Visual Art
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM CLOSE UP The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 11 Jan ●●●●●
‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s assertion that: ‘Art is the microscope of the mind’ – the link between microscopy and art was always a given.
The latest in the Fruitmarket’s series of group exhibitions attempts, largely successfully, to draw a line from William Henry Fox Talbot’s experiments in illusion through to the contiguous body art of Mona Hatoum, Kate Craig and, most mischievously, Wim Delvoye. It’s a journey that takes in avant-garde conceptual art and its contemporary offspring. Starting with the ‘straight’ scientific stills and
documentary films that inspired many of the artists represented here, the entry space brings the Virgilian joy of discovery of the late 19th century prints of flora and fauna by Lt Col JJ Woodward, Karl Blossfeldt, William Henry Olley and many more. Most crucial here are the natural history images of Jean Painlevé whose collected filmworks were restored by the BFI last year,
Painlevé was, for the surrealists and Dadaists at least, by far the most influential of them all. The big boys take over the second room. Man Ray is
represented by his seminal 1923 film Le Retour à la raison and the rampant egoism of his Rayograph pictures. Brassaï is here with his Thimble and his Madrépores. Bunuel and Dali’s legendary Un Chien Andalou buckles up against Dora Maar’s uniquely disturbing Portrait d’Ubu. Two different kinds of modernity are represented in the side rooms. Stan Brakhage’s stunning four-minute short Mothlight (1963) blends natural forms (well moth wings), colour and movement to give off a light and life of its own; and Simon Starling’s tape slide Inventar-Nr. 8573 (Man Ray) 4m-400m (2006) uses microscopy to pay deep homage to Man Ray with mind-boggling effect.
Upstairs is given over to close up representations of the human body with work by Mel Bochner, Mike Kelley, and Carolee Schneemann bringing politics to this trajectory. But it’s in the films of the aforementioned Craig, Hatoum and Delvoye that this wonderful exhibition squares the circle. Their films are frequently repulsive but ingenious close-up studies of the human body in all its spawny filth and beauty. As through the eyepiece of the humble microscope, all nature is here. (Paul Dale)
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REVIEW MIXED MEDIA SPENCER FINCH: GRAVITY ALWAYS WINS Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 4 Jan ●●●●●
A little fluffy cloud made of translucent plastic filters hangs low, back-lit by a line-up of fluorescent tubes, recreating the summer afternoon light of Emily Dickinson’s home town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Blue may be the saddest of colours, but there’s little chance of seasonally affected disorder kicking in when viewing Spencer Finch’s re-alignment of natural light in this collection of five installations inspired by David Hume and other enlightened philosophers.
Alongside ‘Night Sky (Over The Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004)’, which recreates the after- hours view from a motel parking lot using light fixtures and lamps, the aforementioned ‘Sunlight In An Empty Room (Passing Cloud For Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004)’ is the oldest work on show. The specificity of each title evokes a sense of time and place, little moments of everyday history being made and preserved before they float or fade away.
‘Sky (Over Franz Josef Glacier, April 8, 2008, 10.40AM)’ reflects the colour of the sky via a small pool in which blue ice cubes are created and plunged into the shallow end. ‘8456 Shades Of Blue (After Hume)’ is a dot-to-dot light-and- shade colour chart enquiry into human perception, while ‘Two Examples Of Molecular Orbital Theory (Prussian Blue)’ is an optical illusion whereby the same effect is managed separate rooms by different means.
There’s an understandably airy, meditative air to all these works. To come blinking into the light in such a fashion is blur sky thinking made tangibly clear. (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW PAINTING GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTINGS FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS National Gallery of Scotland Complex, Edinburgh, until Sun 4 Jan ●●●●●
The literature accompanying this show sets the bar high: ‘One of the greatest and most influential European artists of the last 50 years’. Whoever chose those words wasn’t wrong. This first retrospective in the UK for 20 years of Gerhard Richter’s work (and his first ever in Scotland) is truly stunning. Even a series of paintings completed in the early 60s is steeped in the zeitgeist of Richter’s native Germany, sandwiched between the post-WWII and early Cold War eras. The artist paints a squadron of diving Mustangs in the same dynamic, fetishistic style that he depicts speed-trailed Fiats on another canvas, even though his upbringing in war-torn Dresden must have taught him to dread aeroplanes. Elsewhere, aerial views of modernist structures are slate grey and cold, or painted in such broad strokes that they might well be decimated themselves.
This is all scene setting for Richter’s most effective works: large abstracts onto which thick oil paints have been squeegeed. Most of these aren’t even titled, the striking waves and textures and colours of the paint standing monolithic and subconsciously evocative. Elsewhere, the deceptively classical studies of ‘Candle’ and ‘Skull’, the playful masking of a series of landscapes with washes of colour and the conversion of 11 sheets of stacked sheet glass into a watery mirror force the viewer to reconsider the acts of painting and of viewing. (David Pollock)
88 THE LIST 27 Nov–11 Dec 2008