Coffee-Table Notes

Cooper Gallery, Dundee (online) Jukebox Jive ‘Too many protest singers Not enough protest songs’   And then Ruth Ewan came along with  A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World . Twenty seven years on from this perfectly reasonable observation by Dundee-raised Edwyn Collins in his euphoric 1994 smash hit, ‘A Girl Like You’, this latest iteration of Ewan’s rolling programme of socially driven songs shows just how much times have changed.    A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World was first presented in 2004, and since then has been shown in London, New York, Venice, Bordeaux, Liverpool and Louisiana. Ewan’s ongoing folkloric excavation, à la Hamish Henderson or Alan Lomax, has developed so it now contains an ever-expanding collection of more than 2,000 works that might be broadly described as protest songs. This provides the perfect set list for the sort of political cabarets that have given voice and inspiration to protest movements for decades.    This time out, the  Jukeb

Counterflows At Home   The sound of laughter is what strikes you first in For Ruth, the nine and a half minute sound work composed by Annea Lockwood. As the flagship piece for the 80-something New Zealand born composer’s tenure as featured artist in this year’s online edition of Counterflows, the annual Glasgow-based showcase of free thinking music, the laughter is infectious.    The laughter too is the unselfconscious kind that erupts uncontrollably when two people find boundless, all encompassing joy in and with each other. The birdsong, sounds of lapping water and more ethereal echoes that filter through between add a filter of sense memory to such intimate exchanges.    For Ruth is drawn from recordings of telephone conversations between Lockwood and her late wife, fellow composer and kindred spirit of more than four decades, Ruth Anderson. The calls took place shortly after the couple first met in 1973, during the first giddy flush of what was initially a long-distance romance.  

  The Common Guild until December 2020 “Whit yi’ up to, mate?” asks a befuddled voice 18 and a half minutes into  A walk through a  different  city ,  Luke Fowler ’s aural excursion through the centre of locked down Glasgow. “Whit yi’ doin’? You doin’ somethin’?”   Fowler’s sonic derive forms the seventh and final contribution to In the open, the Common Guild’s off-site response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This has seen six artists move out of the Glasgow townhouse based gallery and into the wild to create new audio works designed to be listened to outdoors on headphones during government-sanctioned daily walks.   Collated from 500 hours of recordings, Fowler’s 35-minute edit that makes up A walk through a  different  city ambles its way through a winding route, that begins on Sauchiehall Street and ends beneath the Kingston Bridge beside the River Clyde. Inbetween, Fowler leads the listener through assorted back alleys onto Buchanan Street, then into an almost deserted Central S

Dunfermline Carnegie Library and Galleries until May 10th; Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, May 16 th -July 25 th .   The pen-pal style intimations of the title of this independently curated exhibition for Fife-based arts umbrella Fife Contemporary is a very gentle double-edged sword for the broad exploration of drawing it covers. The old-school stencil font of each label for the twenty-three cross-generation artists puts stylistic and symbolic faith in its craft, particularly in relation to the natural world.    Things start simply enough, with Elizabeth Blackadder’s quick-fire capture of Edinburgh in View of North Bridge (1972) and three drawings by Carol Rhodes, Factory Roof and Countryside (2001-02), Reservoir (1999) and Wharf (1999), all so much more than studies for paintings. Blackadder returns later, with reciprocal portraits by and of her and John Houston, that capture the relaxation of marital bliss at its best.    The exhibition’s brief expands by way of musician Inge Thoms

Online and around the city HELLO. It’s a simple enough greeting to usher you into Edinburgh Art Festival’s response to the cancellation of this year’s physical event due to the fall-out from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but it works. Especially when the word is laid out in understated black letters on a series of white flags draped from various sites around an infinitely quieter city than usual as Peter Liversidge’s contribution to the programme. These aren’t flags flying with triumphalist symbolism, but are a peaceful greeting of welcome, inclusion and surrender of the most romantic kind. Like the other nine works on show, Flags for Edinburgh (2020) revisits work first shown at a previous EAF. This isn’t so much a greatest hits selection as a reimagining of each work and the resonances they might have in this brave new world since Covid-19 changed things forever. In Liversidge’s case, this was in 2013. The welcome the flags implied then was just as warm, but, unlike now, as t

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh until May 9 th The totemic properties of the natural world and the strains of ecologically inclined sci-fi course through this group show of twelve international artists, whose work is gathered across the Talbot Rice as a kind of global village come home to roost under the same roof. The show’s title is drawn from The Adventures of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi’s nineteenth-century folk-tale about a wooden puppet boy who comes to life, spreading fake news in a way that causes his nose to grow. Those reclaiming the truth here do so in the face of climate deniers, colonialists and corporate puppets, while those pulling their strings keep their distance. The semi-circle of tribal masks that stand at the centre of the downstairs gallery suggests a ritual space amplified by drones from above. Set against the backdrop of Chilean artist Johanna Unzueta’s cartoon-styled mural, Resonance (2020), inspired by women weavers in Mexico, Canadian First Nation artist