FESTIVAL VISUAL ART | Previews and Reviews
REVIEW ROBERT MONTGOMERY: EDINBURGH FIRE POEM Blazing start to EAF ●●●●●
The new Edinburgh Art Festival commission by Prestwick- raised artist Robert Montgomery has happened. You missed it. It occurred on a warm August night as people stood in the middle of the road on the Mound and the last of the sun bled away. Or is it still happening? You can go and see it and gaze upon the words he sculpted in oak and set light to that night. The flames have gone, the words remain. Is his art within the words, or the fact they once burned and people saw this and felt the experience enliven their soul in some way?
By his own admission, Montgomery works in ‘a poetic and
melancholic post-Situationist tradition’ (see his installation Echoes of Voices in the High Towers, left) , and what he calls his ‘fire poems’ are certainly exercises in hard-bitten conceptual contemplation of the spectacle. They speak of lived experience versus learned information, of the tension between a thing happening and the knowledge that a thing has happened. How does one experience inform the other? Can the sensation of witnessing it be recreated by putting yourself in the same location after the fact and imagining it? Maybe most people will walk or drive past, or look out of their
bus window and simply see a burnt-oak motto which reads: ‘Rather the rain on the window of the castle than the castle itself. Rather the flight of the bird, rather burned than captured.’ But these sentences have been put there and burnt and left for a reason, even if that reason’s merely the one our own imagination ascribes, and Montgomery’s words seem to speak keenly of hard meaning being pinned down falling secondary to the soaring possibility of our mind to free-associate a narrative of our own. (David Pollock) ■ The Mound, until 1 Sep, free.
PREVIEW SARA BARKER: PATTERNS Ambitious sculpture enclosed in a glass pavilion
REVIEW WITCHES AND WICKED BODIES Diverse exploration of witchcraft over the past 500 years ●●●●● REVIEW BOBBY NIVEN: PALM OF THE HAND Collision of physical and manufactured in exhibition of sculpture ●●●●●
The skeletal quality of Sara Barker’s work acts almost like a frame or window, drawing attention to the openness of her sculptures and the space that fills and surrounds them. Her most recent work, Patterns, has been produced for Parley – an Edinburgh Art Festival programme that commissions publicly sited artistic projects most likely to generate dialogue and debate. Her contribution, and first outdoor exhibition, is an ambitious and thought-provoking structure of brass, aluminium and steel enclosed within a glass pavilion in the sculpture gardens of Jupiter Artland. Constructed in situ, Barker’s structure incorporates the natural effects of light, and the weather and temperature of the surrounding area. This is a deliberate and crucial feature of Barker’s work, and due to the mutable nature of environmental factors one viewer’s experience may be completely different from the next – the likelihood of this increases enormously when staging an outdoor event in Scotland, so there’s an extra element of surprise thrown in here. (Rachel Craig) ■ Jupiter Artland, 01506 889 900, until 15 Sep, £8.50 (£4.50) or free entry with free shuttlebus from city centre (booking essential).
88 THE LIST FESTIVAL 8–15 Aug 2013
There’s much more to this fascinating exhibition than sorcery and witchcraft. Rather, a diverse collection of more than 80 works explores themes of gender, age, beauty, sexuality and death as portrayed by artists over the past 500 years, from the Renaissance right up to the present.
From Goya’s grotesque, sexually indeterminate hags to William Blake’s bewitching and seductive whore, the exhibition explores the fearful fascination society has long had with witches, and the enduring myths that surround them of unsettling evil practices and sexual deviancy.
Curated under six themes, Witches and Wicked Bodies explores the subject matter against a broader backdrop of the ways in which women have been – and still are – treated and depicted in society as a whole.
The show is brought up to date by way of the symbolists and surrealism to more recent work including Cindy Sherman’s postmodern self-portrait that questions and subverts classic ideas of female beauty. (Rhona Taylor) ■ Modern Two, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, until 3 Nov, £7 (£5).
The physical and the manufactured collide in this new exhibition from young Glasgow School of Art- educated sculptor Bobby Niven. Anthropomorphic elements haunt Hands, a pair of four-fingered carved wooden spears jutting from the wall, or Leg Platter, an assemblage of found wooden shapes in the image of a small podium perched upon a pair of legs. Three pieces of varying size in the People series resemble hoops of wooden fat hanging low from a thin, leg-like frame.
The effect is playful and uncanny. There’s a certain dynamism to them, and the fact Niven tends to work with lighter woods and brighter colours where necessary gives them a cheery patina. Yet the rough-carved wooden stumps of his Garden Party diptych are at once like abstract garden ornaments and unyielding cemetery monoliths, while his Flowers subvert the still-life repose of a similarly ambivalent image such as Van Gogh’s fruit. Cast in concrete and quick-setting foam, they lend a sense of below-the-surface strangeness which pervades all of his work. (David Pollock) ■ Old Ambulance Depot, 558 5400, until 1 Sep, free.