VISUAL ART | Reviews
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O T O H P 108 THE LIST 1 Jun–31 Aug 2017
GROUP SHOW NOW Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until Sun 24 Sep ●●●●●
Gathered around Nathan Coley’s iconic ‘The Lamp of Sacrifice’ (pictured), featuring 286 places of worship constructed in cardboard, NOW brings together a collection of works by Scottish and international artists that question the artist’s role in society. Mona Hatoum’s performance documents show her working through issues of estrangement and vulnerability using repetitive material processes that seem closely linked to her identity as a displaced person.
A compilation of personal shopping lists gathered by Rivane Neuenschwander questions the habitual mass behaviour that underpins society, while her film The Tenant follows a bubble round an ambiguously institutional building. If the artist’s role is to reflect society while participating in it, then
their work requires them to inhabit a position of contradiction or paradox. This produces interesting questions, such as those raised by Dundee artist Pete Horobin’s ‘Data Sheets’, which present a prodigious array of personal information about the artist’s daily life. Made in the 1980s, this work seems to predict the mass surveillance culture and data harvesting which is so familiar to us now.
Nathan Coley’s cabinet of curiosities ‘Paul’, constructed inside a model of St Paul’s Cathedral, is a plea for the anachronistic orderliness of a bygone era in which the microcosm and macrocosm still reflected each other. Inside the model, he houses ephemera of the Occupy Movement. The overall reading of these objects falls flat in much the same way that Occupy has been criticised for the unproductive nature of its consensus decision- making.
NOW subtly inverts the perceived association with states of insanity that artists have traditionally enjoyed. If we suspect an entire culture may be embedded in collusive madness, where is the baseline that defines sanity? (Jessica Ramm)
POP ART MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES: ED RUSCHA AND LOS ANGELES Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until Sun 29 Apr, 2018 ●●●●●
‘The music from the balconies nearby was overlaid by the noise of sporadic acts of violence,’ runs some text on the large-scale painting from which this exhibition takes its name. The associations evoked by image and words are in sharp conflict: a peaceful, barren prairie versus an imagined scene of disruption, danger and intrusion upon the senses. As the key work in a short exhibition examining polymath pop artist Ed Ruscha’s links with the West Coast of America and Los Angeles in particular, the piece takes on even more vivid significance. It’s possible to see within it two Americas: the untouched and idyllic pre-settlement New World, and laid over it like a bandage, a suggested gauze of tarmac, technology and human activity.
Yet humans are absent, including Ruscha’s repeated photographic series of architectural features which speak vocally of LA, even to those who have never been. There are rooftop shots of the West Hollywood skyline from 1961 and a range of acrylic paintings. In ‘The Final End’ (1992), ‘The End’ text of a classic movie overgrown with tall grass, there’s a subtle but powerful call-back to the exhibition’s title image. A filmic narrative can be traced throughout, with one piece as first reel and one piece as final, its theme revealing that everything – life, a city like LA, Hollywood’s glory days, the career of an iconic artist – grows, blooms and returns to the soil. (David Pollock)
SCULPTURE STEVEN CLAYDON: THE ARCHIPELAGO OF CONTENTED PEOPLES – ENDURANCE GROUPS The Common Guild, Glasgow, until Sun 9 Jul ●●●●●
All that glitters is not necessarily gold in a first solo show in Scotland by Steven Claydon, former member of avant-electro sleaze merchants Add N to (X), who was shortlisted for the 2016 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.
Here, Claydon’s new (or are they?) constructions question notions of authenticity and value; this could be through a shrine to dead teeth, a similarly worshipful array of multi-coloured gas canisters, or numerous subversions of ethnographic fetishism which illustrate what Claydon calls ‘cultural cannibalism’. Chain-store ‘African’ heads devour gold-painted packets of pills, as if sanctioned by private medicine millionaires who would hike up the prices of life-saving drugs by 1000%. Shredded bank notes – a much more efficient way of dealing with money to burn – are framed as a dappled decorative backdrop.
Crocodiles grow out of carved canoes, saved from some biblical flood. All this and the Pink
Panther is captured against a rug made of bark.
Much of the work The Archipelago of Contented Peoples – Endurance Groups is discreetly highlighted by LED lights, which both make things shinier and put them even more off-limits in a plastic palace where nothing is how it seems. (Neil Cooper)