Our Surroundings
Until July 17; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Not so long ago, the road from Dundee railway station to Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) was lined with trees. On my last visit, they were lying prone and scattered, their roots where their branches used to be. Today, there are just a few tell-tale remains left in the fenced-off building sites, along with twisted girders, bricks and rubble. Only the ivy has managed to stage a comeback, insinuating its way through a pile of gravel.

My usual route to the gallery has been usurped by the steel frame of a half-built structure – whether it’s an office block or a multi-storey car-park is currently hard to tell. A new path between the sites is dictated like a lab-rat’s, by two stern lengths of fencing. The only landmark in this unfamiliar territory is Alister White’s kinetic sculpture, still intact at the top of the slope.

The stainless steel flags of Strange Attractor II waft in the breeze, relaxed and oblivious to the chaos below. The sculpture has been there for 12 years and, fenced off carefully, it looks like it’ll be there for some more. I think about Dundee’s priorities; not all towns would put their art before their trees like this.

The timing is apt for DCA’s new show, Our Surroundings. Purporting to “engage with the nature and character of our specific situation”, DCA has invited seven international artists to make new work which is rooted in contemporary Dundee… just when contemporary Dundee’s roots are being pulled up.

At first sight, the exhibition appears to be a return to the much-raked over topic of place. DCA’s last show was about the built environment, and the one before that about place, space and context. Our Surroundings revisits these same themes yet again, but is saved from tedium by its strong local angle. Dundee provides plenty of juicy material for the visiting artists, and the result is a diverse range of artworks whose original theme – thank goodness – starts to melt away.

Perhaps closest to the brief is Slovenian artist and architect, Apolonija Sustersic, who is inspired by the 19th century pioneer of town planning, Patrick Geddes. Focussing on Geddes’s dream of a public garden in Seabraes (one of the aforementioned building sites), Sustersic has planted a greenhouse slap bang in the middle of a nearby brown-field site. Not only is it a fully working greenhouse, but it also has a temporary square of grass to sit on.

Sustersic’s hope is that Dundonians will come together in her meeting place to discuss improvements to the city, and to put their ideas on the postcards and notebooks provided. The greenhouse itself is an eloquent tribute to Geddes, and topical at this time of waterfront regeneration, but Sustersic’s crude effort at public consultation lets it down. One comments-box does not a discourse make.

The fact that DCA has funded an artist to build a fully-fledged and fully-staffed greenhouse in the middle of Dundee is impressive. That the gallery can also commission brand new work from another six artists, some indoors and some outside, must be turning curators green with envy, up and down the land.

Of all the artists, Matt Stokes has tunnelled his way the deepest into Dundee’s soul. Northern Soul to be precise. The young artist staged a powerful event and from it came a compelling film. Reuniting old stalwarts of the city’s Northern Soul scene, Stokes filmed them dancing in the ornate nave of St Salvador’s Church.

The scene grew up in “Sally’s” adjacent church hall, but by bringing the dancers inside the church itself, Stokes reconnects the music with its religious source. The resultant film matches the exuberance of the swirling dancers with the heavenly golden imagery of the altar. Stokes’s beautiful film has a strong sense of place and of historical import. Here is something truly Dundonian, and at the same time universal.

At the other end of the scale, Olafur Eliasson’s work is less about Dundee’s surroundings than one’s surroundings generally. DCA are clearly proud to have hosted the artist’s first UK show in 1999, before his meteorological rise to fame with the Weather Project at Tate Modern. The current show’s title is surely a nod back to the first show, Your Position Surrounded And Your Surroundings Positioned.

This time, Eliasson has tucked a huge, artificial waterfall between some university buildings. Water is pumped up through a plastic tube before tumbling down seven ugly metal shelves on a crudely constructed scaffold. The whole thing sits in a black rubber paddling pool, only just squeezing into the chemistry department’s neatly trimmed, fenced-in lawn.

This is a re-assembly of a work which previously appeared in Austria and Spain. There, it was a single, tall, sheet of water on a grand, symmetrical scaffold. In Dundee, it is higgledy-piggledy, twisted and confused. Maybe this is the way Eliasson sees Dundee.

Waterfall is resolutely man-made, but it mimics nature’s spectacle so successfully that it draws people to it. The sublime waterfalls so beloved of the Romantic movement were wild and uncontrollable, and here is one that can be switched on and off just as the lawn underneath it is trimmed and mowed. Even with the romance removed, it’s a thing of beauty – and that’s a revelation.

Inside the gallery, Mark Dion exhibits his designs for an interpretation building at Camperdown Wildlife Centre; certainly a positive project but a little out of place at DCA. Bridget Smith and Jordan Baseman present personal responses to the Observatory and the Satellite Receiving Station respectively. To a greater or lesser degree, all three of these projects feel a little like advertisements.

Back along the river, Susan Philipsz’s speaker gives an occasional fog-horn blast, towards the road bridge and out to sea. It’s a typically wistful piece, accompanied by a haunting fragment of text by the late Alan Woods. He wrote of our changing routes, as “cities change faster than people do”. His words echo as I pick my way back between the barren building sites to the station.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 12.06.05