CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH: LANDSCAPE WATERCOLOURS
Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 5 Feb 000”
This luminous exhibition brings together virtually all of the watercolours Mackintosh painted white in France. Having given up his architectural career. he lived with his wife in quiet seclusion in the Pyrenees (1923-7). In these works he depicts farms. hill towns. ports and flowers. distilling contemporary art with his design experience.
Sketches from his early career demonstrate a flamboyant penmanship. Striated rockfaces. ploughed fields and streams create abstract patterns that wrap around the swell of emerald-green land and sharp. grey cliffs. Dramatic late afternoon shadows emphasise corners and architectural planes. A dense tessellation of terracotta roofs and windows. seen from a low. .laponesgue viewpoint. describes a hill town where the sky is the narrowest strip of a/ure. recalling the work of Klimt and Schiele.
Mackintosh harmonises the high colours of the countryside that inspired the Fauves and JD Fergusson. He refined the compositions to highlight the modernism of simple architecture. the drama and serenity of the view. The most confident of these paintings glow with light and colour. This is a glorious exhibition, showing. to an Edinburgh audience. another side to the architect's skill. (Ailsa Boyd)
i'ii M lNSlAl lAllON MEIRO KOIZUMI
Mary Mary, Glasgow, SHOW CLOSED 0000
Film and Video installations seem to be the next big thing in the art world. so it is fitting that. for Mary Mary’s last exhibition at Alexandra Park Street. Japanese artist Meiro Koi/umi should be called in to fill the domestic space with five video pieces. His work explores masochism and masculinity. the flipsides of a coin that's always very difficult to grasp. Koi/umi's work can be seen as the new generations take on Mishima in this sense: it treats the male bodily ego as spectacle. turning psychic screws and disturbing its easy existence. Through narcissistically investing his body, locating it at the centre of the narratives depicted in the film, it becomes a battleground. a stupid sex toy.
In ‘l-lardcore'. 2004 (pictured). a supine male figure (the artist) lies down on a leather recliner. leaning backwards and groaning into a microphone. He vigorously rubs his thigh to create the sound of skin on skin. all the time precarioust balancing like a Raconesgue figure trapped in the claustrophobic frame until his painful phantom ejaculation. ln 'Mum'. 20013. in the room next door. a man talks quietly and slowly to his mother on the telephone. He tries in vain to get to the point before saying: 'Mother. I need to tell you something. No. it's not that . . . I'm in a war /one!' All hell breaks loose. his sound-effmt vocal terror raining bombs and bullets down on the imaginary mother at the end of the line. Mummy is internalised. and she gets a thrashing. (Alexander Kennedy)
[1‘ i l 1'“ 1‘
Review
M K) I ()GHAPHY JAMES EDWARD BATES - GENERATION
KKK: PASSING THE TORCH
St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, Glasgow, until Sun 9 April .00.
The Ku Klux Klan has always had a complex relationship with the media. The second incarnation of the organisation was directly inspired by DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Iynchings were commemorated on postcards and the costumes and burning crosses are surely designed to supply iconic imagery as much as they are meant to terrorise.
James Edward Bates acknowledges and subverts this history in his documentary series of 40 photographs. There are cross-lightings, with ominous hooded figures marching in circles; a Klansmen, arms folded across his chest, stands beside a policeman. More Klansmen on parade stride past black schoolchildren, their faces uncovered, smug. These images are so familiar that with each caption comes a shock: Bates worked on his photographs between 1998 and 2002.
This reminder that the Klan are active today is
Visual Art
powerful, but Bates is at his best when documenting the mundane. He shows us a robed man buying a packet of cigarettes from the general store (pictured). We see Klan members out of uniform struggling to erect a cross, like a bunch of bumbling scout masters at a jamboree.
The final twist, implied in the exhibition’s title, comes with Bates’ concentration on the children of Klan members. In perhaps the most affecting image on show, a four-year-old boy sits at the breakfast table as his mother fusses over him, making final adjustments to his first hood. More disturbing still, a young boy shows off beside a sort of modern incarnation of the Golliwog, a soft toy in hip hop garb, ‘Homie’ on its hooded top. The doll is swinging from a noose. The grandson of a Grand Wizard is shown beside a crude, misspelt sign warning ‘Niggers, Mexicans, Orientals, Wiggers, Jews and other assorted mongrels’ that they will be shot on sight. A father and daughter hug in an image that would be pure schmaltz - if daddy wasn’t wearing a hood.
They may now be powerless, at the far fringes, and faintly ridiculous, but Generation KKK: Passing the Torch shows that the Ku Klux Klan will be a blight on the American South for another generation.
(Jack Mottram)
Hardcore by Meiro Koizumi
f) 15) Jill) 2’tXitS THE LIST 79