Close-Up
Until January 11 2009; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Beagles & Ramsay: Good Teeth
Until December 19; Glasgow Sculpture Studios

Langlands & Bell: Films & Animations 1978-2008
Until December 13; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Something immediately strikes you as unusual on the ground floor of the Fruitmarket’s latest show, Close-Up. It’s not that the images cross the boundary between art and science; it’s not even that they are black and white, relics of a century ago; it’s something more subtle: they are exquisitely beautiful.

Beauty is something of a taboo in contemporary art, and indeed Dada and Surrealism – two movements strongly represented in this show – were not known for their adherence to conventional ideas of beauty. But at the core of Close-Up lies something central to the Surrealist agenda – the discovery of beauty in unexpected places; the uncovering of hidden truths.

Close-Up is one of a series of ideas-led exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery, by guest curators from outside the gallery circuit. Academics Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, experts on Surrealism and contemporary art, have tracked the photographic close-up from its birth in the 19th century to its use in art today.

It’s an exhibition of two halves, the older work on the ground floor a cornucopia of microscopic images from nature: flowers, insects and rocks so magnified that they are unrecognisable. Laure Albin-Guillot’s micro-photographs present mysterious, eye-catching cross-sections of organisms printed in luxurious metallic inks. Man Ray’s supposed aerial photograph is in fact a close-up shot of Duchamp’s famous work, The Large Glass, gathering light-bathed clumps of dust.

Upstairs it’s almost all about naked bodies, seen too close for comfort, in a challenge from the conceptual artists of the 1970s. Giuseppe Penone maps the entire surface of his body in 104 photographs, creating a fragmented, depersonalised self-portrait. A blurry, hand-held video tour of Kate Craig’s body leaves us even more in the dark about the person behind the tiny surface details.

There are bridges between the two halves of the show: in 1929 French writer Georges Bataille published three repellent close-ups of the human big toe, which would sit easily amongst the conceptual art of the 1970s. In 2006 Simon Starling took a Man Ray close-up, and zoomed even closer with an electron microscope, revealing the particles of silver in its surface, and moving inside them.

With every show the Fruitmarket mounts, its installation becomes more sophisticated. The real triumph this time is the screening of numerous films with apparent ease. There’s nothing worse than suffering a jumble of films from all angles (for which see Langlands & Bell, below), and nothing better than gliding from cinema to cinema with nothing to bother you but your thoughts.

Close-Up is a meticulously researched and presented show. It’s not the first time that art from by-gone eras has graced the walls of the Fruitmarket, but this show raises the bar: the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art had better take note.

For a close-up experience of an entirely different sort, Glasgow Sculpture Studios opened their new premises last weekend with a commission from Beagles & Ramsay. Having pulled out of the Briggait redevelopment project late last year, GSS had to find a new home in a hurry. Less inspiring than the old fishmarket, but more spacious, the council building at Kelvinhaugh Street will serve them for the next four years, until the lease runs out all over again.

Along with 45 studios and heavy-duty workshops of every kind, the new venue boasts an additional research space and two modest galleries. They wouldn’t seem so modest, if it weren’t for the scale of Beagles & Ramsay’s sculpture, a glittering behemoth squatting inches beneath the concrete rafters.

The giant legoman basks in the light of a neon bearing the immortal words, Good Teeth, but he has no teeth. What he does have is unmistakeable: the large rectangular erection has a large rectangular erection, as glittering as the rest of his glittery self (it took the artist pair three months, apparently, to apply the industrial quantities of glitter by hand).

I often wander away from new work by Beagles & Ramsay with a grin on my face, and a feeling that I’m missing something. There’s more to it than kitsch and naughtiness; there’s something there about spectacle and consumer culture, but beyond that, don’t ask me.

Lastly to the jumble of videos aforementioned – Langlands & Bell have been working together for 30 years, in a variety of media including video, printmaking, wall-painting, architecture and intervention. The Talbot Rice has singled out their films and videos for attention, but with too many soundtracks and projections fighting for attention, the gallery could learn a lot from the Fruitmarket.

The artist couple deals with complex issues of ownership of space, and hidden systems within society, often focussing on transport as a visible manifestation of these systems. That’s the background to their animation of world airport codes (LHR, EDI and so on), but without associated art works in other media, such as their prints of international air routes, the animation is lost in a sea of incoherency.

The most coherent section of the show contains three works made by the pair in Afghanistan, as official war artists. A joystick tempts you through the house of Osama Bin Laden, which finds the war against terror at home as a media spectacle. Next to this runs a video on constant loop, a succession of snapshots of English-language signs in the war-torn landscape. Reconstruction is big business, and this hidden invasion of western acronyms is sinister and unnerving.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 02.11.08