Graham Fagen: Clean Hands Pure Heart
Until March 13; Tramway, Glasgow

From one exhibition to the next, Graham Fagen’s ideas unfold like a flower in bloom. It’s a slow and delicate process, nudging at home-truths to reveal truths of a more universal variety. He allows his symbols to grow with him, accumulating their own life history. Gradually, layer upon layer of meaning is teased out, and a complex visual language is born.

It’s within that context that Fagen has created Clean Hands Pure Heart. Of the five works in Tramway’s huge gallery space, all are deeply rooted in the artist’s previous practice. Fagan has been making bronze casts of plants for years: here are four new ones. The fifth work, a video, combines Reggae and Robert Burns; Fagan has been edging the two together for some time.

But this is not old hat. Just because you’ve used a word before, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it again; it’s the way it’s combined with other words that makes it meaningful. Combinations – and conflicts – are Fagen’s speciality, and the dialogue which he has set up between these five objects will nudge his investigations a little bit closer to the truth.

Apart from anything else, the sheer sensuousness of the installation is a pleasure to experience. The huge darkened room is filled with the languid sounds of Ghetto Priest as he revisits Auld Lang Syne and the Slave’s Lament. The four bronze sculptures keep their distance from each other, each under their own spotlight. They’re like ballet dancers, poised as the curtains rise, silently waiting their cue to unfold and enthral.

Before they do, the video commands your attention; in the hands of the Rastafarian singer and his legendary producer Adrian Sherwood, the reggae version of The Slave’s Lament sounds as if it could be the only possible version. Even Auld Lang Syne loses its weary tarnish.

The music world has been revisiting Burns successfully, from Irvine to Senegal, for years, but Jamaican Reggae is especially apposite. Burns had all but booked his passage to Jamaica when literary success struck; in the end he never left, but he could still imagine the way a slave might have felt, so far away from his African home.

It’s not all hands across the ocean; the fruit and veg complicate matters. Fagen has used flowers in various forms over the years, exploiting their manifold symbolic meanings. Sectarianism, with its own language of signs, is never far from the surface. Then art history insists on its own set meanings for flowers, while personal experience provides a different understanding. The bronze plants in this show are laden with all of these systems of communication.

The lily is easiest for the art historian to pigeon-hole, often used in paintings of the Virgin Mary to symbolise her purity. Fagen has put his bronze lilies in a clay pot which wouldn’t look out of place an early Renaissance painting. But, on their plinth, there’s also a whiff of extravagant corporate décor.

The little black pansy is more personal. Asked once for his favourite flower, Fagen was mocked for choosing the pansy, so modest and effete. Here he strikes back with a goth pansy, or, perhaps, a Jamaican one.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. In my innocence, I presume that the encased pineapple and orange (entitled True Love) represent exoticism under lock and key. I’m told, however, that they represent the two halves of the sectarian equation: chapel and orange.

That brings us to the leek on the coffee table, which is a direct quote from one of Fagen’s previous works, Theatre, at the Imperial War Museum. After visiting Kosovo, the artist filmed a short play as a metaphor for ethnic conflict. There, two of Fagen’s characters wield power because they own a sceptre. When their subjects discover that the sceptre is only leek, they seize power, and so it goes on.

That gets to the nub of Fagen’s concerns. People will always fight people in an endless cycle of prejudice. Cultures will continue to clash, collide and combine, and there will be good results as well as bad. The owners will become the owned, the slaves become the masters. This dialectical thread that runs through history has been the cause of revolutions. Here it is again, quietly embedded by Fagen in a handful of plants and a couple of songs.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.02.05