The Edinburgh Arts Festival (EAF) www.edinburghartfestival.org (27th July- 3rd Sept) entered its third year with a packed programme of exhibitions, events, talks and walks. Although distinctly devoid of extraordinary shows, a few EAF highlights included David Batchelor at The Palm House in the Royal Botanic Garden, new paintings by Monya Flannigan at Doggerfisher and recent prints by David Shrigley at Edinburgh Printmakers. Whilst professionally presented, much of the EAF felt more like an un-ambitious exercise in window dressing than a legitimate visual art festival, the lack of meaningful correspondences between exhibitions stemming from its complete lack of curatorial vision. The EAF merely capitalises on the huge number of visitors in Edinburgh in August and has little real substance to offer when compared with the Book or Film Festivals. This isn’t helped by the inadequacies of the few ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions that are curated with the EAF in mind, the Tussaud spectacle of Ron Mueck at the National Gallery of Scotland and the ill-concieved fairy-tale schlock of ‘Girlpower & Boyhood’ at Talbot Rice being two of many embarrassments.
The Edinburgh Annuale www.annuale.org (28th July – 3rd Sept) also enjoyed its third year. Coordinated by The Embassy, Edinburgh Annuale is a collaboration between 12 of the capital’s artist-led initiatives and independent publishers all operating a frenzy of overlapping art events produced on shoestring budgets. The organisations occupied a variety of locations, including galleries, co-ops, studios, pubs, pool halls, tenements and other piggy-backed venues, rejuvenating the spirit of the early Fringe. Many event-based exhibitions creatively combined music, art and performance. Four different exhibitions were staged over four days as part of Roll Over[TeT1] in Hyperground, while Babak Ghazi’s Not Yet Night, held at The Embassy, brought together Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Karen Cunningham, Michael Fullerton, Gareth Jones, NoBra, Aline Bouvy and John Gillis for one night only. For the superlative ‘Musique Cinematique’, curated by Ruth Beale of Aurora at Edinburgh College of Art, Kraut-folk-rock band eagleowl accompanied avant-garde films by Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp to an ecstatic full house. Necessity being the mother of invention it came as little surprise that the Annuale won the Herald Angel Award, given to those who make an outstanding contribution to the Festivals. In future the Annuale will be held in April to coincide with the Glasgow International festival in the hope that this will become a ‘joined-up’ central Scotland biennial of international repute, a munificent gesture which will leave the EAF the dubious privilege of tempting the tourists away from the late night comedy.
Meanwhile, at the Changing Room in Stirling an international smogasboard of re-enactment culture was on display in Once More… With Feeling (24th June – 26th Aug) curated by Robert Blackson. Blackson brough together artists, scientists and hobbyists, including re-enactment guru Jeremy Deller, Helicon, the City of London Metropolitan Archives, and Yoko Ono. In Dundee, Generator Projects celebrates it’s 10th anniversary with ‘Open Season’, a residency programme (24th July -10th Sept). Six members of the artist-run organization are each given a week to produce work and exhibit it in their large gallery or to use the time and space to stage events. Elements of each residency are then exhibited in the retrospective Open Season/Review (9th-10th September). In a similar performative spirit, DCA promises to follow up their excellent group show Where the Wild Things Are with Killing Time (9th Sept – 5th Nov) with a collaboration between Graham Fagen and Graham Eatough of theatre company Suspect Culture involving performance, sculpture, installation and an event.
