musical/W... Festival Visual Art
:thvouébb‘mss'fo“ HOLYROOD - GROUP SHOW Attic Salt, Edinburgh. until Sat 2 Sep
O... i. , I l 2' v v ..«- 4' V . w - 1' - - ‘ .' I.li""’,:-4.'.;‘ :'::' ' . 'fl __ .z' r' :3 . '- :- ‘ v s “W ".‘:"“- l ', 2” 2 " " " 1' 1" : Tapes‘ry ' “.4. fl ' . ' - "" " “W ' byI-lermanBas - t - l1 ‘5' I.” ' l - dz g . cmwowen sovuooo l.. . . . ... . _GROUPSHOW ' .a, yiesacenaurinan “" W ’ ' ' ' ' ' ' I, " ' ' Talbot Rice Gallery. University of Edinburgh, until Sat express'on'St'c 'andscape' anomer '5 sup'"e 0” the (in, . “923+ ,7 .2 ' . ,z ' '. 30 Sep ..... back of an enormous swan. Mythology is queer and l' ,1. Il' .rewuzf'“ :.: .' ' : '- : '. ' ’ wonderful, gaudy and glorious, with Eros and \‘J-wi it - 2' x. ' ' ~- 2. Infantile fantasies present a rich dark seam of Thanatos always ready to mate. In some paintings subject matter that is eternally mined by the artist‘s figures don‘t ‘play nice' and we remember the terror paintbrush. In saying this we must remember that of childhood. Vanessa Phaff‘s girls are fascists, the psychic complexes that have been thrown over whose murderous tempers have been unleashed. the unformed ego like a sharp wire net are not The works on show are not necessarily explicit in process that are anchored in time, ie lost to their sexual imagery, but we are presented with the childhood. The Freudian and Lacanian mythic sometimes uncompromising, blunt version of sexed metaphors that shape the psyche are continually subjectivity (sexuation) that the adult finds when shifting states that are returned to and rewritten ‘looking through the eyes of a child.‘ In Bourgeois with each experience of self and other. The prints ‘Male and Female‘ (2005) we see a exhibition of paintings and prints at the Talbot Rice, Freudian/Kleinian version of the child‘s sexual delves into these metaphorical webs, untangling the fantasies, with genitals reduced to cones and fantastical correspondences that spin out from the sockets, and the ‘good mother‘ and ‘bad mother' unconscious through the artists‘ fingertips. represented as impersonal goddesses, the The exhibition flows from Technicolour daydreams embodiment of universals. In Bourgeois‘ ‘The Laws to the starkness of black and white nightmares; of Nature' (five prints of a man and woman adult sexuality is shown to dwell in the messy space attempting and failing to manage gymnastic sex) between the two (in the work of Louise Bourgeois we are reminded that ‘there is no sexual and Kiki Smith, for example). Girls and boys, at this relationship‘, as Lacan would have it, only the stage still occupying very separate worlds, frolic fantasies of omnipotence in childhood.
and gambol, looking both impossibly pre-pubescent (Alexander Kennedy)
;%\‘\‘;"_LJE ~ ’3'?" “W LAURA FORD - ARMOUR BOYS . Royal Scottish Academy. Edinburgh. until 10 Sep 000 I I (‘1 ‘.t ' t x :1 SI‘ .l‘»: i Ht" "i 1' I‘ M" l' . \.
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' THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 103