Review
.rzr EC NATHAN COLEY - JERUSALEM SYNDROME
Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee, until Sat 26 Feb 0..
Jereri‘r Deller's .vork aside. rinich of the 'poiitsc'sed' .ilfi‘IO art shortlisted for the Turner Prize resopated Milt anger and significance but offered iittie new insight, Nathan CoIey's current piece — (,Ulllll‘lSSIOHQC}. exhibited and paid for D,’ Jenn, Brownrigg's piOneering exhibitions team at Duncan ot Jordanstoi‘ie — consists of two films and falls into a similar trap.
The first is an lllif}l".’l‘3\.‘.’ '.-/ith Dr Moshe Kalian. head of Jerusalem's psychiatric hospitals. in which he discusses Jerusalem Syndrome. It's a psychological phenomenon afflicting tourists who arrive in the city and subsequently undergo some form of breakdown. which leads to them proselytising in the City.
s the urbane Kalian implies. this ,‘an be something of a problem in a place where Christianity. Judaism and Islam frequently fail to find room for each other. The second film is a series of images both of the bazaars and the city's maior religiot s sites. It's very pretty and acctimulatively it does Create a sense that religion is the very fabric of the City.
Coley has tried to eschew the political diviSions of Jerusalem With the hope. one presumes. that the Viewer engages With the psychology of faith, which is asking an awful lot of them. Unfortunately. Jerusalem is a city in which politics and race intertwme With religion under the world's bewddered gaze. If Coley is using Jerusalem Syndrome as a prism through which to see this complex City. then this exhibition is lacking. Coley doesn't examine the prism itself — we see no one in the exhibition who actually suffers from it — and the Viewer leaves the exhibition With the ideas they brought into it unchallenged. (Tlllt Abrahamsl
‘H . ,. ¢-.
MIXED MEDIA BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 19 Feb 000
As the first show at the Collective under the superviSion of its new committee. group effon Born Under a Bad Sign encompasses both the exotement and the ominous
tidings inherent in that title.
At the top of the heap come the SCLintural creations of curator GOrdon Dalton. who recreates pop-Culturally iconic images in a manner which draws attention to failings which may leave them exposed as works of sloppy artifice. 'Grand Canyon'. fOr example. is a half-baked monument to the open-road ideals of East Rider. a motOrcyclist's helmet perched atop a flimsy cardboard stunt track. Yet the main fOCus of attention is the tacky plaster 'Eagel' topping the piece. Any attempt at grandeur is instantly rendered laughable by the misspelling.
Dalton's 'South of Heaven' ta robin drowns in a tin of red paint atop a nameless roadsigni and ‘Born Under a Bad Sign' — an initially menacmg black contraption
INSTALLATION CRAIG MULHOLLAND - BEARER ON DEMAND
Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. until Sat 26 Feb 0000.
Craig Mulholland’s last exhibition, Plastic Casino, was a whopping great thing, filling a disused factory space with work that attempted to tackle most of art history, the nature of consumerism and a few more weighty subjects besides. This time, in the twilight of Transmission’s basement, Mulholland, instead of pouring out swathes of work, seems to have become a distiller, boiling down his themes - economics and computer viruses, roughly speaking - into a sticky goo of cross-reference, allusion and repeated forms.
A video work sees deutschmarks, dimes and one-penny pieces dance through a landscape drawn from dollar bills. The Queen’s profile is overlayed with the face of a bespectacled man, probably Bill Gates. A viral pile of badges, entitled ‘Virus (Please Take One)’, seeks to propagate itself outside the gallery.
There is too, a merger between the means of
balanCing a balloon and a bucket of water on a stepladder — expertly hollov. out the saCred cows of convention. Hazel McLeod's pencil drawmgs of Baroque-style armoured vehicles carry on this theme of irreverent playfulness.
Which all makes the second room a maJOr disappointment. McLeod's Gla‘.'JngS on stained paper are suitably macabre. but Christopher Walker's SCulpture — made from painted foam. old speakers and bottle caps - neither fills the space. nor engages in any meaningful way. They come described as ‘Io-fi', but Surer the whole point of lo- fi Creation is that the end reSuIt transcends its frugal origins? Instead. Walker's set is no more or less than the sum of its few parts. iDavid Pollocki
Visual Art
Live Sports
production and the end product. or, perhaps, a hostile takeover of the latter by the former. French curves - those wiggly pre-CAD draughting tools - are everywhere, both represented and presented as sculptural forms. A bent printing plate, too, is shown as sculpture. There is even a hand, the most basic implement in the artist's toolbox, cast in transparent resin.
It’s not entirely clear what Mulholland is up to here. There‘s a queasy horror of the commercial aspects of the artworld, a hint that the work here is a carrier, like the Trojan Horses wrapped around computer viruses, and a strong sense that Mulholland is seeking to forge a system, but one as incomprehensible to most of us as the voodoo that powers international finance or the lines of code that wreak havoc on our hard drives. In the end, transformation and alchemy seem to be key, whether in terms of capitalist transactions, artistic endeavour or compiled code, all of which Mulholland seems to see as vampiric, the turning of good into evil.
Unsettling, murky and confounding stuff, then, and all the better for it. (Jack Mottram)
y
Ursus Armoured Trophy Cars by Hazel McLeod
‘ 7 Feb-T; I. a' 23",", THE LIST 103