ART
R-Cade/On A Plate
Glasgow Print Studio until 14 Aug flint Once upon a time, talking about money in the art world was regarded as vulgar. Not any more: two shows at Glasgow Print Studio - On A Plate and R-Cade - are determined to prize open your wallets, set the moths free and liberate your hard-earned cash.
On A Plate features the work of eighteen artists who have decorated and designed a range of plates. mugs and functional/dysfunctional household objects. All of these items are on sale at 'affordable prices' - £50 being the going rate for a plate.
The exhibits are broadly traditional
in their subject matter and
technique. For instance, Will Maw's
work is rendered in a graphically
striking style - crude, bold black
lines and primary colours, familiar to
any fans of German Expressionism.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Ruth Greer presents delicate, Edenic images of Adam and Eve and angels. If Maw‘s plates are perhaps suitable for eating pie, chips and beans on, Greer's seem more receptive to a subtle arrangement of new potatoes, salad and salmon.
Next door, the Glasgow-based group Lapland present a markedly different approach to the production of art for sale. While On A Plate is traditional and craft-based, R- Cade is by turns cool, funky, hi-tech, lo-tech, expensive and cheap. This is a far looser, infinitely more varied art shop, packed with computer games, T-shirts, prints, sculptures, paintings, mutant domestic objects and photographs.
Karen Vaughan will sell you an amusingly stupid knit- your-own dominoes kit for £38, while Peter McCaughey and Dave Bellingham offer a miniature spherical chess set
Part of Cookie Will Persist by Jim Hamlyn
in precious metal for £310. Meanwhile, for techno luddites, Torsten Lauschman and John Constant have produced the perfect antidote to computer rage with a CD version of Space Invaders (£7) which allows you to shoot down the dreaded ‘Restart And Shut Down' message of doom.
Jim Hamlyn also puts the computer to good use in his virtual gallery. On CD he has constructed a realistically rendered 30 world of desert islands in which a selection of artworks reside. After climbing a walkway to an isolated building, the artists’ works materialise either in the form of a video clip or an interactive collection of pictures and text. The piece works well as a commodity, being attractively produced, conceptually neat and, most importantly, financially affordable at £15. Shop till you drop. (John Beagles)
A souvenir of Coney Island: printed on rayon cushion cover, America 1950s
to far more exotic chines.
There's London buses and Russian dolls, Empire State Buildings and Eiffel Towers, flamenco dancers and can-can girls, all in perfectly formed iiiiniature that would look just lovely on the mantlepiece, pet. EspeCially that smashing glow in the dark Our Lady of Lourdes mannequin. Nessie was there of course, looking far cuddlier than whenever she's spotted bobbing on the Loch. There's brass, glass and badges of honour from days gone by. And look, there’s relics from the World's Fair and the Silver Jubilee. Maybe I should get my Millennium Dome mug now. It'll be worth a few bob in no time, I shouldn’t wonder
It's not just holiday junk either. There's a Bay City Rollers Fan Club pack and some Elvis memorabilia. Good job I kept hold of my Spice Girls ticket stub. Best of all, though, was walking down a mock-up of Blackpool Prom. There's Kiss Me Quick hats, picnic flasks and pink sticks of rock And the tower and the beach, of cOurse I almost Wish I'd brought my bucket and spade. There's Mickey and Minnie in Disneyland and tea towels from everywhere. And lots of those little glass globes you shake so it snows, even in summer, wherever you are in the world . . .
Sentimental Journey Edinburgh: Royal Museum, until 9 Jan ****
Dear All, Hi-de-hi! Well, tourist season's in full swing once again, so I thought I'd drop you a line on a non-saucy
80 TIIEIJST 22 Jul—5 Aug 1999
postcard to tell you all about a top exhibition I've just seen. Sentimental Journey is a great day-trip trawl through all that holiday tat you cram in your suitcase to remind you of fun in the sun. Or not, if it's Dunoon. Judging by the look of it, though, someone's been
Mind you, it’s not like that anymore. Holiday romance is a thing of the mm. and going to lbiza’s a trip in every sense of the word. But, just for a'day, you can pretend the modern world never happened. Wish you were here. (Neil Cooper)
London Photographic Awards
Glasgow: Street level Gallery, until 14 Allg it; i as
This annual touring show, now in its second year, invrtes entrants to interpret a particular poem — an emotional snapshot which inVites, but nevei imposes, description. This year's brief was Shelley's ‘Love, Hope, Desire and Fear, the four elements that frame the heart’ and the pick of the entries is as diverse as you'd expect of twenty photographers from various countries and backgrounds.
Among the most striking are Britta lastliinski's menacing animal studies, Philip Lee Harvey's tearful, anguished man and Adrian Ensor's beach scene, a vast hazy expanse broken up by two disparate figures. Julie Kim Rossiter's gold-saturated portraits of a young woman echo Gustav Klimt, and there's humour too, With 80 Haylen's Cycling nun freewheeling through a medieval town, legs stuck out in front like a Chlld. Glen Perotte goes for rather heavy-handed symbolism With a bullet, condom, flickering candle and (human?) heart.
If many of the works have at least a hint of the ad world about them, that's because the organisers aim to break down barriers between 'pure’ and ’applied’ commercial photography. A mixed bag but plenty to hold the interest (Sam Phipps)
Untitled by Britta Jaschinski
Artpark '99
Glasgow: House For An Art Lover, until Thu 30 Sep e a: it
It has been a big step for the House For An Art Lover to expand into its surroundings in Bellahouston Park, and the move is intended as the first stage in a bid to become a new outdoor venue for the Clly.
It was perhaps ineVitable that public sculpture would be the chosen media for the first project. The five sculptures selected range from the big guns like Doug Cocker to the work of younger artists like Marion Smith's gilded cone and Aeneas Wilder's seed pod. There's a healthy variety of means and materials, with highlights in Paul Cosgrove's pigeon loft and Peter Bevan's grove of ceramic palms buds.
It Will be fascinating to see which way Artpark might develop. Contrasted with some of the work going on in Glasgow — as part of the Five Spaces project, say - it all seems a little genteel. Or maybe that's just the impression .created by the new landscaping — the day we get beyond planting endless begonias in straight lines will be the day that art really reaches our parks. (Moira Jeffrey)