Coffee-Table Notes

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 c

“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 for five m

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, and that you mi

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 likewise with an AI