VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
SHORT FILMS JOHN SAMSON: 1975–1983 Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Mon 17 Apr ●●●●●
When the then 22-year-old world darts champion Eric Bristow is captured throwing the tools of his trade to victory at the end of Arrows, John Samson’s 1979 study of the self-styled crafty Cockney, he’s invested with a poetry that makes him appear part Robin Hood, part pop star. Similarly, in Samson’s first film, Tattoo (1975), the closing tableaux of artfully posed illustrated men and women resemble inked-in Greek statues.
Kilmarnock-born Samson may have only made five short films between the ages of 29 and 37, but his fascination for largely working class sub-cultural fringes was on a par with Kenneth Anger, while pre-dating some of Jeremy Deller’s work. Samson followed Tattoo with Dressing For Pleasure (1977), which unzips the assorted rubber, leather and latex-based fetish-wear scenes, and briefly features Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and his SEX shop assistant, Jordan. After this, the steam train enthusiasts of Britannia (1978) is a surprising diversion, although it and Arrows lay bare worlds similarly occupied by enthusiastic obsessives who are rarely given a voice.
Only the more polemical The Skin Horse (1983), a ground- breaking personal study of disabled people’s relationship with sex originally screened on Channel 4, is invested with any kind of narration, courtesy of actor and on-camera host, Nabil Shaban. In this way, as he lays bare all the things hidden from polite society, Samson remains compassionately curious rather than voyeuristic.
While this first gallery presentation of Samson’s work might have benefited from being framed within the socio-economic context of an era that scaled the post-permissive dawning of Thatcherism, the films themselves remain vital touchstones of a pre-camera phone, pre-YouTube age when underground culture was a genuinely samizdat form of community. (Neil Cooper)
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PAINTING JOAN EARDLEY: A SENSE OF PLACE Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, Sat 3 Dec–Sun 21 May
As one of Scotland’s most popular 20th-century artists, Joan Eardley’s passionate and expressive paintings capture the harsh realities of her ordinary life in post-war Scotland. This aptly titled exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will focus on two divergent aspects of her practice; her brutally honest portraits of street children from the Townhead area of Glasgow, and her rugged landscapes set in the small fishing village of Catterline, near Aberdeen. Eardley was one of a generation of artists drawn to poverty-stricken urban childhood and she often portrayed Glasgow’s children against boarded up shops and buildings damaged by the war. She said of these children: ‘They are Glasgow – this richness that Glasgow has – I hope it will always have . . . as long as Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint.’ Eardley’s landscapes share this gritty quality, painted onto huge sheets of board on location in all kinds of weather, and her aggressive brushstrokes veer close to abstract expressionism.
Alongside the usual favourite paintings on loan from numerous public and private collections, an archive of unpublished sketches and photographs will also be on display, giving viewers greater insight into the ideas behind her much-loved paintings. (Rosie Lesso)
124 THE LIST 3 Nov 2016–31 Jan 2017
EXHIBITION ALPHONSE MUCHA: IN QUEST OF BEAUTY Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow, until Sun 19 Feb ●●●●●
The style of Alphonse Mucha is so central to defining the art nouveau moment that his work remains both instantly recognisable and hugely popular today. The first exhibition in Scotland since the major show at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh in 2000 places works from the Mucha Foundation in Prague next to his British and Glasgow contemporaries, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mucha became an overnight success in Paris in the mid 1890s after an impromptu opportunity to design a poster for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. He built a reputation as a designer for advertising and ‘decorative panels’, a low-cost option to beautify the home. His later years were devoted to an epic series of paintings supporting Czech independence.
SOUTH AFRICAN ART WILLIAM KENTRIDGE & VIVIENNE KOORLAND: CONVERSATIONS IN LETTERS AND LINES The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 19 Nov– Sun 19 Feb
While much can be revealed by an exhibition which looks, in depth, at the career of a single artist, new aspects can shine out when that artist’s work is placed next to another. Never is that more the case than when the artists are contemporaries and friends, and have been engaged in a conversation about art going back at least 40 years.
William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland met as students in South Africa in the 1970s. She became a painter, he studied performance, directed operas, made films. He now lives in Johannesburg, she in New York, but the conversation between them continues, about critical theory and politics and history, about what art does, what it can do.
The show draws interesting parallels with the Curator Tamar Garb, a friend of both artists, brings
Pre-Raphaelites, and with Mackintosh: there are similarities in their designs for print, and in the sense that both have a ‘total art’ aesthetic, but the Glasgow style quickly becomes distinct from the Czech. While easy on the eye, this show lacks the breadth and depth of the Edinburgh show, and leaves the viewer with a sense of superficial beauty, rather than a more muscular interrogation of his ideas. (Susan Mansfield) their recent work together in this show. Though the contrasts are obvious – Kentridge making films using new, fast-paced technologies, Koorland painting on burlap sacks and stitching linen – the common ground is evident too: the combining of images and words; the concern with history, time and place; and the desire to engage with the complexities of the country in which they grew up. (Susan Mansfield)