VISUAL ART | PREVIEWS & REVIEWS
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PHOTOGRAPHY LINDA MCCARTNEY RETROSPECTIVE Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, until Sun 12 Jan 2020 ●●●●●
‘My photography is me,’ the artist formerly known as Linda Eastman once said about her work. This shines through this remarkable era-defining exhibition, put together with love by her husband Paul and two daughters Stella and Mary two decades after McCartney’s death. Like Yoko Ono, McCartney is too often disgracefully derided as being some kind of Beatles hanger- on. The expansive range of both public and private moments gathered here together for the first time, however, reveal a major artist in her own right. There is an easy intimacy to everything McCartney shot, from her swinging sixties portraits of the rock’n’roll jetset at play, to more personal images of her family in the Scottish countryside on their Campbeltown farm. Both are here, with early assignments including a gnomic Neil Young and a yawning Jimi Hendrix. A smiling Fab Four are captured in their psychedelic pomp at the Sgt Pepper’s press launch. A cooler, cockier Brian Jones and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones are framed elsewhere in their own state of majesty. McCartney’s images of the Beatles on Abbey Road, which, as they process in line as if crossing a parted Red Sea, are larkier and less studied than Iain Macmillan’s actual album cover shot.
Among the portraits of a family at rest, one of a naked Paul on the bed with a new-born Mary encapsulates a warmth that all but embraces the viewer. A 1970 shot of Paul on a Glasgow street captures him roaring like a Gorbals legend. With later images – including a wise Allen Ginsberg, and Kate Moss and Johnny Depp sharing the coolest of cuddles – in terms of pop history, McCartney’s access all areas insight is unparalleled. Beatles heads will lap it up, but it’s family affairs that matter most. (Neil Cooper)
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FILM ROSALIND NASHASHIBI Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh, until Sun 27 Oct ●●●●●
Across the 45 minute running time of Rosalind Nashashibi’s new, two-part video work – Part One:Where there is a joyous mood, there a comrade will appear to share a glass of wine and Part Two: The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray – fragments of family life and friendship emerge. A group of people take a walk in the hills, two young children are drowsily wakened by their mother, free and easy conversation is had on whether linear time is the greatest obstacle to space travel, and a science fiction scene appears to be re-enacted on a beach, in which a man instructs a young woman walking lonely across the sand to return to base. These films – which feature Nashashibi, her children, friends and family – fall somewhere between lush 16mm home videos and attempts to recreate the esoteric feel of 1970s arthouse sci-fi. Inspired by Ursula K Le Guin’s The Shobies’ Story, in which a crew must bond and reach a consensus understanding of the universe to enable space travel, the two pieces creates a vivid impression of both the enormity of raising a family in the present, and the hypothetical possibilities for future advancement which human imagination and potential for working together affords our race. (David Pollock)
100 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2019
MULTIMEDIA ALBERTA WHITTLE: HOW FLEXIBLE CAN WE MAKE THE MOUTH Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 14 Sep–Sun 24 Nov
With the proposed date of Brexit falling right in the middle of Alberta Whittle’s DCA show, it feels like an ideal opportunity to reflect on our relationship with the rest of the world from a unique perspective. Whittle, who was born in Barbados and has lived in Scotland since graduating from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA programme in 2011, offers just that outlook. Eoin Dara, DCA’s head of exhibitions, says: ‘Alberta
starts from her own lived experience, her family and her connections to Barbados and Scotland, looking at the way history is written and which voices are being left out. It feels really timely to be connecting to that kind of practice which asks us to think about how we got to where we are right now, and how we can move towards a more inclusive, more equal future.’ Whittle’s video works will be supported by
sculpture, installation and new prints. Dara says this – Whittle’s biggest solo show to date and her first museum show in the UK – is long overdue. ‘Alberta has been making incredible, really important work here in Scotland for quite a few years and her profile has been increasing internationally for a while. It’s time we caught up to her.’ (Susan Mansfield)
VIDEO INSTALLATION FIONA TAN: DISORIENT Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 26 Jan 2020 ●●●●●
In the darkness of Fiona Tan’s video installation, Disorient, huge beanbag cushions are scattered across the floor. Lounging visitors are softly lit by the glow of two huge screens. A male voice recounts extracts from Marco Polo’s Book of the Marvels of The World, detailing a series of far-away places with exotic sounding names, the religious customs or physical attributes of their populations and the remarkable commodities to be found. Pearls, indigo, porcelain, coral; the sonorous voice laps like waves: an entrepreneur’s fever dream. Marco Polo's manuscripts detailing his travels for
24 years through the Middle East and East Asia circulated widely through Europe, kindling powerful visions of exotic places to be explored and handsome fortunes to be made. Disorient was was first displayed at GoMA in 2012. Built by a wealthy merchant in 1778, GoMA’s building has also served as the Royal Exchange where merchants and businessmen once congregated to deal in commodities such as coal and sugar. In Glasgow as in Venice, power and wealth derived from spices, tobacco and slavery is no longer conspicuously accumulated. Instead both cities trade on the production of cultural capital. (Jessica Ramm)