REVIEW ART
house. The cat starved to death, a
y : 3: { discovered 200 years later and ’ g A, bequeathed to the National Museum of ,‘ I "’ Scotland. ‘1 . In 1945, Allied forces liberated
r ‘ 3.3; process, some were killed, others ' 'tv § committed suicide. Lee Miller, the r I '3 celebrated Vogue photographer, was ls. ' g on-site to capture the inherent ‘l'l, g tragedy of those days. 7 " In 1995, performance artist Soren Horse play: Hannes and Fischer’s horse
sculpture
SUSPENDED ANIMATION Collective (Jul/cry: Edinburgh until Sat [7 l-‘eln'uury. What do yotr get if you cross a Trojan horse with a paper tiger — a large two- headed wood and paper horse pretending to be sorrrething it's not‘.’ Well this horse is inhabiting the Collective Gallery in an exhibition entitled .S'us/mult'i/ Atrium/rm: and purports to be ftrll of hidden substance: ‘dealing with the fundamental elements of sculpture: nrass. volume. weight and balance.‘ But in reality this curiously large object is rather an unattractive piece of carpentry. playfully laced together with strips of printed wall paper. which looks as if it should belong to a group of street performers. A more obscure. brrt less entertaining. product of the collaboration between artists Helle Hannes and Michael Fischer adorns the walls beside the imposing horse sculpture — eighteen paper plates. childisth painted with poster paints. Their work‘s graudly described as exploring ‘complexity and banality. reality and memory. individualism and repetition. mortality and destruction'. One can only hope it is founded on a well-developed sense of irony. (Tanya Stephan)
DEREK— 21 DAYS or DARKNESS
Transmission Gallery, Glasgow until Sat 24 February. Darkness has always meant different things to different people.
In 1683, Bo’ness builders sealed a black cat into the walls of a new
warning designed to repulse supernatural forces attempting to bring misfortune on future occupants. The animal’s mummified remains were
Dachau concentration camp from Hitler’s SS - some escaped in the
Martinsen played the knife game. Stabbing between his outstretched fingers, the blade hit flesh as often as the wooden board supporting his hand. He filmed this self-mutilation in its entirety.
The results - an emaciated cat in a glass case, a framed photograph and a
painful event repeatedly played on television - compel the viewer to react strongly. 21 Days of Darkness at Transmission Gallery incorporates all three objects and demands an equally intense response from numerous other pieces in this powerful group exhibition.
The show’s disparate elements barely manage to cling together. Patrick Moore’s favourite picture of the Orion Nebula is placed beside an explicit photograph of homosexual transvestite Pierre Molinier, one-time surrealist and all-time ‘man without morality’ (his own self-appraisal). Make a connection - close to the edge perhaps? - then give up any attempt to predict where the remaining exhibits arrive from or go to.
But 21 Days is not entirely heavy. Duirky works like Art Club 2000’s pastiche of art school gothic-angst and Simon Periton’s Thorn Daily cut from card, add humour and craft which complements the titilation and revulsion which appears in equal abundance upstairs. But leave the video and film in the basement till last.
The sound track of Douglas Gordon’s installation Baffle, makes the trip downstairs a descent into some Multi-Media Hades. The down side of the whole experience is the exhibition’s inability to completely satisfy the glutinous appetite it
r -
Vampire Home Movies: 3 still from Darren Marshall’s 1996 video lnstallatlon
Budapest walls: Colette Wilson's multi-layered photographic image from Urban Fragments
encourages — there is just not enough in this chaotically excellent show. 21 Days aims to transcend all acceptable codes of curatorship, as well as behaviour, so go wander through the darkness . . . this is one you will not forget. (Paul Welsh)
URBAN FRAGMENTS
’l'lli'uln' ll'ErrA‘s/mp. lit/t/r/nng/r until Tue 2‘) l't'lll'lltll’lfl
(r'r/mu I’mgim'uts. a small and unassuming exhibition currently showing at the Theatre \\'or'k.slrop.
offers some unexpected rewards. After
a year irr Budapest. working with a grant from the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. (‘olette Wilson has returned to Edinburgh with a body of work which shows both talent and potential.
Wilson's photographs are mysterious. superimposed images of the earthy colours. curious rrrarkings and textures of walls in the streets of Budapest. But what looks like layered photographic negatives, is surprisingly a series of photographs of her paintings of the same subject. Photographic images of the original walls have been placed on top.
Though the explanation sounds complex. the work is sirrrple and fluid and is based upon a direct response to her experience ofthe city. ‘I think I was just trying to capture what I felt about Budapest. what I was seeing as l was going along in buses and trains. The city has really grand buildings. The walls havcthcir own history. l just like the human touch of it.‘ Wilson‘s concern is with exploring colour and trauslrrcency and walls with their signage and chipped paint srrbtly recording the passage of time.
()riginally intended as a tneans to develop her large abstract paintings. Wilson‘s photographs. ifenlargcd. could have at least as much impact as her paintings. t'l‘auya Stephan)
LA JEUNE FILLE DANS lA VILLE
Institut Francais d’Ecosse, Edinburgh until Thurs 14 March.
Striding through the decades, la Jeune Fille Dans la Ville — a show of photographs by over twenty photographers, including the likes of Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Diane Arbus and Martin Parr - adds up
to a near-reportage look at young women in the 20th century.
First shown at the Galerie du Jour in Paris, the exhibition takes in the casual snap to the posed portrait of women living in the urban setting. Though not hung chronologically, the earlier photographs stand apart as wistful - Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s Bib In London of 1926 shows a dreamy woman atop an open double-decker bus —- while the works approaching the present day are more gritty. Slavia Perkovic and Lewis Blatz’s Irene’s Story - Berlin, Winter 1992, consisting of panels of text and three photographs, shows a woman at a window, the focus blurred and the range short, giving an intense feeling of danger within the room and menace from the street below.
Cartier-Bresson, for one, broke away from the photograph-as-simpIy-pretty school, believing there was often more to be said. Che: lip, Paris of 1968, without doubt is a stylish photograph, but you still catch the collision between establishment style and 605 chic, as an elderly woman takes time out from reading Le Figaro to gaze at a young thing in a white mini.
As to the modern day, fly-on-the-wall photographer, Martin Part is known for catching on camera those sometimes crude but true moments of everyday people going about their everyday life. His photograph, Tallinn. Estonia shows a woman, disconsolate and bored, sitting behind a cash register. It speaks volumes on disenchantment. (Susanna Beaumont)
Slttlng pretty: boys meet girls and hang-out in Rue de la Hachette, Paris in a photograph by Willy Ronls from 1957. One at a collection of photographs on show at Edinburgh's lnstitut Francals d’Ecosse
The List 9-22 l’eb I996 57