British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet
Until August 21; CCA, GoMA, Tramway

Coming round every five years, the British Art Show is a veritable marathon; a group show so hulking that since 1995 it has filled several large venues in almost every city it visits. This year is no exception: back in Glasgow for the first time in 21 years, BAS 7 spreads its tentacles from the Gallery of Modern Art and CCA in the centre, out to Tramway’s enormous galleries in Pollok.

It’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps with the naked young man who will every so often run unannounced into Tramway’s main gallery to tend a fire on an otherwise unspectacular park bench. Roger Hiorns’ untitled work is an echo on a very human scale of BAS 7’s subtitle: In The Days of The Comet.

The comet is one we all know: Halley’s comet. Appearing every 76 years, it has been seen through history as a powerful harbinger of change, despite its reality as a lump of space debris. It comes and goes, from age to age, always present, but rarely visible. For all its implications in terms of history, mythology and the passing of time, it has been fixed upon as a motif by Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre, the show’s curators.

That comet can be interpreted in so many ways. Haroon Mirza’s collection of turntables at GoMA loop round in relentless disharmony: stickers, a light bulb, and a spinning, crackling radio all adding to the dissonance. This swirling pattern of live sound is something like the planets on their trajectories, a brutal music of the spheres. Their orbit contains broken 1980s flat pack furniture, pointing to a time that is gone, but has looped around and come back again.

This is the first time that the British Art Show has been subtitled. Up until now it has made impossible attempts to be comprehensive, but inevitably, curators applied their own preferences and agendas. This time, the organising committee decided at the outset to choose curators who would take an openly authored approach.

Morton and Le Feuvre, an intelligent pair, have clearly thought long and hard, and have worked closely with the 39 artists of their choice. They are very proud of the fact that 80% of the exhibition is composed of brand new work, making this far more than a survey show of the latest generation.

Charles Avery’s large drawing at GoMA, Untitled (Cirque de la Revolution), is so new that it isn’t even finished. An extension of the artist’s lifelong project to imagine the intricacies of life on a fantastical island, its characters are coming into being like apparitions, heads fully finished and legs still floating in half-sketched outlines. A perfect, though probably unintended, nod to the curators’ preoccupations with the fleeting present.

It’s odd, considering the authored approach, that this British Art Show feels less homogenous than the last one. BAS 6 was memorable for its emphasis on modernism; artists everywhere were revisiting the delights and problems of that old cube-shaped chestnut. BAS 6 consequently lingers in the memory as having had a strong, identifiable look.

This show is different. Although Morton and Le Feuvre have worked with a particular motif, with its own clear symbolism, there is nothing visually which binds the works together. Conceptually, at the centre of the exhibition is less a legendary comet, burning bright; and more the confusion wreaked by dark matter.

“Undermining assumptions and locating ruptures,” says Lisa Le Feuvre in the catalogue, “BAS7 does not seek to entertain, educate or redeem.” That’s pretty hardcore. The art, she seems to say, just is. It’s too close for  interpretational comfort. “The work here does not represent the world,” she says, “it is of the world.”

An exhibition focussing on ruptures ends up, inevitably, somewhat ruptured. This is no doubt aggravated by the proportion of art which is specially commissioned. It’s a commendable practice, but can throw some ill-fitting spanners into the works of a carefully crafted group show. Or maybe that’s just another welcome rupture.

Roger Hiorns’ huge cross-shaped incision in Tramway’s wall must be the most literal example of rupture, especially if seen as the crack in the wall of Dr Who fame. But a look at the detail reveals the existence of “brain matter”, which is not, I understand, a metaphor. Hiorns does use calf brains in his work, along with other chemical and biological stuff which grows and changes – making it a suitable neighbour to Karla Black’s sculpture.

Black is represented by three works very typical of her, although her mounds of soil get more solid every time I see them. This tightly packed terraced mountain, like an Inca temple in miniature, is topped with vibrant yellow powder and fragments of soap. The moisture in the soil is already seeping into the powder, causing it to solidify and crack. So its base may look robust, but its surface remains vulnerable, in flux, untenable, and that’s the bit that’s always teeteringly, waftingly beautiful about these transient landscapes of Black’s.

I vented my anger when reviewing the last British Art Show, at the deliberate exclusion of artists over the age of 40. One can produce important work at twice that age, and indeed, aged 76, Alasdair Gray has pride of place in BAS 7. Vigour bursts from his portraits, which come via one of Scotland’s most cutting edge contemporary galleries.

The comet analogy works well with Gray’s portraits at CCA, which were inscribed as having been drawn nearly 40 years before they were painted. The present circles around, becoming its own past and future, and arriving again. Angus Calder is pictured in the place where the inscription says he later died. With this simple device Gray pokes a hole in time: you are with the subject in his present, but also looking back from the future.

We take a scathing look at the 20th century from a future standpoint at in Elizabeth Price’s stylish film at GoMA, User Group Disco. A whirl of objects and text, it promotes taxonomy to the status of a theory of the universe, and then judges the 20th century on the basis of facial massagers and other such car boot sale objects. Impeccably constructed, it’s a clever, poetic gem of a film.

One of the strongest, and indeed most traditional, contributions to the show is from BritArt bad girl Sarah Lucas. A far cry from the crude innuendo of her earlier work, these stuffed nylon tights, entwined and tangled on breeze block plinths, are ambiguous in meaning, and yet completely human. They are sexual, foetal, fleshy, and at the same time they are utterly classical: screw up your eyes a little, and they are the Laocoön’s writhing tangle of body and snake, or the ouroboros eating its own phallic tail.

There is much else worth mentioning: Christian Marclay’s addictive 24-hour film extravaganza, Clock; George Shaw’s modern urban pastorals, so mundane that only future generations will find the charm in them; Blightman’s quiet intervention at GoMA, and Mellors’ disconcerting puking face. To understand what ties all these together is perhaps unnecessary; to expect to enjoy everything, over-optimistic. But this is no empty metropolitan show of new generation chic: it’s quietly substantial, and puking aside, it offers plenty food for thought.


Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.05.11