Off The Wall
Until May 28; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Right from the off, the new show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is a little bit different. Off The Wall starts with an introductory text panel, not on the wall, but on the floor. Struggling to read the vinyl text spread out before your toes, you’ll soon find that you are applying the wrong conventions. Try reading forwards, as you walk, and you’ll find that reading from bottom to top comes naturally.

Before you even reach the first work of art, your usual expectations have been turned on their head. Your eyes sweep a wider curve than the usual head-height, wall-fixed range of movement. The art could be anywhere – below your feet, above your head, rolling all around you. Some of it doesn’t even seem to be complete without you in it, the vital human point of reference.

Of course art hasn’t always lived on walls. “In the history of indoor looking up,” said artist and critic Brian O’Doherty in his famous Artforum essays of the 1970s, “we rank low”. He reminded us of swirling Baroque ceilings (“like a sublime overhead toilet”), of seductive Rococo embellishments, and of the Georgian ceiling “like a white carpet… which gently reverses the viewer into a walking stalactite”.

By the 20th century, ceilings were all but forgotten, but as with so many aspects of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp opened up a whole new realm of possibility. In 1938, at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, he suspended 1200 bags of coal upside down, making the ceiling look like a crammed and dirty floor, and at once upstaging all those Surrealists who had squeezed so obligingly into standard-issue picture frames.

But the ceiling never quite caught on in 20th century art, or not as much as the floor. During the 1960s, the Minimalists toppled the upward thrust of sculpture, laying bricks flat to be walked on, and placing shapes on the ground to be considered from every angle. The plinth was abandoned in favour of a more democratic space, where the prowling viewer became part of the equation.

Nothing demonstrates this better than Sol LeWitt’s Five Modular Structures (Sequential Permutations On The Number Five), the oldest work in the SNGMA show. The knee-high structures are scattered around the floor, inviting you to walk through and around them. To make sense of the shapes, and of their internal logic, you need to keep moving, your mind working hard to complete the picture.

You don’t have to work too hard, unless you want to, in the rest of the show. Drawn entirely from works in the gallery’s collection, there is almost a fairground feel about Off The Wall. Many of the works, following in Duchamp’s footsteps, are deliberately playful, creating a multi-coloured buzz throughout the galleries. If proof were needed that floor- and ceiling-based works are more accessible than wall-hung pictures, then this is it.

As I wander through the show, children charge through LeWitt’s sculpture, triumphantly pointing out to their parents that there is no line on the floor to say they can’t. A proud father photographs his children against Jim Lambie’s dazzling striped floor, and a Spanish tourist photographs his girlfriend nestling underneath Christine Borland’s suspended shower of glass jars. These are well-known works of art, and like most of the pieces in the show have enjoyed substantial exposure in the few years since they were made.

The overall sense of light entertainment is also the result of a curatorial light touch. No real critical development of the topic is attempted, the only texts being straightforward descriptions of the individual works themselves. But following the show around does reveal some beautiful continuities snaking from piece to piece.

After Yinka Shonibare’s regimented rows of bowls, arranged in a conscious nod to Minimalism, comes Martin Creed’s concoction of balls of every shape, colour and size. The controlled discipline of one mass of circles gives way to the cheerful chaos of the next. The following two rooms, crammed with Nathan Coley’s cardboard city of churches, echo the disorganised clutter of balls, but while Creed wants us to move around inside his work, Coley’s doesn’t let you in.

There are some curatorial obstacles which have not quite been overcome, such as the forbidding white gym-hall lines keeping us away from some of the more delicate, or hazardous, floor pieces. David Shrigley’s Sculpture Of A Piece Of Paper needs to look bedraggled and discarded in a corner; the white line makes it look instead like a murder victim from some Surrealist film noir.

While many of these works were specifically designed to break down barriers between art and the viewer, the gallery is morally and legally obliged to protect our national collection from greasy paws and clumsy accidents. Signs warn us of the danger of Creed’s work, and ask us not to touch. Warders watch, eagle-eyed, perhaps ready to catch us as we skid on a marble and fly through the air, puncturing an inflatable beach ball or two as we land. But that, the artists would surely insist, is all part of the fun.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.12.06