Circa 115: Article
Self-confident but self-questionsing: a quick look at the Scottish art scene
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Alex Polland: Thing, 2005; courtesy the artist/ Sorcha Dallas/ Collective Gallery
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Early January is probably not the best time to visit anywhere. This tail-end of the holiday season can lead to an uneven visitor experience as many venues are still closed or in the middle of changing shows. My brief trip to Scotland was primarily to see the exhibition Selected memory: Scotland and Venice Biennale, a revised and expanded version of the earlier summer show now housed primarily at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (SNGMA) showing the work of Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, Cathy Wilkes and Alex Pollard.
Despite the return of the Ireland at Venice exhibition to the Cork’s Glucksman in February, 2006, there are more differences than similarities between the two shows and scenes that they chose to represent. Both group shows did select artists from single cities – Dublin and Glasgow – with artists who had contributed much to their respective local scenes and actively eschewed the traditional confines and limits of nationalism. The devolved Scotland practically assumes sovereign status in Biennale geography after all, where nations become pavilions and art citizenship only requires that you are ‘based’ somewhere to be from there.
This type of postnationalist world
suits the global market well as ideas
of nationalism, while sometimes
actively questioned in certain forms
of critical practice, are generally
confused within the art world, being
both superficially celebrated and/or
selectively avoided. This is not the
nationalism of sectarian violence,
politics or even history, but one that
needs to be peripatetic, fluid and
modest, and generally fuelled by
low-cost airlines. There is a more
nonnational feel to this international
flow, one that is nonterritorial but
also located somewhere.
Still, both Ireland and Scotland are obsessed with traditional nationalism and both are equally muddled, as we struggle to understand our post-colonial or post-other identity. Some of the literature I picked up on my visit helped me understand a rather bombastic New Year’s column in the Sunday Telegraph by Niall Ferguson.1 In this he calls for the liquidation of the Scottish nation, with its new parliament building sold off as a multiplex or shopping mall, to reflect the reality, as he sees it, of a failed nation in North Britain which has thought too much of its minor achievements for far too long. A few years, back Richard J. Finlay claimed that the Scots, after devolution, had “recovered their long lost ability to blow their own trumpet.”2 This goes in some part to explain the dysfunctional superiority complex that Ferguson now fears, but one which is then complicated elsewhere.
Gerry Hassan, Head of the Demos Scotland 2020 programme, and writing in the CCA news sheet Process, says in a report about his report on Scotland’s future, that “one of the main factors holding Scotland back is its ‘social democratic culture’.”3 This seems to be at odds with the Scotland associated with the self-starter ‘Glasgow Miracle’ which produced artists such as Douglas Gordon, Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland, Roderick Buchanan, Lucy McKenzie and many others over the past twenty years. These artists were certainly not the victims of “linear optimism,” becoming filled with “pessimism, resignation and fatalism.”4
The Demos report recategorises the future into something to do with “story-telling” and group hugs. This has maybe more to do with the larger politics of a burgeoning cultural bureaucracy and thankfully there is Variant and Alex Law’s explanation of what’s going on with this “think-tankery,”5 as he calls it. As he explains, “since ideology and class interests are too depressingly backward-looking the vacuum in ideas is filled eclectically by commercial thinkers for hire. If Scotland is a culture obsessed with selfloathing and depressing urban realism, then the Demos ‘critique’, according to Law, has more to do with a “self-interested revanchism,” one where the power elite feel left out of any cultural success stories and are attempting to find a way to subvert any achievements into their own mediocrity.
In Ireland we are all too familiar
with the championing of mediocrity
and we are not unfamiliar with
consultancy reports that cost a lot
of time and money with no tangible
outcomes, other than generating
even more reports. For the moment,
it is worth looking at the artists
chosen to, possibly, represent this
culture at odds with itself (if that is
the case at all).
The exhibition in Edinburgh was the second of three incarnations of the Selected memory programme over a two-year period. Further venues have not as yet been announced but are most likely to be not in a metropolitan or single site. The reasoning behind this is to overcome the limited possibilities of the biennale experience and support the chosen artists and their practice in a more sustainable and unusually committed way. As Jason E Bowman, co-curator with Rachel Bradley of Selected memory, said, “we wanted to take people who had invested beyond the production of art works and who had expanded forms of practice.”6 This is maybe impossible to represent in the gallery or in one single show, so through several different configurations of the exhibition this practice can develop or be nourished in alternative way.
The exhibition in Venice was therefore never intended to be the same as the one in Edinburgh, which was spread between SNGMA and another show titled echo echo at the Collective Gallery. All artists share a particularly mature practice, where their object-making functions as a meta-language or, as Bowman described it, as a “set of fascinations and behaviours.”7 This involves the reoccurrence of certain symbols, icons, tropes, and ideas which are recycled and repeated in different formats or subtly reconfigured into new installations, particularly suited then to the different stages of the exhibition programme.
On entering SNGMA one is confronted by a large installation by the collaborative team Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan. This has reached the limit conditions of a routine sequence of external actions, 2005, is typical of their long-winded, reflexive titles. As is often the case, the installation was a compendium of several of their key tropes. These included the three dimensional words ‘Heroin Kills’; a sculpture of a stick figure wearing a top hat; large gloss-painted wedges with painted faces and painted strata; pink neon tubes; and a squared-off ‘O’ shape. Some of these elements were part of the Venice show, but the gallery space at Campo San Rocco only had room for two big wedges and some wall pieces, with a giant stick-figure sculpture being placed in the park behind the Giardini (which was vandalised after a few days). At the Collective Gallery their iconography is more graphically represented through a series of drawings, which the artists hired illustrator Simon Manifield to undertake. In these, a couple of top-hated Victorian gents engage with various absurd activities around similar icons, also including this time the Thingamajig, which is a black cube containing a diamond white shape.
None of these works ever really
reveal themselves, with the play of
motifs and iconography creating
an enigmatic and circular narrative
that is intentionally obtuse. Through
the repetition of what might be
described as mock-signifiers, what
becomes clear eventually is that it
is interpretation itself that is being
questioned and tested. This was
made even more apparent in
comparison to another exhibition
upstairs at SNGMA of the Italian
Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis.
With a selection of works from
1958 – 2005, there was a similar
recycling or repetition of symbols
and signature styles. These,
however, were made of more macho
materials like steel I-beams, thick
rope, church bells, coal, or lumps
of glass. The integrity of these
humble materials implies a weight
of cultural meaning, with a larger
interpretative scheme, and one that
is mocked by Tatham & O’Sullivan.
Their humble materiality of roughly
constructed, large scale gloss
painted sculptures scoffs at such
belief systems and defies broad
cultural histories in favour of
closed, self-absorbed, private
narratives. It’s a healthy and
contemporary disrespect for the
signature style, while still having
one, located maybe somewhere
between pomposity and irony.
The literature for the exhibition asked us to enjoy a possibly unconscious. dream-like state, drifting around the works, not expecting the answers that sometimes result from ideas turning into objects. The showmanship and theatricality across the entire exhibition was given a more openly personal touch with the Cathy Wilkes installation Non-verbal, 2005. The figure has been central to Wilkes’ practice over the past few years, appearing as fragmented bits and pieces of armatures nestled between and around found and painted objects in psychologically intense arrangements. With the Venice piece, She’s pregnant again, 2005, references to this elusive figure were even more indirect, as the installation spread fragments of a domestic dystopia and motherhood throughout the room. With the Edinburgh installation the figure returned with a vengeance by using two female mannequins, each half dressed with small abstract paintings attached to their foreheads. Various elements from the Venice show surrounded these glamorous ‘art mothers’, with a baby buggy placed in front of one and the base of a bathroom sink adjacent to the other. These were joined by a wide-screen television and stand, bowls, saucers, bits of thread, and a large metal tray filled with an oily yellow liquid with semi-submerged objects like a bathroom mat and remote control.
These arrangements of the detritus of everyday life provoke quite strong reactions with audiences as the installation was visually alienating, or moreover, raw and direct, which can be strangely disconcerting. I spoke with one of the invigilators from the Venice show (Kirsten Lloyd from the EmergeD artist collective), who recounted that most people entering the installation reacted quite strongly, many finding huge offence with the baby buggy in the room. This use of ordinary objects is again – as with Tatham & O’Sullivan – constrained within a private narrative, but here the domestic context and its implications are easier to read. A new video also on display does help locate the installation in a not-so-tortured domesticity, within rather banal everyday activities. Most women never experience, 2005, shows two naked women, one of whom is pregnant, wandering about their homes engaged in mundane activities like drinking a glass of water, lying in a bed, carrying a child, switching on a TV or walking between rooms. This work removes a certain amount of the mystique behind the main installation, where we see how recording the ordinary has been reconfigured into a complex visual conundrum.
Wilkes tests our tolerance for appropriation in these works, creating an uncomfortable engagement that is psychologically rich. In contrast, Alex Pollard plays with the notion of appropriation by presenting a range of faux found-object constructions that offer immediate visual pleasure. His pieces use the tools of the trade – pencils, brushes, rulers, packing tape – rendered in Jesmonite plaster, which are then put together as small toy-like dinosaurs, beasts, hands, faces or, as with Figures, 2005, two assemblages of faux pencils fighting it out in the middle of a large table. Other wall works show hands made from brushes, pencils and erasers drawing and rubbing out large lines of arcs and angles, each stopping and starting this mark-making. The work is reminiscent of those curious anthropomorphic oddities that you see in animation and as such while it’s easy to read more into them; the trompe l‘oeil effect does not necessarily conceal a hidden narrative.
The construction of the art object
is highlighted with all these
works, but also the way in which
the expectation of meaning is
constructed and manipulated.
These works seem to reject any
totalising or essentialist ideologies,
preferring a murky nether world
that is neither nihilist, self-loathing
or fatalistic, but engaged in an
active questioning.
This attitude was interestingly
shared in other exhibitions in
Edinburgh and Glasgow at
Fruitmarket and the Centre for
Contemporary Arts (CCA). Both
these public spaces had curated
shows that questioned ideas
around fictional and documentary
narratives in a more direct way.
The artists were drawn from the
international arena, not local, and
were accompanied by equally
strong curatorial language coupled
with a flurry of interpretative
material, surveys and videos that
can be sometimes overbearing in
these types of venues.
The Fruitmarket show, At the same time somewhere else, was comprised of work by Melik Ohanian, Pia Rönicke and Sean Snyder. There were several pieces from each artist and their practice was well presented through these works. Snyder displayed images and texts related to the conflict in Iraq, downloaded from amateur image archives and servers or purchased from press agencies. These were by no means sensational and instead reveal the banal details that now come as part of the glut of digital images that gave us Abu Ghraib. This populist, or even participatory image era, still warrants close analysis in order to understand the cultural and political codes at work that contribute to the construction of meaning and news in the press and wider media.
Ohanian leaves interpretation more open with a series of unnamed photographs of various places, implying narrative where there may or may not be one. A video projection of a film projector screens a film out of view but with the soundtrack still audible. The film depicts the struggles of some detained activists, originally shot in 1971 but mirroring the brutality of detainees from ‘the war on terror’ today. Rönicke’s work on architectural and urbanist ideologies ponders these issues through a Situational-type cartoon strip conversation with Le Corbusier and then, in a video, with some architects wandering through a ‘development zone’ outside of a Danish city. As a counterpoint to Selected memory, these artists offer a more direct critical engagement with media representations but lack a more poetic distrust of meaning.
At CCA in Glasgow, the exhibition In the poem about love you don’t write the word love (a title almost inspired by Tatham & O’Sullivan but actually by Jean Genet) had a more museum-like feel to it. There was a substantial film-screening, talk and performance schedule where half of the show was presented over the duration of the exhibition run. With over thirty-five artists participating, the range of work was vast and included some nuggets from the early 70’s like the Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson 1971 film Swamp, John Smith’s Girl chewing gum, 1976, and the more recent Walid Raad/ Atlas Group’s I only wish that I could weep, 2001. These, like many other works questioned the construction of reality and cultural forms, as well as the implications of signification. The surprisingly small gallery spaces (for such a large building complex) and durational nature of the exhibition programme meant that many works were either crowded or remain unseen from a single visit. The diversity and scholarship of its curator, Tanya Leighton, is however, worth commending as it is rare to see such a range of work outside of a major museum.
The final connecting exhibition on my journey through lost signifiers and reworked urban realism was at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, which showed works by Keith Farquhar and Mark Leckey. Farquhar, originally from Edinburgh, has made a name for himself internationally with his signature ‘hoodie’ sculptures, made by pinning hooded tops and folded denim jeans to the wall, which in this case became seated figures perched on the skirting boards around the galleries along with other configurations of denim fabric and jeans. The demonised ‘hoodie’, with all its ASBO malice, is somewhat sanitised in the gallery despite the accompanying audio football chat of “Nice pair of trainers, shoes, jeans and top…”The works were, however, wonderfully complemented upstairs by three Mark Lecky films and a giant Soundsystem speaker stack with two 1,600 watt amps. Lecky’s nostalgia for 70’s subcultures reverberates to pounding tracks by his band Jack Too Jack, with images sampled, layered and synthesized from glam rock fashion, a 70s remake of a postwar teenage urban drama, and documentation of ‘modernist’ public sculptures in London. This immersion in sub, club and public cultures exemplifies the socially constructed subject, albeit in a more celebratory than critical manner.
It was disappointing that none of the artist-run spaces like Transmission and Tramway in Glasgow or Embassy in Edinburgh were open during my short visit. The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) is certainly not worth mentioning; it had a very dull collections show punctuated, not by the current Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, but by the 2003 winner Grayson Perry. Instead I spoke mainly to gallerists who represent the artists from Selected memory. Both Toby Patterson of The Modern Institute and Sorcha Dallas of Sorcha Dallas Gallery connect unapologetically to different generations of artists, having built their businesses initially around friends and college mates. With little public funding earmarked for individual artists8, these galleries and others like the emerging Mary Mary Gallery have developed through artist-run or artist-led initiatives. This is, however, more than just a logical commodification of a maturing art scene, as even Transmission now attends art fairs9 and local art fairs cater for artistrun spaces. These all function as support structures for groups or cliques that have professionalised their networks beyond the local, building on the success of previous, or more recent waves of artists based in Scotland. There will always be local grumblings, and there has been criticism of how the rise of market possibilities is affecting the very production of work, endangering more critically engaged practices. But there are still many smaller artist-run initiatives and many artists outside of these groups. Neil Mulholland, who teaches at Edinburgh College of Art, listed Cell 77, Aurora, One Zero, Wuthering Heights, Magnifitat, Total Kunst, and EmergeD as local spaces and collectives which function in tandem to the more established spaces in Edinburgh alone. The recent Glasgow international and the Edinburgh art festival also provided a cohesive marketing glue which offered more opportunities and exposure for other groups and individuals. It is these kinds of sustained approaches that have continued to propel the ‘miracle’ that should not have happened beyond the city limits of a large art capital.
Alan Phelan is an artist from Dublin.
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Simon Manfield, you have forgotten why you asked us here, we cannot remeber why you came (heroin kills), 2005; drawing on plywood, gloss paint, glass 60.5 cm x72.5 cm x 6.5cm inclusing frame; courtesy the artist/ The modern institute/ collective gallery
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