Coffee-Table Notes

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...

I only ever met Robbie Coltrane once. That was in 2005, when I interviewed him for the Herald newspaper a week or so before he opened in Peter McDougall’s short play, The Brother’s Suit. We met in the top floor games room of the now long closed BBC Club, a stone’s throw from BBC Scotland’s then HQ on Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow. Oran Mor, the former church turned pub on the corner of Byres Road and Great Western Road, was also close. The production of The Brother’s Suit would form part of David MacLennan’s trailblazing lunchtime theatre initiative, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, which made the venue a new home for West End bohemian types.   At one time, it seemed like the by now globally recognised regular of what was then four Harry Potter films, and a James Bond villain twice over in GoldenEye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999) might have been a regular on that sort of scene. As it turned out, this was Coltrane’s first visit to the BBC Club since he took over from Richard S...

Behind the Games Room door there is laughter. Then, from within the faded, cluttered grandeur of the top floor of Glasgow's BBC Club, Robbie Coltrane's dry but fruity transatlantic Scots twang can be easily discerned.   It is the end of the day for rehearsals of The Brother's Suit, Peter McDougall's new work for A Play, A Pie And A Pint, the ambitious series of lunchtime drama at Oran Mor, Glasgow, that has reinvigorated Scotland's theatrical old guard. The play will mark Coltrane's first appearance on a stage in this country for 15 years.  The BBC Club, meanwhile, hasn't seen Coltrane grace its doors for even longer.    "I haven't been in here since we did A Kick Up The Eighties, " Coltrane muses as he tucks himself into the corner of the room like a naughty, if somewhat oversize, schoolboy. The "alternative" sketch show is just a memory now, though the club was "a good place for meeting people. Not that it's changed much, ...

Downtown   The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s hit TV drama about a 1950s New York housewife who becomes a stand-up comedian.  Much of the show’s early action is set in Greenwich Village, where Rachel Brosnahan’s eponymous Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel cuts her performing teeth at The Gaslight Café.    The Gaslight was a real life basement club, which, as well as comedy, in the 1960s played host to early performances by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, and many more riding high on the era’s folk revival. Jazz bassist Charles Mingus played the Gaslight, as did civil rights legend Odetta, blues singers Son House, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and many more.   Exteriors for Mrs Maisel’s depiction of The Gaslight were filmed, not where the real Gaslight was, over on MacDougal Street, but on St Mark’s Place, in the doorway of a tenement building previously photographed for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album, Physical Graffiti. A few years later...

When Ian MacInnes was headmaster of Stromness Academy on Orkney, he introduced a Friday activities afternoon, whereby students would knock off their studies early in order to explore less academic pursuits such as sailing, introducing an element of play to start the weekend.   This was a typical act of everyday rebellion by MacInnes, whose work is currently on show on home turf at Pier Arts Centre to commemorate the centenary of the Orkney born artist’s birth. The exhibition spans MacInnes’ life’s work, from formal portraits of friends and contemporaries such as writer George Mackay Brown, to more politically driven impressionistic images of life on his doorstep, with striking studies of the ever changing local landscapes in Stromness, the West Shore and Rackwick Valley inbetween.   Also on show are some of MacInnes’ early satirical caricatures of local dignitaries that appeared in the Orkney Herald when he was still a teenager, as well as his illustrations for books by Mackay...

Iza Tarasewicz never danced the Mazurka while growing up on her family farm in the rural Polish village of Kaplany. Only a decade ago did she discover the prevalence of the sixteenth century folk dance that brought farm worker serfs together in a way that has influenced similar expressions of choreographed community across the world.   Tarasewicz has applied the spirit of the Mazurka to her first solo UK exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, where the circular rhythms of the dance become a life force to her large-scale sculptural constructions crafted from agricultural machinery rendered redundant by industrialisation. Following research based on the decline in farm labour, agricultural problems and controls on produce distribution in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tarasewicz gives what she calls ‘traumatised objects’ a new lease of life that mirrors a real life need for community in a turbulent world.   " The whole world is in a crazy state just now,” says Tarasewic...