Reviews
WAl ERCOL oua TURNER IN JANUARY: THE
VAUGHAN BEGUEST
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh until Tue 31 Jan 0000
For over a century. the annual January event at the National Galleries has been the Turner exhibition. In 1900. London collector Henry Vaughan bequeathed 38 draWings and watercolours. on condition that they would not he on pennant-Brit display. but shown only in the low light of January. These days. of cOurse. light levels are monitored and controlled electronically. hut Vaughan's Will has ensured their surVival. His connoisseurs choice put together watercolours from all stages of Turner's career. from topographical wash draWings of the t 790s to atmospheric sketches of the 1840s. encompassing Venice. the Alps. Skye and the Rhineland.
To convey the drama and emotion of nature in the work shown. he thickens paint With gouache or gum arahic. creates highlights by removmg areas of paint. and allows colours to drip and mix. Increasingly Turner used ViVid colours and dramatic light effects. as in Heidelberg (1846). where da/xling sunlight is scraped out of the paper. exploding over the bridge and bathing the misty Rhineland scene With red. gold and blue light. The delicate illustrations for the Works of Sir Walter Scott are in a contemplative mood: careful Views of Ahhotsford, including an empty bench or chair. are poignant in their anticipation of the death the folIoWing year of the writer who so influenced Turner's perception of landscape. From Rhymer's Glen to his most dramatic depictions of nature's power. the human element is always present Within the sublime. (Ailsa Boyd)
WORKS ON PAPER AND iNsTAi i AllON SUE TONIPKINS
INS TAl l Al'ION AND VIDEA O ELIZABETH OGILVIE: BODIES OF WATER Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 12 Feb .0000
‘The sea says no to names and nationalities.’ runs a reprinted quote from Douglas Dunn in the literature accompanying this show, a quote from Elizabeth Ogilvie’s 1999 collaboration with the Scots poet entitled Into the Oceanic. These words are only a small scene- setter, but they ably sum up the way Ogilvie has captured a perfect impression both of nature’s restful beauty and its tumultuous destructive capability.
As well as providing quite simply one of the most ambitious and spectacular gallery conversions you can imagine, Ogilvie’s impressively constructed work is primed with a narrative seemingly just waiting to happen. In this respect, the first piece you see is only an introduction to the main event, although it’s a display that would take pride of place in many other shows. With a shimmering and indistinct video of shining water ripples projected on a freestanding wall in the gallery’s centre, video screens at right angles to either side complete the triptych. To the right, Ogilvie splashes water against a wall at screen’s edge, and to the left, Taiko drummer Joji Hirota provides a suitably unpredictable percussive
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 11 Feb
Working (iiiite comfortably in the tradition of anti art performance and concrete poetry.
Sue Tompkins' work appears; traditional in its attempts at radicalism. But it always manages to alienate some of the VieWing audience by its minimalism. anti representational concerns and its simplicity. Alienating an already alienated audience is a strength. of cOurse. so 2006 Becks Futures; nominee Tompkins Wins on this front, When everything is stripped from her work. all you are left With is intention ihence the need for these works to be performed) and originality in this cultural context. These paper and text-based pieces are freed from the burden of universal originality. but are new enough for us to be interested. Text-based works and the documentation of performances. either in the form of the written word. photograph. enough occurrence. But her performances. if recorded. do not become fetishised the performance dissolves back into the
hermetically sealed Video documents everyday and into the words we all use,
oi fi‘in. is a common
The texts Tompkins presents become veices constantly inurinuring. echoes of her veice. With the Viewer as reader tuning in and out of the text's frequency. This is not a cliched stab at the “Death of the Author’. but exploits the 'Death of the Reader'. Everyone becomes a reader in front of her texts. and the author of the words and veices that are then activated in3ide one's head. Tompkins presents unremarkable words that are temporarily made remarkable. nothing more. (Alexander Kennedyi
Visual Art
Installation shot
soundtrack.
It‘s a canny and evocative use of space, but not as much as the darkened main gallery’s piece, a striking conversion of the space into two large water-filled tanks. The first rests so peacefully as to almost blend into the walkway surrounding it, only its stale oil-slicked surface and the reflection of a video screen showing trickling water revealing its nature. The second pool, on the other hand, is constantly shifting, overhead pipes loudly jettisoning streams of water in as projector lights reflect the eerily beating surface of the pool back on to the walls.
From her home in a converted cinema in the Fife town of Kinghorn, Ogilvie must be perfectly sited to view both the narrowing of the Firth of Forth to her west, where the land encloses and seems to direct and control the water, and its widening into the North Sea towards the east, where the safety of the shore is no longer there to protect from rough, darkened waters. As Dunn’s quote alludes. the political control of water - both for shipping and supply — is a recurrent theme of Ogilvie’s continually aquatic-themed works, but it’s this fearsome yet poetically unknowable nature of the seas which she manages to evoke most strongly. (David Pollock)
Untitled, 2005
“’ l!" 5'01
'~ THE LIST 79