine of Israel Regardie, the former secretary and friend of occultist Aleister Crowley. This eponymous text occupies the central shelf in Bove’s sculpture ‘Easter Everywhere’ 2007, a bookshelf which also contains Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double, and M.C. Escher’s ‘Magic Mirror’ as well as diminutive concrete blocks, peacock feathers, photographs, and other ephemera.
This exhibition, The Middle Pillar, is an explicit statement of Bove’s investigation of the philosophies and aesthetics of the 1960s and early 1970s, lthough it may be conte

Karla Black: Mother Sculpture

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Having just seen the big Louise Bourgeois show at Tate Modern, it was hard to see Karla Black’s recent London exhibition (at IBID Projects) without thinking of the elder artist’s much quoted dictum, ‘For me, sculpture is the body’. Now, what this means for Bourgeois is not on the face of it hard to comprehend. Her work is filled with images of the body, or at least of some of its most symbolically-charged parts: breasts and penises, most obviously, but also hands and legs – and in recent years she’s been representing the figure as an entirety more and more. Karla Black’s sculpture is not like that at all. No organs, no bodies – and precious lit

Oliver Godow: Waiting for Godow

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
I never have seen, nor probably ever will, a job description for an artist or a philosopher. What is it that they are supposed to do, exactly? I think it would be difficult to define with any precision. Jean-François Lyotard has had a shot at it, suggesting that both artist and philosopher produce work in situations where the rules governing the making of such work are unknown. OK. My own provisional specifications would probably be slightly more modest, rather less heroic. I would be looking for them to perhaps make the familiar seem less familiar, to make me look and think again. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I am thinking of. Jean-Paul Sartre goes to a café to

Obituary: Steven Campbell

06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Ex-steel worker, Fulbright scholar, dandy and graduate of Glasgow School of Art, Campbell conquered New York in the 1980s and at that time was styled by the media as one of the leading lights of the New Glasgow Boys. His complex, powerful paintings in the 1985 New Image Glasgow show at Third Eye Centre, Glasgow contributed to a renewed interest in Scottish art.

Sandy Moffat, a fellow Scottish painter, borrows the words of Samuel Beckett, written in tribute to artist Jack B Yeats and repeated below, to celebrate Campbell’s eventful life and mysterious, dark narratives: ‘What is incomparable in this great solitary oeuvre is its insistence upon sending us back to the dar

Scott Myles

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This slim new book is the first monograph on the work of Glasgow-based artist Scott Myles, an artist whose work requires some explanation; loaded as it is with elliptical references in need of unravelling and decoding.

In past works he has re-presented posters by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres in double-sided display cases, and cast scoops of ice cream to form bronze paperweights. In 2001 he employed someone to carry out cigarette ‘breaks’ as paid ‘work’ over the course of one day, and in 2002 a project with Dundee Contemporary Arts led a group of children abroad from Dundee, after placing a bottle into the sea that was later washed up and f

Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
One doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual nay-sayer to wonder if critical theory is not paradoxically at its pretentious worst when addressing issues of immediate political consequence. Theory can frequently be distant from its adopted concerns: too often theorists respond to the injustices of the world by treating actual political complexity with equally complex but abstracted jargonised contemplation. That distantness, especially when exacerbated by exclusive language, seems bizarre if not intolerable when the jargoniser is himself distant not only from the social realities of the subjects objectified by his theorising, but also from those men of action who might seek to redress in

Daniel Johnston: It?s A Beautiful Life

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
They may be selling Daniel Johnston t-shirts across the bridge in Baltic’s bookshop, but this first UK retrospective of the cult savant singer/songwriter is more at home in alt. gallery’s bijou back-room space in one of the most out-there record emporiums anywhere.

Seeing the faded customised cover of Johnston’s very first home-recorded cassette, Songs Of Pain, even out of arm’s reach beneath glass, it’s clear how his musical exorcisms of his inner demons pre-dated and even predicted what’s on offer. Row on row of hand-crafted, make-shift artefacts are wrapped around an overload of primal squall

Re-make/Re-model

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Michael Bracewell’s timely, extended examination of the genesis of Roxy Music’s first and best album opens with a florid description of the Penshaw Monument, a neglected temple in the Greek tradition set in Ferry’s Tyneside. Here is the epitome of stylish grandeur and something to aspire to, even before Ferry fled to seek out Newcastle’s bright lights, where the art, pop and fashion of the book’s sub-title rush together to become one exhilarating whole.

As Bracewell makes explicit via a series of extended interviews with the key players of Roxy Music’s extended entourage, Richard Hamilton’s influence at Newcastle University in the 196

EXTRACT: Portraits Of Sound Artists

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Cheap technology and access to Resonance FM, the art/noise radio station run by London Musicians Collective, has made sound art less a samizdat activity and more a community-minded experience, practised in solitude but disseminated with ease. This exquisitely packaged release from Vienna’s Nonvisualobjects label, founded in 2005 by Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser with the aim of focussing on ‘interpretations of minimalism in sound’, is a bumper compendium of hiss and fissures, deep listening rhapsodies and deconstructed noises off. Presented in a numbered edition of 500, its 22 tracks spread across two CDs are an attractive enough proposition. The 96 page hard-

Interview: Linder

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
So, what’s the buzz, cock?

Buzzcocks and Magazine vocalist Howard Devoto got the name for Buzzcocks from an article in Time Out about Rock Follies, the 1970s television series. This featured The Little Ladies, a hard rockin’ trio of feisty girls managed by a man wearing a white fedora hat called ‘Hyper’ Huggins. For the hat alone, feminism was a necessity, and, in my view, remains unalterably so. So I’m busy working on the cause.

Domestic appliance: what are your current working concerns?

I’ve spent the last year making a series of collages using 1960s ballet annuals and glamour maga

Emerging: Katie Orton

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Women in the 21st century are masters of disguise. A dynamic working women is a good daughter one minute, a sexy partner the next, and then a shoulder to cry on. This is not dissembling, but the reality of the many roles arising from modern living – a kind of liberation from expectation and enforced roles which offers freedom to have control in different spheres.

But with that come the demands of complex shape-shifting; navigating the needs of self, others, and situations; confusing and liberating at the same time. This, while holding on to a clear sense of self, could prove to be the defining challenge for women in this age, and Katie Orton is grabbing it with both hands

Report: Customising the New Monument

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Smithson wandered through the post-industrial landscape on the outskirts of his hometown in New Jersey in the autumn of 1967. He passed incomplete concrete highway shoulders, rusting pipes that rose like leviathans in the dry mud, and languishing sandboxes that exhibited their emptiness as much as their function. Within the dilapidated scenery, he reconfigured the landscape as a ‘utopia minus a bottom’, a series of modernist monuments he photographed and presented in his Artforum essay ‘The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?’.

Since minimalist sculpture itself seems to have accreted with time, and its monolithic s

Emerging: Neil Clements

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Death metal and Modernism might not immediately appear the most analogous forms, but to Neil Clements, they share the same romantic ideal: purity.

Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2004, Clements has shown extensively – at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Fridge Gallery, Glasgow, Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin, and Konsortium, Dusseldorf. In each show a developing fascination for a perceived nihilistic value of metal and Modernism can be witnessed.

Death (or black) metal is about noise, destruction, and taking things to the ultimate, extreme conclusion: drumming as fast as possible, no verses or choruses, shouting, untuned guitars. The aim was p

Commission: Alasdair Gray

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Updated soon...

Back Page: Donelle Woolford

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

At the ICA, I will set up a work space for myself, so that patrons can not only see my work, but see it in process. The space will be set up not unlike my studio in Harlem, and I will be working there periodically and be available to talk to visitors. Come to think of it, the public will have the opportunity to watch me think and zone out and pick my nose. I guess I’ll be as much a part of the exhibition as my work. I don’t think it’s possible for the artist to only see the ‘finished’ piece when s/he looks at his/her work. I think that’s implicit in the word ‘work’. ‘Work’ doesn’t mean the end result, but the path one takes

Craig Mulholland: Viral Transmissions

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

(view commission)

Susannah Thompson: For the last year or so you’ve been working on a series of exhibitions, Grandes et Petites Machines, which consists of concurrent shows at Sorcha Dallas and Glasgow School of Art, as well as a more extensive selection of work at Spike Island in Bristol. Grandes Machines is the term for the monumental history paintings of the 19th century French Salon but I’m guessing there’s a pun or double meaning in there Can you expand on the title?

Craig Mulholland: It develope

Wilhelm Sasnal: Deluxe Punk

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Film and Painting

Wilhelm Sasnal’s work develops in the space between film and painting – this space then links the symbolic with the imaginary. Curator Adam Szymczyk said Sasnal’s painting is ‘a way to prove what a photograph cannot, as it must always start from something existent – even if it is able to change its object endlessly – though after all it is a way to record things. Painting is a way to observe ambiguous and dramatic changing of conditions’. Traditionally, filmmaking is connected with reality, objectivism, technology, rational and analytical approaches to the world, whereas painting usually entails imagin

Torsten Lauschmann: Play it Again

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
I’ve heard he’s charming, modest and generous. GSOH.

That’s some write up. Torsten Lauschmann’s practice is extraordinarily expansive too; he makes work in a broad range of contexts – galleries, theatre and the internet, and across as many media – video projection, animation, photography, music and sculpture. And there is a sense of experimentation and of addition and subtraction which exists across all of it. In an attempt to define this multi-faceted order, academic Neil Mulholland recently described Lauschmann’s work as being a ‘variety show repertoire’.

Each Lauschmann piece is moulded to contexts relating to m

Elena Filipovic and Adam Szymczyk: Q + A

26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Steven Cairns: Has the prerogative of the biennial been effected by the increasing number of this type of art event? Do you think that ‘the biennial’ has to be individualistic in its approach, and how will bb5 relate to the city of Berlin while maintaining this individualism.

Elena Filipovic: A biennial can be many things, but it is first and foremost an exhibition, and as such it should give artists the support, space, and context in which to say something; it should articulate critical ideas, and be something that an audience can engage with. The rest is mostly marketing and hype. Should that ‘exhibition’ that the biennial is at its core be individualisti

Loris Gr?aud: On and Off

23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The work of Loris Gréaud develops through different levels of displacement: between fields of expertise, between references, between the studio and the exhibition space, and between various modes of presentation for the same project. After his widely discussed exhibition Cellar Door, which filled the entirety of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from February to April 2008, this protean project has since moved to London’s ICA with the subtitle (Once is Always Twice). In this interview conducted in Paris in March 2008, Loris Gréaud and Christophe Gallois discuss the problematics at the heart of Gréaud’s work, including his use of the exhibition as production s

Henrik Olesen: Oblique Vision

23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In the work of Danish artist Henrik Olesen, born 1967, the concept of ‘information’ is not merely central, it has a twofold operating mode. Many of his works appear to be a harsh and cutting examination of the interaction between powers, sexual genre and access to legitimisation – thus in some way working towards the production of information, or disinformation. Olesen seems to place the spectator in a zone that is much more viscous and opaque than the information itself, within a diorama of exclusion and privilege. Better yet, his installations, sculptures and textual interventions, appear to reproduce the effects of the uptake of an informati

Scott Myles: Unlike Pairs

23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Appropriative processes underpin the work of Scott Myles, in particular the degrees of change through the process of repetition of original gesture, attitude, form or positing. His sculptures, spatial installations and screen prints refer to structures of existing ideas and artworks, particularly within their original context, which he then appropriates either formally or in content. Yet, in the moment of citation or imitation within another context and via repetition, the appropriation deviates, in a way that not only reflects the original idea but is also an authentic presentation of something else, something personal.

Myles’ installation for OPEN SPACE at Art Co

Paulina Olowska: And it is Time

23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘I’ve always wanted to give up painting, now I have a rational reason to do it. What am I waiting for?’ So writes Zofia Stryjenska, the once acclaimed artist, designer and illustrator during Poland’s interwar years, and yet largely forgotten during the country’s Communist period. The 34-year-old Stryjenska writes at the critical moment between choosing to stay with her children after the breakdown of her marriage, or leaving to fulfil a prestigious commission for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, 1925.

This extract from Stryjenska’s diary is contemporary artist Paulina Olow

Sighs Trapped By Liars

25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after a quarter of a century of the collaboration between Mayo Thompson’s The Red Krayola and Turner Prize short-listed conceptualists Art & Language (A&L). Both parties threatened this year to finally record and release long-standing operatic project, Victorine, the libretto of which was published by A&L in 1984.

As it stands, with lyrics and texts by A&L scored by Thompson and impeccably played by some of Chicago’s finest, this new set is a far cry from the harsh social-realist music hall of their 1976 virgin outing, Corrected Slogans and squat polem

Residency: Rob Kennedy

12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
I’m sitting in JFK airport, in the only spot the heating does not seem to be on full, reflecting on having spent five weeks in residence, thanks to the Scottish Arts Council, at Location One studios, in New York City. I’m counting down a three-hour plane delay with the bar already closed.

“I remember quite well when I gave my famous
barnyard party…
‘Captain Willy, in this Jade Ballroom I am going to
give a farmyard party, a barn dance.
I am going to have trees with real apples on them,
even if the apples have to be pinned on. I’m going
to cover those enormous chandeliers with hayricks.
I’m going

Report: Exhibition by Commission

05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The commissioning of contemporary art by public galleries and museums is an activity growing at an unprecedented rate; indeed more has been commissioned in the past 15 years than in all of the previous century.

It is a phenomenon that has been propelled by several factors: the fame, notoriety and public appreciation of landmark works such as Anthony Gormley’s gargantuan ‘Angel of the North’, 1998, a sculpture that has inspired other high-visibility projects throughout Britain.

Then there is the huge success of high-profile public gallery commissions such as Tate Modern’s Unilever Series that for the past eight years has afforded each

Emerging: Ben Jones

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Ben Jones, a member of east coast American art collective Paper Rad, takes neon and comic to new oddities of meaning. With the hand style of the best graffiti artist and the conceptual, absurd rigour of a dadaist, his paintings, sculptures, videos and comics take a fresh look at figuration with their subtleties of form and unsubtleties of colour to make you think about the human form in new ways.

Some of Jones’ best works are just shitty sharpie comics. These you may have to scrounge up in old zines or find hiding in his studio, and every single one will be worth the effort. In the comics world he is renowned for his extreme economy of line and a spa

Emerging: Ann Bowman

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

‘THE DILEMA’ is projected in pink on the gallery wall, while a mirror image of the words plays opposite. The film cuts to two twenty-something American males bouncing up and down, their conversation broken by both their own self-consciousness and the artist’s editing. ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, by the band Journey, starts playing over a slowed down clip from Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 film Showgirls.

‘The Dilemma’, a short film by Denver-based, graduate of Glasgow School of Art Ann Bowman, shown in her recent exhibition at Transmission, Glasgow, deploys several components from previous video works: the use of popular soundtracks,

Glasgow international

12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The music is repetitive, metronomic, occasionally punctuated by crescendo. It is a piano piece by Philip Glass, in a minor key: haunting, melancholy. The image of the wasp is big, magnified many times. It is disturbing, like something invented to scare. I know I am watching it die because the work at The Fridge Gallery, by Zatorski + Zatorski, is called ‘The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp’, 2001-04. I don’t know how long it takes before I start to have coherent thoughts.

At first I wonder how far into the 3600 seconds we are, and how much longer I must watch this insect’s death throes. I have probably killed my fair share of wasps, but

Always Begins By Degrees

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This is the first in a series of exhibitions curated by The Common Guild to be staged at Douglas Gordon’s townhouse in the Park area of Glasgow. Given that ex-Dundee Contemporary Art curator Katrina Brown is the artistic nous behind The Common Guild and given Gordon’s fame and wealth, the combination was always going to intimidate by displaying grassroots Glaswegian do-it-yourself acumen on an untouchably glamorous level.

Not a case of worrying if your art school friend-of-a-friend will bring his wet paintings round in time for the hang: nor a case of hiding bikes, books and bongs in the spare room before opening night: more likely to be a case of the li

Whitney Biennial 2008 / Judy Chicago

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’, 1974-79, the nonpareil of feminist art, has recently become the jewel in the crown of the Elizabeth A Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

It is a triangular banquet table, heavy with ornate place settings for 39 women, which sits on a floor of triangular porcelain tiles bearing the names of a further 999 women of historical significance. In its new home it is to be accompanied by a series of biographical exhibitions about the 1,038 women it names.

Although this series is intended to enhance Chicago’s work, it can also be seen as an illustration of the failures of the golden age of

Mark Handforth

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
A sentimentality towards material and traditional values underlines Mark Handforth’s collection of new works – all endearingly independent – in his solo show at Gavin Brown. There is a dialogue between the works of course, but they don’t punctuate the space in the way large scale pieces are expected to. Handforth sites sculpture both inside and out – a bronze wolf-head and ubiquitous (post Whitney Biennial 2004) bent streetlight are situated on the street. He casts an ostentatious command over the gallery, the street and the surrounding area.

‘Rope Snakes’, an eight foot bronze cast of two ropes, coiled and intertwining is charmed into sh

Broadcast Yourself

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Since the ‘counter-cultural’ emergence of video, artists have wrestled with the institution of TV, both as opportunity and as threat. Broadcast Yourself: Artists Interventions into television and strategies for self-broadcasting from the 1970s to today is a carefully curated panorama which pulls out some key artists’ projects from the 70s through to the 00s, and hence covers a course of artistic endeavour in broadcasting through to narrowcasting. A pivotal model is Van Gogh TV’s attempt to transform the mass medium of television into an interactive one that reverses the relationship between a single broadcaster and many receivers. ‘Piazza Virtuale&rsqu

Chris Marker

07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 1921’, according to Wikipedia. Already one feels in a no-man’s-land between fiction and document. The footnote to the entry cites David Thomson’s authoritative New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 4th edition, 2002, along with these words from Thomson: ‘The previous edition and other reference books give Belleville, France, as his place of birth – but Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct.’

Perhaps, instead of fiction and document, I should have said rumour and truth. Like a lot of people, I didn’t know much about Marker until

The Hidden / Lars Laumann

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
I dreamed of Princess Diana’s death. August 30, 1997. (My mother and father were trying to pull me away from my lover – it was a life and death struggle). I awoke screaming and crying. Shaken, I fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle. I thought to go swimming, wash away a bad night.

When I got to the beach my friend called. He said: ‘The princess is dead.’ Legends, fairytales – it took several minutes to register what he meant.

Lars Laumann’s video, ‘Morrissey Fortelling the Death of Diana’, audaciously expands on the inexplicable mysterious subject of premonition. The video consists of two separate components that Laum

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This exhibition, Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, is that rarest of things: a pub dare executed with sober diligence in the cold light of day. Partly inspired by the opening passages of Thierry de Duve’s book Kant After Duchamp, in which an alien visitor to Earth tries to understand the category ‘art’ – which he finds so elastic as to have ‘no other generality than to signify that meaning is possible’ – curators Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee present a ‘large collection of contemporary art objects under the fictional rubric of a museum conceived by, and for, extra-terrestrials’.

Two hundred works are divided int

Joan Jonas

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
As the feminist art movement swung into action out of New York in the early 70s, Joan Jonas delivered a series of performance works, ‘Mirror Pieces’, that would challenge the representation of women in the arts and precipitate possibilities for all makers in new media. The importance of Jonas’ contribution to art history is also defined by her radical anti-European narrative stance in which all forms of cultural expression are perceived as equal and acknowledgment of how the mode through which one experiences the art work, such as the video monitor or performative prop, influences both the shape and perception of the content. There is little doubt of Jonas’

Simon Starling

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Like a boomerang propelled by the potential energies bound in process, Simon Starling’s practice is one of far-flung returns across the bend of time and space, gathering momentum around a singular object or event whilst striking unexpected targets along its strange trajectory. The gathered threads of these meticulously rewoven journeys and histories are fully in evidence between the nine works surveyed in Cuttings (Supplement), an exhibition that also provides the crucial yet understated resolution of Starling’s Toronto-based commission for The Power Plant.

The invisible narrative of ‘Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore)’ pivots upon art historian and Briti

Raymond Pettibon

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘It’s a dark world y’know?’ Pettibon’s words chime immediately with a drawing of a transected male torso pissing copiously – ‘No title (Forgive my pouring…)’, 2005 – accompanied by the legend ‘forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties and superfluities’.

Torrent is right. Pettibon’s tide of skewed invective is as powerfully overwhelming as those big blue waves he’s fond of illustrating that threaten to engulf a lone heroic surfer.

The format of his new show No title, 2008, has no formal surprises – the sheets of ink are still tack

Cathy Wilkes

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The enigmatic works of Cathy Wilkes are notoriously difficult to penetrate, a trait for which she has become well known, and one that has not hindered her burgeoning international profile. This exhibition – the most comprehensive of her career – is spread across the gallery’s three spaces and exudes a confidence that, despite the perplexing nature of her work, is refreshingly compelling.

In ‘Untitled’, 2008, several piles of dried bulrushes and pond reeds have been laid out on the floor, some covered by polythene sheets. Behind these stands a stack of terracotta tiles painted with a faint cross motif. In the solemn ambience of this dimly lit room

Huang Rui

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In the most intact section of the fortified Aurellian Wall next to the Porta San Sebastiano, Huang Rui has constructed Peking 2008: Time, Animals and History, a site-specific work that compares Western and Eastern concepts of time and evokes our inexorable collective tendency to empire building. Inspired by Rome’s monuments, which chart the layers of history and memorialise their associated political regimes, the artist has arranged 2029 bricks left over from the recent demolition of Peking’s traditional single- family hutongs, into rectangular ensembles throughout the various rooms, levels and passageways of this museum dedicated to the ancient Roman wall. Each of the

Claire Barclay / Neil Clements / Sally Osborn / Jonathan Owen / Sara Barker / Albrecht Sch?fer

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The blatently obvious fact that galleries have walls and floors, and that art is displayed on them, has been charged with considerable significance in art since the 60s. An important reason for this is that spatial orientation says a lot about the particular objecthood of artworks. Not only do wall and floor correspond to traditional notions of painting and sculpture, they also stage particular relationships between viewer and work.

Exemplary of such debates is the contest over the appropriate orientation of Pollock’s drip paintings. Do they belong to the idealising wallspace of painting (addressing ‘eyesight alone’), or to the messy, material, embodied floorspa

Duncan Campbell: Telling Stories

16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In 1969, Bernadette Devlin, aged 21, became the youngest ever female British MP. One of the student founders of the organisation, People’s Democracy, Devlin won the Mid-Ulster seat in April that year, defeating Anna Forrest, the wife of Ulster Unionist MP George Forrest, who had held the seat from the mid-1950s until his death at the end of 1968. Devlin famously declared that she had been elected by the ‘oppressed people of Ulster’, and took her commitment to social equality to Westminster as an Independent member for her Unity Party.

Four months later Devlin was in the middle of the Bogside riots in Derry. For the first time since the partition of Ireland i

Uncle Chop Chop

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The latest issue of this medieval punk zine features contributions by Chop Chop regulars Jim Ward, Dan Perjovschi, Mick Peter, John Russell, David Shrigley, Erica Eyres and Deborah Holland along with new Choppers Rebecca Anson, Luke Collins and Pingyeh Li (among many others).

Initiated in 2002 by John Beagles and Graham Ramsay, this year’s publication is the fourth edition of their paen to all things Rabelaisian. When asked recently how often it appears, the editors claimed (á la Julie Christie in Demon Seed) that it manifests itself ‘whenever we feel a little skull inside of us trying to get out – then we know it’s time for another Chop Chop’.

Video: The Reflexive Medium

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Video has always been a medium to argue over, inflamed as it is by a samizdat literature of manifestos, postures and (sometimes very angry) tracts. Few were angrier than Radical Software, the self-conscious voice of ‘expanded cinema’ activism between 1970 and 1974.

In the first issue the editors printed an image of a woman holding a video camera up to her eye while smoking a cigarette. Half her face was skin and flesh, the other metal and plastic. This co-mingling of the organic and the mechanical, the casual and the intended, seemed to redeem Marshall McLuhan’s statements of technology as a form of amputation – the eye being replaced by lenses, memory

Jonathan Monk

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Dyed with the yellowing tones of three decades, this book, created by Jonathan Monk, edited by Dan Rees and just published by Tramway, is a multi-layered scrapbook of ideas that takes as its framework the 1969 Blue Peter annual. Against this jolly backdrop, here portrayed as a faded relic, Monk affectionately throws a scattering of invitation cards to exhibitions and interventions by important male conceptual artists of the 60s, 70s and beyond. The association is in the time – in 1969, when pre-gaming children avidly tuned into the BP brand, Seth Siegelaub, the New York curator associated with names such as Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner, organised a show that contained no

Nalle - The Sirens Wave

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Anyone who’s floated in the same air as the soundworks produced by Glasgow-based artist Hanna Tuulikki will be aware of her use of the voice as a vessel of ritualistic expression on land and sea. Whereas works such as ‘Pollockshaws Song Portrait’, 2006, and ‘Kensington Cradle Songs’, 2007, were conscious attempts to tap into an essence of community in a human urban context, ‘Call and Response (Polly Vaughn)’, 2005/6 and ‘Salutation To The Sun (Replica)’, 2005, were equally real communings with more elemental forces.

With Nalle, the band she formed with Chris Hladowski and Aby Vulliamy, Tuulikki allows herself to unleash the ful

Wilhelm Sasnal: The Other Church

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Angelika Kluk was a 22-year-old Polish immigrant found murdered under the floorboards of St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, Glasgow, in 2006. Wilhelm Sasnal’s 16mm film doesn’t set out to recreate the horrors of that event. Nor does it sensationalise it. Rather, even as it sets up its bare floor-boarded and claustrophobic context in the basement of a dilapidated shop-front, it makes it legend.

From the unlit gloom upstairs, the music filtering through from below sounds like it’s occupying some unlicensed punk hang-out, with all the boy’s club associations implied. Down a rickety step-ladder in an empty basement, a projector whirs in antique counte

Back Page: Juliette Blightman

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Dear Juliette

We would like to invite you to write a back page where we ask an artist to email us a jpeg of the view from a window and write 550 words about that view or whatever associated thoughts are inspired by it. We heard you are a bit of an avid rear-window photographer and thought this small project would go well with the domestic-space thematic inherent in your practice.

Best, MAP

Two cyclists go past from left to right, one is wearing a red cagoule the other a dark t-shirt. I imagine how hot she must feel, I think it is a she, I cannot really see from here but she rides a bike like a woman even if she isn’t, another cyclist then

Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century / Lawrence Weiner

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Manhattan is etched with a grid of streets and avenues anchored on a roughly north-south axis. The cultural consequences of this topographical orientation permeate New York’s conception of culture, dividing the city in two: uptown and downtown. Uptown bears connotations of money, American patrician class, and the history with which money and aristocracy like to associate themselves. Downtown, by contrast, represents working-class, spontaneity – the new and the now of the city.

Exactly where the uptown/downtown divide lies is not clear. Rather, the two are known by their extremes; in music, uptown means Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, while downtown means Exper

Thomas Houseago

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Thomas Houseago sought out his own Ground Zero. Renouncing irony and abundance of critical theory, he manoeuvred a return to a brutish expressive embodiment of the figure as a method for addressing personal experience.

The resulting sculptures formed a confrontational excess of creative exuberance, a kind of anarchistic verve and a romantic political strategy for opposing the commodification and homogenisation of subjective experience and difference under advanced contemporary capitalism.

This latest exhibition, A Million Miles Away, follows closely along these lines, working with an established visual vocabulary of monumentalised hum

Thomas Zipp

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Thomas Zipp’s Planet Caravan. Is There Life After Death? a Futuristic World Fair, takes its title from a song by the British heavy metal group Black Sabbath, and draws on classical, scientific and pop-cultural epistemologies, combining painting, drawing, sculpture and appropriated photographic imagery.

In the third incarnation of a work shown earlier this year at Kunsthalle Mannheim, and Museum in der Alten Post, the centrepiece is a large chapel-like structure containing a granite font inscribed with the words LATET ANGUIS IN LUMEN (a snake lies hidden in the light) – a modification of Virgil’s ‘Latet Anguis in Herba’ (‘A Snake Lies Hidde

Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
We are obsessed with context and comparison; we tend to ask not what an artwork is, but what it shares with other artworks. Propinquity is now a medium. Many group shows subsist on this truism alone, treating artworks as mere links in a chain of curatorial kinship.

Steven Claydon’s Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring is not like this, though it does occasionally commit sins characteristic of the junketing group survey, for example, the tendency to ‘contemporise’ dead artists through quirky juxtaposition. ‘Behold my irreverent placement of this Lynn Chadwick’, I could hear Claydon saying, as I regarded Chadwick’s ‘Pair

Carol Rhodes

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) said, ‘I try to see beyond the range of sight’. Carol Rhodes’ small paintings attempt that expansion of vision. Portraying mysterious spaces, with some of the components of nature, but categorically far removed from nature itself, they create a quiet, whispering presence in the large, downstairs connecting rooms of the gallery.

Carol Rhodes works in Glasgow today, lived in Bengal as a child and was born in Edinburgh. A student of Glasgow School of Art in the early 1980s, her paintings have built slowly into a body of work and are now beginning to receive wider recognition; this retrospective is her first solo mu

Phillip Lai

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The elaborate ambiguity of London-based Phillip Lai’s collection of works in the solo exhibition, A metal bar fell on someone’s head or something, is a subtly humanistic bricolage of formal and conceptual elements. Altarpiece to the exhibition, ‘Untitled’, 2007, a large colour photograph of a teen male and female, backs turned, acts as a binder to the individual sculptural elements on show.

The piece immediately implies the action-response of human interaction that overarches the exhibition, referring to the effect of the artist’s hand and the potential for movement and use in the static works on show. Captured in the photograph the models pose slumpe

Ulla von Brandenburg

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
A busy Sunday afternoon in the Stedelijk Museum does not offer the best conditions to view Ulla von Brandenburg’s new work ‘La Maison’, 2007, being given its European premiere. Too many visitors peeping in between the loosely hanging, coloured curtains that are ordered in a strict architectural pattern. In the middle of this labyrinthic structure a ‘room’ is created in which a crooked screen reflects a 16mm projection – probably a brutal visitor accidentally stepped into the back of the screen in an attempt to enter the space from behind.

But if we think away all these disturbing circumstances, what is left is an aesthetically interesting piece.

Rosa Barba

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Thierry De Duve notes that Modernism would never have been necessary if the artists then had felt they had some connection with their audience. Instead, as the period played out, artists turned towards medium as both subject and witness. This in turn presents a unique problem in film, which holds its audience as a central component of its apparatus. Without an audience, film was reduced to its individual components by the likes of David Lamelas with his reductive single light beam, ‘Limit of a Projection 1’, 1967, searching for an autonomous purity within the machine.

But the search for a film disconnected from the living beholder produced new limitations. It was as i

Gabriel Kuri

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
A derisive interpretation of Gabriel Kuri’s work seems to make sense: coming in out of the Berlin cold to endorse an economy of objects, substantiated by their ‘showroom’ housing and the artist’s wry manipulation of form and artefact.

As the title, space made to measure object, made to measure space, suggests, a number of works have been made to fit the gallery, highlighting their instant aptness, while ridiculing the dysfunctional nature of 21st century ‘products’ and their disposable life spans. The temporal nature of ‘the exhibition’, aside from its duration, is exploited by Kuri and successfully turned on its head. With this sele

Live Undead

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Curated by former Transmission committee member and Glasgow-based artist Michael Hill Johnston, Live Undead brings together the work of ten painters from across Europe and America. Based around the theme of portraiture, it is a labour of love for Johnston, who has culled choice pieces from the vaults of Glasgow Museums and Scottish National Galleries, as well as from international and private collections.

This format is an unusual variation on Transmission’s commitment to showcase contemporary Scottish art in a broader context. Here, the exhibition includes historic artists. Walter Sickert, David Bomberg and André Derain make up the ‘undead’ contingent, t

Luke Fowler & Charlie Hammond

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Curator Gordon Schmidt gave Fowler and Hammond two directives for this exhibition at his Glasgow flat – ‘Show new work and keep the shutters closed’. By good fortune or intuitive design, this stage-managment has brought about an illuminating theatrical gloom which serves the works well.

In a perhaps predictable concession to galleryness, the screening room for Fowler’s five-minute 16mm film has all domestic clutter removed, save for three ailing chairs and a piano covered in a sheet. But gallery normality gives way to unease. In this dim, emptied space do we witness the visual evidence against the now evicted tenant?

Ambiguously titled ‘Ge

Keren Cytter

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
To emphasise the cinematic issues at play in her video works, Cytter calls them ‘films’. Here, she presents her latest (and perhaps most self-reflexive) ‘film’ to date, SOMETHING HAPPENED, 2007, alongside four drawings and a wall text.

The film, a home-made film noir complete with femme fatale and a gun in a drawer, follows an argument between a young man and woman that ends with both being shot dead. As in most of Cytter’s works, SOMETHING HAPPENED involves amateur performers and a domestic environment, here bathed in horror movie reddish light.

The film is influenced by Natalia Ginzburg’s book È stato così, 1947, thoug

Pablo Bronstein

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The quip ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ (variously attributed to Frank Zappa and Steve Martin among others), is subverted by the centrepiece to Pablo Bronstein’s new show.

Paternoster Square, all works 2008, is a video installation comprised of four screens bordering a square. On each we see ballet dancers on a stage which has three postmodern architectural props designed by Bronstein and Etienne Descloux. Bronstein’s voice is heard at regular intervals directing the green Lycra clad dancers to pose or change positions.

Their elegant movements within the sets, these models of public spaces, are regulated by the director

Anri Sala

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Outside it’s teeming. Shoppers in Christmas frenzy hoover up Piccadilly, and all its old-style excesses. Inside it’s dark. Pushing a heavy door of the discreetly labelled Hauser and Wirth gallery, the cold blackness is a relief.

Here, Albanian-born artist, Anri Sala, now based in Berlin, has installed reworkings of two works and one new one. The high-vaulted interior feels like a church, although until recently, it was a Midlands Bank. In one corner, spot-lit on a lecturn are gallery notes – written as part-musical score, part-scientific explanation. The creamy parchment and elegant type provide high-minded accompaniment to the videos that are alternately beamed

Queen West District Toronto

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Even on a humid summer’s day, Toronto’s Queen West gallery district thrives in the aftermath of Canada Day celebrations and on Quebec City’s 400th anniversary, commemorated on the Plains of Abraham, by a Van Halen concert that bids an incongruous sort of nod to the battle for identity in a country still so democratically young. One wonders if Pierre Trudeau, most famous of Canadian Prime Ministers, knew the reality of the quandary he created when declaring Canada a nation with ‘no official culture’, favouring wild diversity over safe shelter.

Given the ambiguous legacy of this ostensibly multicultural citizenry, Toronto’s notion of the local ha

Manifesta 7

16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This edition of Manifesta, established in 1996 as a meeting point between Eastern and Western European artists, was held in the autonomous Trentino-Alto Adige region of northern Italy, a mountainous border territory with a turbulent history. Normally based in a single city, the nomadic biennial reflects the particularities of each place; in fact, the 2006 exhibition, designated for politically volatile Nicosia, Cyprus, was cancelled at the last minute because of friction between the local organisers and the multinational curators. Titled 100 Miles in 100 Days, this year’s ambitious exhibition is the first to be scattered among various cities – Bolzano, Trento and R

Andreas Dobler: Uncertain Scenes

26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
An intermix of aesthetically similar, but fundamentally different architectures (brutalist, modernist, minimalist and international style) and a system of objects, are composed in Andreas Dobler’s portentous visions-in-paint. His depictions of post-apocalyptic landscapes, or as they are frequently, sky or space-scapes, open the possibility of narrative while remaining refined enough in content to maintain their relationship to the historical canons of landscape painting. Although he often challenges traditions by his use of media, acrylic, oil and spray-paint. This has developed in a practice that, since the 1980s, has remained committed to paint throughout the changing perceptions of

JG Ballard: Atrocity Exhibition

26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Earlier this year, the case of the Crown versus Michael Stone – who in 2006 invaded the Northern Ireland Assembly, threatening to slit the throats of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness(1) – took an interesting turn when the defendant claimed his actions had been a work of performance art. The convicted Loyalist killer presumably thought placing the assassination attempt within an avant-garde tradition would emphasise its essentially conceptual nature, strengthening the claim that he hadn’t meant any ‘real’ harm.

It’s interesting to compare this case with that of Marcus Sarjeant, who in 1981 fired a replica pistol at the Queen

Oreet Ashery

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘For me Marcus is never about mocking,’ Oreet Ashery once wrote, ‘I never mean to mock, on the contrary; for me it is always about belonging, albeit a double edged belonging.’

The Jerusalem-born, London-based performer and video artist was referring to her most poignant creation, Marcus Fisher, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who was her alter ego for many years, and direct or indirect subject of three of the five pieces included on this DVD.

The earliest of them, ‘Marcus Fisher’s Wake’, 2000, is a 16-minute-long mockumentary that traces his life from childhood. Raised by a mother who’d rejected the Orthodox co

The Mousetrap Book: On Dealing With Art Institutions In Contemporary Curatorial Practice

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
This little book poses a couple of big questions: are contemporary curators co-opted by the art institutions they work with, or, does a vibrant strain of opposition and alternative positions continue to draw on the legacy of institutional critique?

The best essays in the collection directly engage with the impact of the fall of Communism and the aggressive deregulation and liberalisation of Europe’s economies. Eleven texts are drawn from the Mousetrap Conference held in 2005 at Wyspa Institute of Art, located among the Gdansk shipyards of Poland. There is enormous variation and quality in the book. While while suffering from poor translation and proof reading, it neverthele

Melanie Gilligan: Prison for Objects

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The relationship between art and performance is an odd one. Performers from a theatre background emphasise projection, craft and nuance to make their delivery effective to the point of appearing mannered.

In contrast, when artists ‘perform,’ they underplay things to extremes of Method madness, all self-conscious fidgets, scratches and mumbling into beards. Both are routines, each one a well-practised schtick with its own set of protocols and nervous tics acquired from their individual historical circumstances.

Given the delivery of her line of inquiry here, such apposite tensions may be something London-based Canadian Melanie Gilligan might wish t

Die T?dliche Doris

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
‘The East Is Best, But The West Is Better.’ So declared German electro-primitivist duo Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft in 1981. Whether by accident or design, such a manifesto/gauntlet summed up the spirit and creative needs and contradictions of an austerity-era post-war generation who may have been physically hemmed in by the Berlin Wall, but were testing new boundaries beyond by sometimes literally bashing through it. Die Tödliche Doris – The Deadly Doris, often mis-translated as the Christiane F-ish Deadly Dose – was created and convened as an ever-mutating, imaginary and archetypal über-Frau by Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen along

Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Sound Art may yet to be co-opted into the mainstream, though the loose store it sets down for itself legitimises it in a way the current wave of ‘Noise’ acts, weaned on Metal and Hardcore, give a wide berth to. As a practitioner himself, both with bands such as Love Child and Run On, as well as more explicitly cross-artform projects such as Text Of Light, founded with Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth, Alan Licht is perfectly placed to observe how ‘avant-garde art is now commercially viable’. Anyone who stumbled through the theme-parking of the avant-garde in the British Library’s apparently un-ironically titled Breaking The Rules exhibition of 2007, will already be wi

Whispering In The Leaves

08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Chris Watson began his tape experiments as part of pioneering electronic band Cabaret Voltaire, and later co-founded The Hafler Trio. He has recorded albums for Touch Records, created sound installations across the world, recorded nature documentaries with David Attenborough and collaborated with artists including Alec Finlay and Hanna Tuulikki. He is currently working on ‘Whispering In The Leaves’ for 2008’s AV Festival in Sunderland.

What’s going on in the garden?

I was commissioned to do a sound piece for the Winter Gardens in Sunderland. It’s similar to the sorts of places I remember in Sheffield from when I was a kid.

Residency: Maria and Natalia Petschatnikov

26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Travelling can be tedious. Worries about connecting flights, visas, outsized luggage, materials that might be classified as highly explosive and then confiscated. And then there is always the thought that you aren’t going to find that village in the mountains in Spain or in the pine forests in Finland. No, it’s not travelling that make residencies so special for us; it’s having the privilege to live and work in such a variety of places we find so exciting.

Residency programmes can often be located in a remote areas away from the metropolis, surrounded by spectacular landscape. For a limited period of time a small, international group of strangers live together a

Emerging: Alan Stanners

26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Alan Stanners’ paintings reveal an investment in the legacies of surrealism, while retaining an astute questioning of what it means to revisit such legacies from present perspectives. With a mature clarity of approach, this interrogation maintains a self-aware position while embedding itself within the paintings themselves, objects already shot-through with an understanding of their history.

Masks lift off to reveal hollow, shadowy absences, disembodied, stretched-out faces reminiscent of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Two blackbirds peck at each other. These cliches work as ciphers for the inverted norm, the ‘other’, a surrealist intention. Anthropomorphised f

Emerging: Carla Scott Fullerton

26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The final year exhibition of work by students from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA programme is always a topic for discussion for artists in Scotland. This year’s show was no exception. The usual questions ensued. Was it a good vintage? What did you think of this work? Who do think will stay in Scotland? And so on.

One particular focus in 2008 was on the work of Scottish artist Carla Scott Fullerton whose sculptural installations were shown in the upper foyer of Glasgow’s Tramway. In this situation, Fullerton’s work undoubtedly benefited from having space to breathe and the opportunity to be seen (almost) in isolation from that of fellow graduates.

Report: Back to you: Contemporary performative practice

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
In 1979 Roselee Goldberg wrote in her groundbreaking survey publication Performance Art, ‘Live gestures have constantly been used as a weapon against the conventions of established art.’ This was certainly true of the radical concrete performance of 1960s and 70s practitioners such as Ulay and Abramovic, Gina Pane, Dennis Oppenheim and Chris Burden, which attempted to re-invest performed actions with a sense of realness.

This important sense of anti-illusionism was underlined when Marina Abramovic applied to Chris Burden for permission to restage his 1974 piece, ‘Trans-fixed’, as part of her Seven Easy Pieces season of re-enacted performances at the G

Residency: Abraham Cruzvillegas

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Roof out of line up with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chickenwire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong.
The fences and houses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes
William Carlos Williams

The main direction in my work is based on an attempt to forge a consciousness about the self-construction of identity. One of the main metaphors for this has been inspired by the process of construction of my parents’ house in Mexico City.

During the first half of my life I witnessed the slow construction of the house in which my family lives. The construction started in the mid-1960s, as part of a massive invasion of im

Emerging: Alex Gross

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
It’s summer and Alex Gross is on a road trip in the US with friend and fellow artist Sandy Smith. They are collaborating on works as they go, and have already had ‘hit and run’ shows in Las Vegas and Seattle. At Central Utah Art Center, their show, The Object Moved By Its Own Success, opened on 3 October. In December this year they are going to present some of this latest stuff in the New Work Scotland programme at Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery.

‘When we were starting this road trip’, Alex writes from Utah, ‘Sandy and I talked a lot about what kind of a relation with the environment we would put ourselves in... We actually started observ

Emerging: Phoebe Unwin

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
It’s an audacious start to a career by anyone’s standards. British painter Phoebe Unwin, in the three years since graduating from the Slade’s Fine Art MA course, has sold several works to Charles Saatchi, participated in some seven group shows in significant international venues (from Honor Fraser in LA to Thomas Dane in London), secured representation with major London gallery Wilkinson and produced enough work for three UK solo shows. Debate continues over the real impact of such a speedy career trajectory on the student artist – being unwittingly lobbed over the art world wall as opposed to a slow and careful scaling of its spiky defences. Unwin’s second solo

Folkestone Triennial

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
During the infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, faux news bulletins fooled many listeners into believing that an actual alien invasion was in progress; panic ensued and many fled their homes in terror. The radio play was adapted from HG Wells’ classic novel, reputedly penned during his time as a resident of Folkestone. This summer, the Kent seaside town has been subject to a different kind of invasion, one engendering a much less hysterical reaction.

Consciously modelling itself on Skulptur Projekte Münster, the inaugural Folkestone Triennial, curated by Andrea Schlieker, presents public artworks by 23 international contributors. Whereas Mü

Mark Neville

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Mark Neville’s solo show, Fancy Pictures, the result of a six-month residency on the Mount Stuart estate, hangs on its title well. A powerful little word, fancy – its many definitions being intricately connected – imagination in a capricious manner, a conception, an artistic ability to create whimsical imagery, decorative detail, an illusion, a whim, a liking, a taste, breeding of animals to develop points of beauty, much too costly, mild surprise.

Though Neville chose the phrase ‘fancy pictures’ to connect with a genre of 18th century paintings of rural life given a fantasy twist by Mercier and Gainsborough, his work li

Lucy Skaer

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
The art historian WJT Mitchell argues that, ‘we need to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive – but also dead; powerful – but also weak; meaningful – but also meaningless.’ Lucy Skaer’s artistic practice addresses just such paradoxes, demanding our attentiveness to them. Her solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket is conceptually astute in this regard, but also markedly beautiful. It made a convincing case for the ambition and quality of her work, which requires, but certainly repays, careful attention.

Skaer often engages in the mobilisation of images: they shift from one state to another, one medium to

Communication Suite

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Communication Suite draws on the experience of Christine Borland during her research as a NESTA Fellow when she explored the work carried out at the Wolfson Medical School Building in the University of Glasgow.

The Communication Suite is situated on the top floor of that building and is comprised of 10 pairs of rooms. These units combine a ‘consulting room’ with an adjacent classroom, linked by closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Actors, playing the role of patients, encounter medical students in the consulting room.

Meanwhile, next door, the remainder of the class assess each student’s ability to cope with difficult one-to-one situatio

Seth Price

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Writing about a Seth Price exhibition is problematic, as never was an artist so cannily aware of what is in play for the critic. Undoing any ambiguity that might reside in one’s role as observer, he even articulates how, in the process of writing, works otherwise kept in suspension in a gallery are given structure, in case I should have hoped to escape doing the same unnoticed.

Price’s medium is media – the communication, reproduction, dissemination and chaos that informs contemporary life. At 35, he is enjoying considerable success, having shown at the Whitney Biennial, PS1, Modern Art Oxford and many commercial galleries. According to Laura Cummings of th

Psycho Buildings

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
In late May I found myself in a huge plastic geodesic bubble on one of the Hayward Gallery’s terraces. It was hot, humid and painfully bright, and I was forced to put my jacket over my head as some sort of protection. Twenty feet above me on a kind of sealed mezzanine another visitor sprawled; the transparency of the dome made it look like he was flying, but his movements caused the whole thing to shake.

Five minutes and I’d had enough of this deeply uncomfortable, but impressively visceral experience. I had just experienced ‘Observatory, Air-Port City’, 2008, by a young Argentinian artist, Tomas Saraceno, who believes (according to the wall text)

Lothar Hempel

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
From the other side of the gallery window Lothar Hempel’s very mannered assemblages promote a sense of worry. Close to, evidence of his charming DIY aesthetic and humorous juxtaposition of materials softens but doesn’t altogether dispense with the concern that these are rather nice bits of nonsense. With the exception of John Hutchinson’s description of Hempel’s practice as sculptural tableaux within which everything but the kitchen sink is bound by the evocation of drama, the press release prose reads like the ramblings of someone firmly embedded within a fantastical existence. In the cool clinical container of the gallery such ardent and emotive expression seem

Chantal Akerman

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Ornate, spectacular, sentimental – these are terms that sit uncomfortably next to the oeuvre of Chantal Akerman, whose work is known for its domestic yet avant garde styling that has inspirationally defied the many categories that she spans – filmmaker, writer, artist to name a few. Yet there is something incongruous in the selected trio of works on show here. It seems necessary to revisit Akerman’s previous works immediately after the experience of this Camden show to recall she has indeed produced some of the most interesting film-based art in the past 40 years, even if those works are not present.

‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,

Alan Michael

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Alan Michael’s exhibition title Mood: Casual may state that the mood is to be a casual one, but his paintings ooze such technical precision they hardly portray nonchalance. The complex layering of detached objects, isolated words in trim typeface, vintage graphic design and intricate photorealism, quickly establish that it is not for the audience to be blasé. Indeed, the exhibition title refers to the free attitude of the artist in the cutting, tweaking and realistic rendering of images and ideas from a wealth of sources, an arbitrary process that generated each of the 18 paintings by Michael, the most recent participant of Art Now, Tate Britain’s long-running series of ex

Dawn Mellor

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Who to love? Who to hate? How to love? Who will see you in their dreams? Not Dawn Mellor, I hope. Hers are violent, mean and cruel, filled with ‘vile affections’. Everyone is fucked.

In A Curse on Your Walls, this cycle of large scale paintings, Dorothy Gale is fucked, she is really fucked up. She is a chopped up bloody mess impaled by delusional protest signs, ‘A STAR IS BORN’, ‘SUICIDE IS PAINLESS’, ‘THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME’, (‘Dead Dorothy’, 2008). Slavishly pushing a wheelbarrow of gold bricks, she is an exhausted coal miner with ruby red shoes, a half dead Auschwitz labourer with skeleton legs, a girl

The Great Transformation ? Art and Tactical Magic

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Phenomena aside from rationalism and scientific concepts are currently regaining popularity in the arts. Young artists are making use of the Satanist Aliester Crowley’s ethereal illustrations or historical spiritualistic photos as their source of formal inspiration, which for a while could only be classified as ‘outsider art’. The artistic fascination in the extrasensory is also fed by popular culture: mystery and horror films, hard rock and gothic subculture. The 1960s already witnessed a similar casual, even ironic handling of the theme; famous examples include Sigmar Polke’s ‘Höhere Wesen befehlen’ [Higher beings command], 1968,

A?da Ruilova

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Aïda Ruilova’s work is characterised by its direct address: her jump-cut editing technique and euro-horror references that pivot on an audio-visual axis. So it’s surprising that her new work on show here subtly contrasts with any preconceived interpretation. Listed as her first solo show in Germany, Ruilova has composed an exhibition of works that are unique in their content but long for a dislocation in time that is fragmented by diachronic referencing.

Inside Baudach’s hangar of a space Ruilova has constructed the inverse of a gallery: her physical works hung on the outside of what, for once, is actually a white cube. This may be due to practical

All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art examines the paradigmatic shift in art practice since the mid 1990s. It is a book that art students must read and one their tutors must take on board or risk becoming further out of touch. It is also a book for curators to look deep into. This is a book for readers ‘who don’t really see Art as a game for smartasses and know-it-alls’. It aligns itself with the more speculative and provisional aesthetic witnessed in recent exhibitions like Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and the most recent Berlin biennial. As co-editor of frieze, Heiser is an insider writing a daring book.

The chapter entitled &lsq

Art Power

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
At the root of this collection of essays by the professor of philosophy and art theory at the Academy of Design in Karlsruhe and global professor at New York University, seems to be a deep conviction that the power of art is underestimated in contemporary culture. The group of writings here, covering a ten-year period of critical output, take the opportunity to capitalise on the vantage point provided by the turn of the century, to reflect upon and examine some of the fundamental concerns informing the production and reception of contemporary art. His view is broad, taking in the impact of alarmingly nebulous qualities of global markets, the digitalisation of the image, the interface of art

The Sun, the Moon & Everything In Between

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Apparently, one legitimate type of academic research methodology is called the ‘snowball’ sample. As the name implies, this works by one piece of information connecting to several others, each of which leads to more knowledge being gathered, resulting in an ever-growing ball of research.

Some artists work in a similar manner, picking up information as they roll through the world, which, in the process of collation, grows into something whose structure creates its own momentum. Emmett Walsh’s title suggests that this process has a near infinite capacity. His book comprises 14 items of print and an audio CD.

Three pamphlets provide the bulk of the t

Paul Rooney

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
It’s a good life on the buses. Ask Paul Rooney, whose alter-ego revisits his alma mater via the tourist route on an open-topped double-decker in this newly commissioned video installation, which plays on the sort of wood-finish screen every des-res aspired to in the three-channel age.

Like a VHS version of Lindsay Anderson’s The White Bus, which sent A Taste Of Honey writer Shelagh Delaney’s own imagined self on an impressionistic voyage round her native Salford, Rooney’s journey isn’t so much into some urban heart of darkness, but visits a leaf-lined, heritage-industry limbo where the ghosts of wartime spies lurk.

Unlike The White Bus, the

17

09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Buying ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as your first ever record must be like visiting Venice – everything else is a bit of a letdown. And maybe like Bill Drummond you’d come up with the conclusion that in 2008 ‘all recorded music has run its course’. Perhaps it might have been better if that initial purchase had been ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ by Wings say, the sonic equivalent of being brought up in East Kilbride. After that, everything else can’t help but be fantastic. Poor Bill, a tin Pol Pot who craves a year zero for music; he remains the quixotic iconoclast embracing his ambiguities, openly fessing up to being ‘an unreconstruc

EMERGING: George Henry Longly

20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT
The objects George Henry Longly exhibits are associative, an assertion that goes far beyond their minimalist references. They are crammed with the psyche of the artist, creating a web of unspoken formal and conceptual communications between object, artist, audience, surrounding objects and gallery.

The artist’s sculptural works range from readymades, such as the curled lighting gel of ‘Gels’, 2007, and ‘Line moiré (Site Specific Rolled Vinyl Column)’, 2007, to the spot-lit cast concrete column, ‘Jeremy Brett’, 2007. Both sculpture and wall-work frequently makes reference to past architectural and decorative design movements, the cl

FOCUS: New York

20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When chief curator Nancy Spector entrusted the Guggenheim to ten artists representing relational aesthetics, no one could have suspected how prescient the result would seem in light of this fall’s economic meltdown. From early 1990s penury, the movement achieved the zenith suggested by a Guggenheim takeover, and suffered the same consequences as an inflated Wall Street: insolvency, despite years of interest.

The exhibition theanyspacewhatever is disjointed, alternately prim and unconsidered; it boldly leaves certain halls vacant without compensatory presence elsewhere; it gratifies the wit of some artists while understating the poetry of others; it is often c

Feminism: A Question of Readership

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Question 1 : To what extent is the nostalgia for the early stages of feminism an obstacle to its future?

Question 2 : Uncertainty over feminism in contemporary art discourse is due to its plural directions and multiple points of reference. Does this mean that feminism, as a term, is rendered inactive, or does it have greater agency by working through diverse networks in a dispersed state?

Question 3 : The recent resurgence of performativity relating to the female body is suggestive of a revisitation to historical concerns of feminism. Are there identifiable characteristics of a feminist heritage in contemporary

Charles Avery: Mythologies

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
harles Avery has harnessed a fertile imagination to a realist style of drawing since his earliest exhibitions. He has created, for example, the genealogy of ‘the Haselswon dynasty, a very dear family who never existed’. The numerous drawings that make up ‘The Life and Lineage of Nancy Haselswon’, 1999, evoke family holiday snaps, with slender, angular figures engaged in games, walks, discussions and a range of habitual group activities.

These figures are rendered in what has perhaps become Avery’s trademark style, alternating thin, effortless lines with dense, vertical strokes sparingly smattered with bold, usually, primary colours. Although bristling

Cyprien Gaillard: Recycling the Ruins

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
‘I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins... The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.’

Don DeLillo, White Noise

The work of French artist Cyprien Gaillard has inspired more than a few frissons for his synthesis of romantic landscapes, modernist ruins and land art ethos. Gaillard’s videos, collages, etchings and photographs disclose, however aesthetically, the blemishes of urbanism and the spectacular, destructive efforts to erase them. His lat

Lara Favaretto: The End of Motion

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
There is a history of movement that repeats itself mechanically, a history of automatism and shifting of function that ranges from how children learn to understand objects and language, through repetition, to kinetic art. It sweeps across autism and certain moments of negative and emancipatory thought, as in the case of Georges Bataille and his concept of dépense. It is a history of the pulsation and expenditure of energy.

In recent years, Italian artist Lara Favaretto (Treviso, 1973, lives and works in Turin) began to write a personal history of generosity and obsolescence through a work that focuses on an ambivalent treatment of the two opposite poles of aesthetic experie

Gerhard Richter: Radical Senses

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Gerhard Richter is wary of all ideologies and of all exclusive claims on the truth. Having grown up under two totalitarian regimes, first in Nazi Germany and secondly in communist East Germany, he has every cause to be mistrustful of people and causes that ‘have the answer’. This scepticism extends to Richter’s views on art as well as to his general philosophy. Asking himself the age-old question ‘What can I know about the world?’, he comes to the conclusion, ‘Only what my senses tell me. But that doesn’t mean I know anything about the real world, about objects in themselves’.

The trouble with sense impressions is that they cannot b

Michael Fullerton: Triangulation Theory

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
On April 9, 1799 Humphrey Davy discovered that pure nitrous oxide (laughing gas, N2O) was safe to inhale, and records that on the next day he became ‘absolutely intoxicated’ by breathing 16 quarts of it for ‘near seven minutes’.

In 1800 he published his findings under the title, ‘Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide’, thereby underlining the element of abstract speculation that accompanied his scientific activity.

The arts and the sciences were yet to diverge, and understanding the materiality of the world was a common cause among intellectuals, the foundation upon which reason and im

Merlin James: Yes Yes Yes

18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT
There are many ways to describe Merlin James: artist, writer, critic, sculptor of strange little buildings, collector, occasional curator, a painter’s painter and even a writer’s painter. All of which are correct, but without a doubt Merlin James is a painter first. He is an artist concerned and engaged with the craft and language of painting; in this I am referring to the object that is painted and the language ‘vision’ that constitutes ‘painting’. Here these two aspects sit both easily and uneasily together in his works.

Easily, because we have become so used to seeing paintings as the rectangle on the wall, very few of which today

HAYLEY TOMPKINS: HYPOTHETICALLY SEEING

20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hayley Tompkins’ work is easily many things: subtle, intuitive, abstract, intimate. But it is not easily photogenic. Tompkins recently sent me images of her contribution to a group exhibition at the CCA, Glasgow, six images, to be precise, for only four works. The surplus were photographs of a single painting coincidentally entitled ‘Variations’.

In the first image, ‘Variations’, 2008, a large tray collaged with photo fragments and painted in gold and silver, appeared to be simply variegated taupe. The second was pale mustard faded with silver, the third gold and dapple-grey. That this protean painting required three images was a case in p

Emerging: Stina Wirfelt

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Stina Wirfelt’s film, ‘Monuments’, 2008, is composed of still images and long, pregnant, black pauses. As is often the case with the artist’s films and photographs, this title contradicts expected paths of reason within the work.

Comprising a series of photographs shot by the artist, ‘Monuments’ documents a series of truncated, unfinished roads and abandoned highway ramps around Glasgow. In the fictional city of Metropolis, the deadpan voiceover describes these unused thoroughfares as remnants of ‘…a fallen paradise that remained standing – a constant reminder of what could have been’. Wirfelt casts the towering yet des

Emerging: Peter Simensky

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
It’s impossible to say what made this past winter in New York colder; the particularly bone-chilling temperatures, or the particularly depressed economy. Each day the news seemed bleaker, leading investors and news writers to ask, ‘Where is our money safe?’. In what seemed like a response, Peter Simensky opened Consulting Mediums. Finding meaning(s) in uncertain times, at SculptureCenter in New York’s Long Island City, as part of the In Practice series. Investigating the use of divining rods (a collection of tools made in shapes ranging from a three-pronged ‘Y’ structure to the ‘L’ and ‘U’ shaped rods, historically used for the prac

Report: Rediscoveries & De-Marginalisations

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
A typical rite of passage for the student of American literature is the life and work of JD Salinger, whose withdrawal from society and refusal to continue publishing often exercises an irresistible fascination. Such a fledgling might imagine that in his self-imposed exile the curmudgeonly Salinger has somehow discovered the secret of life. This fancy is often succeeded by visions of tracking him down and, by dint of some miracle of charm, wresting the secret from him. It would seem that this process, or rather the fascination that engenders it, is a kind of formula: artistic success + withdrawal = one and/or all of the following – superhuman wisdom, artistic nirvana and unassailable a

Report: Art, Adolescenc and Sociality

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
The email came through on 20 April: ‘Thousands of Teenagers to Flood Sleaford in New Artwork’. It was an evocative subject heading. I pictured the good people of that town unlocking the gun-rooms, issuing short arms to their womenfolk as the youngsters closed in.

I clicked and read on. The invasion, commissioned by Beacon Art Project, conceived by Kelly Large and entitled Our Name is Legion, was scheduled for an undisclosed date later that month. The plan was to film it ‘from a small non-rigid airship positioned high above the moving and densely packed mass’, the teenagers (wearing high-visibility vests to distinguish them from other citizens) app

Emerging: Rupert Ackroyd

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Rupert Ackroyd puts his constructed-sculptural approach to matter through the materialist strategies of consumer culture. His battles with weight and form, in cut-and-shut assemblages, monumental structures and modular installations, make humanoid opponents out of iconic pop-cultural symbols and the domestic effects of his showroom-styled arenas. But don’t expect an anti-consumption rant – the viewer is consistently pulled between the different associative territories of the studio and shop floor, the gallery plinth and the soapbox. Ackroyd conveys – through specific combinations of elements – the tragi-comic coalescence of brand and social, high-art and mass-market i

Production: Anja Kirschner & David Panos

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Where did ‘The Last Days of Jack Sheppard’, the film co-commissioned by CCA Glasgow, and Chisenhale London, begin?
The idea came several years ago while researching for ‘Polly II...’, 2006 (a distopian pirate adventure that collided 18th century London with sci-fi and soap opera elements). We came across Sheppard in Peter Linebaugh’s history of 18th century crime and punishment, The London Hanged, where he dedicates a chapter to him.

An outline film treatment for ‘The Last Days of Jack Sheppard’ existed since 2006, but at the time we were already working on another project and saw it as a potential feature treatment. After co

Emerging: Lynn Hynd

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Lynn Hynd’s latest works are unsettling post-painterly objects that can’t seem to settle down in any conventional dimension. Over the past century we have seen the humble collage, with its radical cut-n-paste techniques, evolve and shift into video editing, sculpture and architectural design. But collage cannot abandon the flat surface entirely. Recent works by this Glasgow-based artist find resonance from the existential threat posed on the two-dimensional world by a pair of scissors.

In a game of Stone-Paper-Scissors, it’s as if someone has removed the stone from the game, leaving the remaining ill-matched opponents to a showdown. Hynd’s work often compo

The New Easy

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Reviewed by Karen Archey

How easy can you get? Curated by Dutch performance artist Lars Eijssen, The New Easy combines a zeitgeist-appropriate curatorial statement with a solid line-up of emerging artists. Claiming that all work in the exhibition appears to be ‘conceived of in one second and created in three’ The New Easy’s structure proves too limiting to accommodate all the work on show, and regardless, a little flat. What’s the significance of ‘easy’ art, anyway?

Eijssen attempts to define a new artistic movement by opening up the exhibition’

Luke Fowler: The Way In

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
‘Bog isn’t a place for humans,’ says Luke Fowler, off-screen, to the eponymous star of ‘Bogman Palmjaguar’ near the beginning of the 30-minute, 2007 film. ‘It’s a wonderful environment,’ counters the self-christened Palmjaguar, a stocky, bearded, 57-year-old conservator of the waterlogged Flow Country in the Scottish Highlands, ‘and human beings can become a part of it.’ Anyone who has watched the Glasgow-based artist’s sequence of films since ‘What You See is Where You’re At’, 2001, Fowler’s skewed documentary about renegade psychiatrist RD Laing, knows that there’s a certain degree of metaphor a

Manon Dd Boer: Turning Around

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
In music, a cell is an isolated melody, a unit in a cyclical composition. In Attica, New York, a cell is six feet by nine feet and still bears the residuum of the 1971 prison riot that inspired American composer Frederick Rzewski to create ‘Coming Together’ and ‘Attica’, minimal compositions incorporating texts from two prison inmates. Both pieces feature in the film ‘Attica’, 2008, by Brussels- based artist Manon de Boer.

Played by a quartet, the first taut movements of ‘Coming Together’ transition into ‘Attica’, each musical cell added to a sequence and then successively removed. De Boer’s camera, first trained o

Haris Epaminonda: Images in Search of Lost Time

04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the novel’s protagonist K comes across a prison chaplain on his labyrinthine journey through the municipal legal system. During their first meeting the chaplain enquires about a book tucked under K’s arm. ‘What are you holding in your hand? Is it a prayer book?’ K answers the chaplain in the negative, explaining instead that the book is, ‘an album of the city’s tourist sights’. The chaplain demands that K throw away the book, to which he immediately acquiesces. As the book falls across the floor its pages are inadvertently torn.

Tucked under K’s arm during half the novel (a handbook he plan

Etienne Chambaud: The Hole of the Matter

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
In a work from 2007 entitled ‘Le Comble’, Etienne Chambaud compiled all the preparatory notes for his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lucile Corty, painted them black, and pinned them with magnets to a canvas brushed with black magnetic paint. If this suppression of content seems paradoxical or even maladroit, given how openly it is carried out, it also indicates something of Chambaud with regard to both his forebears and his peers – irreverence toward one kind of mystery, and devotion to another. The first could be called ‘the recondite’ or esoteric, an echelon of knowledge open only to the initiate. Among Chambaud’s neo-conceptualist peers, that knowled

Stephen Sutcliffe: Come to the Edge

14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT
A 1969 episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus includes a sketch in which an amateur dramatics group reconstruct the Battle of Pearl Harbour in a muddy field in West Yorkshire. The Python actors are in drag, wearing tweedy skirts or tea dresses and clutching their handbags before them. Eric Idle fronts the group, introducing the men as the ‘Batley Townswomen’s Guild’. With the cows grazing on the hill behind them, the actors assume their positions and Idle blows on his whistle.
The muddy scuffle that ensues forms the basis for Stephen Sutcliffe’s short film, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, 2008. Sutcliffe told me recently that he chose the footage

Report: The Rise of Art Publishing

18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT
A small crowd of people gather around the beer and bowls of monkey nuts served among the shelves in Donlon Books for the launch of Succulent Legume. Later, in a now heaving crowd, performances get underway – a mix of music, semi-nudity and slapstick gymnastics – a live equivalent to the collaged melange in the pages of the fanzine itself.

This is one of many launches at Donlon Books in the East End of London that demonstrates one of the key roles in artist-led publishing – bringing people together. The bookshop owner, Conor Donlon, and Ele Brown who works in the shop, run events there under the moniker X marks the Bökship. Like some return to the (in)famous

Emerging: Anna Molska

18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT
Anna Molksa’s film ‘The Weavers’, 2009, shown this year in Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, Broadway 1602, New York, and Kunsthalle Basel, is based on a play by the German Nobel Prize winner, playwright and novelist, Gerhart Johann Hauptmann (1862 - 1946). The social drama, written in 1892, depicts the mid-19th century weavers’ riots in the Owl Mountains of south west Poland. Molska’s re-make is set in the present day, in the context of Silesian miners. She has chosen only those scenes she thought were actual, but kept the original text, choir and author’s staging.

Although the original play was revolutionary, there is no rebellion in Molska&

Emerging: Corin Sworn

18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT
‘Swords are to be inspected by staff.’ This statement, along with a number of other seemingly non sequitur orders (‘Playing with water indoors is forbidden’ or ‘No sticks with nails in them’), form Corin Sworn’s silkscreen bill ‘The Rules’, 2006. The black and white print is rendered in high-waisted art nouveau typography and is encased in a deep border of whiplash curlicues – a design that gives an unlikely aesthetic sophistication to the otherwise authoritative dictates.

These are the rules of Summerhill, an alternative school founded in Dresden by Scottish progressive AS Neill in 1921, which was originally set up in o

REPORT: THE ARTIST REMAKE

08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Share |

If you listened up a bit, which is to say, if you stayed put for the duration, for the not-newly commissioned stuff, for some of the more cranky or inefficiently-told tales, the material reality of pre-suburbanised pre-professionalised downtown NYC of the 1960s and 70s, and the conditions, rage, un-archived anarchic output (not to mention the sexual militancy) it produced, was very much in evidence. Fortunately, Berlin remains a city in which vitriol has not yet been displaced by enthusiasm, politeness, grateful inclusion, or optimism as the tools of the cult

MAP COMMISSION: Nairy Baghramian

08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Share |

Q&A: Katy Dove and Victoria Morton

22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

PART ONE. Victoria talks to Katy about her new commission

KD BBC Scotland approached me about making an animation to project in their new building at Pacific Quay over the festive period – it was a brief I could interpret in my own way.

I had been taking photographs of winter landscapes over the years but had never known how to incorpora

Fiona Mackay, Morag Keil and Manuela Gernedel: 84 Paintings

30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Installation view of 84 Paintings, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2010.
For a while now I?ve been interested in the idea of painting as a project, that is, in the idea that an individual art object, such as a painting, cannot ultimately be regarded as an end in itself ? that the fundamental unit of ?work? that as viewers, as critics, as art lovers we seek to know, judge, and interpret is one of which the individual painting is typically just a segment. ?Project? is the name I give to this larger unit. When I go to an exhibition by Gerhard Richter, for instance, and start to wonder what it means t

Residency Silberkuppe

23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT
Silberkuppe ? what is the significance in the name?
The idea of the space and how we might go about running it came long before opening in May 2008. We had already sat around for ages deciding not ?what to renovate? or ?how sparingly to apply white paint? in our old space, which we sublet from the collective basso, before the name problem arose. Actually it was part of our idea to only do things that seemed really necessary. We thought a name for our space would somehow suggest itself as we started working, that we might even open nameless. The only thing that was clear was that we weren?t going to call the space after ourselves like a new brand of tea. From the beginni

EMERGING Jason Underhill

23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT
Of all the fattening cities across the globe, Los Angeles is the most in thrall to its suburbs. Seamed together by evocatively named trunk roads ? the Golden State Freeway, the Mojave Freeway, and (rather less poignantly) the Ronald Reagan Freeway ? Southern California is a frayed landscape of outlying conurbations that has spawned an entire genre of neo-gothic fantasies. Filmmakers, from Tim Burton to Tod Solondz and writers from Joan Didion to John Cheever, have found a map of sublimated and quashed desires within this landscape. Suburban sprawl is the subconscious of our civilisation and Los Angeles has the full Freudian psychic apparatus: there is a super-ego (Hollywood), an ego (

James Welling: Glass House

01 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Share |

Vilnius is a town like any other one in the world; it?s an ?anytown? with an old city, suburbs and has a legend concerning its founding. According to the myth, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf on top of a hill where he was supposed to (and eventually did) build a city. So, Vilnius was reputedly born out of a dream.
This myth inspired Kestutis Kuizinas and Ann Demeester, curators of the X Baltic Triennial of International Art, to create an exhibition about an imaginary city. The title of the exhibition, Urban Stories: Black Swans, True Ta

Glasgow: Mircea Cantor The Common Guild

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
?Which light kills you?, the work that lends its title to Mircea Cantor?s first exhibition in Scotland, consists of a lightbox-mounted photograph of an old light bulb, its surface spotted with the tiny corpses of dead flies.
A particularly spare and economical work in comparison with some of the other photographs, films and sculptures included here, it nonetheless aptly sets the tone for the show as a whole; as is often the case in Cantor?s practice, his wit and lightness of touch open onto worldly concerns. Here, an expired source of illumination re

Glasgow Votive

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
Writer, academic and curator Sarah Lowndes has gathered a variety of subtly poetic artworks and arranged them as if according to the uncanny logic you might meet at the heart of a dream. Votive is an economical exploration of three central themes: the intrigue generated by those carefully fabricated things which have since time immemorial supported magical narratives; the awe that even secularists can register when close to the minds and manners of humans capable of extraordinary devotion; and the idea of ?sculpture as event? ? matter fixed in the momen

Edinburgh: Darren Banks and Oonagh Hegarty

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
As I stood mesmerised by the phantasms emanating from the cornucopia of objects, drawings, videos and audio in Darren Banks and Oonagh Hegarty?s exhibitions at Sierra Metro, it struck me, that it is not God, but the devil who resides in the detail. In the chill ambience of the cavernous space, the spirits that hide in the subterranean recesses of ?popular culture? and ?domestic banality? can be glimpsed and heard. Both artists are soothsayers and alchemists, expertly attuned to channelling these malignant ghosts in our culture. In their reanimation

Session_7_Words

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
Session_7_Words comprises of works by 82 artists who all emailed a text piece that was then printed on a single sheet of A4 in Arial typeface and displayed. So, language is presented here first and foremost, with the words as close to a simple idea, or thought, as possible. With this in mind, the show might be seen as a dissembled book with its pages torn out and stuck on the walls ? a ?rattle bag? anthology of poetic ideas pasted up in an otherwise empty space. All printed sheets are attached at reading height and the mode of visual address is no

London: Anthony Gree

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
19 November ? 19 December
Limoncello For Anthony Green, surface is everything. The artist?s wall-based practice of mixedmedia sculptural assemblage and graphite drawing transforms a disparate array of objects into an aerial geography of lines, colours, patterns, forms and counter forms. Six graphite on paper works, despite an airy lightness of touch visible in Green?s semiabstract drawing, leave no surface uncovered in their relentless shading. Attention to surface, and indeed the inclusion of some mainstays of graphic design history (archive copies of

London: Ruth Buchanan

07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT
In 1971 British filmmaker Annabel Nicolson made ?Slides?, an 11-minute silent work that demonstrates a strip of film being run through a contact printer and then refilmed in a convulsive up-down pattern that Nicolson orchestrates. Constructed from cut-up fragments of Nicolson?s previous works, ?Slides? is a strip of re-filmed-film that reveals sprocket holes, colour flashes and the occasional recognisable image. Watching this work the viewer is rendered into a confounded state of trying-to-look.
?Several Attentions?, a 16mm film shown as

Dispatches from Ben Rivers on location for his forthcoming sci-fi project

23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT
This will have to be a bit rushed. I?ve just left Japan and I?m on my way to Tuvalu ? a place that is disappearing into the Pacific Ocean never to be seen again (well, in 20?30 years or so). I?d just like to see it before it disappears. I read about it when I was young. It has the lure of the Arctic. But I had to wait for a commission opportunity so that I could argue my case to go there and do a project. It?s a good location for the project I?m currently working on ? a four-part post-apocalyptic sci-fi. After 30 years of watching films like Glen and Randa, A Boy and his Dog, The Quiet Earth, Zardoz, it seemed about time I made one myself.
It all started when the art organisation Picture

The Exhibitionist: Journal on Exhibition Making

03 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The Exhibitionist calls itself a journal ?by curators, for curators?, a slogan that makes it sound titillatingly exclusive. Indeed, the front cover of this first issue features the fa?ade of Duchamp?s ?Etant Donn?es? with its two peepholes, beckoning the reader to peek inside. Disappointingly, there is no hidden erotic scene behind this door, just a lot of text and a smattering of mostly black-and-white installation shots about which only curators could have wet dreams. Likewise, there is little insider gossip or divulging of curatorial secrets ? no top tips for the next hottest art region, the biennial

Perpetual Inventory:Rosalind E Krauss

30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT
This anthology of essays and reviews by the redoubtable American critic serves as sequel to the 1986 landmark, Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. In that book Krauss set out to demonstrate that criticism and art are interesting because of meanings revealed on consideration of their methods. The intention there was to allow insight from analysis of method to supersede the meaning of any value expressed in a critic?s poetic judgement of a particular work. The critic?s role as spirit guide for the private message of the art maker was much less important to Krauss than what the method of the critic might bring to the artwork as an open site of discursive potential.