Festival Visual Art
REVIEW MARTIN CREED: DOWN OVER UP Playful exercise in keeping order from Turner Prize winning artist ●●●●●
It’s tough at the top, as class-conscious ex-Animal Alan Price once sang. Price also added that it’s rougher at the bottom, and positively boring in-between. Equally pertinent to the irresistible rise of Martin Creed is Robin the Frog’s maxim that halfway up the stairs is neither up nor down. Creed proves himself no Muppet, however, in this series of well-ordered games with scale(s), even if some of the works resemble the wet dreams of an autistic shelf stacker-turned-furniture removal man with a Russian doll fetish and mild obsessive-compulsive disorder.
A series of tables, chairs and boxes are built up into neat little towers, with the smallest of each at the top. Planks of wood are stacked in an orderly pile. Different-sized nails are banged into a wall and set against each other like maids in a row. The rising and descending steps of a series of coloured felt tip-festooned paper hangings move through the spectrum and at times resemble the pecking order of Olympic podiums. A film shows a tiny Chihuahua at play with what looks like a (hungry) wolf. All of which suggests that size really does matter as much as
the mathematical precision of each artefact’s conception and construction. This reflects the works’ hard-to-pin-down namelessness, with only Creed’s chronologically catalogued numbers to hang onto. It also points to Creed as a man who understands the structural simplicities of a verse-chorus-verse- chorus pop tune and the power that comes with it. Everything’s in its place in these variations on a theme, and there’s a place for everything. If the much vaunted musical staircase is a bit Fisher Price, then
the singing lift is as swooshingly precise as a Philip Glass chorale. Overall, Down Over Up is a playful exercise in keeping order that doesn’t so much rip up the rulebook as rearrange the index in his own archivist’s image. Stepping out has never looked like so much fun. (Neil Cooper) ■ Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 31 Oct, free.
REVIEW IMPRESSIONIST GARDENS Remarkable exhibition of iconic, influential works ●●●●●
The National Galleries of Scotland’s ambitious exhibition brings together around 100 paintings focusing on the garden as subject for impressionist painters: remarkably the first show of its kind to have been held anywhere in the world. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting line-up for a summer exhibition, with a
dizzying collection of works by painters such as Monet, Manet and Pissarro that demonstrate not only these artists’ passion for the subject matter but also the dialogue they opened up between artist and nature by taking their practice out of the studio and working directly outside.
But the exhibition covers ground that goes far beyond what might be expected in a show about the movement. Instead, starting with the origins of impressionism, it provides a social, as well as artistic, narrative, exploring the garden not only as subject matter but also as a social and historical phenomenon. Supported by botanical illustrations and other book extracts, the show conveys the cultural significance of the garden at the time, as well as the growing enthusiasm for horticulture and how this was influencing the way people lived and interacted with one another.
There is plenty to please the crowds this show will inevitably attract, but the real pleasure here is in finding and exploring the unexpected. The change of pace in the final two of the six rooms reveals developments that followed impressionism in Europe and the US as well as a nod towards abstraction, while a work by Klimt hanging alongside two van Goghs and four of Monet’s ‘Water Lily’ paintings demonstrates how influential these painters of gardens really were. (Rhona Taylor) ■ Royal Scottish Academy Building, National Galleries Complex, 624 6200, until 17 Oct, £10 (£7).
84 THE LIST 12-19 Aug 2010
REVIEW KIM COLEMAN & JENNY HOGARTH: STAGED Edinburgh-based artists stage a cultural land-grab from August’s colonial invasion ●●●●●
Entered by way of a curtained-off doorway and presented in a compact room whose pillar-effect cornices form a kind of proscenium arch, this collaborative show by Edinburgh-based artists Coleman and Hogarth sets out its stall as a reflection upon the swamping of the city by the bulk of the international entertainment industry in August. Yet there’s only one character here, and that’s the city of Edinburgh itself, displayed in five looped video projections filling each wall. Staged is a mesmerising piece of psychogeographic fieldwork, a view upon the city which feels as representative as the panorama visible from the venue door. It’s certainly manipulative, as the familiar and sweeping Calton Hill views of Leith and Arthur’s Seat are grabbed at and snatched from sight by jerky pans and fast zooms, the lens resting instead upon familiar sandstone brickwork, weathered copper cupolas, venerable marble slabs and sanded floorboards, and the brass and red-cushioned interiors of a New Town bar and the Playhouse itself.
In a month where Edinburgh must deal with being placed in a reductive and perhaps unrepresentative box by the media, Staged takes a little reminder of its true essence and hides it away in plain sight. It may not make a difference that the artists are based in the city, but whatever the ‘real’ Edinburgh is, this feels like a determined cultural land-grab back from August’s colonial invasion. (David Pollock) ■ Collective Gallery at City Observatory, 220 1260, until 15 Aug, free.