Fruitmarket Gallery, Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Edinburgh Castle 30 July — 25 September 2005 While running counter to global technocratic culture, spiritualism customarily acts as a dramatic subterfuge. Tantalizing us with the anticipation of spectral spectacle is the key…
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As the People’s Republic of China enters the 51st Venice Biennale for the first time this year – staging an exhibition in the Arsenale complex and the Vergini Garden – Scotland makes its third independent appearance since the Scottish Sculpture…
Comments closedIrish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Anderson hacks technologies and spaces, making things and places do things that they weren’t designed to do. She playfully reappropriates media, lending it a performative drama. It’s a cut-up tactic purloined from William Burroughs,…
Comments closedScotland burst out of Caledonia onto the international art scene at the beginning of the eighties with the Newer Glasgow Boys spearheading England’s bid for global New Image supremacy. But Scotland didn’t really come its own, commercially or artistically, until…
Comments closedHigh Street Fighting Years The Collective Gallery has its roots in a tradition of independent and artist-led activities in Edinburgh that can be traced to 1960s organisations such as the New 57 Gallery and protests led by Alexander Moffat and…
Comments closedLike many of her local peers, Glasgow artist Katy Dove works with unadorned playschool media. Colouring-in shapes with felt-tip pens and watercolour, she produces the kind of delicate forms and biomorphic sketches last seen alive in the abstract Plexiglas and…
Comments closedAurora, Edinburgh – Alberta Whittle and Robin Scott Collective Gallery, Edinburgh – Lee O’Connor and Rabiya Choudhry. Edinburgh’s artist-led galleries have been particularly responsive lately to a growing tendency among local artists to fouter with decoration, heraldry and pageantry. In…
Comments closedThe Embassy, Edinburgh, UK The Embassy has an unenviable job competing with the imposing Salisbury Crags, a magnet for Edinburgh’s spiritual dissidents, from the Beltane fire of the Pagans to the tub-thumping of Covenanters. ‘Fire and Brimstone’ is a…
Comments closedO the most violent Paradise of the furious grimace! Not to be compared with your Fakirs and other theatrical buffooneries. In improvised costumes like something out of a bad dream, they enact heroic romances of brigands and of demigods, more…
Comments closedThu 12 – Sat 14 July 2004 Opera House, Manchester, England Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal…
Comments closed…….is a question oft asked by dull-witted tourists in Scotland’s capital. Sadly, Sergeant ‘Tam the Gun’ McKay hasn’t let one off for a bit, (the shops on Princess Street complained of shoogling…
Comments closedCornerhouse, Manchester 6 March to 17 April 2004 Cornerhouse’s visual arts director Kathy Rae Hauffman has come in for much criticism from local artists in the past year. The cry of ‘New Media New Danger’ has echoed around town as…
Comments closedIn Room Three: the Eating Parlour on the front ground floor, infancy is awakened by enlightenment, and – as in adolescence – opinions are formed and sides taken. The room consists of bold contrasts; back or forth – even the…
Comments closedIt’s been a while since the domestic Bert & Ganddie gallery drew its net curtains to the public. Gallant Ganddie diligently poked around for a vacant space for a new project, all the while encountering the usual problems with finding…
Comments closedHostile images abound of missionaries who participated in the global spread of secularism. Scots sport pundit Archie McPherson expressed disdain for heathen missionaries: “An atheist sermon is an unprovoked bellum; hit seeks tae wyle, tae gadge, tae broubatter, tae steer,…
Comments closedFULLERTON, Michael Scottish painter of portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, one of the most individual geniuses in European art. Born in Glasgow, he showed an aptitude for drawing early and first was encouraged by his mother, who was a woman…
Comments closedPersona: Cornelius and Dr. Ink Scene: The souvenir shop in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. Cornelius (coming in through the spin doors). My dear Dr. Ink, don’t coop yourself up all day in the shop. It is a perfectly…
Comments closedSome small hope, far away when national imaginaries were composed of garden centres, golf-courses, sewage works, car parks, underpasses and airports, an epic struggle took place between The Garden, and the bare-breeched brethren of the Rossie-Crosse, those reptilian supporters of…
Comments closedMark Leckey Mark Leckey’s Londonatella was last year’s one and only dominator of bastard pop video, trespassing a cover of techno novelty act Altern 8 under the historical footlights of the English capital’s crumbling, perilous backstreets. Using found movie footage…
Comments closedMainstream:Turning Piss into Lager Since 1997 Sometimes it’s hard to find time to sit down and write to people who really matter. That’s why each year, when the time comes around to write this message to you, I ask my…
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