www.list.co.uk/visualart REVIEW DRAWINGS & COLLAGES ROSEMARIE TROCKEL Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 30 Apr ●●●●●
This exhibition of Rosemarie Trockel’s works on paper is at once haunting and unnerving; the German artist’s handling of uncomfortable subject matter successfully challenges the viewer through the blurring of reality and the subconscious. In a collaboration with Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunstmuseum Bonn, more than 200 works are displayed throughout the rooms of the Talbot Rice gallery. Central to the exhibition is a collection of Trockel’s book drafts, displayed behind glass and presented almost as items of curiosity to the viewer – an intriguing set of multiples offering a glimpse into the artist’s ideas but their contents hidden. The subject matter explored on the covers recurs in works throughout the exhibition: the placement of text and image, sinister and sometimes grotesque animal hybrids and the mutation of different species and genders into ambiguous and disturbing images. Trockel’s drawings and mixed-media collages – often dark, explicit pieces that deal with subject matter such as decaying human bodies and the recurring motif of masked faces – play around not only with the traditions of art exhibition but also our perceptions of what is real. Her collages, incorporating different media, are almost sculptural in form, and respond to what feel like her more experimental drawings. This powerful show engages the viewer not only in its raw confrontation of subject matter such as sexuality and gender, but also in how it makes us question our expectations of materials, space and process as well as the traditions of exhibiting artworks. (Rhona Taylor)
VisualArt
PREVIEW FESTIVAL NEW TERRITORIES Various venues, Glasgow, until Sat 26 Mar
One thing the annual New Territories festival has never done is stand still. This year, the longstanding National Review of Live Art may have vanished, but the newly branded This Is Performance Art strand has risen from its ashes with an ambitious programme of performances, workshops, residencies and a winter school, all designed to break the frame of what constitutes art with a set of ever-changing radical strategies. Central to all this activity is Black Market
International, the long-standing troupe of individual artists who combine resources to present a series of durational performances that can last for anything between two-ten hours. A lynchpin of BMI, and indeed New Territories, is Perthshire-born Alastair MacLennan, who for the best part of half a century has pushed both himself and his work to the limits of endurance. This year, the BMI epic will take place at the SWG3 artspace, where anything and nothing may or may not happen. ‘It has to do with a German word, Begegnung,’
MacLennan explains, ‘which means the art of meeting. What this means has something to do with the phrase, “being in the moment”. That’s about going into the performance without any prefixed object or plan in mind, but being prepared to be adaptable moment by moment and to be ready to embrace anything and everything as it happens. So in actual fact we don’t know what will happen.’ This willingness to fly without a safety net has
become a hallmark of the genre that has remained on the margins, but which in the current climate has captured a new generation of visual artists exploring performative forms. These up and coming artists could learn much from MacLennan, who originally trained as a painter at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College. ‘All the artists in Black Market International have their
own individual practices,’ MacLennan points out, ‘and we only meet maybe six or seven times a year, so we have to think on our feet and be adaptable enough to negotiate the unexpected. You could rehearse it, but you might find that something happens which doesn’t allow you to do what you’ve rehearsed, so you have to remain open to possibilities. I enjoy it, being in the moment.’ (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW PAINTINGS & SCULPTURE CRAIG MURRAY-ORR Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 26 Mar ●●●●●
There’s a sense of magnificent isolation as you go walkabout in New Zealand-born Craig Murray-Orr’s first show for a decade, that says much about self-imposed exile in the wilderness. Both Henry David Thoreau’s novel Walden and the sprawl of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur map out some barren topography of the soul, their three-dimensional splodges of purple-grey and orange-green hues lighting up 57 varieties of desolate science-fiction landscape that silently hum with the voices of the ancients. Only the clouds or streams of black shooting through the night sky suggest any kind of movement beyond the raging calm below. Three oversized Victorian rifles carved from rich mahogany guard both floors,
their edges smoothed into undulating curves, so even the spaces where the triggers would be become circular voids resembling standing stones in miniature. The largest, ‘Tribute to Florence Baker’, honours the crack-shot wife of explorer Samuel Baker, the notches on her belt acknowledging her single-mindedness as much as Murray-Orr’s. This is borne out even more in a new work, ‘A Breath of Wind’. Again carved from mahogany, the surface of this large wall hanging displays a relief of seven clumps of grass blowing in the wind. The fact that it took Murray- Orr a monumental seven years to make gives a clue to the absolute power of stillness, where natural forces are only noticeable when at their most forebodingly fragile. (Neil Cooper)
17 Feb–3 Mar 2011 THE LIST 89