Top Five Shows of 2004

1 Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Good art tends to make an impact on you right away. Really good art continues to nibble at the edges of your consciousness long after you’ve left the gallery. Louise Bourgeois achieved both this year, piercing decades-old anguish with needle, and ensnaring it with thread.

The New-York based artist, now 92, reached back to her roots in Surrealist Paris to bring us high-pitched hysteria in lace, nylon, and rusty old metal. The Fruitmarket resounded with inaudible screams, soft female figures looking far from comfortable on hooks, in cages, and stitched out of shape.

Stitches in Time was the first show organised by Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley since her arrival from London’s Hayward Gallery. Less than a year later, she has lifted the Spirit of Scotland art award.

No wonder. Out of all the exhibitions I’ve ever seen, this one cut the deepest. It carved its way, without invitation, into my darkest insides, and it washed them out, as if with bleach. Images of dangling dolls, their threads hanging, will never fade. It was hard to deal with it on a purely intellectual level – the art, in its rawest state, simply got the better of me.

2 Steven Campbell: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Glasgow Print Studio

Since his early dash to fame as one of the “New Glasgow Boys” of the 1980s, Steven Campbell has come a long way. The prolific Glasgow artist frightened the art world in 2002 with a bleak exhibition full of blood and murder. But this year he pulled out a series of 22 new canvasses which – while still full of gruesome happenings – returned to the playful absurdity which Campbell does best.

A finely-tuned cast of characters, from Bela Lugosi to Rosslyn Chapel’s Green Man, played out bizarre scenes from Campbell’s fecund imagination. “Siamese Boxing Triplets” shared the athletic field with those gunned-down unfortunates who’d entered “the Tarantino Dash”.

There was some twisted logic in there somewhere, and Campbell’s ever-increasing visual lexicon was a complex code just waiting to be broken. Like the mysteries of Rosslyn Chapel, or of the world itself, the answers all seemed to be there, tied up in a teeming jumble of conundrums.

3 Susan Hiller: Recall
Baltic, Gateshead

Baltic hosted 30 years of work from American-born artist Susan Hiller this summer, using the vast old flour mill to great effect. In the dark basement lurked Punch and Judy as they have never been seen before, menacing, sinister, terrifying. Up the stairs you could pick your way through an enchanted forest of voices, from hundreds of dangling speakers. On the light-soaked top floor, in a brand new installation, Hiller filled the room with stories of near-death experiences, the sound triggered by your own movement through the space.

While the former anthropologist explored near-death-experiences, UFOs, group dreams and auras, her real target was the collective human psyche. These phenomena are, in many ways, of our own making. Hiller plays the dream-catcher, trawling our collective unconscious, projecting our dreams and desires back to us in the cold light of day. And the cold light of Gateshead proved to be an ideal place to do it.

4 The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

The National Gallery of Scotland was awash with champagne this summer, celebrating the dual pleasures of a Titian exhibition and a brand new underground link. The Weston Link, with its state-of-the-art facilities, allowed the gallery to raise its game, and The Age of Titian was a sign of things to come.

The National Gallery’s own Titian paintings were the stars of the show, but they were joined by hidden gems by the Venetian master and his contemporaries, discovered in Scotland’s stately homes and hitherto unknown to scholars.

Bright pastel colours leapt off the walls. Fleshy nudes shimmered in the light. Chunky brushstrokes and luminous glazes were a reminder that the High Renaissance was not only about the virtuoso precision of Rome, but also about the freedom and exuberance of Venice.

5 Mike Nelson: Pumpkin Palace
Collective Gallery off-site, Edinburgh

The more adventurous festival-goers among you might have worked up the courage this summer to step onto Mike Nelson’s bus. Parked behind wooden hoardings on Edinburgh’s Market Street, it was wrapped in Arabic newspapers, emblazoned with a red crescent, and looked like it had – quite literally – been through the wars.

Inside, a creepy mix of underground paraphernalia – witchcraft material, hash pipes, and a Hamas recruitment video – were stashed away in grimy nooks and crannies. There were rough and ready sleeping berths in every available space, and it felt like a bizarre concoction of dodgy characters had just popped out and would be back at any minute.

The atmosphere was thick. The incongruous mix of belief-systems was dizzying. Stepping back into Market Street, you really felt like you had been somewhere far away, and come back all worldly-wise.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.12.04