C106 review

Edinburgh: After Image at the Fruitmarket

There is a poetic conversation between girlfriends that runs through this exhibition. After Image places together four artists who employ photography as a means to explore ideas of feminine identity. Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman have been displayed and discussed together previously and you'll be pleased to hear are still speaking to each other. Simryn Gill joins this trinity - making for an interesting yet awkward addition to a party of old friends - adding a more socio-political point of view. Victoria Miro Director Glenn Scott Wright, acting as guest curator, has made a good selection but it would perhaps have been more intriguing to have also included a voice like Sophie Calle or Georgina Starr to stir up this gathering.

On the ground floor to welcome you are Mendieta and Sherman with Woodman and Gill to be found upstairs. It is a chronological order but it is also appropriate, with each artist allocated a similar amount of space and the 'exotic' art of Mendieta and Gill sensibly kept apart. There is a strong sense of play in this exhibition, with themes of masquerade and disappearance all played out with a strong nod to surrealism. An abject fancy dress party is going on downstairs - Sherman is after all the master of dressing up, and we all know (and Peaches knows) that Mendieta does a great Mona Lisa reworked by Duchamp. Meanwhile, Woodman and Gill play an elaborate game of hide and seek upstairs.

It is very easy to see why a mystique hangs over Mendieta and Woodman. The total way in which they committed themselves to their work and their ultimate fates add layers of poignancy. Sadly not shown, Mendieta's Silueta series would have been a more appropriate enjambement to the upstairs displays of Woodman and Gill. However, the Facial transplants series from 1972 and the Ocean bird wash up (1974) film are strong works and link well with Sherman.

Lleft: Ana Mndieta: untitled; right: Cindy Sherman: She; both courtesy the Fruitmarket

The intimate scale and haunting quality to Woodman's long-exposure photographs are portraits of a young girl on a voyage of self-discovery. She had an acute awareness of the alacrity of experimentation in youth. The clear understanding of the medium she displayed aged thirteen, controlling casts of light with her fingertips, was truly prodigious. You get the sense that, when she jumped to her death eight years later, she had the camera on elapse one last time. Fascinating though the work and her life story are, she is doomed to be the malcontent teenager who never grew up. Imagine if Cindy Sherman's career was just the untitled film stills. Some critics do make out that this would have been a good thing, but Sherman continues to invest in the disguising of her own image - moving away into equally rewarding transformations - dolls, clowns, historical figures. With the recently held retrospective at the Serpentine travelling to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in the winter, this ten-photograph summary feels slightly underwhelming.

above: Simryn Gill: Vegetation, 1999; courtesy Fruitmarket

In Vegetation (1999), Simryn Gill's head is always covered by a shrub of some sort whilst the body is still visible. This is a wry anti-portrait of an outsider trying to tap into or disappear within unfamiliar territories. Gill's Dalam (2001) (which roughly translates to mean 'inside') is another interesting idea for such a well-travelled artist. Gill gained access to Malaysian households and documents the room with a single photograph. There is a simple artless style to these photographs that is an equivalent to Ed Ruscha's Parking lots or Dan Graham's Homes for America. There are some 258 of these ordered interior geometries which feels slightly out of context with the rest of the exhibition. You are supposed to consider the trace of the photographer or the absent home-owner. What it did do was help the exhibition avoid the trap of a male-selected exhibition being entirely about females' expressing themselves purely through their body-forms. But the idea of the domestic or the exotic presents itself with another set of problems.

After Image is the ideal exhibition for art students to pour over and seek inspiration from. Surrealists Bellmer, Cahun, Kertesz, Duchamp and Man Ray all exert an influence and Rosalind Krauss and Whitney Chadwick are the required reading and art historian David Hopkins of Glasgow University provided a useful introduction to the artists. What a pity that the exhibition ended just as the student term starts. Nonetheless, this is one of the best exhibitions displayed at the Fruitmarket in a long time and new director Fiona Bradley seems set to reinvigorate this important venue.

Graham Domke is a curator and writer based in Edinburgh.

After Image, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, August/September 2003