FESTIVAL VISUAL ART REVIEWS
7X7TH STREET Interactive sound sculptures create a musical promised land ●●●●●
Seven and seven is, well, a very magic number indeed in Jean Pierre Muller’s walk-through collaboration with musical icons including Robert Wyatt, Nile Rodgers, Archie Shepp and Terry Riley. Free-associating ideas based around the number seven (days a week, musical scales, colours of the rainbow), Muller has created seven wooden huts, each painted a different colour of the spectrum. Inside each, short snippets of music created by one of the composers surrounds the viewer as they walk towards an extravagant collage painted onto the shape of a note from A to G. From the outside, this brave new world looks part-global village shanty town seen through a lysergic haze, part Sesame
Street multicultural promised land. So for High Llamas auteur Sean O’Hagan’s ‘Mellow Yellow’ shack, sound-tracked by exoti- cally doleful banjo, there are big yellow taxis and yellow submarines; Ethiopian jazz genius Mulatu Astatke is awash with jolly green giants and green hornets; Rodgers’ indigo-coloured ‘Harlem Lights’ is strictly disco.
The effect, as you promenade each, is of diving into a very personal archive of jumbled-up pop culture associations that
contrive to make up some dream state idyll. Like any boulevard, 7x7th Street is better occupied and full of bustling life. Nobody loves a ghost town, after all, and, as Muller attempts to catch the fantasy essence of Harlem, Chicago, Camden or the Cosmos – mystical meeting points of inspirational artistic endeavour all – the street-life in this big city seventh heaven playground makes it the ultimate ’hood to hang in. (Neil Cooper) ■ Summerhall, 0845 874 3001, until 27 Sep (not 17, 18 & 19 Aug), hourly 11am–9pm, £1.
IAN HAMILTON FINLAY: TWILIGHT REMEMBERS Outstanding overview of work by a remarkable artist ●●●●●
Poet, artist, avant-gardener; the late Ian Hamilton Finlay is best known for Little Sparta, the Pentlands garden he created with his wife, Sue. From this realm, populated by Greek gods, pastoral images and military technology, Finlay launched his ideas into the world through his Wild Hawthorn Press and numerous collaborative artworks. The rediscovered ‘Carrier Strike’ (1977) is the centrepiece of this outstanding exhibition, an intermedia work
which enacts an epic naval battle. A master of association and metamorphosis, Finlay turns an ironing board into an aircraft carrier, flanked by iron destroyers. The battle is presented as a film, the narrative unfolding through a series of stills. Shrouded by cotton wool clouds, model aircraft attack an iron battleship. John Purser’s superb score helps bring the story to life, a piccolo conveying the playful qualities of the piece while dissonant harpsi- chord and urgent timpani reflect the drama and tragedy of war. By juxtaposing the domestic and the military, Finlay reminds us that behind every warzone lies a home front. Such oppositions are at the heart of Finlay’s world- view: violence and beauty co-exist in the universe and it is up to mankind to take responsibility for them.
The upper gallery becomes a colony of Little Sparta, with the maritime themes transposed into the pastoral. ‘Three Inscribed Stones’ (1977) are carved with lyrical phrases: Eastern Sea, Summit in the Mist, Young Cherry. These are revealed to be the names of Japanese naval planes from WWII. There is a tension between the beauty of the words and the brutality of war, but these beach-worn boulders stand as epitaphs to fallen warriors.
In discussing such themes, it’s easy to overlook the humour that runs through much of Finlay’s work. The postcards and posters in the print room show his wit in abundance, from the delightful series of found texts drawn from Fishing News headlines (‘Shetland boats turn to scallops’) to the loving homage to Scottish football. Beautifully laid out and thoughtfully curated, Twilight Remembers invites us into Finlay’s world, offering a few gen- tle nudges, while allowing us to contemplate his genius for ourselves. (Stewart Smith) ■ Ingleby Gallery, 556 4441, until 27 Oct, free.
RACHEL MAYERI: APES AS FAMILY Dual screen video installation fails to create monkey magic ●●●●●
Los Angeles-based visual artist Rachel Mayeri’s anthropomorphic study of entertainment created for simians, a series entitled Primate Cinema, is perhaps best appreciated for its conceptual design, one of those off- the-wall ‘somebody had to do it’ ideas that contemporary art often throws up, than for its application. While her work has rightly gathered interest from social researchers and psychologists, its execution is – on this evidence as a simultaneous dual-screen mirror of action and response – only sporadi- cally engaging.
The set-up is simple and amusing. On one screen a bunch of human actors dressed as apes perform scenes in the style of filmic genres: a chimps’ tea party of a kitchen sink soap opera; a porn film; a gritty indie noir with one ape channel-surfing on the bed in his hotel room. On the other, apes in the monkey enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo react to this film as it’s screened before them, or more often don’t.
Across their near 20-minute running time, there are a couple of striking moments within the films, particularly a few seconds where a group of apes separately converge upon one screen as if they were a family settling in for the evening, or a poignant moment where one monkey moves close to the camera, allowing a big close-up of his eyes straining with incomprehen- sion as they flicker across the screen. But otherwise the apes seem content to have a look and go off to play outdoors instead, a lesson for us all as we silently hope the actors didn’t resort to the Method for the ape- shagging and crotch-sniffing scenes. (David Pollock) ■ Edinburgh College of Art, 651 5800, until 2 Sep, free.
88 THE LIST 9–16 Aug 2012