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The self-styled urban warrior Alan Parker is back. Braveheart he ain’t, but he addresses the Scottish people with the battle cry, ‘Evolution, not devolution! ’
That is my new slogan on Scottish issues. I know what you're‘thinking: ‘That’s a great slogan, Alan, but what does it mean?’ Good question. Well done for asking it — and generally keep up that questioning approach to life. It’s got to be the way forward because maybe if we all keep on asking questions then that will be something in itself and the slogan will have served its purpose by provoking a bit of debate. Then it won‘t matter so much that I haven’t worked out what it means yet.
Once there was a man. He had a wife. They got on all right generally. Maybe he didn't treat her as well as he should have, and she for her part was a bit cold, hilly and ‘economical with money' some said, though that was a prejudice. But then one day she said to him: ‘l’ve had enough of you, I want to be more indepedent.’ How does the story end? The future will decide — a messy war followed by divorce? Who knows, it's up to us . . .
We have so much in common. We all liked Big Country. OK, we in the south have got over that and moved on, but the point remains. We’ve got to unite. l was in the pub during Euro 96 and there was an England fan and a Scotland fan with their football scarves on, and they were arguing. I split them up and said. ‘Stop arguing, you!’ and tore both their scarves in two. They were looking at me absoluter stunned.
Then I picked the bits of scarves off the floor and tied them back together in a special way to create two new combined England and Scotland scarves, which I gave back to them, one to each. And you know what happened? They attacked me. TOGETHER. They may have knocked me down, but I knocked down the barrier between them. Cheers, respect accepted.
Anyway I really like Edinburgh - which is really the Glasgow of East Scotland - for just as Bristol was the' Manchester of the early 905. so Scotland may become the Wales of right now.
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10 The List l6-22 Aug I996
high profile
In what turned out to be a posthumous show, aptly entitled Stilled Lives, Helen Chadwick’s timely photographs of human embryos are seen for the first time in Edinburgh. Susanna Beaumont . profiles the artist.
Back in the late 703, when Helen Chadwick was a student at Chelsea
School of Art, ‘the boys from the sculpture department’ as she described them, vied to be on the doors of her degree show installation. Chadwick was already causing a stir and her fellow students wanted to be in on it.
Last March, Chadwick. one of Britain's most brilliant and innovative artists, died of a heart attack aged 42. It was a sad irony given that Chadwick had just finished and titled what was to be her last work, Stilled Lives. A series of micro-photographs taken at London‘s King’s College Hospital, they explore the process of in-vitro fertilisation. Working with fertilised but dead cells which she manipulated under the microscope and then
photographed, Chadwick has created a timely and poignant mediation on the fragility of life and the attendant ethical dilemmas concerning frozen embryos and advances in medical technology.
Chadwick's work may be provocative but it has never been gratuitous. In 1987, her importance was recognised when she became the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize.
Relentlessly exploring society‘s taboos, her work centres on the point were the beautiful meets the mundane. Whether surrounding a cluster of orchids with a tide of Windolene or weaving a braid of hair with offal, she teases and delights. She has photocopied her naked body in the midst of vegetable matter and taken bronze casts of snow that she and her partner, David Notarius had urinated on. creating her notorious Piss Flowers. It was a classic example of the ‘why’ and ‘what for’ response that her work provoked.
But it was Chadwick’s fountain of molten, bubbling chocolate, Cacao, created in 1994 and shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery, that projected her name beyond the confines of the art world. The tabloid press subjected her to the usual ridicule but her status reaches far beyond jokey headlines. Chadwick was not one for shock tactics, nor did she crave attention, preferring to throw her energies into the detailed execution of her work. Though Chadwick‘s art is often irreverent she also celebrated beauty and injected humour in to everyday things. Her creative explorations have left a unique and forever-stirring collection of works.
I Still“ ll!” Helen Chadwick, Portfolio Gallery, until 2| Sept. Mon-Sat I0am-5.30pm; Sun noon—4.30pm.
festival diary FULL TAM WHISTLE
Despite having been born within a pie’s throw of Tynecastle, Sean Connery appears to have transferred his allegiance to lbrox. While in town this week for the premiere of the kids movie Dragonhearr, he is understood to have lunched with Rangers chairman David Murray. We faxed the lbrox press office asking Murray to nominate his favourite Connery movie but no response was forthcoming. Instead, we fall back on that old journalistic stand-by in the absence of hard fact — speculation. The early contenders were Rising Hun and The Man Who Would Be King Billy, while monastic whodunnit The Name of the Rosarie was quickly eliminated. But given Murray's ground-breaking signing of Catholic striker Maurice Johnston a few years back, and the
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fact that it really had to be a classic Bond, we nominate the official lbrox favourite as Dr Mo.
STILL LIVES
We have a proposition for National Galleries director Timothy Clifford,
who is currently trying to scrape together the final £200,000 he needs to prevent a painting by the Italian master Guercino from falling into the hands of the voracious J. Paul Getty art empire. A squad of gold-painted buskers has hit town for the Fringe whose entire act consists of standing stock-still like frozen sightseers, while their hats fill up with pound coins. Now, Clifford already has a couple of perfectly serviceable fibreglass figures in the form of Duane Hanson's polyester-clad American tourists at the Gallery of Modern Art. We suggest he wheels them out on to the High Street to boost the Guercino fighting fund.
HARD TO SWALLOW
Another Festival pairing which is just waiting to happen (assuming glitches leading to a first-night cancellation are ironed out). French-Canadian theatre tyro Robert Lepage uses a stage prop in his multi-media adaptation of Hamlet, titled Elsinore, which might interest the Circus of Horrors, the alternative types who are currently