VisualArt REVIEWS
FILM INSTALLATION LUKE FOWLER Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until Sun 29 Apr ●●●●●
‘We are actors in a play . . . whose plot we don’t know . . . and whose end I dare not imagine.’ These words, delivered by iconoclastic Glasgow-born ‘anti-psychiatrist’ RD Laing, not only form the opening gambit of ‘All Our Divided Selves’, Luke Fowler’s latest feature-length video that cuts up rarely seen archive film of Laing with new footage. As soundtracked by Alasdair Roberts, such grandiose epithets also go some way to summing up the entirety of this, at times demandingly overwhelming, but most deeply personal of Fowler’s collections to date.
The 93-minute film is the (un)holy grail at the end of a show which begins with ‘Ridges on a Horizontal Plane’, an installation made in collaboration with sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, who also fills a room with his own sonic sculpture, ‘Composition for Maguchi Bay’. At all points in between, the walls are lined with a series of split-screen colour photographs that juxtapose elements of Fowler’s world’s eye view at work, rest and play. It’s a world of bookshelves, parties, performances and protest, a place where the old counter-culture is picked up, absorbed and, to use a Laingian word, rebirthed, for modern times.
If Fowler seems to be mapping out facets of his own life via such dualities, it’s Laing who dominates, be it splitting focus and personalities on film in a manner both infuriating and compelling, or in the accompanying basement display of portraits by theatre photographer John Haynes. In both, Laing is by turns self-consciously beatific, demonic, shamanic, flower-shirted, polo-necked, bare-footed, cross-legged, bombastic or else a little fragile. On film, in his fabulously grainy study of Glasgow for the ‘Cities’ series of psycho- geographic documentaries, Laing stands in a bombed-out slum, fires burning behind him as he posits expectations of his own past he should never have lived up to. ‘Culture?’ he says scornfully, crazy talking to the end. (Neil Cooper)
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GROUP SHOW CONSTRUCT Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 7 Apr ●●●●●
SCULPTURE ROGER ACKLING Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 21 Apr ●●●●● FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY JANE AND LOUISE WILSON Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 25 Mar ●●●●●
Construct brings together four artists, Barbara Kasten, Alan Michael, Daniel Sinsel and Ricky Swallow, in a study of manipulation and alteration as the method for constructing new images. Swallow’s quirky sculptures, which open the show, display bronze casts created from cardboard tubes, reconfigured into a pipe, a clock and two cups with a lever between them like a detonator. They stand opposite Michael’s photorealist painting, ‘Mood 3’, depicting a badge he previously made for a fanzine about a band called Felt.
These works bring an unusual permanence and weight to disposable and uninspiring objects. Kasten’s photographs of her abstract installations bring us into the second room; these are like beautifully intricate and uncanny ‘stages,’ full of mirrors and mysteries. Sinsel’s work in the far corner is the most minimalist; the wall of wooden blocks he has assembled is as impassable intellectually as it is physically.
Construct casts the artists in the role of the alchemist, creating flashes of beauty from mundane lead, but always with a disappointingly self- referential slant. (Michael Davis)
120 THE LIST 1–29 Mar 2012
It’s hard, at first, to see just what Roger Ackling has created here. An alumnus of the late 1960s St Martin’s School of Art scene that also produced Richard Long, Ackling’s ideas of what constitutes sculpture are unique to say the least. In this case it is an assemblage of old wooden garden tools from his shed laid next to one another along one wall of the gallery. On two of the other walls, a line of string bisects at around chest height, held in place with irregularly spaced halves of wooden clothes-pegs. Only close inspection and possibly a prompt from the gallery guide reveals that each wooden surface has been seared by regular, almost tribal markings created by a magnifying glass and the sun, a subtle, pain-staking evocation of nature’s ability to both erode and create. As you examine the earth-shaded hoes, axes and fruit boxes, two crossed pieces of wood fastened high on the white wall, it’s possible to see this arrangement as a landscape and the clothes-pegs as a representation of the solar system, a statement that all destruction – creative or otherwise – is merely a function of nature. (David Pollock)
In ‘Face Scripting – What Did the Building See?’, a major new film installation that forms the centrepiece of this body of surveillance-related work, Jane and Louise Wilson cast themselves as undercover operatives moving behind enemy lines. A monitor plays out a forensically-assembled CCTV narrative showing the mundane comings and goings leading up to the murder in a Dubai hotel room of Hamas agent Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh. Meanwhile, the Wilsons’ own after-hours footage pans through the same hotel corridors. Aided by an impressionistic voiceover, a true-life detective story is lent a poetic weight that’s heightened by the 16 large-scale mug shots of the disguised sisters that form ‘false positives and false negatives’. The seven large-scale photographic prints that
make up ‘Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum)’ bear similar witness, this time to interiors within the 30km exclusion zone in place since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Black-and-white yardsticks mark out swimming pools and libraries like barcodes, which suggests secret agents are everywhere, watching always. (Neil Cooper)