Skip to main content

Andy Hope 1930 - When Dinosaurs Become Modernists 


Inverleith House, Edinburgh
November 1 to January 13 2013
4 stars
Scary monsters and super-creeps abound in the Berlin-based artist 
formerly known as Andreas Hofer's first UK museum exhibition, which 
features five new works among an epic forty-one on show. Seen side by 
side, there are moments when they resemble an outsize pulp fiction 
collage of pop culture ephemera swirling around Hofer's brain, 
over-lapping each other as they burst through the frame. Even the fact 
that Andy Hope 1930 has a secret identity speaks volumes about where 
he's coming from.

Because, drawing a line between Roy Lichtenstein and Daniel Johnston, 
Andy Hope 1930 takes the  trash aesthetic of golden age comic book 
iconography and invests it with a subverted mythology born of the more 
questioning, me-generation years. So, against a Zabriskie Point style 
landscape in 'Impressions d'Amerique', Batman and Robin are dressed as 
The Lone Ranger and Tonto, making the umbilical link between 
existentialist outlaw (super)heroes of old and new America as he goes.

  The nod to French proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel, who so influenced 
a generation of New York poets, is as knowing as the wonkified 
charity-shop Kurt Schwitters homage, the portrait of John Baldessari as 
Marvel Comics super-villain Galactus, which comes complete with extra 
added Jesus, and the strip cartoon take of Linda Lee as Supergirl. 
Because, amongst the desolate landscapes that recall the early work of 
Wim Wenders, another German fascinated with the Wild West reinvented as 
post-war counter-culture, Andy Hope 1930 needs heroes to call his own.

Of course, there are dinosaurs, be they larger than life and hidden 
behind wall-papered candy-stripes, or pocket-sized and contained, as 
they are in 'The Education Dinosaur Movie Hall'. This earth's core 
installation is a cardboard box peep-show into a Ray Harryhausen-style 
parallel universe where dinosaurs watch science-fiction B-movies at the 
local drive-in. As evolution goes, it's a spaced oddity, for sure. 

The List, November 2012

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more