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. Visual Art
REViEW PHOTOGRAPHY
FOTO: MODERNITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE, 1918-1945 (GROUP SHOW) Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 31 Aug 000..
The years between the two World Wars marked an incredibly innovative period in the development of Modernist photography. Today the photographic image is so ubiquitous that it barely merits comment, yet the foundations of this phenomenon were laid during this earlier period, as avant-garde artists and designers began to experiment with the form.
Foto brings together inter-war photographic works created within Central Europe. Many great modern photographic innovators originated in this area, and, considering the number of themes and ideas explored by this exhibition, the viewer may be grateful for this geographic limitation.
Foto features an incredible range of artworks, from camera-less photography and experimental darkroom techniques, to developments in photojournalism and landscape photography. There are wonderful images by Karol Hiller and Walter Peterhans that leave you wondering what photographic techniques could possibly have created such strange effects, while less technically experimental images by Lotte Jacobi and
96 THE LIST 3—1 7 Jul 2008
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy explore multiple concepts of modern life. There's also an impressive selection of photomontage, much of which may be unfamiliar to those who can tell their Hoch from their Heartfield. While both these artists are represented, it is the work of their lesser-known Central European contemporaries that is most exciting and intriguing. Special efforts have been made to promote some less recognised, often female, figures such as ringl+pit and Lucia Moholy.
It is often only possible to experience the vintage photographic print as an object in its own right through exhibitions such as this, and there are some beautiful examples of obsolete techniques such as varnished carbon prints and the bromoil transfer process. Similarly, photomontages such as ‘Metropolis’, Paul Citroen’s mishmashed cityscape, appear completely transformed if only previously seen in reproduction.
Foto brilliantly demonstrates how the new photographic vision extended into all areas of modern life, through advertising, graphic design, fashion and art, often carrying a personal, political, artistic, or simply commercial message. While the avant-garde creative fervour eventually died away, what was left includes examples of the very best in Modernist artistic and photographic practice. (Liz Shannon)
R EVlEW PHOTOGRAPHY
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REVlEW DESIGN HAPTIC
The Lighthouse, Glasgow, until Mon 29 Sep 0»
High design and its pioneering spirit are taken on a Seuss-like tangent in this enjoyable. inventive and very silly exhibition. According to curator Kenya Hara's notes ‘haptic' means ‘relating or pleasant to the sense of touch'. making this a show about ‘the design of the senses' — a phrase more likely to evoke risque Japanese sex dramas than anything more conceptual.
Form, quirk and function are the key ideas here. so there are Iightshades made of hair, wastebaskets created from paper. and drinks cartons made with a synthetic amalgam of real fruit peel. Presented on flimsy waste-high tables with small sample pads to allow us to ‘creatively awaken our human sensors'. Haptic is often (intentionally or not) laugh out loud funny.
Silliness and familiarity aside (the Panasonic Design Company's Gel Remote Control [pictured] evokes Dali's melting clocks but is actually only a step away from bendy keyboards). there are some elemental and environmentally prescient pieces on display here. Shin Sobue's ‘Tadpole Coasters' uses bio-organic technology to seemineg capture tadpoles in resin with cruel but pleasing results. while Shunji Yamanaka’s doily-Iike ‘Floating Compass' plays on the form of water- gliding insects with an effeminate twist that’s all too rare in this male- dominated field.
Hapt/c is ultimately a welcome exhibition about duality, ingenuity and contrivance in an age when those things can often seem an irrelevant indulgence. (Paul Dale)
NICKY BIRD: BENEATH THE SURFACE/HIDDEN PLACE gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jul mo
For a project which corrals so many amateur photographers and their family photos to share co-creative billing with the artist, its unifying theme is acutely realised. This show is about representations of nostalgia, and asks whether memory is an absolute. or merely a subjective image we carry in our minds.
For this ongoing series of work which began in 2007. Bird seeks to document the change in Scottish housing developments between a point in the recent past and the present day. By speaking to residents in various areas that have experienced urban regeneration and incorporating their personal photographs into her work, Bird builds up a ‘then and now' series which places these found images within a photograph taken by the artist on the precise spot the original was shot. Thus we can view an anachronistic reversal — in the case of older photographs taken around the former mining communities of Dalmellington, Ayshire — such as a field of farm crops blowing where a row of mining cottages used to stand.
Elsehere — as in Ardler. Dundee (pictured). where the last of six tower blocks came down in 2007 to make way for a new estate — it's the yellowed surface of the previous photos and the fashions of the youngsters playing in them that define the images’ ages. even as Bird's landscapes are cold and precise. Yet, to say the show offers a dialogue between past and present is a pat explanation. Rather. we should use it to question what we find in our own memories. (David Pollock)