Visual Art
Review
PAINTING. SCULPTURE AND DESIGN
CHOICE - TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF COLLECTING FOR SCOTLAND
Royal Scottish Academy Building, Edinburgh, until Mon 21 January 2006
With twenty-one years of collecting, a substantial budget and a suitably catholic taste, Choice at the Royal Scottish Academy Building, marks the departure of Sir Timothy Clifford, who steps down as Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland in January 2006, to be replaced by John Leighton later that year.
Five hundred objets d’art ranging from works from Raphael to Hirst are included in this aesthetic melange — a glorious exercise in beauty and narcissism. And something close to piety. Acquiring art becomes an act of devotion in itself, to belief (although it is repulsive to turn art into a religion), to an ideal, to history, and the rooms filled with Renaissance devotional art (Botticelli’s The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ 1444, being a central piece) are breathtaking.
There is a strong Scottish heart to the work dated from the mid 18th century, where important works by Gavin Hamilton, Allan Ramsay, David Allan and Sir Henry Raeburn remind the viewer of the importance of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, and that its philosophical projects stretch to our current epoch. That said, the contemporary Scottish (and English) work is slight, and resembles an exercise in what could be perceived as questionable taste: a Hirst spin painting Beautiful C Painting 1996, and one of Howard Hodgkin’s big brush daubings Memories 1999 fighting it out, with Jim Lambie’s mattress covered in buttons acting as a pearly crash mat. Francis Bacon’s Figure Study I 1945-6, is hideous for all the wrong reasons - not the usual nightmarish subject matter but an amateurish approach to mark-making and colour.
But it’s easy to forget these mistakes and continue your promenade through twenty-one years of an enviable career. (Alexander Kennedy)
Music is Liquid by Fabien Verschaere
FILM INSTALLATION. DRAWING AND SCULPTURE KADER ATTIA, ROB KENNEDY ROSALIND NASHASHIBI #flfiEYsSKAEl-‘t AND FABIEN VERSCHAERE - IN BETWEEN
Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 20 Nov 0000
In Between Times is one of six satellite shows in elliptical orbit around this year's Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon — althOugh there seem to be no explicit links to the Biennale beyond fostering a bit of Franco-Scottish freundschaft. The five artists here share. broadly speaking. an interest in the everyday. unpicking daily interactions. turning over commonplaces in their hands.
Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer have joined forces to make a filmic portrait of the British Consul General to Hong Kong. who is shown doing not much at all in his official residence. It‘s a Quiet look at a Iiminal figure. a post-colonial occidental in the Orient. and a portrait that seeks to present rather than draw conclusions. Kader Attia. who in the past has covered similar ground to Nashashibi and Skaer. focusing on class and nationality. here homes-in on the domestic. turning the humble tick- tock of an alarm clock into a claustrophobic psychodrama. imprisoning innocuous sounds in a grim black cube.
Rob Kennedy makes good use of s0und. too. His ‘Between Yes and No Stop and (30' features a syrupy piano refrain. accompanying painfully slow motion footage from a news network. amplifying the co-hosting couple's every gesture into one of high romance. as TV snow projects onto a panel covered in snippets of text ab0ut translation and anonymous images Culled from newspapers. In this context. Fabien Verschaere's work doesn't quite fit: where his fellows investigate. he apprOpriates. There is a long. dizzying wall drawing littered with hokey slogans. ghosts. superheroes. cobras. saints and winged hypodermic Syringes. This jolly hotchpotch of references (like the automatic drawing of a man reared on a strict cultural diet of undergr0und comics and Heat magazine) leads to an animation. in which more of the same unfolds to a godawful. preSLimably ironic. electroclash soundtrack. ‘Music is Liquid' (pictured) dominates the centre of the space. a large- scale construction resting on an unruly blob of carpet. (Jack Mottram)
92 THE LIST 3—1 7 Nov 2005
The Three Graces by Antonio Canova
MIXED MEDIA NEW WORK SCOTLAND 14 Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 19 Nov .000
Notions of religion. tribalism and the sense of misunderstanding when looking in on these worlds permeate the work shown by Neil Clements and Alberta Whittle — artists exhibiting at Collective's latest New Work Scotland 74. In this respect. each may be viewed as opposite sides of the same com. with Whittle extolling an inclusive. compassionate worldview and Clements referencing Norwegian Black Metal and its corresponding anti-Christian values.
Using the 1992 arson attack on Fantoft church in Norway by Black Metallists. Clements marries a field recording of a walk he took around the old site of the church to a black matt on black gloss landscape paintings. The effect is Blair Witch eerie. and perhaps sums up the nihilistic. potent fury felt by teen followers of this musical sub-culture with more precision than the unlistenable dark quagmire of the music itself.
Whittle. on the other hand. emphasises the symbolic religious light over Clements‘ darkness. although her work is somehow more subversive in its blending of Christianity with other religious cultures. The centrepiece is a film named 'Fiat Lux' (pictured) which takes its inspiration from Jean Rhys' 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. and shows a morning baptismal ceremony in a river in Barbados (Whittle's childhood home). Derived from an Ethiopian tradition. it's characterised by much religious pageantry. yet most likely relates directly to nascent Christianity. Presenting it alongside a wall mural of the Virgin Mary and a woman in a burkha in Similar poses. Whittle makes the point that tribes are all inscrutable from the Outside. (David Pollock)
Fiat Lux by Alberta Whittle