Visual Art
REVIEW ltlixl E) i'v‘l Ul, UNRELIABLE WITNESS Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 7 Dec 0000
Who says the world isn't flat? Not, one suspects, any of the six artists playing with personas, pseudo-science, imagined histories and parallel universes in a show that creates a set of brand new myths made in their own (self) image. The first thing you see is a series of billboard-sized hoardings featuring a publicity still of 19905 Glasgow band AC Acoustics. In real life noted for a low-key and lo-fi presence on Glasgow’s indie scene, the monumental scale of Michael Fullarton’s posters suggests all-consuming world-domination on a monumental scale. Two smaller paintings tucked to the side accentuate the effect.
Peter Friedl’s ‘Liberty City’ loops the sort of blurred vérité sensationalism seen on late-night true crime reality TV shows. As rioters kick a cop senseless, you’re willing whoever’s filming to intervene. The realisation that it’s a reconstruction of actual riots doesn’t make you feel any less uneasy. Beside it, Gabriella Vanga’s ‘George’ offers clues to an imaginary boyfriend with an identikit jigsaw that bestows even
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more intrigue on an already secret identity. On a screen at the other end of the room, Andrea Fraser gives her ‘Official Welcome’ lecture, a wrny insistent 30-minute video subversion of art institution politesse, in which she plays all the parts. On the walls opposite, stills from an unedited DVD set in a hotel room suggests a more intimate exchange of consensual creative acts.
Susan Hiller’s hand-crafted boxes in ‘From The Freud Museum’ contain meticulously arranged displays of ornamental cows, while individually wrapped bags of soil from each of Ireland’s six counties suggest arcane preciousness. Finally, Nedko Solakov’s installation, ‘The Truth (The Earth Is Plane, The World Is Flat)’ carves out an elaborately justified piece of conspiracy theory crankery.
Such a world turned upside-down mix-up is somehow inkeeping with the recent vogue for fantasy-wish- fulfilment reconstructions. The fact that all the works here are isolated from each other suggests that if these very special worlds collided, the fall-out could result in something even more seismically unreal. A notion, of course, that isn’t scientifically proven in any way, shape or form. (Neil Cooper)
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REVIEW DRAWINGS
RICHARD FORSTER
lngleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 22 Nov 0000
Recalling poet laureate John Masefield's most famous poem, Sea Fever (‘I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied'). Untitled (Seascapes). Forster‘s first solo exhibition in Scotland, is a spume-flecked revelation. These 45 detailed works. the result of many months' intensive work are near photographic rectangular pencil drawings mounted on light gray board and housed in light pine frame document. Their trajectory maps the ever-changing nature of the sea.
In some of the images froth and foam encompass the tide line. while in others the spray makes the image go fuzzy, the journey around this delightful space taking on the resonance of Eadweard Muybridge‘s zoopraxiscope early motion studies (with just a hint of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe's studies of the Whitby harbour». Forster uses the power of repetition to examine both the universality of the feelings brought about by simply staring at an encroaching or retreating tide. His graphite drawings travel from light to dark, hyper-real to grainy and misty absUacnon.
Ultimately. this collection of deceptively simple images is a meditative work. one informed more by infinitesimal variations than anything else. Time spent circumnavigating this space will pay off for those of a laid-back disposition. as Michael Bracewell points out in his eloquent catalogue introduction: ‘ln tone and temper, Forster's drawings of the sea inspire both contemplation and wonder, their fidelity to nature seems to edify the viewer.‘ (Paul Dale)
Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 18 Dec 00.
The work of the three artists in this group show is rich and multi-layered. but there's a lack of austerity. which makes each piece readily available to the viewer. The first work in the series. Gregory Chatonsky's ‘I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself'. is an interactive one. A red—lit, fingertip-shaped pad invites us to press our thumbs against it. and then recreates the fine skin contours as a monochrome image on a screen. This image slowly degrades. suggesting a meditation on — or a warning about — the dissemination of personal information.
The other artists here deal in a different kind of body fear. Michael Zansky's large digital photographs. while impressive. are also fitfully eerie. Within them, he mixes and matches parts of plastic dolls. plaster busts and a toy monkey to create warped. otherworldly characters in tableaux like ‘2348 BC' and 'Vacation on Mars'. developing a freakish grotesquery of strangely humanised beings.
In Michael Rees' ‘Putto' diptych. meanwhile. a disconcerting bronze statue of a centipede-like elongated torso lined by eight human legs is shown in sickening. all- too-realistic motion Within a blurred animation. Rees‘ other pieces, meanwhile, are semi-abstract plaster shapes which could conceivably be collections of bones. digits or internal organs. Where the curator explicitly states that he wishes this to be a consideration of the aspects of scale involved in each work, the title more closely relates to a creeping. lizard-scale sense of physical fear. (DaVid Pollock)