Coffee-Table Notes

Saturday lunchtime in January, and on a plinth on the City Art Centre’s third floor, two incense sticks sit side by side. As a small crowd circle close, the first stick is lit. The scent it emits is drawn from ‘the first forest’, 385 million years ago at the dawn of civilisation, in what would become Cairo in New York State.  Once this first stick is burnt out, a second is lit, releasing a more recent odour that  comes from ‘the last forest’, deep in the Amazon Rainforest.  As the scents of Paterson’s work intermingle in the air, they create a sensory cocktail that draws across the centuries to infuse the air that we breathe today. This little ritual is To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), Katie Paterson’s contribution to the City Art Centre’s group show that gets back to nature to explore the human relationship with the natural environment. With the show’s mix of photography, painting, sculpture and installation nestling side by side, such cross fertilisation of approach itself...

Stills, Edinburgh Five stars   Over the last decade, Craig Atkinson’s Café Royal imprint has become one of the most vital platforms for documentary photography in the UK. Since 2012, an array of artists have utilised Café Royal’s punky A5 zine-like format across some 600 editions and rising to produce a street-smart archive of a population at work, rest and play. These have ranged from short form photo essays by well-known artists including Martin Parr and Syd Shelton, to less familiar but just as vital fly on the wall witnesses to a pre digital, pre gentrified age.   All life is here, be it on red brick streets, in back street boozers and social clubs, out of season seaside towns and 1990s raves. Middle-aged matriarchs scream in close up at 1980s wrestling.  Ballardian breezeblock monoliths reach for the sky in what we used to call concrete jungles .    This exhibition consolidates Atkinson’s tireless vision in collecting and curating the vast swathes of materi...

If the artists’ studio is a sacred place, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s photographs of forty-five artists in their workplace are a rare access-all-areas pass into a world where imagination is channelled into hard graft. Sutton-Hibbert’s cross-country - and cross-generational – peek behind assorted curtains doesn’t so much reveal displays of genius at play as make pin-ups of his subjects while on a break from the daily grind. With the rooms pictured awash with the acquired clutter of endless works in progress, from such an up-close and personal set-up, a much bigger picture of each artist’s world taps into the personalities that inform their process.    Tessa Lynch sets the tone with a smile as she holds on to a full-length mirror. The mirror Helen Flockhart looks into causes her image to become part of the wall of pictures that surround her. Graeme Wilcox too could be one of his own head and shoulders portraits lined up behind him.    Reflection comes too from Sekai Machac...

Every face tells a story in Simon Murphy’s frontline portrait of assorted communities in Govanhill, the neighbourhood on Glasgow’s south side he once called home. This is the case whether it is Paisley wearing a No More War badge on her camouflage jacket, hands on hips as she blows bubblegum bubbles, or tattooed Jim wielding an artfully poised cigarette. Then there is Sahar, his hands in fur lined pockets as he leans against a car with studied cool; Dylan hanging tough on roller skates; and Cassidy swathed in matinee idol paisley patterned scarves.   And what about Eliza, on the way to the shops with a cat wrapped round her neck; or Callum and Marek, the epitome of couldn’t-care-lessness as they loiter outside a corner shop looked down on by a sign declaiming ‘Today’. As one young lad brazenly sucks on a fag, the other fails to hide his laughter. Most fantastical of all is Seamus, a street entertainer who looks like he’s on his way home from some surrealists’ ball. This is me,...

At first glance at the cover image of Alicia Bruce’s new book, one might be forgiven for presuming it to be a coffee table tome immortalising North East Scotland’s epic rural landscape. Look closer, however, and it heralds a vital pictorial document of a community campaign against a predatory attempt to erase it along with its natural surroundings, redrawing the map in the name of big business.   The title of the book is the giveaway, taken from a song by Karine Polwart, who recounts in her afterword how she co-opted the motto of the MacLeod clan. Given the circumstances of the song’s composition, this it is as much anthem as work of art.   The same can be said of Bruce’s book, which features eighty photographs that bear witness to almost two decades of resistance by residents of Menie, close to Balmedie beach in Aberdeenshire, to Donald Trump’s building of a golf club on what was then a Site of Special Scientific Interest. This is a status supposed to save it from hostile dev...

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow until 28 April 2024   In the GOMA shop, just beside the loading bay style entrance to Beagles & Ramsay’s new exhibition, limited edition t-shirts, tote bags, lanyards and postcards based on the show are nestled next to assorted art stars’ merch. While not usual to advertise within the confines of a review, given the Glasgow based double act of John Beagles and Graham Ramsay’s long-standing dissection of consumer capital, in this context, it seems appropriate.   This year’s model sees the pair in their occasional guise of New Heads on the Block and Rope-a-Dope transform the gallery space into a department store. Here, off the peg items and bespoke couture are modelled by eighty-one life-size flatpack showroom dummies that wear their brand with pride.    Constructed from cheap office furniture and resembling Viz comic characters or more regular mannequins after a crash diet and a makeover, the models sport ostentatious uber-moderne ou...

The sound of a heart beating breathes out across a room that seems filled with memorials in David Eustace’s exhibition of sculptures, prints and funereal photographs that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a Joy Division record. The sound also recalls  Breath (1969), Samuel Beckett’s miniature piece of proto sound art that charted matters of life and death. Here, the steady rhythms of Eustace’s heart casts a kind of raging calm across the exhibition, its occasional missed beats leaving a fleeting silence in which to contemplate the void.  A tombstone engraved with the exhibition’s title sits at its start, in front of a platform filled with what initially look like screwed up paper cranes. On closer inspection, these are revealed as photocopies of a letter offering Eustace for adoption the day after his birth in 1961. Eustace made 1,961copies of the letter to be taken away and given new life, just as he was.   Much of what follows is about mortality, even as Eustac...

Four stars  " Booze makes everything better", says Lindsey Mendick in her voiceover to   Shame Spiral  (2023), her twenty-minute warts and all gonzo film documenting a big night out and the morning after. "Until it makes everything worse". These lines are the driving force of Mendick’s debut show in Scotland, which charts her topsy-turvy relationship with alcohol. This is done in a monumental display that mines the dark underbelly of what lies beneath the surface of everyday politesse once a messy night on the lash has unleashed the beast within.   In the show’s title piece, Mendick draws from Dante’s Divine Comedy to create a ceramic-based model of a nightclub, one half of which shows off the calm before the storm as businessmen and hen parties unwind. The other half lays bare the depraved nightmare of what altered states can reveal. A full-size reimagining of a club bathroom sees similarly monstrous forces inveigle their way into assorted sinks as well as the unde...

Inspace, Edinburgh until August 28 Four stars Finding one’s voice isn’t easy in the AI age. As the title of this state of art show implies, however, all that glisters is not necessarily authentic. Everest Pipkin’s ‘Shell Song’ is a push-button recorded monologue that takes in face blindness, talking books and a personal history of the recorded voice.   The Unit Test collective’s Samuel Beckett referencing ‘Not I’is a   film based show and tell of Speech2Face, a new fangled construction that attempts to generate an image of a speaker’s face based on their recorded voice.   ‘Whose voice is it?’ finds Holly Herndon, Never Before Heard Sounds and Rachel MacLean compiling a   jukebox of machine age bangers generated by Holly+ creation, which puts voice cloning at its mechanical heart.   Best of all is ‘All the boys ate fish’, Theodore Koterwas’ interactive installation that records and cuts up the voices of those speaking in front of it before playing back what it he...

  Three stars Young hearts run free in Rabindranath X Bhose’s new installation, the latest contribution to Collective’s Satellites programme of work by emerging practitioners. Drawing from the ‘Hanged Man’ tarot card and the spiritual preserves of bogland, Bhose has created an environment of vinyl bogs fringed with dams of peat to protect them. Coloured scarves and other totems of illicit after hours liaisons are tied onto branches, as if marking their territory.   On the windows are etched four images of the ‘Hanged Man’ himself, dangling in the limbo land between heaven and earth as the noose tightens before the final death rattle dance begins. With a recording of poetry by Bhose and writers and artists Sammy Paloma and Oren Shoesmith soundtracking the scene like some Derek Jarman fantasia, Bhose’s construction is a temple of sorts that falls somewhere between the sacred and the profane, finding liberation as it goes. (Neil Cooper)     Collective Gallery, Edinburgh...

Devon Projects, Huntly The fish is on the fire in the outdoor clay oven built by Kawther Luay and Fionn Duffy for the final part of their yearlong exploration of food, foraging and hospitality as collective ritual and shared artistic act. It’s a blowy but sunny Sunday afternoon at Greenmyres, a sixty-three acre site run by Huntly Development Trust ten minutes outside Huntly in Aberdeenshire. More than twenty diner participants are seated at a long table in a covered outdoor shed, having already helped prepare the food the are about to share under Luay and Duffy’s guidance, be it as chef or ceramicist.   Recognising the performative nature of the experience, Luay has cast both herself and Duffy as well as assorted ingredients as characters in their mini epic, from the milk of Act 1 and the grain of Act 2, both presented earlier in the summer, to the third and final act, fired by clay.   With the foodstuffs sourced within a fifty-mile radius, the pots they are contained in have ...

Muscle and guts are at the heart of Peter Howson’s work in this major exhibition, as one of Scotland’s most formidable and most sensitive artists squares up to his back catalogue on an epic scale. A holy trinity of self-portraits introduce each of the three floors, from Jekyll and Hyde (1995) to the Repentant of 2001, and, in his most recent study, a man etched with the lines of experience.     This points all the way back to Howson’s early images of boxers, bruisers, prostitutes and dossers, who seem to be threatening a square go with the viewer. Like the prowling beast in Tiger (2000) painted during a wildlife commission in India, many of Howson’s subjects look ready to pounce. Howson’s choices of celebrity portraits are as telling, as a toned and pneumatic ‘Madonna’ (2002) sits in repose, while a defiant but wary looking ‘Steven Berkoff’ (2002) occupies the mean streets.   On the second floor, under the umbrella title of Suffering and Salvation, Howson charts his relig...

Love and anger are at the heart of create dangerously, this major institutional exhibition by Alberta Whittle, the Barbadian born artist whose irresistible rise across a series of shows saw her representing Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Both works made for Venice are at the centre of create dangerously, which draws its title from Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat’s 2010 collection of essays concerning immigrant artists at work.   Whittle’s take on things sees her embark on a very personal journey, not just through the eleven rooms housing her work on the ground floor of Modern One, but across continents and centuries of black experience and the forces that continue to colonise and enslave. This global expanse becomes a kind of ceremonial address to the ancestors who are both the fire and guiding hand behind Whittle’s all too current work.   This moves from mini manifestos and slogans lining the corridor that seem to dance off the paper they’re written on, to the vibrant ...

Buried treasure abounds in this very special show of around 40 unearthed printworks by George Wyllie (1921-2012). These are drawn from Wyllie’s original theatrical satire of the same name as this exhibition, which took an irreverent look at power, wealth and the historical roots of capitalist exploitation he dubbed     ‘a great bum steer’.    Glasgow’s maestro of absurdist largesse originally conceived his comic critique as an installation at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (now the site of CCA). Working with actor Russell Hunter, Wyllie gradually expanded this into a cabaret style show first performed in 1982 Later iterations saw Wyllie form double acts with Bill Paterson for an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, and with John Bett for a last hurrah at Tramway as part of Glasgow’s 1990 tenure as European City of Culture.   Wyllie’s  deceptively serious inquiry of what he called ‘the greatest ever confidence trick to be played ON the human race BY the human race’ ad...

If money makes the world go round, its out of control axis is addressed at a historical and global level in this urgent and expansive new group show. Drawing its title from French thinker and writer Georges Bataille, nine contributors address the idea of debt in different ways, with the spectres of war, colonialism and economic exploitation ever present.     Congolese artist Sammy Baloji reconstitutes fifty copper mortar shell casings as plant pot accessories for ideal homes. A 1948 recording of a choir becomes similarly troubling once you learn how Christian missionaries made the singers hold copper crosses in front of their hearts.   Western influences are there too in  Terra Rationarium  (2018), Cian Dayrit’s trinket filled wooden cases, where toys and totems point up a damning history of exploitation in Dayrit’s native Philippines.  Working with marginalised communities, Dayrit’s series of tapestries map out strategies of change.   Moyra Davey’s...

Fun and games aplenty are to be had in this group show of sculptural works by twenty-two artists, brought together by Emma Hart and Dean Kenning as a collective show of class-conscious strength. The idea by Hart and Kenning is to seize the means of production in a more ad hoc way than the posh trappings of the mainstream art world may not always embrace.   The resultant counterblast to imposter syndrome is a workers playtime of a show, with an entertaining larkiness at its Fun Palace core that explores what Hart calls the ‘everyday thingness of sculpture… made of ordinary materials’. This ranges from the puppet-like figures aloft an iron bar in ‘ Oblivion’ (2021), Rosie McGinn’s small-scale reimagining of a rollercoaster ride; to  ‘Sulkamania’ (2019/2023), Aled Simons’ filmed re-enactment of how he became a bootleg Hulk Hogan.    Anne Ryan’s ‘Friday on My Mind’ (2022-23) is a floor level array of cut-out shapes depicting pleasure seekers in search of that elusive goo...

Four stars   Lindsay Anderson’s status as Britain’s great lost outsider filmmaker has long seen the anti-establishment auteur behind If… (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982) championed by the University of Stirling, which holds Anderson’s considerable archive. To marks the centenary of Anderson’s birth, the life and work of this self-styled anarchist shows rarely seen production stills, theatre programmes, press cuttings and writings, with each section punctuated by written commentary from key collaborators.   Anderson’s stage work at the Royal Court is acknowledged alongside his films, while his contribution to television is marked by angry broadsides from columnists outraged by his radical production of Alan Bennett’s play, The Old Crowd (1979). There are images too from The Whales of August (1987), Anderson’s final feature prior to his death in 1994. This brought together veteran Hollywood stars Lillian Gish and Bette Davis  in an elegiac swan...

As the criss-crossing cacophony of Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s ten-screen installation,   Labour in a Single Shot  (2012-2014), engulfs you from all sides, close your eyes and it’s easy to believe you’re in the heart of some twenty-first century global village. With monitors hung back to back on metal platforms that could double up on building sites, this compendium of 60 moving image snapshots of people at work forms the centrepiece of this first major exhibition in Scotland by German filmmaker Farocki. The resultant bombardment of sound and vision captures all the bustle and noise of a world in messy motion.        Made prior to Farocki’s death in 2014 aged 70,  Labour in a Single Shot  forms part of a larger project begun with Ehmann in 2011 by way of a series of film and video workshops in fifteen cities. Here, participants were tasked with producing videos one to two minutes long, based on the idea of ‘labour’, and filmed in a single sho...