Coffee-Table Notes

The pictures on Morvern Cunningham’s office wall look like little time capsules of the ghosts of Leiths past. In her upstairs room in the Albion Road business centre that is a thriving hub of grassroots artistic activity, Cunningham is surrounded by posters from previous editions of LeithLate, the mini DIY festival she founded in 2011. With LeithLate’s latest incarnation happening over two days and nights this coming weekend, the posters chart a story of LeithLate’s initial one-night event featuring a collection of now long-lost bands and a series of pop-up exhibitions in multiple premises running the length of Leith Walk. Other posters continue the story, of how the festival has expanded and contracted over the last nine years before arriving at this year’s event, run in conjunction with Leith Festival. Next to the posters is a large map of old Leith, revealing an engrossing image of how the port looked before being amalgamated into Edinburgh almost a century ago, with the co

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Sometimes it’s hard to break free from the daily grind when all you do is cruise around, watching from on high at a safe distance, seemingly sheltered from the blast. So it goes in Harry Josephine Giles’ episodic meditation on the half-life and times of a remote control drone. Given a personality, a back-story and a routine of Sisyphean drudgery akin to a robotic office girl doing as she’s told, there is little chance of shattering any kind of glass ceiling, even as she is released into the world to film the audience at the top of the show. Accompanied by a John Carpenter style live electronic score composed and played live by a Dr Phibes-like Neil Simpson, Giles’ leap into the void is a quasi-kitchen-sink fantasia that could have been cut up from the pages of a hippy sci-fi zine and given the flesh and blood gravitas of a fable. Key to this too is Jamie Wardrop’s barrage of projections, so we initially see things through a drone’s eye

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow until August 25th Four stars In the beginning was the woodcut. So said art historian Gustav Hartlaub in his Die neue Deutsche Grafik volume in 1920. It’s a suitably dramatic epithet immortalised at the start of this major retrospective of an era-defining burst of energy that captured the disaffected and ever so slightly lost spirit of a defeated Germany following the First World War and the failed revolution of 1918-19. The products of the cultural coup it prompted and gathered here are the result. With multiple editions now possible beyond painting, the more democratised artform of woodcuts and lithographs were disseminated with the last-gasp urgency of something subversive being passed around in the after-hours shadows of the short-lived Weimar republic. Gathered together largely from the Hunterian’s own collection, it’s a black and white world that is occupied here behind the monumental headings of each section. ‘LOVE AND ANXIETY’; ‘A BRIDGE T