Palermo Restore: The Bonn Archive
Until December 3; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Strategy: Get Arts Revisited
Until January 8; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

For 35 years, brows have been furrowed and hands wrung over four little strips of coloured paint in Edinburgh. Blue/Yellow/White/Red was a site-specific painting made directly on the walls of Edinburgh College of Art in 1970, by one of Richard Demarco’s rebellious Dusseldorf imports, Blinky Palermo.

During the occasion of the “massive happening” that was Strategy: Get Arts, Palermo climbed a ladder above the college’s main staircase, and coloured in the horizontal bands of its neo-classical architrave. It was a bold act at a time when paintings were still expected to adopt a certain basic form, on stretched, portable canvas.

Over the years those four coloured strips have disappeared deeper and deeper under regular coats of white emulsion, to the despair of Demarco, and of a whole generation of artists who were inspired by the intervention.

After years of debate about the problems of restoration, it was agreed that Palermo’s painting should be recreated from scratch. Now, Edinburgh College of Art proudly bears the four colours once again, but after all that fuss, it doesn’t look like much.

That’s why it’s so important that we’re told, in the two special exhibitions mounted to celebrate the Palermo Restore project, why Blue/Yellow/White/Red is so special. Unfortunately that’s the one thing we’re not told.

The Talbot Rice’s display, of Palermo’s drawings and plans from the Bonn Archive, falls pretty flat. It’s not so much an exhibition as a straight relocation of the archive, without any attempt at interpretation for the casual visitor. German labels are left untranslated and only serious scholars with a headful of Palermo are going to get much out of it.

The second show, however, is bursting with appeal. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) has plundered the Demarco Archive for its juiciest Strategy: Get Arts material. One modest roomful of clearly interpreted pictures and documents transports you right back to that crazy time in 1970.

A raft of photographs convey the excitement of the show which is credited by some to have introduced conceptual art to Scotland. Visitors are shown negotiating Klause Rinke’s spout of water at the front door of the art college, and fragments of Stefan Wewerka’s chairs are seen scattered on the stair where they were smashed.

Demarco had the foresight to document all of Strategy: Get Arts, and letters and telegrams tell the story of an event which bears his unmistakeable hallmark. Why did Golthard Graubner’s installation on the second floor catch fire? The indignant exchange of letters bats responsibility back and forth between the artist and the college technician.

What happened when the British Board of Film Censors confiscated all the artists’ films, and when the local police vetoed Gunther Uecker’s corridor of knives? Read it, see it and weep.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.11.05