VISUAL ART | Reviews
RETROSPECTIVE GEORGE WYLLIE: IN PURSUIT OF THE QUESTION MARK Mitchell Library, Glasgow, until Sat 2 Feb ●●●●●
Perhaps best known for his public sculpture depicting a clock on running legs outside the Buchanan bus station in Glasgow, the late George Wyllie has become a household name in Scotland. His work has always been populist, accessible and life-affirming, and this retrospective celebrates the passion and infectious energy of a man who only decided to become an artist in his late 40s.
The exhibition consists of a fabulously upbeat mix of sculptures, drawings and paintings, hung and placed salon-style spanning the length and breadth of the Mitchell Library hall. There are quick, quirky drawings and complete paintings, sculptures and humorous objects, maquettes and the real thing, works never seen before and others well documented.
Self-styled as a ‘scul?tor’, his inquisitive and public-
focused work continuously asked questions, hence the question mark in the middle of it all. We get to see documentation of memorable projects such as his straw locomotive and the paper boat, both addressing the decline of the city’s industrial heritage. In May 1987 the straw locomotive was hoisted up the
Finnieston crane and later burnt in a Viking-style funeral revealing a question mark made of cast iron when the straw fell to ashes. His paper boat sailed down the Clyde, then the Thames and later the Hudson in New York. This exhibition will be loved by young and old alike, by
the ‘Why?sman’s’ diehard fans, and shoud even warm the cockles of a cynic’s heart. (Talitha Kotzé)
GROUP SHOW MATHEW CERLETTY, SEAN KENNEDY, MATEO TANNATT Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 19 Jan ●●●●●
INSTALLATION JOEP VAN LIEFLAND The Duchy Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 22 Dec ●●●●● TEXTILES CARPETS OF DISTINCTION Dovecot, Edinburgh, until Sat 12 Jan ●●●●●
With a self-avowed aim of redressing our experience of images, notions of representation and referencing in making objects, this show has lofty ideals to say the least. The works themselves, though, are flat, fake and rubbish (in the most literal sense), with abstract painting, trompe l’oeil, and abject mass-produced items.
Sean Kennedy shows three ceiling-based tableaux of quotidian objects, plastic bags, ball bearings, colanders, etc, displayed as rubbish but meticulously listed.
Mathew Cerletty’s paintings are abstract and formal, creating illusions but little content (as in ‘Blue Paper’) and offering no easy way in. The best in show, however, is Mateo Tannatt’s cheap wheelbarrow filled with garden centre soil and a supermarket baguette. Overall this show is a great example of all
the things that are wrong with contemporary art in Glasgow – the knowing irony, the lack of explanation, the pointing at things but never trying to make them better. It feels empty and alien, determinedly so; a craven husk of consumerism, or a post-modern acid reflux – which is, I fear, the artists’ intent. (Michael Davis)
138 THE LIST 13 Dec 2012–24 Jan 2013
Joep Van Liefland’s Video Palace #34 is a spartan, dilapidated and easily missed installation. The work hides the entire gallery space under a mimicry of a disused video rental store; the gallery walls are roughly covered with half torn-up wallpaper and empty shelving units have seemingly faded signs of categories long gone. The street-facing window has also been transformed, holding ads selling items of recently outdated technologies, VHS, CRT televisions – even the gallery sign has been wrapped in black bin liner. The show is entirely convincing in its imitation
of the surrounding decay, the results of declining commerce and the relentless march of technology. Liefland draws convincing parallels between the disuse of recent media types and the physical spaces that relied on them, a process he describes as media entropy.
Liefland’s mimesis is a meticulously arranged theatre, the placing of each broken wall-bracket considered, which makes you wonder why the intervention of the artist’s hand is important in this: why not invite us to consider a real disused video shop? The content, after all, would be almost identical. (Michael Davis)
This cross-disciplinary collaboration between seven artists and Glasgow-based designers Panel, working with Dovecot Studios, explores the practical and historic relationships between art, craft and industrial design, creating contemporary narratives on traditional techniques, framed within the broader context of the Scottish textile industry. Work by John Byrne, Ruth Ewan, Nick Evans, Alasdair Gray, Nicolas Party, Tom O’Sullivan and Joanne Tatham is inspired in part by the Templeton/ Stoddard carpet factory archive and is all for sale. Carpets of Distinction is presented in a space in the Dovecot that blurs the line between gallery and showroom, while exploring a range of different values including those of commerce and tradition.
Ewan’s wide-eyed giant comic cat references the Calton Weavers’ ancient vow, depicted upon their coat of arms – incorporating a strong historical narrative into the work alongside stories of individual identity. And Party’s fantastical ‘Landscape’ – one of four works to be displayed on the gallery floor – not only plays with ideas about space, colour and perspective, but uses the tradition of landscape to explore the boundaries of art, design and functionality. (Rhona Taylor)