Olivier with Snake
Visual Art
Review
PHOTOGRAPHY JUERGEN TELLER - AWAILABLE Royal Botanic Gardens (lnverleith House), Edinburgh, until Sun 15 Apr 0000
Being held up as a revolutionary is too often a bittersweet plaudit, as for every voice championing your revolutionary zeal there are others queuing up to stake their claim first or rubbish the argument. Such praise has cast no shadow on the photography of Juergen Teller however, who - along with Wolfgang Tillmans and Terry Richardson - is regularly credited with turning the whole notion of fashion photography on its head in the 19905. His work for the likes of i-D, The Face and
Vogue, and on advertising campaigns for the likes of Stiissy, Helmut Lang and Katherine Hamnett were considerable, and this slight, but affecting collection
SCULPTURE AND DRAWING NICK CROWE - COMMEMORATIVE GLASS CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 31 March 000
It‘s difficult to figure out what Crowe hopes to achieve by his exhibition at the CCA in Glasgow. There is no conceptual cohesion. no base (however shifting and rolling) that can be perceived to be unifying such disparate work. His sculptures and drawings on glass seem to be about general social issues, big themes such as war. vandalism, racism. injustice and technology. with glass (his material of choice) acting as the only discernible relationship between the pieces.
That said. his sculpture 'The Campaign for Rural England' in the gallery's foyer is a seductive construction. a memorial to countless teenage urban romantics who see diamonds in the shattered glass stars that illuminate our grey pavements. The planar steel structure of the bus shelter has been transformed into English Oak. with sheets of fragmented glass glittering like Byzantine tessera. At a push. the metamorphosis could be said to invoke William Morris, the socio-political arguments that dogged his apparently reactionary wish for a return to ‘traditional materials'.
In the gallery 3. a large glass mobile spins slowly. with headless bodies acting as the glass ornaments. 'The Beheaded' is a “memorial to all the individuals who have been beheaded in the first five years of the 21st century'. a worthy justification for such a beautifully silly looking contraption. As the figures spin the reflections on the wall become gradually simplified. turning from recognisable human forms into figures. little number and letters: ‘1' and 'l'. Details are compiled and abstracted. but the horror of the Real remains.
(Alexander Kennedy)
Campaign for Rural England
makes up his first Scottish show, which is something of an anti-greatest hits.
The exhibition is grudgingly brief given Teller’s international stature. The ground floor is instead given over to Scottish sculptor Andrew Miller’s first solo Scottish exhibition centred on a pair of spectacular wooden structures meticulously reproduced from photographs of a shack he discovered in Trinidad.
Upstairs we are initially confronted with a cement-pallored Vivienne Westwood and a shot which captures Marilyn Manson prostrate over a naked Dita Von Teese hint at his high profile resume, but he resists star spotting, favouring an eclectic mix of still life, portraiture and candid snappery, all of which give an exemplify the slightly translucent, haunted qualities of his photography.
To use a filmmaking analogy, if David LaChappelle is Baz Luhrmann and Rankin is Ridley Scott, then Teller is Lars Von Trier. Singular in vision, doggedly determined to show the world from his gaze but retaining real heart.
i Teller’s shots of Japanese snow storms have a patient beauty and are perhaps the most compelling of the exhibition while, on a joyfully different tack, Gisele Biincdhen in the bath paired with fashionista snake charmer Olivier (pictured) keep a watchful eye on the pictures of children scattered around the room, the centrepiece being a portrait of his son Ed as a baby, be-jewelled and glammed up in a Motorhead babygro. This ramshackle nuclear family seem to sum up Teller’s sweetly skewed take on the world: simultaneously oddly domestic, bravely esoteric, chic and darkly funny. (Mark Robertson)
Atmosphere by Karen Cynm .
an i ’
FILM NEVER STILL CCA, Glasgow, Fri 16 Feb .00
Never Sir/l marked the first public art event sponsored by Map magazine. and brought together work by a host of respected international artists who primarily use film (video or digital) as their medium. The event highlighted some of the problems that can occur when changing the preferred site of reception for an ‘art object'. in this case the gallery. turning films by artists into ‘art films' by showing them in a cinema. It‘s a difficult path to travel. but one that Rosalind Nashishibi. Daria Martin. Mark Neville. Torsten Lauschmann. Aida Builova. Enid Baxter Blader, Karen Cytter and Luke Fowler hoped to negotiate.
Visitors to Scottish galleries will be familiar with most of these artists, with at least five names exhibiting in either Glasgow or Edinburgh in the last year or so (in Mary Mary. Doggerfisher. Tramway and the CCA itself). so the screening successfully acted as an overview of recent. critically acclaimed work. But some of the shorts didn't manage to convince. working with a sophomoric and confessional approach that seemed uncomfortably out of place alongside work that was theoretically bullet proof. witty and profound. Blader and Cytter's films did not relate to the questions raised in the other work. and suffered from their proximity.
Nashishibi's ‘Eyeballing'. Martin's 'Man and Mask'. and Lauschamann's 'The Mathematician' managed to be provocative through creating insightful narratives that refused to do exactly what the cinema viewer w0uld want. but gave us what the gallery goer requires: art over entertainment. (Alexander Kennedy)
1 ~15) Mar 2007 THE LIST 89