MIXED MEDIA
ROBERT THERRIEN lnverleith House, Royal Botanical Gardens, Sat 7 Aug-Sun 31 Oct
lnverleith House has a long- standing reputation for exhibiting work that benefits from and plays with the gallery’s unique setting, j ‘~~.-.._\ and in Robert Therrien they could hardly have chosen a more suitable artist to mark their opening after refurbishment. Therrien, in his more recent practice, fashions a world where the everyday is rendered fantastic, an alternate reality that calls to mind fairytales or cartoons. Often he plays with scale to examine his quotidian surroundings, making a table and chairs fit for a giant, or a stack of plates that tower over gallery-goers. ‘The artist’s point of view - from the small world - could be viewed as a large gesture publicly,’ he explains. ‘The practice is creating something both large and small. Publicly, Table and Chairs is perceived as a big object, where it actually originated from a small detail - a corner bracket supporting the table leg. Instead of crawling underneath and photographing an actual table in order to see it, why not shrink yourself and take a normal snapshot?’ As well as altering the familiar, Therrien deals directly with the fantastic.
New work for this show, the artist’s belated first solo outing in the UK, includes a series of beard sculptures. ‘The familiar and the unfamiliar both have fascinations,’ he says. ‘A good example of the
unfamiliar would be the beards. I don’t have a beard, and, in fact, I don’t
know many people who do.’
While Therrien likes to talk in simple terms about his work, which does indeed operate on the simple level of fable and fairytale, its strength is in complex tensions between abstraction and representation, between Duchampian appropriation and fantastic creation; between visual impact and dense conceptual concerns. Whether blowing up domestic objects to Brobdignagian proportions, or refining cultural commonplaces to an absurd degree, Ferrien’s playfulness extends beyond the immediate shock of seeing workaday objects transformed, tickling the mind as well as the eye. ‘There is a balancing act, perhaps that’s true,’ Therrien says of these apparent
From A Wee Bit Far by Amy Marietta on show at Totalkunst
14 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 5—12 Aug 2004
Table and Chairs
paradoxes. ‘There’s a huge conflict between what an object ends up
being and the idea which started it. People my age grew up with
sketchbooks.’
(Jack Mottram)
ARTIST-RUN FESTIVAL
THE EDINBURGH ANNUALE Aurora. the Embassy, Magnifitat, Totalkunst, Wuthering Heights. See listings for details
Cutting a clear path through the notion that in order to be a working artist creating relevant. interesting work for view you need some sort of funds or the backing of an established gallery — the artist-run cooperatives springing up across Edinburgh strip the creative mindset back to its three guiding principles. That is — talent. ingenuity and desire.
In some ways. then, it seems odd that the most well known of these are apparently seeking to emulate the extravagant Biennale tradition. Not so. says Kim Coleman. co-director of artist-run outfit the Embassy and originator of the Edinburgh Annuale. ‘I was just joking around when I had the idea.’ she laughs. ‘I was at the Prague Biennale last summer. and I looked around and realised how much money they put into these things. It's all very swanky. l jokingly said we could easily put on our own Edinburgh Annuale next year. and it all sort of came true from there.“
Where money is no object for the big boys of the European art scene. however. the object is no
abstraction. Many of us worked our way out of it, where abstract artists had worked their way out of the representational. Sometimes I think we should work our way back: maybe we were better off. In my sketchbooks, one subject, directly or indirectly, on different levels unfolds. In fact, a person could become unbalanced if it weren’t for
And, it seems fair to say, a person could become a little unbalanced wandering through Therrien’s world, particularly when that world is conjured up at lnverleith House, a rather magical place itself.
money in Coleman's case. The Embassy has limited funds. while her other project Magnifitat (also showing as part of the Annuale. and based in her own Bruntsfield flat) has precisely no budget. The other contributing projects — Aurora. the Forest Cafe's Totalkunst and the similarly flat-based Wuthering Heights — are equally hamstrung. which is kind of the point.
‘lt's just really a way of tying together all of these projects temporarily.‘ says Coleman. ‘80 that anyone visiting the city will easily be able to find out what’s happening in terms of all the artist-run spaces in Edinburgh. If you visit one. the programme will tell you what's happening elsewhere. when. and how to get there — which is important when people who don't know the city will be viewing.‘
Essentially. then. it's strength in numbers for a small group of players who play an important part on the city's scene. ‘Artist-run galleries encourage people to stay in the city.‘ concludes Coleman. ‘They enc0urage people to work. they develop an audience for contemporary art. Really. they're essential in terms of developing an artistic and cultural scene in the city.‘ (David Pollock)