Coffee-Table Notes

When Suky Goodfellow received a random message on social media from a stranger asking if she’d like to try out as front-woman of his band, the poet and singer’s understandable response was to to find out who was behind this unsolicited missive. Fortunately, Goodfellow’s googling revealed her new correspondent as Paul Mackie, aka Paul Research, who in 1977 had co-founded Edinburgh post-punk band Scars. Mackie had provided spiky guitar lines alongside the vocals of Robert King on Horrorshow, later sampled by Lemon Jelly, and Adult/ery, the band’s sole single on the capital-based Fast Product label. This led to Scars signing to a major label for the release of the band’s Author! Author! album in 1981 before they eventually split up. Goodfellow, meanwhile, was carving out a lively niche of her own, both as a spoken-word artist performing at some of the city’s many live showcases, and as guitarist with nouveau riot grrl trio, Fistymuffs. As a graduate of grassroots music tuition initia

I n February 2008, the Mackintosh Room of Glasgow School of Art played host to Vanishing Point – Gustav Metzger and Self-Cancellation. This round-table discussion formed part of Instal 08, the Arika organisation’s festival of ‘Brave New Music’ which took place more or less annually at the Arches club and performance venue throughout the noughties. In the 1960s, Metzger had been one of the prime movers behind the notion of auto-destructive art, in which art destroyed itself as it was being created. One of Metzger’s first public demonstrations of auto-destructive art in 1961, Acid action painting, saw the Bavarian born artist ‘paint’ acid onto sheets of nylon, which burnt itself out of existence after fifteen seconds. Metzger later showed an ongoing series of enlarged historic photographs of twentieth century disasters. With Metzger in attendance, the discussion focused on the idea of self-cancellation, and included references to the Hindenburg air balloon disaster of 1937 and t

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh until April 28 th 2019 All creatures great and small are everywhere throughout the fourth edition of NOW, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s six-part series of exhibitions designed to show off the wealth of living artists from Scotland’s creative diaspora alongside others beyond it. They’re roaming the hills in The Bedfords (2009), Henry Coombes’ feature film in progress about landscapist Henry Landseer, excerpts of which are screened in a room surrounded by storyboard prints covering the walls. Human creatures, meanwhile, are alive and kicking in Moyna Flanagan’s cut-out shapes of women in motion drawn from Flanagan’s Tear series made between 2016 and 2018. Most of all, though, an animal mentality is at the heart of Monster Chetwynd’s expansive trophy-like menagerie that forms the heart of the show. The stand-up large-scale collage of Crazy Bat Lady 5 (2018) at one end of what Chetwynd styles as Revenent Corridor