Coffee-Table Notes

Carolee Schneemann embodied an era of late twentieth century live art that was all about pushing boundaries. Works such as Meat Joy (1964) indulged in orgiastic celebrations of bodies in motion in collective acts of play. Meat Joy itself saw near naked participants roll around in bucket loads of paint while assorted foodstuffs rained down on them like an action painting come to full liberating life.   While Barbican’s overview of Schneemann puts photographic documentation of such works at the centre of her half-century of iconoclastic wildness prior to her death in 2019 aged 79, this epic homage goes a lot further. This is clear from the insistent thwack of a mechanically controlled mop beating the top of the television set it is attached to that permeates the air as you move through the exhibition. It is clear too from Schneemann’s declaration quoted at its start.   ‘I’m a painter,’ Schneemann said. ‘I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have develop...

Dan McCafferty – Singer, songwriter   Born October 14, 1946; died November 8, 2022     Dan McCafferty, who has died aged 76, was for more than forty years the lead singer of Dunfermline sired rock group, Nazareth. McCafferty’s rasp-laden voice defined a sound that came of age in the first half of the 1970s, with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert  Plant and Free’s Paul Rodgers clear vocal peers. Weaned on first generation rock and roll, Nazareth took backwoods blues into spit and sawdust inner city barroom territory.    This was evidenced on a spate of cover versions that included rock reinventions of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight (1973), from Mitchell’s 1971 album, Blue, and especially on their U.S. hit, Love Hurts (1975). The latter appeared on the American edition of Hair of the Dog (1975), the sixth Nazareth album, which saw the band cross over into the big league. Originally intended as a B-side, the Boudleaux Bryant penned ballad had previously ...

If travel broadens the mind, how to capture an unexpected moment that changed everything beyond mere postcards home? This is something Mark Cousins’ new four-screen film installation attempts to tune in to, as he channels a once-in-a-lifetime epiphany experienced by St Andrews born artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). This occurred in May 1949, when Barns-Graham climbed the Grindelewald glacier in Switzerland. Whatever intoxicated her up there on what was meant to be a mere away day excursion left its mark on her mind’s eye with such force that she never quite came down.   This is evident from the cycle of paintings drawn from that afternoon, which at points beam out from each screen like transmissions from Barns-Graham’s brain that Cousins immerses the viewer inside alongside his own retelling of the event. This comes by way of a subtitled dialogue between the older and younger Barns-Graham indicated by photographs taken of her fifty years apart. The cross-generational disc...

Flashback Some time in the mid to late 1980s, I attended a short season of films by  Shūji Terayama , a Japanese radical best known for his features, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1968), and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971). The screenings took place at Filmhouse in Edinburgh, which I visited on a semi regular basis to see the sort of subtitled arthouse films I’d previously only been able to watch on small screen BBC2 or Channel 4. Tickets were cheap, especially if you were on the dole, as I was, and spending afternoons watching Godard and Fassbinder, or more current works by Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway, was a steal for 50p. The  Shūji Terayama season, however, was something else again, and seemed to relate more to performance or visual art as much as film. One short film, Laura (1974), had a group of women address the camera directly, with Terayama’s assistant, Henrikku Morisaki, walking from the audience and through the slatted screen to become part of t...

McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee Saturday October 29th   It is thirty years since Alastair MacLennan performed CAN’T CANT over several days at McManus Galleries in Dundee. Three decades on, the Perthshire born artist is recognised as one of the world’s most important live practitioners, with his ever-expanding archive now housed at his alma mater, Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Returning to The McManus for this afternoon commemoration, MacLennan’s new work, SILIBANT MISCIBLE, bridged past, present and possible futures.   Brought together by DJCAD (University of Dundee) and Leisure and Culture Dundee with artist-led spaces, Bbeyond in Belfast, and GENERATORprojects, Dundee, this fusion of the institutional and the independent also saw two younger artists - Rabindranath X Bhose and Hattie Godfrey - present work inspired by the Archive.   In the Howf Graveyard, across the road from The McManus, Bhose, bare-torsoed and sporting coloured scarves tucked...

When Elizabeth Price undertook a Research Fellowship with the University of Glasgow Library in 2020, the Turner Prize winning artist found a kaleidoscopic world beneath her feet. The vivid swirls that pattern the carpets lining the Mitchell Library in particular led to two new commissions about to go on show at the University’s Hunterian Art Gallery.   UNDERFOOT (2022) is a moving image work drawing from the photographic and pattern book archives of carpet manufacturers, Stoddard International Plc, and James Templeton and Co. Ltd. A complementary textile piece, SAD CARREL (2022), sees Price embark on her first non-video work in five years.   Commissioned by the Hunterian and developed with curatorial organisation, Panel, Fiona Jardine of Glasgow School of Art, and Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Price’s new constructions mine the sort of social histories that won her the 2012 Turner for her video, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012).   With vinyl records forming a recurring m...