VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
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VIDEO REVIEW JORDAN WOLFSON McLellan Galleries, until Mon 21 Apr ●●●●●
It’s the soft-core gloss that sucks you in first in Raspberry Poser, the 14-minute billboard-size video projection that forms the heart of Jordan Wolfson’s life-and-death fusion of high-end corporate ad-land stylings and provocative animations. A CGI-generated HIV virus bounces around the neighbourhood like an ever- pulsating nail-bomb, multiplying in a regimented, choreographic display that ricochets around the chi-chi bathrooms and bedrooms of the privileged to a soundtrack of Beyoncé’s ‘Beautiful Nightmare’. As a flipside to this, a condom full of chocolate hearts seems to be serving up something sweeter, but possibly more sickly.
A cartoon bad boy, looking somewhere between Hanna
Barbera doing Dr Seuss and Sergio Aragonés reinventing Dennis the Menace for the counter-cultural age, asks the viewer if they think he’s wealthy or gay, then proceeds to throttle himself, or else cut out his innards ad nauseum.
There’s a self-laceratingly playful and almost joyous nihilism pulsing through all this, basking in its backdrop of urban regeneration even as it fires off poison darts. Wolfson’s own Orson Welles-like cameo recalls vintage footage of doomed Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, crashing and burning in public in a way that Wolfson is far too savvy to fall for.
The other pieces on show are smaller and more self-contained,
but no less full of attitude. The best work is the smallest, as, at the end of the McLellan Galleries’ downstairs corridor, a 16mm black-and-white silent film shows a dicky-bowed man speaking in sign language. Only when you realise his speech is the impassioned call to arms from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire on Hitler’s rise to power, The Great Dictator, do Wolfson’s provocations fully speak volumes. (Neil Cooper) ■ Part of Glasgow International Festival
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GROUP SHOW PREVIEW LEITH SCHOOL OF ART ALUMNI SHOW Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Fri 2–Sat 31 May
FILM & SCULPTURE REVIEW BIGERT AND BERGSTRÖM: THE WEATHER WAR Summerhall, until Sat 24 May ●●●●● MIXED MEDIA REVIEW ALEX FROST: REPRODUCTION Glasgow Print Studio, until Sun 18 May ●●●●●
Leith School of Art works outside the traditional ‘big four’ art colleges in Scotland, meaning that its influence tends to slip off the radar. But the institution has made its own contributions to the Scottish scene over the past 25 years. With such a significant anniversary this year, this group exhibition will select work from some of the finest artists to have passed through the doors of the former Norwegian Seamen’s Church. ‘The school was established on the belief there was a need for a small, community-like alternative to the big institutions,’ says the principal, Phil Archer, ‘with a passion for teaching art with clarity and structure and a respect for tradition, while embracing the contemporary world.’ The area, he says, lends its character to the
experience: ‘Leith’s ideal for an art school as it’s visually stimulating, with contrasts of land and sea, industry and commerce, old and new, rough and gentrified, as well as a tight-knit community of people.’ The 17 artists in the show constitute a similarly eclectic roll call, featuring Toby Paterson, Tommy Grace (better known as a member of Django Django), Owen Normand, Pernille Spence, Morwenna Darwell and Jamie Stone. (David Pollock)
96 THE LIST 17 Apr–15 May 2014
Man’s attempt to control the weather is the focus of this exhibition by the Swedish artists Bigert and Bergström. The installation’s focus is a film, which serves as both a walk through the history of the weather and contemporary methods of weather modification, and an explanation for the odd sculptural forms that inhabit Summerhall’s cavernous spaces. The film records the artists’ own attempt to
control the weather aided by a machine-turned- sculpture, the ‘Tornado Diverter’. This flimsy funnel claims to shift the electromagnetic field enough to run the wind off course. But contemporary weather modification is increasingly aggressive, and the film also records more forceful pieces of equipment, including the Chinese missiles that diverted rainfall during the 2008 Olympics. Meteorology developed symbiotically with warfare, and weather forecasts have long influenced military strategies. Now the conflict is with the weather itself, as mankind desperately attempts to control its power. Ending on aerial shots of tornado-flattened Joplin, Missouri, and the slum towns of displaced Bangladeshi flood victims, the message of the film feels far from victorious. (Rachael Cloughton)
The birth rate in Britain has leapt 18% in the last decade. That means, in statistical terms, we’re in the midst of a baby boom. Alex Frost uses this as a playful stepping-off point to explore issues of reproduction, human and artistic, in his solo show for Glasgow International. Continuing an interest in packaging, he
creates large beanbag-like packets of Pampers and Huggies, and boxes of pregnancy and conception vitamin pills encased in resin. These are interspersed with ‘screen-rubbings’ of Walker Evans’ photographs of Alabama sharecroppers, images reproduced and reappropriated many times through the artistic generations.
Most interesting are his sculptures: an agglomeration of boobs and penises from novelty mugs, which starts to look like a contemporary fertility god, and a sculpture made of sand impregnated with the maternal bonding hormone Oxytocin. These are astute, creative comments on how the private process of human reproduction has become commodified, though whether the metaphor can be extended to originality in art is more problematic. (Susan Mansfield) ■ Part of Glasgow International Festival