Coffee-Table Notes

“Justify yourself! Go on. Justify yourself…”   These are the words I associate most with Dom Phillips, the investigative reporter who disappeared on June 5 th in a remote part of the western Amazon. Phillips was travelling with Indigenous advocate and guide Bruno Pereira while researching a book about sustainable development in a region where criminal activity at the expense of both the environment and the Indigenous population is paramount.    The disappearance of the two men and the seemingly lacklustre initial response from the Brazilian government caused international outrage. A tireless search by the Indigenous community working with police has seen two fishermen arrested, with the inquiry reclassed as Homicide. One of the fishermen has confessed to murder, and two bodies have been found. Whatever happens next, some hard questions need to be asked, about how such a tragedy happened, and why it was allowed to happen. But who will be doing the asking?     Dom Phillips’s demand for o

If you go down to the woods today - or any other day at Jupiter Artland during opening hours for the foreseeable future – the big surprise for visitors to the Edinburgh sculpture park can be found in a forest glade tucked away off the beaten track.     Here, Tracey Emin’s newly unveiled bronze sculpture,  I Lay Here For You (2018) lays in repose, in wait and possibly in state  beneath a tree. Monumental in scale, Emin’s six-metre construction of a woman’s body lays her bare with her secret self, face down and possibly in the throes of some private ecstasy.    A hand is tucked under the bent thigh, bum perched high, while a distorted head bites the pillow  of earth that cushions her. The body itself seems to ripple with the current of some erotic charge, every muscle and sinew taut with some unseen force.  No teddy bear’s picnic this, Emin’s creation is getting back to the garden, like a prodigal Eve reclaiming original sin, or a horny Titania still dreaming of donkeys the morning after

Michael Clark was still only in his mid-twenties when he danced solo on Italian television to Marc Bolan’s 1971 song that gives this epic exhibition of Clark’s vast back-catalogue its title. In the footage, Clark moves slowly, swathed in a swishy yellow dress and black lipstick as Bolan sings over elegiac strings of how he danced himself ‘right out of the womb’.     Broadcast in 1986, with Thatcher’s Britain in full pomp, it was a daring and tender routine for Clark, already feted as a taboo-busting enfant terrible of contemporary dance. Thirty-six years on, and with Clark now in his sixtieth year, his performance looks as vulnerable and as heroic a show of strength as it ever did.     The clip forms part of a loop of archive material that graces screens large and small before you even step in to the exhibition itself. As a tone-setting tease of things to come, it is the perfect curtain-raiser to what might be regarded as a sort-of prodigal’s return to Scotland for the Aberdeen-born po

When Daniel Clark and Amy Gear decided they wanted to open their own arts space   in   Shetland, they saw their ambitions as filling a gap in terms of studio and workshop provision on the Scottish islands. When they took over a former Methodist church on Burra, they acknowledged that aim by calling the new centre Gaada, which in Shetland dialect means ‘gaps’, and is a word Gear heard growing up on the island of Yell. It can also refer to a type of potato with holes in that became their logo.   Clark and Gear founded Gaada in 2018 after meeting while studying printmaking at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, Clark initially took a job at RCA, while Gear moved home, where a lack of studio spaces on the islands prompted the pair to take matters into their own hands.    “When I came home I worked as a freelance artist, running workshops and things like that with no studio,” Gear recalls. “There are no studios in Shetland, so it was quite hard work, and every time Daniel visited, w

When Linkshouse opens this summer as a new artists’ residency centre in Orkney, it will mark the culmination of several different lives the grand looking house has lived over the last century. Situated in Birsay village, on the north west of Orkney’s main island, The Mainland, Linkshouse’s most recent incarnation was as the base of the Erlend Williamson Fellowship, a charity set up in honour of the artist who tragically died in 1996 in a climbing accident on Glencoe.     Williamson had been a contemporary of artists including Ross Sinclair, Simon Starling and Mike Nelson. When Williamson’s parents, Barbara and Edgar, discovered the importance of Orkney in their son’s life and work, they set up the Fellowship at Linkshouse in his honour with some of his peers and friends.   One of the clauses in the Williamson’s wills was that if the charity should close, then the property be passed into the care of the Pier Arts Centre, based thirteen miles away from Birsay, in Stromness. For more than

The world had yet to close down when Imogen Stirling began writing Love The Sinner in 2019. By the time she finished her epic poetic take on the seven deadly sins, any chance of performing it were thwarted by assorted pandemic induced lockdowns. When Stirling brings it to Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival this month, however, her stripped back rendition of a forthcoming full theatrical production - both created with composer and fellow performer Sarah Carton, who performs a live electronic accompaniment - can’t help but echo recent times.  As the latest link in a chain of poetic and dramatic interpretations that date from Dante through to Chaucer, Brecht and beyond, Stirling’s take on the seven deadly sins drags the action into a big city urban environment that sounds not unlike Glasgow. Here her seven protagonists live in fractured isolation, as a biblical rain pours onto the streets outside.    “ The concept of the seven deadly sins has always fascinated me,” says Stirling, “and I qui

Ross Simonini began his podcast, Subject, Object, Verb, in 2020, with the desire to “ express the sonic dimension of contemporary art, and an audio show seemed like the best format for doing that.”    Produced by ArtReview magazine, the show’s title is a kind of manifesto that joins the dots between artist, art, and the life driving them.   “Art is not created in a vacuum,” Simonini says. “The personality and the life of the artist are connected to the work. We live in an era where people want to understand those connections more than ever - the rise of social media, activism, the  # MeToo movement, identity politics.   “Even if an artist wants to stay out of the work and hides in the woods, and completely rejects the capitalist system, their hermetic life is reflected in the work, and people will consider the artist’s refusal when they see the work. Think about Lee Lozano or David Hammons or Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger - known as much for their work as their obscurity.    “This desi