Edinburgh Printmakers
until September 8th 2012
3 stars
It's coming. The end of
the world, that is. Or at least that's the case according to those
who subscribe to the ancient Mayan theories of disaster-movie style
apocalypse, who reckon it will all be over by Christmas. As the title
of this group show suggests, artists such as Damien Hirst, Etienne
clement don't take such hokum altogether seriously, and re
effectively fiddling while Rome or wherever burns. The likes of
Gordon Cheung's classical friezes set on backdrops of the FT index,
meanwhile, have tapped into an infinitely more serious contemporary
malaise.
Hirst's gold-skulled
'Death or Glory: Sunset Fold/Blind Impression Glorious Skull' sets
the scene on the stairs, while Clement's 'Second Coming' finds a
Jesus figurine stopping the Matchbox car traffic against a building
site backdrop as the cameras roll. Beyond such japery, Cheung's
'Revelations 1-XV' and 'Tree' sum up the epoch-changing awfulness of
this century's financial collapse. In terms of the existential crisis
forged out of such blind faith in mammon, Jake and Dinos Chapman's
Kafkaesque 'I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was
months ago' reimagines tormented childhood dreams of how it could be.
It's Andy Warhol's tellingly empty 'Electric Chair', however, that
sums up the way to go. In terms of the ultimate fin de siecle
nightmare, it really is the living end.
The List, August 2012
ends
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