FESTIVAL VISUAL ART | Reviews
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PREVIEW MEDIA SKINS Open-air intervention transforms public spaces
As technology makes the global village ever more accessible, cross-cultural international collaborations proliferate at an ever increasing speed. So it is with Korean artist Hyung Su Kim’s large-scale open air interventions, which take two major artistic hubs in the city, and swamp them with LED images of both Scottish and Korean cultures.
It’s a trick Kim has been doing for some time
in a variety of locales across the world, including both the interiors and exteriors of buildings, public spaces and even mountains. The projections transform whichever space they’re working with into an epic spectacle in which memory and history cross over to align a pathway to the future. Media Skins sits in the Edinburgh International
Festival programme alongside work by other Korean artists, including the Nam June Paik show at the Talbot Rice gallery and Madame Freedom, a work presented by Your Media Arts Project (YMAP), an organisation led by Kim’s wife, Hyo Jin Kim.
’What I do is basically managing time and space through media,’ Hyung Su Kim has said. ‘I will show Edinburgh’s rationality, history and the present with new interface and content.’ (Neil Cooper) ■ Outside Usher Hall & Festival Theatre, 9 Aug–1 Sep, free.
PREVIEW CASTRATION ON A TEN- NIS COURT AND OTHER STORIES Fringe show exploring Carravaggio by art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon PREVIEW FIONA BANNER: THE VANITY PRESS Three new videos explore publishing and performance
Art historian and broadcaster Andrew Graham- Dixon has regularly returned to the life and work of the troubled Caravaggio throughout his career, and now he’s bringing the Italian baroque painter to one of the few mediums he hasn’t yet used – the Fringe show. ‘Caravaggio’s life is dark, turbulent and deeply fascinating,’ Graham-Dixon says. ‘I’m telling his story because I want to show that he wasn’t just some wayward, inspired outsider, but a real human being, suffering under the burden of an appalling, traumatised childhood, who managed to wrestle from the circumstances of his own predicament a way of seeing and painting human life that deserves to be more richly and deeply appreciated.’ Dixon has experienced the Fringe as an audience
member before, and he feels it’s an ideal setting for Caravaggio. ‘I think his work belongs more in the maelstrom of the Fringe than on a pedestal,’ he says. ‘He didn’t elevate things, didn’t pay any attention to hierarchy. Caravaggio doesn’t belong to people who like art − he belongs to everybody.’ (David Pollock) ■ theSpace @ Symposium Hall, 510 2385, 13–24 Aug (not 18, 19), times vary, £8 (£6).
When Fiona Banner began putting her work out under the name The Vanity Press in 1997, it was an ironic statement about how self-publishing is disparaged and also a way of seizing the means of production for what was then a largely text-based canon, be it on film or in books. Fifteen years and one Turner Prize nomination on, her Edinburgh Art Festival show features three new videos: Mirror, a ‘verbal striptease’ based on a performance with actor Samantha Morton; Jane’s, which parodies the hubris of sculpture-making; and Chinook, in which a choreographed Chinook helicopter performs an aerial ballet. The latter continues Banner’s fascination with
flight and military matters, which has resulted in her penning a 1000-page book in which she described the plots of six Vietnam films – including Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket – in their entirety, as well as creating a sculpture of an RAF Jaguar for Tate Britain. Chinook itself takes an object of war and lends it a sense of beauty that takes it beyond the helicopter’s original function in an exhibition in which Banner takes flight in a myriad of ways. (Neil Cooper) ■ Summerhall, 0845 874 3001, until 27 Sep, free.
REVIEW PETER DOIG: NO FOREIGN LANDS Extraordinary exhibition that flies the flag for painting ●●●●●
There are many powerful and challenging works at this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. So it is to the credit of the programmers that this extraordinary exhibition of work by Peter Doig sits comfortably at the centre of the line-up, flying the flag for painting as a medium that not only has a place in contemporary art, but one that can be challenging, innovative and evocative. The show takes its name from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Silver Squatters − ‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign’ − and a sense of place or location forms a strong background to the work. From the years that Edinburgh- born Doig spent in Canada and London to his time growing up in Trinidad, the paintings explore place, identity, belonging and dislocation. The overwhelming feeling, however, is that these dramatically imposingly works are, ultimately, all about the paint. A room that looks at Doig’s use of geometric structures in
his work suggests not only an order that pervades the rest of his paintings, but also the idea of a threshold − a glimpse into another world that can be seen but not fully experienced. This idea continues elsewhere − one room exploring free form and colour shows eerie visions of ghostly figures that aren’t quite there. The translucent layers of paint in muted colours suggest the passing of time, and that Doig is constantly treading a boundary with another world. Nowhere is this more strongly sensed than in the intriguing Black Curtain (Towards Monkey Island), in which Doig uses a veil of paint to create a very visible barrier between us and the world he depicts. This exhibition is an unapologetic show of painting that embraces not only subject matter but also process, all the while crossing the boundary between figurative and abstract art. (Rhona Taylor) ■ Scottish National Gallery, 624 6200, until 3 Nov, 10am–5pm, £8 (£6).
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86 THE LIST FESTIVAL 15–22 Aug 2013