Coffee-Table Notes

GOMA, Glasgow until October 20th Four stars Six artists, buddied up into duos across three rooms, draw from their very singular world-views in terms of drawing, somehow finding a through line running through them all. Both Erica Eyes and Jonathan Owen draw from found images, Eyres copying from photographs in 1970s naturist magazines, Owen’s ‘eraser drawings’ rubbing out movie stars from classic film scenes, so all that is left is the background. Where Owen’s images are existentially bereft, with Eyres, the joy comes, not through sex, but the everyday mundanity of chilling in the pool, waking up and smelling the roses and of barbecues in the sun. France-Lise McGurn’s coloured line drawings of bodies in motion bend, stretch and dance their way through the frame with a classicist retro air. In Contrast, Lois Green's postcard-sized black and white still lives peers surreptitiously into unoccupied but lived-in rooms, where dirty dishes and rumpled bedclothes have been left in...

Edinburgh Printmakers until July 13 Four stars The smell of rubber lingers throughout the inaugural exhibition in Edinburgh Printmakers’ new home in Castle Mills, the former rubber factory which later became a brewery. As the show’s title suggests, German artist activist Thomas Kilpper embraces the social-political and artistic history of the venue, marking out its contradictions as he goes. He does this via a monumental site-specific rogues’ gallery that fills floor and ceiling with a partisan topography of past, present and possible futures. Mirror images of a carved-up cast list of pop/art stars that would put Peter Blake's gathering for Sergeant Pepper in the psychedelic shade as they inhabit Resembling a woodcut of a trade union banner writ large, over thirty-six images, Kipper juxtaposes images of factory workers with art figures such as Joseph Beuys, Richard Demarco and Andy Warhol. John Lyndon and Jeremy Corbin are there, as are artists Jim Lamble, Ross Sinclair ...

A Certain Ratio never got to release the record they were supposed to make with Grace Jones. Island Records boss Chris Blackwell saw to that after he discovered the planned alliance between the brooding Manchester avant-funk band and the iconic Jamaican diva. One of the proposed tracks, a cover of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light era song, Houses in Motion, minus a vocal from Jones, was recently released as a trailer of sorts for acr:box, a four-CD collection of singles, remixes and unreleased demos put out by Mute Records spanning the whole of ACR’s 40-year tenure on the frontline of punk-funk. The band’s anniversary is being celebrated on their current tour that takes in a show at Edinburgh’s Voodoo Rooms this weekend. Bells and whistles, one suspects, will be compulsory. But what of the fabulous Ms Jones? “Grace Jones had done a version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control,” says ACR’s bass player and co-vocalist Jez Kerr, “and it was the A&R man’s idea to do it. We were ...