LIST.CO.UK/FESTIVAL
DIETER ROTH: DIARIES Moving and sensitive, if frustrat- ing, insight into Roth’s final days ●●●●●
A wall full of flickering video screens dominates the downstairs space of the Fruitmarket Gallery, labelled and ordered like surveillance moni- tors. Roth filmed ‘Solo Scenes’ on cameras that he positioned in the most personal spaces of his home and studio, and, by allowing us to observe his seemingly insignificant everyday acts and unthinking actions, created an intimate and unedited self-portrait that is truthful, compel- ling and yet deeply uncomfortable to watch. There is a feeling of claus- trophobia and intrusion as we watch Roth hunched over his desk, working by the light of his Anglepoise lamp, and a feeling of absence – and sad- ness – as we look upon his quiet, empty room. For this was the last year of Roth’s life, documented through the moments of his everyday acts and routines, and it is a moving and sensitive portrait.
Upstairs, ‘Flat Waste’ is an ordered documentation of a disorderly sub- ject matter – all the rubbish from Roth’s studio less than 1cm thick, collected over 12 months and col- lated into meticulously labelled files, presented like a library archive. One or two binders are open to look through, but this feels like an unnec- essary explanation, and makes it all the more frustrating that Roth’s diaries are presented with their con- tents hidden between closed covers. A shelving unit, too, bursting with folders full of scripts, drawings, diary pages and manuals from which Roth made his copybooks, remains disap- pointingly off limits. Roth’s drawings and installations are honest, personal and raw, but it’s hard not to feel that this exhibition could have allowed for even greater intimacy and insight. (Rhona Taylor) ■ Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 14 Oct, free.
REVIEWS FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
CHEER UP! IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Apocalypse images and tormented childhood dreams ●●●●●
It’s coming. The end of the world, that is. Or at least that’s the case according to those who subscribe to the ancient Mayan the- ories of disaster-movie-style apocalypse, who reckon it will all be over by Christmas. As the title of this group show suggests, artists such as Damien Hirst and Etienne Clément don’t take such hokum altogether seriously, and are effectively fiddling while Rome – or wherever – burns. The likes of Gordon Cheung’s classical friezes set on backdrops of the FT index, meanwhile, have tapped into an infinitely more serious contemporary malaise.
Hirst’s gold-skulled ‘Death or Glory: Sunset Fold/Blind Impression Glorious Skull’ sets the scene on the stairs, while Clément’s ‘Second Coming’ finds a Jesus figurine stopping the Matchbox car traffic against a building site backdrop as the cameras roll. Beyond such japery, Cheung’s ‘Revelations I-XV’ and ‘Tree’ sum up the epoch-changing awfulness of this cen- tury’s financial collapse. In terms of the existential crisis forged out of such blind faith in mammon, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Kafkaesque ‘I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago’ reimagines tormented childhood dreams of how it could be. It’s Andy Warhol’s tellingly empty ‘Electric Chair’, how- ever, that sums up the way to go. In terms of the ultimate fin de siècle nightmare, it really is the living end. (Neil Cooper) ■ Edinburgh Printmakers, 226 0000, until 8 Sep (not Mon), free.
PICASSO & MODERN BRITISH ART Feast of a show from the Spanish master and his imitators ●●●●●
Originally seen at Tate Britain earlier this year, this curiously diverse collection benefits from the combining of two major National Galleries’ forces. Whether an exhibition of this kind – examining the personal and influential links between Pablo Picasso and a range of British artists – were really needed is another matter, but Britain’s great cities have never been as well-represented as those on the continent when it comes to carving out a piece of Picasso’s well-travelled legacy for themselves.
Of course, he never remained for long on these shores, and so the resources open to the curators, including costume and set designs for the London-staged The Three-Cornered Hat, are sparse. While it might seem a lit- tle shoe-horned, then, the idea of pairing Picasso’s work with a series of British artists of the same era is a nice change from a straight retrospective, and the meticulous curation of numerous rooms over two floors offers a wealth of high-profile and lesser-known pieces. There are comparisons with Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis, for example, each of the trio’s works reflecting the growing Cubist influence and a robust mutual sense of confi- dent experimentation. There is a less obvious pairing with Ben Nicholson and a very fun room showing Picasso alongside Henry
Moore, the soft, organic corners of the former’s amorphous paintings and the latter’s sculpture tipping a know- ingly referential hat towards classical portraiture. Bacon is also here, albeit briefly, and one tonally bleak room alongside Moore and Graham Sutherland collates responses to the political turmoil of the 1930s, various versions of ‘Weeping Woman’ compensating for only one fragmentary sketch of ‘Guernica’. Upstairs contributions from the Scots Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde appear, and David Hockney is revealed to be a talented and una- shamed imitator and interpreter, while the Tate’s own ‘Three Dancers’ acts as a kind of grand finale to a feast of a show. (David Pollock) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, until 4 Nov, £10 (£7).
9–16 Aug 2012 THE LIST 87