Dundee Contemporary Arts until August 26th 2012 4 stars With a title taken from David Foster Wallace’s footnote-friendly novel, going round in circles is the preserve of all three artists in DCA’s fun-packed summer special of a show. Where the videos of Brazilian interventionist Cinthia Marcelle subvert noisy city-scapes with meticulously orchestrated real-time arrangements, Rob Pruitt is all high-class paddling pools, monster-size cookies and down-time denim. London-born William Mackrell continues the party theme with birthday cake-sized illuminations that may burn fast, but which leave a lunar-etched after-glow to bask in. There’s fire from the off via Marcelle’s video piece,’ Confronto’, setting out its store on a monitor that wilfully obstructs the gallery entrance. Onscreen, a group of fire jugglers stop the traffic, increasing in number as their routine moves from red-light entertainment to green-light environmental alchemy. Marcelle’s similarly-inclined ‘Volta ae Mondo (Round the World)’ goes even further, as increasing numbers of white vans circumnavigate a roundabout ad nauseum. Such an elaborately choreographed urban merry-go-round resembles the staging of a carefully planned heist; The Brazilian Job, if you will. Mackrell too explores the performative, the playful and the political, from ‘90 Minutes’, in which a concrete football sits at the centre of the gallery waiting for kick-off, to the glorious ‘1000 Candles’, in which 1000 tea candles are captured as a photograph, on film and, health-and-safety permitting, from flame-on mode to last-gasp flickers. Onscreen especially, the effect is of some orbiting planet moving from dawn to dusk. If Pruitt’s ‘Evian Fountain’ is a very expensive splash-about, his oversize and indisputably toothsome biscuits in’ Pop-Pop’s Chocolate-Chip Cookie’s suggests Roald Dahl reconfiguring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Lilliput. Pruitt’s two takes on ‘Esprit de Corps’, meanwhile, fills classic blue jeans with concrete and cotton, then sews them together in a body-melding mirror-image which, as with Marcelle and Mackrell’s work, contorts reality enough to drive it round the bend. The List, July 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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