VisualArt REVIEWS
RETROSPECTIVE GEORGE WYLLIE: A LIFE LESS ORDINARY Collins Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 21 Apr ●●●●●
Environmental art may be all the rage these days, but, as with the soon to be mothballed Collins Gallery, George Wyllie was way ahead of the curve. While best known for huge public spectacles The Straw Locomotive and The Paper Boat, as well as a fully-fledged stage show with actor Bill Paterson, A Day Down a Goldmine, this huge archive of small works and papers, posters and other ephemera taps into the ever enquiring mind of the now 90-year-old polymath, who was reimagining Glasgow long before the cultural tsars moved in to take the credit. Having first exhibited his self-semanticised Scul?tors at the Collins in 1976, with other shows following in 1981 and 2005, it’s fitting that the venue’s last ever show should be the launchpad for the inaugural event of the Glasgow-wide Whysman Festival to celebrate Wyllie’s nutty professor-like take on the world.
Perennially captured in smiling photographs sporting
overalls and bunnet, Wyllie may appear somewhere between Oor Wullie, Tom Weir and Ivor Cutler, but file him as a ukulele- playing novelty act at your peril. In his use of outdoor spaces, a (post) industrial tool-kit and playfully serious critique of capitalism in A Day Down a Goldmine, captured on film by Murray Grigor, Wyllie is an equal to, and as deeply serious as, Joseph Beuys, with whom he worked, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and indeed Angus Farquhar’s NVA organisation, who picked up his mantle.
The great bum steers that have allowed Strathclyde University pen pushers to close down the Collins and the Scottish Government to introduce Public Entertainment Licence legislation that would effectively outlaw Wyllie’s work should be noted. This lovingly gathered and utterly humane collection is a serious word to the Whys. (Neil Cooper)
DRAWING & PAINTING ALISON TURNBULL Talbot Rice, Edinburgh, until Sat 5 May ●●●●●
Order and chaos, Alison Turnbull’s work implies, are both functions of human perspective, with her seemingly very precisely constrained pieces actually subject to no more than the artist’s own arbitrary designs for them. In large part that’s a description of art itself, of course, but Turnbull goes out of her way to hem herself in using predesigned patterns. In ‘North & South’, for example, she appears to have redrawn constellations of stars as seen from either pole as a join-the-dots puzzle resembling bacteria in a dish, while the shading of intersecting corners on squared paper to create oscillating, mark-making patterns is a recurring feature. The consideration of colour is also important. ‘Orto
Botanico’ implicitly invites us to match a printed palette of colours with the imagined shades on a black and white landscape photograph and Turnbull’s written descriptions of each shade: ‘dull grey façade of the cactus house’; ‘dead bird, its bright pink foot’. ‘Various-coloured Snapdragon’ takes shades from Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, an antiquarian reference book used by Darwin, to assemble a wall-painting which mimics a molecular structure, the better to suggest that our understanding of colour itself is partly a mechanical and partly a creative process. (David Pollock)
120 THE LIST 29 Mar–26 Apr 2012
PAINTING & PHOTOGRAPHY PÁDRAIG TIMONEY: SHEPARD TONE The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Wed 11 April ●●●●●
Shepard Tone offers an eclectic mix of painting, photography and mixed media wall-based work, seemingly with little in common. The title describes an auditory illusion of continually descending or ascending pitch. As expected, the exhibition is deceptive too, and elusive, featuring works such as ‘The Great Supper’: a painting of an ordinary house at first glance, until we notice the impossible perspective of windows and double horizons within them. There are clues, however, to an exploration of natural versus urban environments, apparent in works such as ‘Socotra’, an abstract acrylic on canvas representation of a spray-paint design, or ‘Sean’s Greens’ and ‘Jack’s Blues’, a series of dots in sheep marking spray-paint on polyester fleece. Nevertheless, the jarring disparity between the works is such that it leaves the viewer feeling like a frustrated detective, constantly looking for a connection just out of reach.
The exhibition feels like a disjointed group show,
as is often the case with Timoney’s work due to his distinctive method of ‘formal diversity’ – it’s certainly not for everyone. (Michael Davis)
SCULPTURE ALEC FINLAY Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 21 Apr ●●●●●
To subtitle mention of the artist with the fact that he’s the son of Ian Hamilton Finlay is to run down his own acute artistic sensibility without cause. Yet it’s inescapable here, because this quintet of ‘poem- objects’ reflects ideas of memory through the process of biography, with explicit reference to Alec Finlay’s own family. The objects themselves are a series of cotton handkerchiefs embroidered with slogans (‘father is the war of all things’; ‘family is a shipwreck’) and hung, but it’s in Finlay’s essay descriptions of them that contextual meat is found. Requiring a guide to feel a complete sense of understanding isn’t ideal but Finlay presents the accompanying printed matter alongside the objects they relate to, involving the stories themselves in the gallery display. The texts are written with a mixture of easy charm and academic exactitude, conflating family walks across the Pentlands with the words of the philosopher Heraclitus and revealing the method of the poems’ delivery to be inspired by Finlay’s mother stitching pieces of fabric for his father’s model boats. As a homage to his father’s work and a meditation on the poetic process it’s robust, although in scale it feels very much like a try-out for a larger show. (David Pollock)