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10 Mark Millar COMICBOOK SUPERHERO
Millar’s Kick-Ass has been a runaway success this year with unprecedented numbers of reprints for every issue (the film adaptation, directed by Matthew Vaughn, is released on 2 April 2010). Millar has also been writing War Heroes, new title Ultimate Comics: Avengers and Wolverine, with his story arc ‘Old Man Logan’. ‘It’s like The Unforgiven but with Wolverine,’ explains Millar of his X-Men strand. ‘Supervillains have destroyed America and he’s the last hero left.’ Beyond comics, the film adaptation of his creator-owned series Wanted was one of the big blockbuster successes of 2008 and the spin-off videogame, Wanted: Weapons of Fate, was released in March this year. (HN)
9 Calvin Harris OL’ PINEAPPLE HEAD
It’s been a pretty good year for this Dumfries-born party-maker. After helping Dizzee Rascal score a number one hit last year with ‘Dance Wiv Me’, the singer and producer bagged one of his own in 2009 with ‘I’m Not Alone’. He also endeared himself to a lot of Jedward haters when he popped a pineapple on his head and crashed the X Factor stage during their performance of Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’. With a bit more personality than the average popper, he’s also developing a reputation for his frequent Twitter rants. (CS)
8 Lucy Skaer TURNER-NOMINATED ARTIST
With group shows in St Louis, Athens,
Madrid and Switzerland, a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, a Location One International Fellowship residency in New York, and a Turner Prize nomination under her belt, it’s been a major year for adopted Scot Lucy Skaer. Her arrangements of highly crafted forms — photos sourced from newspapers and books, transformed via elaborate processes — have attracted international acclaim for their delicate and moving effect. The artist’s inclusion on the shortlist for the art world’s biggest prize — this year lauded for its sensuality and substance – alongside fellow Scot Richard Wright has prompted theorising on the burgeoning importance of Glasgow to the British art scene. Having graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1997 before going on to found artists’ collective Henry VIII’s Wives, Skaer is a fine representative of the Scottish contemporary art scene and produces
work of great intelligence, draughtsmanship and complexity. (RD)
7 Scottish Ballet SUPER TROUPERS
Our national ballet company celebrated its 40th anniversary in fine style this year, with an appearance at the Edinburgh International Festival, a stunning autumn programme and a glossy new coffee table book. And, after years of fundraising, Scottish Ballet finally moved into its impressive new premises at Glasgow’s Tramway. Having spent years squashed inside a former army barracks with leaky showers, the company now has the largest dance studio in Europe to play with — which means we can expect even greater things from this already dazzling jewel in Scotland’s crown. (KA)
6 Biffy Clyro SCOTTISH ROCK BEHEMOTHS
It has been an exceptional year for the hairy Ayrshire trio. After headlining the Rockness festival in June, they raced back to the studio and came out with Only Revolutions, which peaked at number eight on the album chart and went gold soon after, with each of the three singles released from it breaking the top ten in the singles chart. Sticking with what they know, they’re touring incessantly – currently accompanying Muse. To top it all off, Simon Neil also managed to rack up a hit album and single with side-project Marmaduke Duke, with Succioperro frontman JP Reid. (NB)
5 Richard Wright TURNER VICTOR
Richard Wright might well have made it into our Hot 100 by virtue of his contribution to the Modern Institute’s group show, Tonite: a typically eye- catching, complex, mathematically precise geometrical wall painting, and his appearance in the CCA’s current five-star exploration of the object as event, Votive. But, as it happens, the Glasgow-based artist – whose works are often painted over at the end of a show, thus highlighting the immediacy of his intricately detailed wall and ceiling paintings, prints and large-scale works – this year also won some insignificant little bauble called the Turner Prize, with judge Jonathan Jones describing
32 THE LIST 17 Dec 2009–7 Jan 2010 Scottish Ballet
Wright’s works as ‘spiralling, seductive, fascinating things for the eye’. Incidentally, Wright’s victory brings to three the number of graduates of Glasgow School of Art to have won the prize since its inauguration in 1984, the other two being Douglas Gordon and Simon Starling. (AR)
4 Armando Iannucci COMEDY GENIUS
Let’s not even waste time debating the fact that Armando Iannucci is one of the great pioneers, writers, directors and producers of British television comedy. However, the road from television to film is littered with foolhardy corpses, so nobody expected much when it was announced that Iannucci was working on a big-screen transatlantic version of The Thick of It featuring Malcolm Tucker and co. But then in January 2009, the film In The Loop began picking up rave reviews from its debut screening at Sundance Film Festival before going down a storm as the opening gala at the Glasgow (Iannucci’s home town) Film Festival and doing decent business at the UK box office. A political comedy of rare venom and insight, In the Loop made The West Wing suddenly look like so much liberal dribble. Iannucci spent the rest of 2009 making a new series of The Thick of It, producing Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle and new sitcom Genius, but it is for his brilliant cinematic debut that The List salutes him. (PD)
3 Nic Green NAKED TALENT
Amid all the braying comedians and slumming-it slebs on this year’s Fringe, one of the most significant productions was a thoughtful piece of performance art by a young Glasgow-based feminist. Nic Green’s Trilogy was long, political, and didn’t shy away from making uncomfortable points; and it was that deeply unfashionable thing, a feminist treatise. Yet audiences loved it. The moment when a crowd of naked women (local volunteers) marched on stage in a dance celebrating the capabilities of their very different, powerful bodies was thrillingly life affirming. Reviewers and bloggers wrote in their hundreds about the sheer joy they felt, and if parts of the audience turned up for the nudity, they stayed because they were being challenged and entertained. Green, who performed onstage as well as masterminding the whole project, is a charismatic, incisive new talent, and she’s sorely needed. Trilogy will tour the UK and play a run at London’s Barbican next year. (KI)