Coffee-Table Notes

Playfair Library, Edinburgh Five stars It's the eyes that get you first when you step into South African artist Brett Bailey's searing damnation of historical and modern-day racism. Set up as a series of tableaux vivants in the most quietly ornate of human zoos, the audience are invited to peer at living representations of black people down the centuries in this presentation by Bailey's Third World Bunfight company for Edinburgh International Festival. Flanked by the white marble busts of  the victors of the official history books, we pay witness to those abused and treated as a novelty or freak-show by their white masters. Captions use the triumphant colonialist clichés of the 'Civilising The Native' variety, only for the small print to spell out what really happened. Most damning of all are the three so-called Found Objects, in which real life immigrants from Jamaica, Ghana and Nigeria portray, not figures from  history, but themselves, with the details of whe

Talbot Rice Gallery until October 18th Three stars Waiting plays a big part in the Talbot Rice's compendium of eight relatively off-piste artists for their EAF show. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ellie Harrison's 'After The Revolution, Who Will clean Up The Mess?' an installation of four confetti cannons which may or may not be detonated on September 18th this year at a post-referendum party ONLY if there is a Yes vote.  This is something Ross Birrell's uncertainty-based works also point too in their pointers to Heisenberg and Mallarme's poem, A Dice Throw. If Harrison's specially commissioned piece in search of an audience for a once in a lifetime event isn't enough motivation for the accompanying all-night party to go with a bang, one might turn to Michelle Hannah's ongoing fantasy-wish-fulfilment fascination with retro-futuristic electronic torch ballads and the vogue for ice-cool dystopian iconography that defined the accompanying rise of

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars From COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle and beyond, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge  was the ultimate self-created deity. So when he and partner Lady Jaye embarked on their Pandrogyny project in a bid to look identical to each other, it was the ultimate love story. This first UK show since 2003, the same year the pair celebrated Valentine's Day by having identical breast implants, is part document of the ongoing series of body modifications the pair underwent, part homage to Lady Jaye, whose 'body dropped' in 2007. The scars are there still in this in-the-raw assortment of imagery that charts their quest for two to become one, both in large-scale light-box images that provides an entry into their special world, and in elaborately framed photographs of them post-op. Elsewhere, coyote-head installations, religious iconography and royal family subverting collages expose lives in permanent opposition. After such extreme measures, however, it'

August 1st-31st. Performances Thursday to Saturday at 7pm. Three stars The vast top-floor warehouse space of Ocean Terminal's Logan's Run style shopping mall is a gloriously incongruous venue for the Hamburg/London-based Villa Design Group to house its epic reimagining of Gogol's play, The Gamblers. While the array of clean-lined screens and curious cabinets flanking the large stage that simulates Yves Saint Laurent's faux Russian dacha remain in situ throughout the day, this third part of Than Hussein Clark, James Connick and William Joys' Gogol-inspired dissection of architecture and morality blossoms into full dramatic life for a two-hour performance of the play in the evening. Here Laura Schuller's Adelaida holds court to a crooked conference of interior designers brought together to discuss the building of a new library to house Gogol's archive. As she bursts through a wooden construction that is part state-of-art coffin, part dressing-up box, her conn

When Bill Drummond announced that he would be embarking on a twelve year world tour of his The 25 Paintings show earlier this year, it was no belated rock and roll gesture that emulated the life on the road so beloved of ageing icons stuck in a last-gasp music industry groove. Rather, the show's opening leg at Eastside Projects in Birmingham between March and June this year was the latest chapter in Drummond's very personal pilgrimage that has provoked and confused himself as much as the music and art establishments he has subverted over almost forty years. From designing the set of theatre director Ken Campbell's legendary twelve-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's science-fiction conspiracy epic, Illuminatus, through to spending his sixtieth birthday standing on a manhole cover in Liverpool, Drummond's restless wanderings have been a very personal Boy's Own style adventure that have explored ways of being as much as seeing. Thi

August 1st-September 26th It's almost forty years since Scottish Conservative MP  Nicholas Fairburn declared those behind COUM Transmissions' Prostitution show at the ICA in 1976 to be 'wreckers of civilisation'. The artist then known as Genesis P Orridge, who was the driving force of the artistic collective that morphed into Throbbing Gristle, still has the power to provoke, however, as this centrepiece of Summerhall's current exhibitions programme makes clear. Life As A Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and A Search For A Unified Identity) charts the love affair between P Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer, who met in 1993 and married two years later on Friday 13th. Over the next twelve years, before Lady Jaye tragically 'dropped her body' in 2007, the couple became a living artwork as they attempted to merge their identities and bodies into a third unified being by way of cosmetic surgery and body modification. This included having matching breast implants on Valenti

November 7th-February 15th 2015 When Stan Douglas decided to explore what happens in rough-house neighbourhoods after a war, the play, Helen Lawrence, which forms part of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival's Theatre programme, was the result. This film noir writ large is an epic piece of 'cinematic theatre' in which the actors are filmed live as they perform against digitally realised back-drops of Vancouver's Hogan's Alley district and the city's now demolished Old Hotel where homeless war veterans squatted in increasing squalor. It was somehow fitting that the shadows and light of  Hogan's Alley were tucked away at one end of Munich's Kunsthaus as part of Douglas' recent Mise en scene show of his elaborately constructed fictions there. The 3D stylings of both Hogan's Alley and Hotel Vancouver that formed the 'set' of Helen Lawrence now makes up part of the Canadian film and photography-based artist's Fruitmarket Gallery show.