Reviews

INSTALLATION CHRISTINE BORLAND: PRESERVES

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 28 Jan 2007 0000

In Kos, Greece, there is a tree that stands in front of the Castle of Knights. Apparently planted by eminent physician Hippocrates, the town’s locals optimistically put it at about 2400 years old, and its frailty has generated a reliance on a vast scaffold that resembles a monumental zimmerframe. For her carefully edited retrospective, artist Christine Borland has reconstructed this iron skeleton - tree absent on the upper floor of the Fruitmarket, simply titled ‘Support Work (Hippocrates 1:075)’.

The artwork makes clear the scaffold’s own reliance on the presence of the ailing tree. Yet, instead of being made redundant without its primary function, the bald frame appears as a support to the building itself and forms part of a wider set of reconstructive narratives, which Borland uses to connect folklore or given histories to our far less certain present.

Peculiar, then, that the exhibition has been titled ‘Preserves’, when all around the gallery is art that seems to challenge the idea of preservation. The preservation of dignity, beauty, and truth is a suspect enterprise indeed; the kind of conservatism that begs artistic revaluation. And Borland’s art appears to embody the very act of scrutiny, wary of pickled singular histories and thus compelled towards representing plural histories.

In a similar ‘reframing’ of ‘Support Work’, ‘Second Class Male, Second Class Female’ stands in the soberly lit lower gallery. Borland acquired two skulls of ‘natural bone materials’ from an osteological company second class medical specimens - and rebuilt their faces using pathologist’s reconstruction techniques for crime victims. Cast in bronze, the heads appear as a pair of classical busts, far removed from their initial delivery in a cardboard box. Borland’s subjects are not simply adapted with unruly creative licence, but with humanising curiosity.

Displayed with a self-conscious precision that verges on the clinical, her assembled works suggest an idle curiosity, an itching to pick at peeling layers of a supposedly complete history, only to reveal another. These skeleton starting points are not wiped of their pasts and replaced with some cheap artistic vision. Instead, Borland’s scrupulous research and imaginative endeavour is a restorative undertaking that infects us with self- inquiry. (Isla Leaver-Yap)

Karla Black

Visual Art

Bullet proof breath

MIXED MEDIA PLANTING THE TELE - GROUP SHOW Mary Mary Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 13 Jan 2007 000

How many artists does it take to make a good group show? One could opt for a witty retort or just say it right out: ten. Planting the Te/e brings together a host of art workers in an exhibition curated by GI; sgow-based artist Haley Tompkins. which comprises ten artists using film. sculpture. installation and print techniques.

This is a slick little number. pared down, organi/ed and presented with great confidence. But does this strong presence and sure hand reduce the work to one reductive aesthetic? Different voices are flattened in the guest for cohesion. for unity. With the curator-artist's taste overriding any subtle concepts and philosophies that the works themselves hope to declare. It is hard to make the observation that “this show looks great' into a negative statement. but does it ‘read well'. does it ‘sit right' in the head rather than just hang well in front of the eye? This is an artist‘s vision. where each work is utilised as an element in a larger artwork the show itself. Karla Black's wall piece acts as an over-large picture plane. with Helen Mirra's painted palette working as a figure and Joachim Koester‘s wall piece becoming a metaphor extolling the virtues and ‘reality' of the space between the two (between figure and ground).

This could be the point of the show. of course —‘ that work can be freed from artistic intention and the pristine aesthetic and social context -- but is it enough to replace these positions with an Archimedean point that now resides in the curator's hand. ego. subjectivity? (Alexander Kennedy)

lit) Nov H Dec 90061115 LIST 107