What Makes You And I Different
Until March 26; Tramway, Glasgow

It might look like a grammatical blunder worthy of Home And Away, but there’s more to the Tramway’s new exhibition title than meets the eye. What Makes You And I Different is a sideways reference to influential 20th century linguist, Émile Benveniste, who identified the first and second person pronouns, “I” and “you”, as fundamental clues to the nature of language.

These two little words, “I” and “you”, are empty of any specific meaning except at the moment when they are used. Then, at that moment, the one can’t exist without the validation of the other. Tramway curator Lorraine Wilson takes this argument as the starting point for her show, gathering together a fascinating clutch of lens-based art with one thing in common: each artist takes up position in front of the camera.

If you read Wilson’s baffling exhibition text, as I did, before seeing the exhibition, you might easily conclude that the show will be impenetrable. In fact, the opposite is true; it is elegant, surprising, droll, and stunningly beautiful. Around the walls, every artist has their own discreet niche, and through the dusky twilight of the central space, Glasgow’s old tramlines lead your eye to the kitsch oasis of Beagles and Ramsay’s Glitter Island, specially commissioned for this show.

The international cast of artists boasts some big names, including Matthew Barney, famous for his Cremaster Cycle, here represented by three sumptuous stills from his latest film, Drawing Restraint 9. Cindy Sherman contributes two of her legendary photographs from the early 1980s, and YBA Mat Collishaw assaults you near the entrance with his interactive Spitting Machine.

The Spitting Machine sorts out who’s boss right from the start. Standing in front of a mirrored cabinet, you’re busy admiring your lovely visage when gradually the artist’s image creeps into the picture. He swaggers towards you in his vest, and he spits.

The phlegm oozes down the screen and you can’t help but feel taken aback. An image which is supposed to serve you passively has fought back, subverting the conventional balance of power. While this is the most overtly aggressive work in the show, it does prepare you for a host of videos and photographs which refuse to submit to your gaze.

None of the works are anything like self-portraits. Some artists, following in Cindy Sherman’s footsteps, question our presumptions about appearance and identity. Others, poker-faced, use their bodies as pegs on which to hang universal ideas. Among the most striking are those which remind us of the absurdity of human existence.

In their painfully succinct video, Wood and Harrison crash passively against each other, as their office chairs ricochet around the inside of a moving van. In his double projection, Peter Land falls continuously down a domestic staircase, as the starry screen opposite roams through the infinite universe. Both works capture the tragi-comedy of life, made all the more poignant by the artists’ complete lack of expression.

In a typically absurd installation, Beagles and Ramsay lounge in splendid isolation on a glittery desert island, dressed in vaguely 18th century foppish attire. The pair have made countless grotesque self-portraits over the years, from black puddings to ventriloquists’ dummies, and this one is just as much a masquerade as all the others.

Not one artist in this show is particularly interested in conveying any kind of true, inner self. Dealing with a host of subjects in a variety of styles, if there’s anything that draws the works together it’s their resistance to interrogation. That little word “I”, just as Benveniste suggested, is an empty void waiting to be filled by you.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.03.06