Festival Times 2003
Stills, until September 20

Boyle Family
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, until November 9

When is photography not photography? When it’s shortlisted for the Archibald Campbell and Harley WS Award 2003. Three years ago, the brand new £5000 prize was aimed specifically at Scottish-based photographers, but with inter-media boundaries ever blurring, so too is the remit for this award. Stills presents a small selection of work from each of the six shortlisted artists, combining the well-established with the up and coming, and keeping wall-based interpretation to an absolute minimum (leaving you with homework to do if you want to make sense of it all).

Not long out of Edinburgh College of Art, Lucy Levene’s large-scale snaps of Auld Reekie’s drunken nightclubbers are already an international hit. They convey a strong sense of narrative: why is that girl interrupting a snogging couple, and what’s the story behind the tear-stained woman with the single, drooping carnation? But none of it’s contrived: the drink-fuelled youngsters are intent on kissing, dancing and crying, and they’re too far gone to care about the camera. These arresting images are an accessible and intriguing update to the long-established genre, favoured by the likes of the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel, of voyeuristic tableaus full of drunken debauchery.

That’s the easy bit. The rest gets more obscure. Martin Boyce is the best-known of the chosen artists, and is represented here by 5 photographic works, including 2 ghost-like images of modified Eames leg splints, removed from their previous existences first as functional supports, then as modernist icons, and now reincarnated as tribal masks. Another 3 images are from his series Disappear Here, using black and white grids and texts to suggest the sense of isolation and disorientation inherent in city living.

James Thornhill uses the exhibition to comment on the money-driven, competitive nature of the art world, showing solidarity with his fellow artists in the graffiti-like smoke drawings tucked quietly away on the ceilings, and pointing to issues of access and distribution through various non-photographic means. A bunch of hand-made lock-picks, Write/Protect/Error, are accompanied by web addresses which provide no-nonsense introductions to the underground ethics and practicalities of lock-picking and computer hacking. A DIY poster, available to download free from the internet, leaves us wondering if there is such a thing as an original work of art any more – a question which will leave auctioneers and art collectors shaking in their Jimmy Choos.

Alexander and Susan Maris, shortlisted a second time for this prize, are preoccupied with remoteness and the search for a perfect landscape. What look like four romantic, mist-blown images of mountains and sea are in fact photographs of post-industrial suburbia, taken from a moving motorbike. The long exposure has created wild and weathery Turneresque images, and thus the perfect landscape is proved to be a figment of our imaginations.

Claudine Hartzel’s work is the hardest to grasp and to classify, being a combination of faux photography, girlie handwriting, and teenage-style doodles. The starry images, hung at jaunty angles high and low, are – according to the artist’s statement – challenges to the conventions of photography and explorations of popular psychology, but in their comparative isolation at Stills it is impossible to see through the lurid surfaces to any meaningful motives which may lie behind.

The new Boyle Family retrospective, on the other hand, is one of those exhibitions which are wonderfully self-explanatory. A huge world map, full of a thousand holes marking sites randomly selected by blindfolded dart-throwers, has been pieced back together by National Galleries conservators, and for any Boyle Family fan it is a thing of wonder. The largest number of Boyle Family works ever likely to be displayed together leaves you dizzy in disbelief that grass, sand, tyre tracks or chalk cliffs could really be so convincingly reproduced entirely out of resin and fibreglass, and a whole room is devoted to the fourteen squares of patterned sand which make up the Tidal Series. Other Boyle activities, such as their Happenings and light shows of the 1960s, are well documented through film, photographs, journals and absorbing wall texts. The four boxes full of thriving weeds grown from randomly collected seeds are a welcome sight in the formidable SNGMA, and are proof that Boyle Family is fresh, vibrant and still going strong.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.08.03