VISUAL ART | Reviews
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PHOTOGRAPHY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: PHOTOGRAPHS OF CHILDHOOD FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 13 May ●●●●●
This new display of more than 100 photographs is presented jointly by Photography Scotland’s Season of Photography 2017 and the Luminate Festival. The collection’s stated mission is to explore how attitudes towards childhood have changed in tandem with the evolution of the photographic medium, and these moments come in snapshot rather than through any kind of rigorous survey.
Where technology and faster exposures have clearly led to more off-the-cuff and naturalistic images, most of them – the range of odd, otherworldly Victorian portraits aside – give a visceral sense of being there, and those social-realist photographs from the post-war years reveal their iconic nature yet again. Joseph McKenzie’s ‘Fall From Grace’, with a baby tumbled from its pram, and his scruffy but gallus 1960s ‘Beatle Girl’; David Peat’s poignant images of childhood companionship in bombed-out streets; Larry Herman’s studies of playing kids dwarfed by the modernist Red Road and Gorbals flats: all are iconic and well worth viewing again.
There are other striking, singular images, like the prints from David Williams’ ‘No Man’s Land’ series from 1984 (particularly a great shot of a cool, late-teen schoolgirl alongside a cheerful and unselfconscious pigtailed primary schooler), Diane Arbus’ simple, round-cheeked 1968 portrait of a newborn, and Edith Tudor-Hart’s eerie shot of London children receiving ultraviolet light treatment.
On one level it’s an enjoyable and illuminating show, and yet it feels too white, and too black and white; the latter, because a sense of the really contemporary feels somehow absent. And the former, because non-white faces – an extended family portrait of Bashir Maan, the Pakistani-Scots judge, politician and writer, plus a handful of other images aside – are sadly in too-short supply. (David Pollock)
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MIXED MEDIA VARIOUS ARTISTS Lust and the Apple, Temple, until Fri 8 Dec ●●●●●
It’s worth the pilgrimage to Midlothian to see new work by a cross-generational quartet of international artists in this adventurous contemporary art space. In the driveway, GSA graduate Amy Leigh Bird’s Topophilia, An Archeology puts locally sourced natural detritus in vitrines full of water. Inside, Rotterdam-based Bobby Sayers performance-based So What Do You Do? attempts to subvert the daily grind with a mixture of work, rest and play. In the garden, Square Metres is an ever-expanding carpet of vinyl records laid down by German noise duo Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer, who invite viewers to walk all over their collaborations with contemporary Jonathan Meese.
Back indoors, the show's centrepiece is I/Not I, a
room devoted to veteran French iconoclast Christian Boltanski. At one end, Homage A Samuel Beckett is a digital enlargement of a new work by Boltanski covering the entire wall. Inspired by Beckett’s play, Not I, in which only a mouth is seen in spotlight, Boltanski puts his own lips in the picture in close-up. The image recalls the opening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as much as the Irish playwright. While all about is rotting, Boltanski's image looks like a kiss of life. (Neil Cooper)
124 THE LIST 1 Nov 2017–31 Jan 2018
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE: WORK FROM THE COLLECTION Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 21 Jan ●●●●●
A detuned radio transmission of pop culture ephemera and individual visual snippets with their own discrete purpose are transposed and moulded together in this exhibition by Glasgow-based Stephen Sutcliffe. His collage film works cut together sound and vision from separate sources, while his posed photographs and wall drawing installations adapt the iconic New Yorker cartoons of the late Saul Steinberg. This latter group is the most accessible, big, bold images whose painstaking method of construction transforms (but doesn’t transcend) the original work. There are photographs of a man in the power position telling another man (the artist) ‘NO!’ in a large chalkboard speech bubble; the artist painting sad faces on boxes covering childrens’ heads; a wall-and-floor painting of viciously crossed out speech bubbles. Alongside two longer films, ‘Come to the Edge’ incongruously pairs an uplifting mantra by the poet Christopher Logue with a 100-second film of a teenager apparently being bullied in a school common room. These are works which assert their own meaning over the source material, walking a fine line between the transcendence and crushing failure of making art. (David Pollock)
INSTALLATIONS JOHN AKOMFRAH: VERTIGO SEA Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 27 Jan ●●●●●
There is something clichéd about John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. A man stands looking out over a rugged and mysterious Skye landscape, a women silently mourns as household objects lie scattered to the wind, a dead deer is trussed and hung in a desolate glen. These are all images that have represented Scotland’s national identity since the clearances of the 19th century; but whose images are they? Harrowing footage of whales being slit open for
their blubber and black slaves being dumped from a sailing ship is juxtaposed with glowing sunset vistas, the aurora borealis and flocks of migrating jellyfish; their poignant similarity with drowned refugees washed up on a sandy beach made clear. In this rush of sensory overload there are contradictory aspects of human experience that are impossible to reconcile. Cruelty and beauty are equally compelling and the logic of who hunts whom with the camera or the harpoon seems flawed. Colonial fantasy finds refuge in cliché, in images that allow us to look without seeing. Akomfrah is bound to all manner of phantoms; he shines a light on where they walk and where they hide in our own psyche. (Jessica Ramm)