Visual Art
I S N K P O H
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REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN ‘HOPPY’ HOPKINS – TAKING LIBERTIES Street Level, Glasgow, until Sat 7 Nov ●●●●●
Among many remarkable pictures in this essential retrospective of London’s snapper-in-residence for 60s counter-culture, there’s a wonderful study of the editorial team behind International Times, the era’s alternative bible. In it, eleven people huddle together behind a cluttered desk. Among them are poet Jeff Nuttall, the Traverse Theatre’s spiritual guru Jim Haynes, the era’s chronicler Barry Miles and, unrecognisable, the late Glasgow-born playwright Tom McGrath, then IT editor. Here were people who, judging by the brim-full-of-confidence, touchy-feely grins, genuinely felt like they were changing the world. This spirit spills over everywhere throughout the inaugural show in Street Level’s new home on the ground floor of the Trongate 103 complex. All the usual suspects are here; a scowly William Burroughs, an uncharacteristically chipper Alexander Trocchi in front of a ‘Fuck Communism!’ poster; a euphoric Allen Ginsberg outside the Royal Albert Hall prior to the seminal 1965 poetry love-in; and a doe-eyed and lovely
Marianne Faithful.
Beyond such swinging scenesters, though, Hopkins takes in CND’s Aldermaston march, tattooed bikers looking like they’re auditioning for Kenneth Anger, and the move from Trad revivalism to Free Jazz thunder at Ronnie Scott’s and other dives (and featuring the most short-haired study of pianist Keith Tippett ever). ‘Cooper’s Sky Dance,’ meanwhile, lays bare a derelict London awaiting liberation, but which we now know made do with urban regeneration instead.
Hopkins’ largely unseen archive captures a crucial
flash of history, as do the accompanying collected covers of IT, in all their idealism, innocence and gloriously naïve faith in the hippy ideal. ‘Punk Is Dead’ declaimed the February 1977 issue beside a picture of Red Army Faction pin-up, Ulrike Meinhof. Future cosmonauts of inner space take note. Hippy capitalists like Richard Branson may have changed the world in a completely different way to those imagined by IT, but an all-join-in aesthetic has prevailed. Street Level itself has been a cell of underground activity, while a new generation of avant-provocateurs can learn much from the ideas behind the iconography of the six-year period immortalised here. (Neil Cooper)
www.list.co.uk/visualart
REVIEW FILM HENRY COOMBES:THE BEDFORDS Sorcha Dallas Gallery, until Fri 9 Oct ●●●●●
The Bedfords tells the story of English painter Edwin Landseer’s commission to paint a family portrait of the Bedfords at their home in the Scottish Highlands. Like a 20–minute moving painting, the
film is a portrait study of Landseer and contains a variety of sub-plots that entice and demand to be developed into a feature-length rendition.
A notable figure within 19th century
British art, Landseer was also known for his fragile mental state. His uneasy relationship with the natural world is a motif throughout the film. Landseer’s genteel nature is attracted to the fecund possibility that this wildness could undo him. Through an interplay between comfortable domestic surroundings and the wild outdoors, Landseer is pulled out of his depth. An untamed force of nature seeps through and attempts to push the artist to the edge of delirium. We get a glimpse into each character:
while Landseer and the lady of the house engage intimately, the Duke kills his fish whilst uttering ‘beauty, beauty, beauty’, and Landseer’s son comes to terms with the death of a rabbit. Grandmother pulls the boy close and abruptly licks his face and Grandfather – played with poise by Alasdair Gray – is entertained by his own thoughts and shares them at the dinner table in bouts of giggles.
The film culminates in the finished family portrait which celebrates the Scottish sporting tradition of hunting a stag, a grouse and a salmon in one day. The trophy goes to Henry Coombes for having written, directed and designed The Bedfords with effortless finesse. (Talitha Kotzé)
REVIEW MIXED MEDIA KLAUS WEBER: BEE PAINTINGS Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 3 Oct ●●●●●
It is estimated that one third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination, most of which is accomplished by bees, making us entirely dependent on co-habitation. Klaus Weber’s project develops bio-aesthetic experiments to question the co-evolution of humans and bees.
Bright white canvasses, varying in size, have been splattered with the defecation of bees. In early
spring honeybees perform cleansing flights and Weber captured this by ‘tricking’ the bees into performing a creative act, and putting into question the inter-species relationship between man and bee. The bigger project comes together in the accompanying catalogue and, in a succinct essay by
Tom Holert, explains the epistemological and political conundrum of co-production, and elaborates on Weber’s multi-layered ideas around bees as a human technology.
As part of the project, Weber proposed a political demonstration at the Adam Smith monument in Edinburgh – which features him with his hand on a beehive as a symbol of the industry on which he believed progress was based. The intervention proposed to have around 200,000 swarming bees gather on the monument as an action to poke at the economic theory of free market individualism. Although assuring that swarmimg bees are meek and that sting incidents are highly unlikely at this demonstration, his proposal was declined by Edinburgh city council.
With this project, Weber calls for creative and industrious companionship within human-animal collaboration. His ecological and political message about the importance of our societal reliance on each other as creatures who share this planet is delivered with sheer brilliance. (Talitha Kotzé)
88 THE LIST 24 Sep–8 Oct 2009