Edinburgh trip – many, many galleries…

Today, we head to Edinburgh, for an art feast…A guided tour by Steve Hollingsworth to the more contemporary art galleries in our capital city. The Embassy, Talbot Rice, Stills, Edinburgh Printmakers Studio, Dogger Fisher and the National Portrait Gallery. We are treated to an array of contemporary installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, print and video. It’s an interesting mix of settings, from a house, to a museum, from prestigious frontages, to hard to find back streets – the day is filled with a dizzying variety of art and culture. I was highly entertained by the fact that most of these “places of art” are open to an elite few, well, open to all…but who in the “general public” is willing to enter a house with a metal machine clattering two antlers together? It’s interesting that such a simple, stripped down space could convey such unwelcoming vibes. You have to know of these places, and have a mission to go there, I get the feeling that you wouldn’t “just walk in” if passing. It’s certainly a point I took away from today – the sheer audacity and elitism of these spaces. Dogger fisher, for example, has a bell you have to ring, like an expensive boutique…unwelcoming to most, “exclusive” and “justified” for the few. A recent article in the frieze magazine gave such an insight. A gallery with what looked like a door, but no handle and a buzzer…Buzzing the buzzer gave you exclusive access to a poe faced, droll gallery worker, explaining that the “handle” is at the bottom of the door, like some fucked up Terry Gilliam skit, to enter hell. The writer recalls much buzzer pressing and confused / disdained conversation, only to eventually find the door handle to find it locked, as the Gallery was closed…what fun these “powerful” snobs have over the public…is it any wonder “art” (or “modern art”) gets a drubbing? What’s wrong with wanting people to see work, be they plebs or YBA’s? I’d liken it to walking into a scary pub, it’s not nice feeling ill at ease, just because of a place, you don’t belong here…so what are you doing here? The Rusty Cutlass or Embassy, the choice is yours. This said, good art is about confrontation, so placing work in a space that seems to not welcome you, might just be part and parcel to the whole experience, being on edge might open up the senses, just the tonic for “looking at art”…Not all galleries felt like this today, but at the other end of the spectrum, cosy, safe, old, obvious…much like the art that inhabited it too. Like all things in life, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. So I can understand why such elitist places exist. It’s about confidence; confidence to know you will have a sufficient audience (to create / keep a contemporary Scottish art scene at the cutting edge), confidence to know that you can get funding for projects, confidence to know that your gallery is a necessary part of life – no matter how small the audience. I keep asking myself the question through the day…”Would I show here?” (If I were asked). On the whole, I said yes every time…I am educating myself to understand that these places are important to my life as an artist, I do want to be shown in our capital city and central belt, but I also would feel comfortable showing work in a field in Finzien.

The shows we saw were certainly varied, and I’d have to spend an age writing about them all, to do them justice – so I won’t review them all, but I will write about what I felt were the most interesting points of the day.

Brandon Vickerd – When all our heroes turn to ghosts (Embassy)
In a ground floor flat, we’re treated to a view of two bike-like machines rutting, on and off. It looks impressive, we dutifully walk round it, when it whirrs into action, jazz timings clicking off antlers, rhythm of life…or is it? We’re told (in the very prescriptive / descriptive a4 sheet we’re given) that the machine is an exploration of the randomness from mechanical absolutes. The idea that a pure, constant, known cycle can result in non-repeating, non-cyclic patterns, if an element from nature is interspersed with the machine…I like this Idea, it’s something I’ve been looking at in my own works, how repetition can actually cause variance…it all depends on your level of perception and attention to detail. The antlers, each time the machine heaves into life, do set a different pace, beat and pattern, I’d likened it to some minimal German techno (Thomas Brinkman for example), where it is the detail that makes the difference, not some brash 4/4 rock anthem, or cheesy verse chorus verse chart piddle…which is interesting, as some of the references in Vickerd’s work is of rock / heavy metal lyrics, but extracted (taken out of context). Is this minimalisation of overly theatrical lyrics of death, Satanism and ritual a furthering of the idea of variance in detail? A pentagram covers a map, 5 lyrics next to the map, are we to make a story of each line of verse, to each location of the points in the star? It is interesting that I am the only one in the group to notice that the lines are indeed rock lyrics (Metallica’s “ONE” for example), and I then read that Vickerd’s work aims to look into the bridge between high and low brown cultures…ho ho, I have a head start in the group, I’ve got low brow rock music ahoy in my collection! I can look intelligent, by knowing of unintelligent, teenage angst music…(is that a good thing?) The most striking part of the show (3 rooms) is a large ghostly (based on comic themes of ghosts, “a human shape with a sheet over it”) made of metal, standing 6feet 6 inches towering, and leaning in, as if to fly off at the drop of a hat. Its presence in the room is rather unsettling…The “sell” on the A4 page is certainly interesting, in that we (and I used the word here already) see the sculpture as a “ghost”. The writing states that we accept on a worldly level that a figure draped in a sheet “looks like a ghost”, when we don’t know what ghosts “look like” at all, a very Scooby doo, childhood story vision of what a ghost is…perhaps this is why we feel this way, childhood fears kept for life…like our apparent inbuilt need to recoil from spiders, our marvel at fireworks. I like the sense of humour that dusts the show; the statement on the A4 is smattered with humour, “…unlikely that it [the ghost] would chose to take the form of a hovering bed sheet”. Steve dislikes the rutting sculpture (“ghosts and champions of entropy”), he talks about entropy being, “near collapse” and that the sculpture is solid and hardly likely to fall apart…I always thought that entropy was about the loss of energy, about stillness, balance and equality, an eternal state of nothing, no winner, no loser…it’s amazing what language can throw up, intricate and semantic, definitions, even eloquently conveyed, are still open to interpretation, all bringing me back to my interests, what is truth? How can interpretation be a good or bad thing?

Alex Pollard: Black Marks (Talbot Rice gallery)
Representing Scotland in the Venice Biennale in 2005, this is Alex’s first major show since then. As of many artists I see today, I am unaware of most of them, till now, so I have no basis of judgement from the past, a refreshing “new look” at the work, help or hindrance, it’s of no concern, it’s all about personal experience, perception and reaction (based on history of the artists work, or not…) We’re confronted with a huge, open white space, a grand room indeed, filled with disparate works, large brass “coins” in the centre of the room, they resemble Rebbeca Horn's sculptures, crudly made, thickly applied clay, converted to brass castings, giant wiggly lines (on closer inspection, are pencils) stuck to the wall, along side make up mirrors, false eyelashes, lipsticks, smudges of graphite (the pens comically placed as if they’ve drawn them, whereas we know it was the artists hand that smudged the marks around), lines drawn, almost cartoon like indicating tension, one imagines that the release of this would send the pencil flying across the wall, all comical – linking to the clowning theme, the wiggling line might represent a clown on a unicycle, wobbling his way across a bare circus stage? All that was missing was a bucket of torn paper, too obvious! 5 “portraits” of various clowns are made from broken, exploded pencils at the far end of the show. I can pick out crying clown, mad clown, scary clown, bowie clown…lovely works, how these seem to be the manifestation or condensate of the previous “fun” work on the wall, a seriousness derived from destruction of materials (construction from deconstruction). The show continues upstairs with some rather disturbing, realistic paintings of clown / big top icons, distorted in an almost photoshop-esque way (ripple effect anyone?). It’s as if the show has been pulling focus, refining into a twisted reality, a nightmarish end to what started out as a fun ride. Pay your penny, end up in hell; perhaps those large coins should cover our eyes as we take the ferry across the river Styx. From playful to morbid, it’s certainly an interesting, varied show. I’d noticed that the poster has Alex Pollard as a clown, donning black and white makeup, was this a documented performance? It makes me feel like I am still only seeing a portion of the theme here, it’s tantalising that one poster, with one image, can make you want more from a show.

The other shows were beautiful, ugly, confusing, simple, interesting and banal. The whole day for me, was really seeing Edinburgh from a contemporary art point of view, I’d never been to these galleries before, Dogger fisher, Embassy, Talbot rice etc…but, every time I am down there from now on in, I will make a point of going into these places, I will speak to the owners, I will persist in belonging to this scene. All it takes is time and a will, I have the will, and the time, so why not?

We end the day by saying goodbye to the train-goers, and head for a coffee, to avoid rush-hour. I advise the girls (Susie, Mary & Amy) that we should visit the bookshop : analogue. We inadvertently stumble into the beginnings of a private showing, run by Spin, champagne, Contacts and a bloody good end to a lovely day..well, including the magic drive back up the road, and sublime fish and chips from the bervie...realities luxuries, lovely jubbly. (did I just type that ?)...

Listening to : shellac - acton park : amon tobid - supermodefied