ART
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Zones: Tramway @ Sea
Glasgow: River Clyde Sat l3-Sun 14 Nov.
The banks of the Clyde are littered with remnants of the past. Derelict factories, redundant warehouses, sprawls of wasteland. Once a thriving community of industry. now in the main it lies impotent. For the artist Stephen Hurrel it is poignant urban landscape, particularly as we stand on the cusp of the 21st century. Mentieth century industrialisation is dead.
‘I am aware that the Clyde is seen as a dead zone but it is at a pivotal point in time,’ believes Hurrel. 'The area is changing, new pod-shaped buildings are appearing. It is a sign of things to come, the digital era of the 21st century.’ And in recognition of the river's significance and its history, Hurrel is organising Clyde boat rides. Perhaps not a river readily associated with boat trips a la the Danube or the Nile but Hurrel's boat rides are something different. Hurrel is offering 'audio boat trips'. Each passenger will be given a set of headphones on which will be broadcast sounds of heavy industry at work, smattering of conversations and electronic sounds. 'It will have a slightly ghostly quality, there will be a notion of loss, a sense of a past community,’ says Hurrel.
All aboard the sea: Glasgow's Clyde Hurrel lives in Glasgow and has long been interested in the urban space. Earlier this year to kick off Glasgow
1999, he illuminated various sites around the city. The project, entitled Skyline Online, woke Hurrel up to the
- Clyde and how its presence fuelled the founding and
growth of Glasgow. A further aspect of Hurrel's work is a sense of movement. While on a Scottish Arts Council residency spent in Australia a few years ago, Hurrel became interested in the notion of journeying through not only physical space but through history.
In many ways Hurrel sees the audio track as a kind of audio history. The sounds of factory life and conversations will be followed by a sound that sums up well one late 20th century obsession: consumerism. The boat will travel twenty minutes up river to reach the recently opened Braehead shopping centre and here the audio tape will blast out mall muzak. 'I walked through each shop recording their different soundtracks to produce the sound of commerce.’ says Hurrel. Another sign of the times will be conversations picked up from mobile phones. On each trip, Hurrel will intercept mobile phone wave lengths and transmit his findings. Watch out Clydeside mobile phone users. (Susanna Beaumont)
. To making a booking call 0141 287 3900.
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Day Of The Donkey Day
Friends of the Divided Mind by Chris Evans
artists includes posters by Chris Evans and a painting by Glenn Brown.
female nudity sculpting a parallel between the work of photographer Helmut Newton and counter-culture cartoonist Robert Crumb. High gloss versus street cred? Well, it looks like the same old story when it comes to female anatomy.
What takes this show to another stratosphere is the inclusion of Mika Taanila's half hour film on the Futuro House. A classic case of 605 idealism and the brainchild of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, this plastic modular house (imagine the flying saucer home of Austin Powers) was hailed as visionary. This brilliantly researched documentary shows the path from ambition to marketing disaster - 'we should have appealed to pharmacists', believed one expert.
The Futuro House literally failed to take off in America; the choppers required to transport it were in Vietnam. Finally the ill-fated house found some use as an arts lab in
Glasgow: Transmission Gallery until Sat 13 Nov *kfifi
There's a bit of horsing around at Transmission with this group show of gags, cartoon culture and heroic failures. The exhibition of work by six
32 THE UST 4-18 Nov 1999
Peter Land's video piece is classic Eric and Ernie territory - complete with the ruffled curtain that formed the eternal backdrop to their classical music gags. Land dances naked with his cello, in a practically unbearable display of nude virtuosity. Rebecca Warren looks at
Germany. Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg visited it, and Christo even wrapped it, but perhaps the pornographic film which used it as a set for romping saucy space vixens most accurately captured the zeitgeist. (Moira Jeffrey)
Julie Brook
Glasgow: Collins Gallery until Sat 13 Nov *ini:
Stone bowl, Mingulay by Julie Brook
Since 1995 Julie Brook has lived and worked for part of each year on the uninhabited island of Mingulay in the Outer Hebrides. During her time there, Brook works with the elements and paints the landscape. The resulting works make for a kind of homage to the great outdoors.
On the walls of the gallery hang large sheets of paper filled with expanses of . speckled creamy brown. In one, tiny rivulets have gently carved their way through the speckled mass. The work is made from sea foam residue, while further works are constructed out of seaweed ash.
On film, Brook has recorded the landscape; the velvety-green hills, the craggy cliff edge, the ebb and flow of the sea. A soundless film, at times the camera lingers on a particular 'frame' of landscape. It is powerful and is all the more dramatic for its silence. (Susanna Beaumont)
Erwin Heerich
Edinburgh: Matthew Architecture Gallery until Sun 28 Nov *airvk
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H Erwin Heerich’s walk-in-sculpture at Hombroich
Erwin Heerich is an artist who builds. Born in Germany in 1922, Heerich explores Space and place through his walk-in-sculptures which he has constructed at the Hombroich Museum at Neuss near Dusseldorf.
Translation to the gallery space is bound to be tricky. Here you get a taster in drawings and cardboard models of Heerich’s work. Black and white photographs show a cube-like brick structure set in a flat landscape. Coolly majestic, it is an incomplete cube, in as much as one corner is left as a void. Shadows and shafts of light fall and viewed in profile, the angles of the building jut out at different levels. This is geometry made 3-D: a play of disciplined shapes. And standing alone in the landscape, the building has the solemnity of a mausoleum. However with Heerich the interior is clean-cut and empty, only slender rectangular doorways punctuate the brickwork and offer views through to the landscape beyond. It would be good to get to Hombroich do a walk-through for real. (Susanna Beaumont)