VisualArt REVIEWS
FILM TORSTEN LAUSCHMANN: STARTLE REACTION Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 8 Jan ●●●●●
You don’t immediately notice the quieter, more domestic pieces in Torsten Lauschmann’s biggest box of tricks to date. The subverted digital clock above the DCA box office and the wired-up chandelier that hangs in Gallery One, where two of Lauschmann’s films are looped, aren’t as flashy as the rest of what’s on show. They don’t seek to dazzle and disorientate; they don’t beep or buzz like much else on show in the gently immersive time-sequenced theme park Lauschmann hood- winks us into believing in. Yet, for all their functional discretion, these two pieces shed light on the big, tangled-up mess of interconnectivity that Startle Reaction is all about.
This is clear, too, in his films. ‘Misshapen Pearl’ is an impressionistic meditation on the place where natural light morphs into neon. Artifice as well as interconnectivity exists in ‘Skipping Over Damaged Areas’, which edits seemingly incongruous big-screen title sequences to make up a phony narrative that gains credence from a big-talking voiceover.
Elsewhere, lost jockeys in flight become computer-jammed still lives; a mansion resembling Rebecca’s Manderley becomes a piece of cut-out shape shadow-play; and a player- piano bashes out little modernist cacophonies while snow falls into the light like some sub-Beckettian floor-show.
Beckett is there, too, in the show’s most poignant piece, in which a projector seemingly gazes out of the gallery window, its computerised voice yearning to be among the streetlights and the CCTV cameras in the concrete jungle where night turns to day and back again. Personified and sentimentalised like the ‘injured’ robot in Douglas Trumball’s eco-hippy sci-fi fable, Silent Running, there’s a sense of disappointment to the projector’s monologue. This is surveillance-culture Happy Days. The projector’s head may not be buried in the sand, but bolted immobile it’s still forced to watch the world pass by, the sun forever out of reach. (Neil Cooper)
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PRINTS HIDDEN CITY Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, until Fri 23 Dec ●●●●●
FILM HENRIK HÅKANSSON: THE END The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Fri 23 Dec ●●●●● GROUP SHOW BEHOLDER Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 18 Feb ●●●●●
In compiling their latest, largest annual members’ show, Edinburgh Printmakers have imposed an unwitting watermark of quality with their decision to give it a theme. ‘Edinburgh Uncovered’ is the subtitle, and the collection claims to offer ‘an intimate, alternative record of the city we live in’. Quite a few of these pieces live up to such billing, from Jane Hyslop’s naïve, almost Aboriginal screenprint of an Old Town map (pictured) to Nicola Murray’s blue-cast, orderly studies of detritus picked from the Water of Leith walkway (one is themed ‘Butts and Bottletops’).
Rosie Walters’ pieces are sweetly stylised graphics which make use of the essential tweeness of the city’s architecture, while even some of the straight landscapes – Jenny Martin’s images of Portobello and Joppa, or Cat Outram’s views from arched New Town windows – capture the essential character of the city. Yet there are also some pieces that resort to bland gift shop scenery and, in the case of a work by Robert Crozier entitled ‘Sleaze, Bankruptcy and Rubbish’, a bit of tired cynicism about tram works. Hardly an alternative view. (David Pollock)
120 THE LIST 15 Dec 2011–5 Jan 2012
Its body cracks under the whip. Wings tear apart, legs fall open, torso flinching, and its head flops lifeless to one side. The momentous instant of the death of the fly is elongated, scored and played back on a grand scale. Then another appears. The fly sits completely still. Being forced to look at the dirty creature brings on a shiver of repulsion. But we know what comes next: the impact of the swat breaks its back and death comes as a relief, only to be followed by sympathy in the moment of execution. Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson understands the
performative element that gives life to music and how sound gives life to cinema. His multi channel video installation centres around a 12-minute film of the death of several flies. The film’s score was played live in the gallery space on the opening night when viewers were able to see the warm up, as well as the stops and restarts under the conductor’s baton.
Håkansson masters the truthful ambiguity of science analysed through different lenses, escaping a single viewpoint. (Talitha Kotzé)
‘Beauty’, according to David Hume, ‘is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’
So it goes in this bumper grab bag of some 50 works, each subjectively selected by a far-reaching network of artists, curators, movers, shakers and other organisers who populate Scotland’s fecund visual landscape. Their brief, as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler tells Lovborg when he heads off to commit suicide, is to ‘do it beautifully’. The result is a gloriously disparate jumbled-up wonderland of art for art’s sake that’s a joy to wander through.
Classicism and conceptualism rub up against each
other, as do the institutions with the DIY pop-up spaces in an all too rare fit of democratic inclusivity in the best sense of both words. Beholder also speaks volumes about taste. So what’s an ugly- bugly portrait in the corner to some will have others in raptures. Yoko Ono and LS Lowry prove as surprising as each other, abeit in radically different ways. And just take a peek at Bruce McLean’s puddle-like floor-mirror, ‘Narcissus’. Wow! Now that really is something pretty beautiful. (Neil Cooper)