Coffee-Table Notes

When a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film was presented at Tramway in Glasgow last month, it heralded a major new exhibition of Jarman’s work at the Hunterian Art Gallery. Blue Now saw four performers read Jarman’s text for Blue (1993), in which extracts from Jarman’s diaries as he came to terms with losing his sight from an AIDS related illness were heard over an Yves Klein hued blue screen as the film’s sole hypnotic visual.  Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland since 1992. Despite the thirty-two year gap, it marks a continuation of the late filmmaker’s connection with Scotland dating back decades. While this comes largely through a headline making 1989 show in Glasgow as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), other tangential connections left their mark, with Jarman going on to influence a new generation of artists shown alongside him at the Hunterian.   Digging in Another Time features works from a...

Anya Gallaccio may not have any memory of Paisley, where she was born, but the Turner Prize nominated artist’s new installation currently gracing the Renfrewshire mecca’s High Street is a homecoming of sorts in other ways. Stroke, after all, is the latest iteration of a work first seen in Scotland in 2014 at Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Gallaccio has a permanent work, The light pours out of me (2012), in situ. As before with Stroke, Gallaccio has painted the walls of a room in chocolate, leaving an ever-changing sensory feast in its wake.   In Paisley, this has seen Gallaccio take over a disused shop, transforming it into an elegant looking chocolaty paradise designed to entice passers by into its sweetly scented interior. Sitting between a branch of WH Smith and Tech Doctor, and with signs for a long closed clothing alterations emporium still in the windows above, Stroke’s ornately painted exterior and flower adorned window is a classy l...

As its name implies, Sonica is about rocking worlds. Over eleven days in September, the Glasgow based Cryptic company’s eighth edition of its festival ‘for curious minds and restless spirits’ mixes up a smorgasbord of international audio-visual artworks from Egypt, Ukraine, Quebec and more. These are seen and heard alongside a plethora of homegrown fare from the likes of the Scottish Ensemble, the RSNO, composer Michael Begg and more, infiltrating the city across multiple venues great and small. Sonica sets out its store from the start with Nati Infiniti, the Scottish premiere of a new work at Tramway by Allesandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails. Other highlights include Songs for a Passerby, Celine Daeman’s Venice Film Festival Award-winning VR opera for a sole headset wearer; a cyborg pop concert of the future from Danish ensemble, NEKO3 and German multimedia composer Alexander Schubert.   Scottish and Scotland based artists in the programme include the world premiere of Ela Orleans’...

St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh has seen many things over the last 900 years since it was founded in 1124 by King David I. Civil War and the Reformation may have put what was once John Knox’s parish church at the centre of history, but neither Knox or the king could have predicted Luminescence.  This unique collaboration between internationally renowned Edinburgh born saxophonist Tommy Smith and Russian émigré artist Maria Rud will see Smith and Rud improvise their responses both to each other and the building. As Smith’s solo saxophone absorbs the cathedral’s acoustic, Rud will project her live paintings onto stained glass windows on the cathedral wall. The result should make for an ever-changing fusion of sound and vision that utilises the venue’s atmosphere to make something monumental.   ‘I love it,’ says Rud.  ‘St Giles’ is very much the third performer in the show. The architecture dictates what I paint, and the acoustics as well are very special. St Giles’ t...

When Flannery O’kafka learned that the shop front space that houses Sierra Metro gallery used to be a carpet shop, something clicked with her ongoing ideas for her proposed Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition. The result is For Willy Love and Booker T; Blue babies do whatever they want. O’kafka’s show mixes photography and film installation as part of a continuum of a deeply personal exploration of the notion of family albums, offering sanctuary and safety to adoptees like her in this most playful of spaces.  ‘It began when a friend of mine sent me this film of her baby with a blanket on her head,’ O’kafka explains. ‘My friend sent me a message saying I’d love it, and how her baby had been doing this for twenty minutes.  In the film, there's a blue carpet, and then I thought, I've always wanted to carpet a space, because there's a different feeling when you walk into a space with a different surface. The carpet in my bedroom as a child was light blue. The baby in the film is ...

As Edinburgh Art Festival celebrates its twentieth birthday, it also marks the tenth anniversary of PLATFORM, the initiative set up to showcase early career artists in the context of a festival environment. This year’s cohort features four artists whose work spans a variety of mediums and has been bubbling for some time now.  Where Alaya Ang works with durational performance, writing and other forms, Edward Gwyn Jones focuses mainly on moving image, text, and printmaking. Tamara MacArthur, meanwhile, uses intricate handcrafted installation activated by performance, while Kialy Tihngang works with sculpture, video, textiles, animation, and photomontage.      Selected by a panel led by EAF curator Eleanor Edmonson, the Platform artists will this year respond to the 2024 festival’s themes of ‘intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution’. The results will be seen on the fourth floor of the City Art Centre, which this year is set to become EAF’s home. This puts Pla...

It was autumn 1968 when a twenty-something Edinburgh College of Art graduate called Alexander Moffat (b. 1943) received a telephone call from one of his former tutors. Moffat was told he had to go on to the committee of what by now had become The New 57 Gallery. The artist run Edinburgh space had been going for eleven years by this time, having been set up by a group of artists wanting to present the sort work that wasn’t being shown in staid institutions adorned with landscape paintings.   Founded ‘by artists for artists’, and with architect Patrick Nuttgens (1930-2004) as chair, The 57 set up a subscription based model, taking up residence at 53 George Street on the second floor studio of sculptor Daphne Dyce Sharp (1924-2010). Moffat had visited the gallery as a schoolboy, and been inspired by what he saw. The spirit of innovation continued after the gallery moved to a shop-front space at 105 Rose Street in 1961, becoming The New 57 en route. It was into the Rose Street New...

Homeliness is where the heart is in Lawnmower, Laura Aldridge’s domestically inclined new commission and accompanying exhibition that has just opened as part of Jupiter Artland’s 2024 summer season. You can see it in the Edinburgh sculpture park’s Steadings Gallery, where hand crafted love seats are given the names You & Me I (2024), You & Me II (2024), You & Me III (2024). These are watched over by a series of wall mounted globe lights in coloured skirts that – with names like Housework (Ultra Vivid Scene (2024), and We too form a multitude (my brain is everywhere) (2024) - give the lights the air of blank faced disembodied doll heads.   The seats themselves are decorated with ornaments that offer up appealingly tactile armrests that allow the sitter to view three screens beaming out seventeen-minute video installation, Go Wo Mango! (2024). This was made by Aldridge in collaboration with fellow artists Juliana Capes, Morwenna Kearsley and Sarah McFadyen, with a soundtr...

When Lynn MacRitchie gave a public lecture at Edinburgh College of Art in February this year titled The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy, it shed light on one of Scotland’s lesser known avant-garde art happenings that might finally have found its time. Instigated by MacRitchie while a student at ECA more than half a century ago, The Participation Art Event (PAE) explored the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. Over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023). Medalla was a Filipino artist and activist who in 1964 co-founded the kinetic art based Signals London gallery, and was one of those behind hippie/counterculture collective the Exploding Galaxy. It was through the latter that Medalla met Dugger, an American artist who landed on the scene in 1967. The pair col...

“Images provoke memories like music provokes memories,” says Fraser Taylor in the foyer of Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery, where his Instant Whip exhibition opened a few days earlier. Shown across four rooms, Instant Whip unveils an archive of printed textiles, garments, sketchbooks, a stage backdrop for Glasgow band The Bluebells and record sleeves for pop contemporaries Friends Again. With much of the work drawn from Taylor’s time as co-founder of influential design collective, The Cloth, the exhibition’s busy array of vividly coloured works look like an inventory of his life transformed into an immersive stage set.   Navigating the spaces with Taylor, his Proustian promenade through his back pages is given extra kick by the fact the archive material on show was missing presumed lost for several decades. Only when three boxes arrived at his studio in 2014 was Taylor reintroduced to a world he thought he’d left behind.   “It was literally like my heart stopped beating f...

As the longest running and most pre-eminent survey of contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial has always attempted to showcase the most interesting work of a particular moment, with a themed approach giving the event a loose-knit narrative that goes beyond individual artists. By naming this eighteenth edition of the Biennial as Inner Sanctum, curator JoséDa Silva is suggesting a meditation of sorts on where we are now.  “ Inner Sanctum came from a simple proposition of wanting to think about what the human condition might be like in 2023 and 2024,’ Da Silva says. “How might we think about the human condition after having lived through three or four years of COVID and all of the experiences of lockdown, and how that might have affected the way we think about our lives, our homes, and our communities.   “It became clear to me very early in the thinking about this show, that there was a way of grouping certain ideas and certain artists together in distinct ways, a...

Laurie Anderson has always sounded like the future. Ever since she scored a global hit in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, the New York based artist has been at the cutting edge of melding her music, words and performances with the latest technology.    It should come as no surprise, then, that Anderson has embraced Artificial Intelligence in I’ll Be Your Mirror, her hi-tech exhibition that arrives in Adelaide after premiering in Stockholm in 2023. While Anderson won’t be present physically during the exhibition’s run, as she has in previous Adelaide appearances, AI Laurie Anderson very much will. This comes by way of machinery that has absorbed everything the real Anderson has ever said to create a writing machine made from her specific way with words and how she delivers them. Activated by viewers feeding in short phrases, new works are created in Anderson’s voice and style.    As the Velvet Underground referencing title of the exhibition suggests, I’ll Be Your Mirror does ...