178th RSA Annual Exhibition
Until May 20; RSA Building

Rosalind Nashashibi: Songs for Home and Economy
Until May 30; CCA

I have a terrible confession to make. Although the Royal Scottish Academy has held its Annual Exhibition every year of my life (and a further 148 years before that), I’ve never got into the habit of going. Having seen this year’s exhibition I now remember why.

European academies have long been renowned for lagging at least 50 years behind contemporary developments in art, and despite its claim to showcase the best in contemporary Scottish art, the RSA is no exception. Apart from the fact that Scotland appears to harbour loyal disciples of Degas, Cézanne, Klee, Magritte and Dali, the show demonstrates a stunning collective denial that art has made any progress beyond Modernism.

The lobby (sorry, Sculpture Court) is a particularly depressing affair, packed with stolid bronze nudes which don’t seem to have much to do with art at all. Lurking in the corner, David Hutchison’s Reef – constructed entirely out of garish plastic beach rubbish – is a gusty breath of fresh seaside air and a sign that someone on the selection committee has imagination after all.

Other signs of light include David Forster’s small acrylic, They Will Appear As If Suddenly Created There, a filmic panorama of three drab blocks of housing in a rough, weather-laden wilderness. The atmosphere simultaneously evokes Psycho and Wizard of Oz with a smattering of Ken Loach. Rachael Burnett’s large drawing, She Inhabited A Twilight of Venture…, draws the eye into an imaginary journey in and out of a series of densely worked, fragmented passageways.

There are good pieces scattered throughout the show, but picking them out is hard work. Old hanging habits die hard, and a whole batch of unrelated pictures in one room are quadruple hung. Honestly, trying to make sense of four tiers of paintings is a bit like reading the Yellow Pages as continuous prose.

One artist who’ll probably have to wait fifty years before getting into the RSA (they haven’t found out yet that images can move) is Rosalind Nashashibi, winner of last year’s Beck’s Futures award. Ironically the Glasgow-based artist’s work is far more deeply embedded in tradition than much of what you’ll see at the Mound.

Hreash House and University Library are two brand new films shot by Nashashibi in Nazareth and in Glasgow. The first quietly documents the daily routines of a Palestinian family home, and the second observes the behaviour of students and staff in Glasgow University Library.

Like Dutch genre painting of the 17th century, quietly focussed human activities are set against sunlit windows and open doors. In Hreash House, close-up shots of patterned fabric are gently intercut with women preparing vegetables and an old man hosing down the plastic furniture, as if the humans are an integral part of their environment in the same way that the fabric is.

In the library, the detailed close-ups are of books, some of them about land and freedom. This might be the subtlest of political points, and it’s one that won’t be lost on the citizens of Nazareth.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 25.04.04