Still from Anne Bevan's undercover/uncovered, drawing us into an amusingly
Freudian world of tunnels. headlamps and persistent damp
Anne Bevan 8: Graeme Todd
Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery until Sat 25 Mar a it we
With the current gallery layout you'd be hard pushed to recognise there was a show at all in the Fruitmarket, but persevere. Travel down the corridor on the ground floor and you’ll find yourself . . . looking down another, more exciting, corridor. Anne Bevan has been rifling around Edinburgh's water supply network looking at everything from reservoirs to water filters. Her Video, made in collaboration with Michael Wolchover, shows the deep, dark and amusingly Freudian world of tunnels, headlamps and persistent damp.
This is the second instalment of the Fruitmarket’s series of exhibitions of espeCially commISSioned work by Scotland-based artists Entitled Vision
: The Blue Chamber
Banff: Duff House until Sun 30 Apr
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Dub Monument by Kenny Hunter, one
of six artists subverting the stately home traditions of Banff
Duff House is a knowingly grand affair. An outstation of the National Galleries of Scotland, it is a large manSion fairly stuffed with paintings of wel|~fed aristocrats and a classy collection of furniture In short, it's not the place where contemporary art gets a look in,
5 until that is, Iain In/ing, a Curator based
in Aberdeenshire, derided to bring in work by six artists
And it was clearly a challenge, the danger being that the contemporary art would curdle under the heat of
Duff House's rirh mix of permanent
For The Future, it is a three-year project and the sizeable budgets available give the selected artists true scope. And Bevan, an Edinburgh-trained sculptor, has clearly revelled in the opportunity. She has laid a concrete floor, installed beautiful casts of pipes and commissioned composer Pete Stollery to create some apt music of chiming drips.
Upstairs, painter Graeme Todd is strictly overground with Mount Hiddenabyss, his series of paintings created during a residency in Basle, Switzerland. Todd probes the landscape traditions of Europe, Japan and China to produce works that are exquisitely layered with both history and varnish. This is the geography of dreams, memories and fairy tales, and it's essentially as mysterious as the hidden landscape that Bevan has uncovered beneath the streets.
(Moira Jeffrey)
residents. This has not happened, but it’s a shame the contemporary work could not have been exhibited throughout Duff House. Instead it's confined to four rooms.
Brilliantly audacious is Kenny Hunter's Dub Monument. An African sculptured head, it stands on a plinth flanked by two giant speakers pumping out hits by Lee Perry, King Tubby and other dub musicians. The music floats through the house and is surely heard by the lords and ladies who stare coolly out from the walls. It offers a telling alternative to the history of the Scottish landed classes.
Ross Sinclair likewise takes on Duff House. In a series of photographs titled Real Life vs Duff House, Sinclair, long- known for the words 'Real Life’ tattooed across his back, stands naked save for a pair of knee-length shorts with his back to the camera. Sinclair stands for flesh and blood in the midst of paintings of long-dead individuals in a house that thrives on its heritage.
Further throwing the stately mood of the place, are two pig’s ears pierced with silver hooped earrings which lie on a mantelpiece. Claire Barclay's work may at first appear repellent, but trophy hides and heads bagged while on safari or out hunting would relax with ease into Duff House. Pig's ears are Just woefully mundane.
(Susanna Beaumont)
reviews ART
Things
Edinburgh: City Art Centre until Sat lSApr *aHr
Things such as bus tickets, rubber gloves, old books, a pair of false teeth, even a stuffed monkey and an old rubber tyre. Since the artists of the Dada movement embarked on the marking of collages around 1916, and Marcel Duchamp infamously exhibited a urinal in an art gallery, the stuff of art and the life of stuff have become curiously intertwined.
Things, the exhibition, is a collection of assemblages, collages and photographs that cover 50 years of art practice in Britain. It is not so much a survey as a scrapbook, stealing through British surrealism, mass observation, pop art, conceptual art and appropriation with a kind of magpie aesthetic.
There’s something a little mournful about all that innovation and energy reduced to a set of browned artefacts, but hidden here are some gems. The knife-edge satire of exiled Dadaist, John Heartfield, the iconoclasm of John Latham (whose most notorious work involved the literal consumption of a library book by chewing it) and the idiosyncratic work of Colin Self with his Cold War obsession. The most tragic piece is a tiny collage made by Kurt Schwitters — now recognised as a poetic genius - a year before his death in the Lake District in 1948. Exiled from Germany and thereafter interned in Britain as an enemy alien, this scrap of his late work shows that mere things can carry contain a vast history. (Moira Jeffrey)
John Heartfield’s Kaiser Adolf demonstrating a knife-edge satire
Crack Is Wack Glasgow: Transmission Gallery until Sat 18 Mar at **
You don’t need illegal substances to indulge your fantasies and desires. Instead, just visit Crack Is Wack.
Bringing together six artists from across Europe, the exhibition seduces us with tales of fantasy and pleasure, sometimes overt and universal, sometimes personal and private. Dimitra Barba's drawings are reworked from 705 and 805 teen magazines loaded with a David Cassidy-style of glam. Similarly, Maria Finn takes inspiration from the fashion models of Vogue and /-D, except in Finn's drawings the women appear faceless and absurd. Elsewhere, Ulrik Hansen shows his automatic drawings. They are beautiful and remote.
Down in the basement, meanwhile, Brain Dawn Chawkey shows a disturbing video/sound work with an image that could have fallen straight out of a David Lynch film, the voice-over trembling with macho intent. Jonas Eggen explores a territory of an altogether different nature. He describes his work as ’cyber- baroque’, his installation treading a fine line between the funny and the pathetic.
Overall, Crack ls Wack is a fragmentary, uncertain and shy show, but it remains all the better for this. (Alex Hetherington)
Continuum 001
Glasgow: CCA at McLellan Galleries _
until Sat 18 Mar 1hr ar
Continuum 007 is really an exhibition I ' -
without a venue; where the work ' I l
happens is immaterial. A group show 1; I ‘_ curated by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, it - . looks at the impact of digital . . , $2 i..\“4. \
technology on the Visual arts. And its Nag, $92.55 hard work. It demands time to “733. navigate your way around the works, ‘N" many of which require the ability to ‘ use the internet with confidence. 2. '
Highlights include Stephen Hurrel’s '\ _ ,1 ,. poetic video installations, Miltos Manetas’ computer art, the X\
architectural collective OCEAN’s CD- ROM and Lee Bul’s remarkable cyborg piece interrogating notions of immortality.
From Continuum 007, it is clear that digital technology and the visual arts are fast becoming intimates. It is an empowering and irresistible meeting of two disciplines. (Alex Hetherington)
Technology and the visual arts get intimate
16-30 Mar 2000 THE U817.