Art News March brings many screenings, openings, talks and workshop events. Here’s the rundown of what to look forward to in Scottish Art throughout the month
Sara Barker, What’s the medium? A medium for their mediums CHANGE-THE-SETTING, 2015 Stainless steel rod, folded aluminium sheet, glass, perspex
Geographies of Dust and Air
Mary Mary
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Surprisingly hard to miss, a handcrafted mirror, mounted on wood that bears signs of its sculpting is set next to Mary Mary’s office door. It’s part of group show Geographies of Dust and Air, a collection of works that trade on succinctness – somehow exceeding the sum of their parts. In Germaine Kruip’s Dot Kannadi (the little mirror mentioned before), its small scale isn’t effacing. In effect, it’s more like a mole on the otherwise even complexion of the wall – scratched and marked, texturally it draws attention. Dot Kannedi faces Bojan Sarcevic's steel and copper frame. The metal sculpture is comparable with clothing shop rails, or a bracket left over from a flat screen TV. Its thick poles become an effective counter to the mellifluous orange-yellow staining of the painting hanging off it.
Credit: Ruth Clark
Words: Adam Benmakhlouf
More metalwork, but skinnier, in Sara Barker’s works. Bored into the wall, its thin scaffolding becomes oddly upheaved, suspended and clinging to the wall. Bringing to mind the ambivalent meaning of the word ‘skeletal,’ it’s emaciated, but reduced to important parts, and referring in form to a supporting framework. While Barker’s work references the sketchy outline of linear drawing, Manuela Leinhoß’s painting work is intersected by straight grey lines on its yellowing white background. All looking bleached out by overexposure, stuck to the surface there are papier mache burst football-looking forms making for an odd pictorial plane. It’s a repeated formula of whole exceeding the sum, and an appropriately concise rationale for the exhibition. Whether from Manuela Leinhoß’s scored board and blobs, the mirror on wood or thin metal frames, each work constructs its own discrete mathematics. [Adam Benmakhlouf] Geographies of Dust and Air continues in Mary Mary until 19 Mar Poster Club, Wheat, Mud, Machine, 2015. Part of CURRENT at Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
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Wolfgang Tillmans GoMA
Wolfgang Tillmans last featured with a four-star review of his 2012 Glasgow International show in The Common Guild. There’s a little overlap in Pictures from New World, a pallid presentation of GoMA’s recent acquisitions. Tillmans himself has been exhibiting internationally for over two decades. He first came to prominence in the late 80s, making a name for his photography of his immediate social circle and documenting Euro club nightlife of the time. Making a virtue out of genre crossing, his portraiture, still life and landscapes range across subject matter and location. Beyond that, for Pictures from New World, there’s no more of a prescriptive reading or concept to be applied. So there are images of old pipes, starry skies and car lights. Next to the flowers, abstract horizon, piles of garbage and other pictures of things, there’s an odd orientalism to the inclusion of what can only be described as non-specific ‘foreign people.’ It’s a predictable and unforgivable consequence of the constructed naïvety of the show’s ‘anything goes’ eclecticism. A trashyard, next to a clean, new-looking headlight, the hanging might be going for a conceptual reference to throwaway culture. Set all in a line, and with the larger paper works fenced off, it’s a standard hang. This is a failure to represent Tillmans’ practice, frequently celebrated for its strikingly unconventional and site-sensitive installations – as we complimented in the 2012 review. Altogether, Pictures from New World comes across as the clean edit of a practice that caused
March 2016
Wolfgang Tillmans, Tag-Nacht, 2009
The Mirror to exclaim in an enraged and misleading headline, ‘Gay Porn Photographer Snaps up Turner Prize.’ Scrubbed up and out, the show make Tillmans’ practice into a bland photojournal, whose trite and vague moralising blunders into offensive exoticising. [Adam Benmakhlouf] Wolfgang Tillmans, Pictures from New World, continues until 7 Aug
Credit: Courtesy Maureen Paley, London
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his March sees the British Art Show 8 continue across Edinburgh, with events throughout the month, as well as a new exhibition from Sara Barker, and the Scottish presentation of Graham Fagen’s Venice Biennale work. Let’s start with the newest Scottish contemporary art, at the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries 2016. Opening on 5 March, the RSA assembles their pick of the degree shows from five of the Scottish art schools. It’s a nice opportunity to check in with some of the recent graduates almost a year since finishing, and to see how they’ve got on with the visual arts’ equivalent of Second Album Syndrome. This is open until 30 March – you can see our own picks on page 21 of this very issue. Also on 5 March is the first of this month’s British Art Show 8 events. Between 2pm and 3.30pm in Inverleith House, writer Mara Fusco and poet Sam Riviere discuss Charlotte Prodger’s work Northern Dancer. In this work, Prodger combines four monitors which display a sequence of racing dogs’ names, with a cycled eight-minute voiceover about the difficulty of reading Gertrude Stein’s manuscripts. The following Thursday (10 March), from 6.30-8.30pm in Inverleith House again, there is a screening by exhibiting artist James Richards and Director of Lux Scotland Isla Leaver-Yap. Together, they present a series of artists’ films, then present a discussion on Richards’ influences and work. There are then further talks and events through the month and into April – check britishartshow8.com for full details. In the first of this month’s re-presentations, the Poster Club will be exhibiting in Dundee’s Cooper Gallery from 10 March. Made from mainly Glasgow-based artists (with one in Newcastleupon-Tyne, and another working in Brussels), Poster Club combines several artists who have
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strong and separate practices. Designing and making posters together, they engage in the complexity of collective practice, and make works that question ‘political, social and economic discourses’. There’s an artists’ talk on 10 March from 4.30pm, with a preview taking place from 5.30pm. Titled NEW Wheat, NEW Mud, NEW Machine, it continues until 23 April. On Friday 11 March from 6-8pm, Glasgowbased artist Sara Barker previews her new exhibition in the Fruitmarket Gallery. Barker’s work is also featured in our review of Mary Mary’s group show, which runs until 19 March. Frequently combining painting and sculptural elements, and working across a range of scales, Barker allows the paintings to invite the form and dimensions of the sculptural elements which are often protruding from the two-dimensional works. A week later, on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 March, there is an open weekend at Hospitalfield to mark the beginning of Graham Fagen’s exhibition there. He will be re-presenting the sculptural, drawing and video works fresh from the 2015 Venice Biennale. There will be a talk on the Saturday between Fagen and curator Dan Kidner about the work from 3-4.30pm. On Sunday, Laura Aldridge presents a workshop on eco-dyeing from 11am. Both available to book online, with the workshop costing £5 per person. Finally, you can also book now for BAS8exhibited artist Linder’s ballet in Dovecot. Titled Children of the Mantic Stain, this will be its only showing in Scotland. Coming from a collaboration between the tapestry studio and the artist, the work begins with a rug exhibited now in the National Gallery of Modern Art, and is based on collaged imagery. On the night, the rug will migrate to Dovecot for one evening to be part of the experimental choreography. 30 Mar; Tickets £8-20.
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