list.co.uk/festival Festival Visual Art
Critical thinking
The latest work by Bob and Roberta Smith subverts the relationship between artist and critic, as David Pollock discovers
For this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition, Bob and Roberta Smith (the multiple pseudonym of Goldsmiths graduate Patrick Brill) extends the artist’s usual habit of painting provocative slogans across slabs of wood and hanging them. This time, he slices up the text of an entire review and transfers it to a series of hanging paintings. The words belong to Steve Bierley, tennis correspondent on the Guardian, who reviewed Louise Bourgeois’ 2008 show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris for a job-swap feature in the paper.
‘His article, I think, is a really great piece of arts writing,’ reflects Brill. ‘It’s straightforward, and it has the pentameter pace of sports writing in that things build up to crescendos. It reflects really nicely on the relationship between sport and art, and how they work in a different way. Louise Bourgeois was 97 at this point, and the piece reflected on how her ideas had accumulated throughout her life. I also liked the way something seemed to occur to him when he saw the exhibition that maybe hadn’t occurred before, about a different way of living. That was quite exciting.’ The piece also comprises a dialogue
between artist and critic. ‘It’s a great piece of writing about the activity of another human being,’ says Brill. ‘I think arts writers often get lost in the rhetoric of art criticism and art theory, but I do wonder how people outside the art world – and sometimes I feel like one myself – view the development of this specialist language. My interest in art is about broadening the parameters of what it can be and who can make it, and I think that art writing is often about enforcing these parameters.’ Or, to paraphrase a beautiful quote from Brill, which accompanies the show, ‘there should be no artists, just people making art . . . there should be no art critics, just people writing about art.’ The extended manifesto, filtered through the pen of one sports writer, can be encountered here. ■ Bob and Roberta Smith: This Artist is Deeply Dangerous, The Grey Gallery, 07910 359 086, until 5 Sep, free.
6–13 Aug 2009 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 69
these smaller works were not necessarily prototypes for finished pieces, the curators of the exhibition propose that they are the key to understanding her work. For the Milestone exhibition at Edinburgh College of Art, ten international artists will each carve a sculpture from a tonne block of UK stone of their choosing. The exhibition is intended to stimulate debate about the use of stone in contemporary art, and viewers will be able to see the artists in action.
‘Today there is an urge throughout the world to connect to something basic,’ says participating artist Joel Fisher. ‘The material world is an honest advisor, particularly in a world in which we are less and less certain about what is real. When I became a sculptor the biggest surprise for me was that my fingertips were more sensitive than my eyesight. That is just one example of the pervasive ocular prejudice in our world.’
The project celebrates a subtractive way of thinking, suggesting it is a useful approach well beyond the realm of sculpture. Professor Jake Harvey says he believes in the value of working with your hands to inform the mind directly and bypass theory. We perceive the world not just through our eyes but through our skin as the organ that allows us to feel space intuitively.
Andrew Ranville is interested in psycho-geography and for his exhibition at the Corn Exchange and a site-specific outdoor piece in Gayfield Square gardens, he uses the situationist idea of dérive (drift), which is about trying to look at the built environment without prejudice or preconception. He
has cut a triangular section of the garden to make it look like the ground has sharply jutted up. The form is simple, but its fantastical nature calls for viewers and passers-by to interact with it. ‘As opposed to abstract painting, for which you often need a knowledge of the history of the medium to understand and appreciate, sculpture has the ability to draw a wide range of people because it is tied to this idea of the body and space,’ says Ranville, ‘It allows a response that is aligned to basic human understandings of touch, distance and movement.’ Other highlights at the Festival include Ballast: Bringing Home the Stones at the National Museums of Scotland, Roger Ackling at the Ingleby gallery, Bob and Roberta Smith at Hawke and Hunter (see panel, right), John McCracken at Inverleith House, and The Embassy gallery’s exhibition Grandmother waits for you, derived from a humorous and unlikely combination of local granny culture and global electronic networking, inviting collaboration from artists and audiences alike to build a giant knitted representation of our interactive ‘noosphere’.
In an age of intangibles, we are drawn to the solid and the real. We search desperately for something visceral, immediate, unmediated, something we can touch, something our fingertips can trace, something we can have in the flesh. This year’s range of exhibitions creates a shadow play of innovative sculptural offerings.
Andrew Ranville, Corn Exchange Gallery, 561 7300, until 10 Sep (not Mon), free; Eva Hesse Studiowork, Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 25 Oct, free; Milestone, Edinburgh College of Art, 221 6000, until 30 Aug (not Mon), free; Jane and Louise Wilson, Talbot Rice Gallery, 650 2210, 6 Aug–26 Sep, free.