DRAWINGS. VIDEO AND PHOTOGRAPHY STREAMS OF STORY Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 21 May 0..
On viewing this exhibition, your mind tracks back to a beautifully succinct and artfully used quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’ in the accompanying programme notes. ‘Half the art of storytelling,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘is to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.’ But where does an ephemeral twenty-first century popular culture leave the storyteller now? This exhibition, curated by Francis McKee and featuring works by four international artists, hopes to answer this question.
Later in Benjamin’s essay, he proclaims: ‘His (the storyteller’s) gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life.' But does the world have the patience right now to wait for new experience to be accumulated, and for the next chapter to be written? The intelligentsia, the readers and observers (not merely the viewers), might say yes, but the auteur in any medium is surely a figure under threat from dwindling attention spans. So perhaps the
92 THE LIST 1 1—25 May 2006
conclusion might be to reduce the story as well, to pare the information right down to the single image, freezing the idea as it’s born.
The artists build on a few precisely chosen images (still or moving, and in Chloe Piene‘s case, drawn) to
Ross SINCLAIR - REAL LIFE PAINTING SHOW CCA. Glasgow. until Sat 3 June
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develop an idea, the presence of multiple works from
each revealing the artists as an accumulation of their ideas. In seven prints by Finland’s Sanna Kannisato, for example, flora and wildlife shipped from tropical rainforests have been photographed under studio conditions. Yet certain items have withered and died in transit, and the brutality she sees in nature is affirmed. Palestine’s Jumana Emil Abboud takes a more conceptual approach with ‘The Pomegranate', a film of seeds being futilely stuffed back into the womb of the fruit, while ‘The Return’ sees us invited to follow a trail of breadcrumbs, like Hansel and Gretel, into the depth of a video screen. That these works show the gentle flame of the creators’ stories, illuminating ‘their life’s wick’, as Benjamin puts, is self-evident. That we want to be told much more is both the show’s strength and
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MARCUS COATES AND HOLMSTRGM Market Gallery, Glasgow, exhibition closed 00.0
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